tlambert | October 2, 2002 [On Oct 03 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof.]
Norman Heath writes: Tim Lambert asked for suggestions as to how John Lott might have formed a belief about the proportion of DGUs that involve gunfire, prior to having conducted a survery. I took this to mean that Lambert was open to those suggestions which involve innocent explanations. But when I offer an innocent explanation, Tim responds by pointing out that a sinister one also exists. I think Lott is owed the courtesy of assuming his innocence, and it still seems to me that there are justifications that Lott might have had, or…
tlambert | September 26, 2002 [On Sep 27 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof.]
Norman Heath writes: Just a suggestion, but perhaps Lott simply made a rough comparison between the number of claimed DGUs and the total number of shootings. I.e. if total shootings is (making this up) 120,000 and we subtract 35,000 suicides, 5000 police shootings, 200 hunting accidents, 15,000 gun murders, then even without accounting for non-fatal criminal shootings the highest possible number of live-fire DGUs would be about 64,800 (again, using made-up numbers). If at least 764,00 people claimed DGUs, then the number of those who…
tlambert | September 26, 2002 [On Sep 27 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof and emailed it to Lott.]
Peter Boucher, replying to this post, writes: I don't have a copy of Point Blank handy, but I seem to recall the 98% figure either explicitly in the text of that book, or directly derivable from the figures in the book.
Yes, as I noted at the beginning of the discussion, the 98% figure could have come from a misreading of "Point Blank". However, the problem with this theory is that Lott has specifically denied it. He says that the figure comes from his survey. It also seems far too much of a…
tlambert | September 24, 2002 [On Sep 25 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof. I also emailed it to John Lott. ]
I have replies to queries about Lott's survey from Tom Smith and Al Alschuler. Neither had heard anything about it. Other than Kleck, Tom Smith would be the logical person to discuss the survey design with---Lott acknowledges his assistance on other survey-related questions in MGLC. He'd also be a good source to obtain a CD of phone numbers from, but apparently Lott obtained this elsewhere.
Alschuler is in the U of Chicago Law School and wrote a reply to the paper where Lott first made…
tlambert | September 19, 2002 [On Sep 20 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof and emailed it to Lott.]
James Lindgren writes: After my post to this list saying that "a big national study doesn't just disappear without a trace" because a computer crashes, John Lott called me and told me a long story about how the study was done (which I don't choose to share just yet, if ever; Lott can speak for himself on his methods, if he wishes). He didn't ask me to do anything about it, and I wasn't planning on posting anytime soon, but given the recent posts I thought I would.
Whether the study should be given credence is a…
tlambert | September 17, 2002 [On Sep 18 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof and emailed it to Lott.]
Some more information about DGU surveying from a Kleck email:
"We got 4,977 completions over 3 months, using an average of about 10 callers per day (and I believe all of them were FSU students)"
Also, look at the acknowledgments of Kleck and Gertz's paper:
"The authors wish to thank David Bordua, Gary Mauser, Seymour Sudman, and James Wright for their help in designing the survey instrument. The authors also wish to thank the highly skilled staff responsible for the interviewing: Michael Trapp (…
tlambert | September 16, 2002 [On Sep 17 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof.]
I've had replies to my queries about Lott's survey from David Mustard and Gary Kleck.
Mustard said that he was not involved with the survey. All he was able to say was what he had been told by Lott: that Lott had conducted the survey in 1997 and lost the results in a computer crash.
Kleck felt that Lott's survey should be ignored unless and until Lott publishes the results and methodology. This would be reasonable except for the fact of the 25+ occasions that Lott has made the "98% merely brandishing" claim.
Nothing from Lott.
tlambert | September 14, 2002 [On Sep 15 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof.]
In response to my appeal for any information about this survey Lott claims to have carried out in 1997 I received this email from Geoffrey Huck. Unfortunately, as you can see, he was not able to provide any support for the existence of the survey, so I repeat my appeal: it seems increasingly likely that the survey is fictional---I seek evidence to the contrary.
From: Geoffrey Huck I was John Lott's editor at the University of Chicago Press for his book, More Guns, Less Crime, published originally in 1998 and then in a second edition in…
tlambert | September 13, 2002 [On Sep 14 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof. I also emailed it to John Lott. ]
Way back in 1993 in talk.politics.guns, C. D. Tavares wrote: The answer is that the gun never needs to be fired in 98% of the instances of a successful self-defense with a gun. The criminals just leave abruptly, instead."
When I queried him about this, he quickly corrected his error: Kleck says in the magazine "Social Problems" (2/88):
"there were about 8,700-16,600 non-fatal, legally permissible woundings of criminals by gun armed civilians" annually, and "the rest of the one million estimated…
tlambert | August 31, 2002Eugene Volokh writes:
Martin Killias's "International Correlations Between Gun Ownership
and Rates of Homicide and Suicide," 148 Can. Med. Assoc. J. 1721, 1723-24
(1993), purported to show that "the proportions and the rates of homicide
and suicide committed with a gun as well as the overall rates committed by
any means were related to the rate of household gun ownership."
Don Kates has just pointed out that a recent Killias work, Martin
Killias, John van Kesteren & Martin
Rindlisbacher, "Guns, Violent Crime, and Suicide in 21 Countries," 43
Canadian J. of Criminology 429 (2001),…
tlambert | August 9, 2002Paul Blackman writes:
I'm not sure Kates actually prevents anyone from learning anything. He
presents something with a clear bias, but he no more prevents anything
than does Tim's commentary.
Kates claims that he is trying "to place Malcolm's contribution in the
context of extant social scientific and historical evidence on that
question." He does no such thing. He doesn't even mention the
existence of any pro-control scholars and he quotes selectively from
the pro-gun scholars. Note also that he attempts to pass himself as
being on the middle ground by describing himself as "A member of…
tlambert | August 9, 2002My comments on this article by Don Kates.
Mr Kates does readers of the History News Network a grave disservice
with his article. He pretends to provide them a criminologist's
perspective on the guns-crime question, but only quotes from pro-gun
criminologists. He carefully selects the evidence he presents to
prevent his readers from learning about facts that contradict Mr
Kates' thesis. The analysis that he does present is simplistic where
it is not flatly wrong.
Kates claims to present extant social science evidence but nowhere
does he address or even the mention the work of Zimring and…
tlambert | July 22, 2002In the Tennessee Law Review (v61 513-596 1994) Kates et al wrote:
the inventive Dr. Diane Schetky, and two equally inventive CDC
writers Gordon Smith and Henry Falk in a separate article actually
do provide purportedly supporting citations for the claim that
"[h]andguns account for only 20% of the firearms in use today, but
they are involved in the majority of both criminal and
unintentional firearm injuries." [265] The problems with this claim
are that the claim is false in every respect and that the
citations are fabrications. The purpose of the claim is to
exaggerate the comparative risks…
tlambert | May 30, 2002Joseph Olson writes:
Ask any gun dealer about women buying handguns for self protection.
A dealer friend tells me that over =BD of his handgun purschasers are
women but also tells me that most of them are very concerned that NO ONE
will know that they have a gun. It's his opinion, after talking with
these REAL buyers, that none of them would admit gun ownership to a
surveyor. None of them subscribe to "gun magazines." And, if they
commit suicide, I'll bet $10 they don't use the gun. So there is a HUGH
hole in the information base. None of these women kill baby animals
either.
And none…
tlambert | May 21, 2002Eugene Volokh writes:
FYI, thought I'd mention that I have a couple of fairly detailed
items today about handgun bans, substitution effects, enforcement need
slippery slopes, rhetoric, and Mary McGrory (of the Washington Post). Seehere andhere.
You argue that long guns are "much more lethal" than handguns because
their projectiles have much more kinetic energy. However, it is not
at all clear that lethality should be strongly related to kinetic
energy (for example, consider what happens when a bullet passes
completely through the victim).
It is surely better to look at empirical evidence…
tlambert | February 24, 2002Lowell Savage writes:
Sorry, Ron. Much as I agree with your position, I have to say that you
haven't addressed Tim's issue: why is it that 37% of non-gun defenders were
injured before they began self-defensive actions while only 13% of gun
defenders were injured before they began self-defense actions?
Perhaps an anecdote from a column by Ann Coulter could illuminate a possible
explanation. Ann said that she was walking alone over a bridge toward her
apartment (or is it a condo? And no I don't remember why she was doing this
alone, at that time.) when she saw a man coming toward her from…
tlambert | February 20, 2002In "Point Blank", Kleck analyzed NCVS data and found that while 38% of
people who used any means of self-protection against robbers were
injured in the encounter, only 17% (the lowest for any means for
self-protection) of people who use a gun for self-defence against
robbers were injured. Kleck claimed that this showed that guns were
the most effective means for avoiding injury.
In their critique of "Point Blank" Alba and Messner point out the flaw
in Kleck's reasoning -- the evidence from the NCVS is equally well
explained if injury makes victims less likely to use guns. Kleck
dismisses…
tlambert | October 8, 2001Mary Rosh writes:
If you want a good study that doesn't cherry pick data the way Lambert
likes to do,
The cherry-picking is Shawn's. How come you're not objecting to his
Vermont vs DC comparison?
read the study by Jeff Miron entitled "Violence, Guns, and Drugs: A Cross-Country Analysis"
Miron's work is the most comprehensive that I know of that tries to
account for different factors across countries and he finds evidence
that gun control is either significantly positively or insignificantly
positively related to more crime. I would love to see Lambert try to
explain away these results or…
tlambert | July 27, 2001by Steven D. Levitt, Professor of Economics, University of Chicago
[Editor's note: A version of this piece was published in the Chicago Sun-Times on July 28, 2001 under the title "Pools more dangerous than guns." ]
What's more dangerous: a swimming pool or a gun? When it comes to children, there is no comparison: a swimming pool is 100 times more deadly.
In 1997 alone (the last year for which data are available), 742 children under the age of 10 drowned in the United States last year alone. Approximately 550 of those drownings -- about 75 percent of the total -- occurred in residential…
tlambert | June 1, 2001Since Kellermann had released his data when that paragraph
was written, the part I left out was irrelevant.
David Friedman writes:
From your point of view, what is the story about his data? The story I
thought I had seen was that he refused to release it until forced to do
so--my vague memory was that the research was government funded and that
eventually made it possible to compel him to release the data. Is that
true? If not, what really happened?
The accounts that claim that Kellermann had to be forced to release
his data come from such obviously biased sources that I'm not inclined
to…