cherry picking
oracknows | December 1, 2014
Every so often there's an article that starts making the rounds on social media, in particular Facebook and Twitter, that cries out for a treatment by yours truly. Actually, there are more such articles that are constantly circulating on social media that I could work full time blogging and still not cover them all. So I'm stuck picking and choosing ones that either (1) particularly pique my interest; (2) irritate me enough to goad me into action; or (3) reach a level of ubiquity that I can no longer ignore them. I don't think this one's hit #3 yet, but it certainly scores on #1 and #2.…
tlambert | December 11, 2008Last year Inhofe released a list of 400 scientists who disputed mainstream climate science. But as Joe Romm and Andrew Dessler observed, the list was padded with TV weathermen, economists and so on and contained very few actual climate scientists. Now he's back with more of the same in a new list that adds 250 more names. Update: Joe Romm takes apart the new list. My favorite entry (reproduced in full so you can get the full nutty flavour):
Field Geologist Louis A.G. Hissink is the editor of The Australian Institute of
Geoscientists Newsletter and is currently working on the ore-reserve…
tlambert | January 27, 2006Jonathon Dursi details the spread of a bogus comparison between crime rate in US in Canada from John Lott to David Frum to Alan Gottlieb:
So here's the path of the lie as far as I can see it:
Aug 2005: Lott claims violent crime is twice as rampant in Canada as in the US; this is untrue, and comes from fallaciously comparing two different statistics from different countries.
Oct 2005: Lott makes other claims about Canadian crime rates in the National Post, equally cherry-picked.
Jan 2006: Frum play the same game in the National Post, comparing incommensurate `Total Specified Crimes'…
tlambert | January 10, 2006In Lott's latest column he cuts and pastes his previous cherry picking on England, so I'll just repeat my correction: He carefully picks his numbers to avoid mentioning the dramatic decline in violent crime in England since 1996. As for Australia, he finds yet another way to avoid mentioning how violent crime has been falling here:
Australia's 1996 gun-control regulations banned many types of guns and the immediate aftermath was similar. While murder rates remained unchanged, armed robbery rates averaged 59% higher in the eight years after the law was passed (from 1997 to 2004) than in 1995…
tlambert | December 20, 2005In his latest op-ed Lott continues his misrepresentations about crime in Australia and England:
The British government banned handguns in January 1997 but recently reported that gun crime in England and Wales nearly doubled in the seven years from 1996 to 2003. Since '96, the rate of serious violent crime has soared by 88 percent: armed robberies by 101 percent, rapes by 105 percent and homicide by 24 percent.
Before the law, armed robberies had fallen by 50 percent from 1993 to 1997 -- but as soon as handguns were banned, the robbery rate shot back up, almost back to 1993 levels. The crooks…
tlambert | November 1, 2005Lott has drafted yet another cherry-picked article where he pretends that crime in Australia is increasing despite plummeting crime rates here. Jonathan Dursi takes it apart.
tlambert | August 23, 2005Over the past few years crime rates in Australia, Canada and England have fallen dramatically.
For example, in NSW crime plunged to the
lowest level in 20 years, in Canada, the 2003 homicide rate was the lowest in 36 years, while in England the crime rate was the lowest since the BCS started in 1981. While crime has been plummeting, John Lott has been drafting a steady stream of op-eds blaming gun control for increasing crime in those places. His secret? Cherry-picking.
Lott's latest column is a little unusual amongst his cherry picking efforts in that he provides links to his sources. He…
tlambert | September 29, 2004 Lott has an article in the National Review Online where he claims that the Washingtonian DC handgun ban caused crime increases:
Crime rose significantly after the gun ban went into effect. In the five years before Washington's ban in 1976, the murder rate fell from 37 to 27 per 100,000. In the five years after it went into effect, the murder rate rose back up to 35. During this same time, robberies fell from 1,514 to 1,003 per 100,000 and then rose by over 63 percent, up to 1,635.
I've graphed the homicide and robbery rates for the ten years on either…
tlambert | September 16, 2004 Crime statistics for the last 12 months in NSW have been released. Most crime categories have decreased significantly.
Indecent assault, act of indecency and other sexual offences
Down by 11.9%
Robbery with a weapon not a firearm
Down by 19.7%
Break and enter - dwelling
Down by 9.4%
Break and enter - non-dwelling
Down by 17.6%
Motor vehicle theft
Down by8.7%
Steal from motor vehicle
Down by 13.7%
Steal from retail store
Down by 17.4%
Steal from dwelling
Down by 5.1%
Steal from person
Down by 17.8%
Fraud
Down by 12.3%
Murder
No significant trend
Assault
No…
tlambert | July 1, 2004
Lehrer and Lott have recycled their previous cherrypicking exercise into an article in the Investor's Business Daily falsely claiming that gun control in Britain, Canada and Australia have lead to "historic increases in crime". Mostly they repeat their previous claims, so I'll just comment on the new ones. They claim that "overall violent crime" in England increased by 118%. The graph above (from Chapter 5 of Crime in England and Wales 2002/2003) shows how utterly false their claim is. Since 1997, violent crime has declined significantly. Where did…
tlambert | June 29, 2004In response to criticism that Lott used cherry picked numbers to claim that homicides had increased following gun registration in Canada, "Maxim" posted on Usenet:
The law started in December 1998. Guns did not have to be registered until 2001. Violent crime was falling until very shortly after the law started doing anything, and the crime rates start rising consistently after that, with the biggest increase in 2002. It is falling before the law and for one year after and then rising consistently afterward.
Hmm, it was posted under the name of Lott's son, but the writing…
tlambert | June 22, 2004 The National Post has printed a letter from Gary Mauser commenting on the Lott/Lehrer oped I discussed earlier. Here is the whole thing:
It should not surprise many people that Canada's gun laws have not worked (More Gun Control Isn't The Answer, John R. Lott Jr., June 15). Anyone living in a big Canadian city has witnessed the horrifying increase in violent crime over the past decade.
Canada's violent crime rate is now higher than in the United States. Our burglary and assault rates are particularly frightening, and illegal handguns are increasingly misused in our largest cities.…
tlambert | June 20, 2004 Lott has teamed up with Eli Lehrer for another cherry picking exercise. In an op-ed drafted in National Post they get straight to it with an outrageous cherry pick in just the second sentence:
Gun control has not worked in Canada. Since the new gun registration program started in 1998, the U.S. homicide rate has fallen, but the Canadian rate has increased.
On the left you can see a graph of Canadian homicide rates for the last ten years (data from Statistics Canada). Since 1998 the homicide rate has pretty obviously gone down. So how were Lott and Lehrer able to…
tlambert | May 26, 2004 Hunt Stilwell asks:
since the gun lobby's statistical claims have been debunked so thoroughly and so often, why do they continue to use them, and why do people continue to buy them?
Brian Linse thinks there has been some progress, since not many progun bloggers linked to Lott's piece, whereas
I remember the days when Instantman would have linked it within seconds of it being posted.
John Ray boasts that he quoted Lott in an attempt to bait me. He also offers an explanation for his earlier conduct in refusing to link to my post that he was responding to. Apparently it was "too…
tlambert | May 23, 2004 Lott has a new article at Fox News where he claims that gun control is unravelling:
Crime did not fall in England after handguns were banned in January 1997. Quite the contrary, crime rose sharply. Yet, serious violent crime rates from 1997 to 2002 averaged 29 percent higher than 1996; robbery was 24 percent higher; murders 27 percent higher. Before the law, armed robberies had fallen by 50 percent from 1993 to 1997, but as soon as handguns were banned, the robbery rate shot back up, almost back to their 1993 levels.
Australia has also seen its violent crime rates soar after its Port…
tlambert | October 11, 2003Lott has an article which purports to show that Rush Limbaugh was right when he claimed that Donovan McNabb was overrated because the media wanted to see a black quarterback do well.
Lott looked at whether media coverage was more favourable to black quarterbacks than to white quarterbacks and found that stories about black quarterbacks were slightly more likely to be positive (67% to 61%). He then did a multivariate analysis controlling for factors like the whether the quarterback's team won and finds that after doing this, black quarterbacks are 27 percentage points more…
tlambert | June 6, 2003Lott's comments about Australia that I discussed yesterday follow a similar pattern to those of many American pro-gunners. First, they greatly exaggerate the restrictions introduced in 1996, claiming that Australia "banned guns" or, in Lott's case claiming that Australia banned "most guns and [made] it a crime to use a gun defensively." In fact, semi-automatic long guns were banned and there was no change in the law on self-defence. Next, the pro-gunners will assert or imply that Australians were made defenceless. In fact, the new laws made very little…
tlambert | June 5, 2003Lott has a new entry on his blog. First, he approvingly links to an NRO opinion piece by John Derbyshire, who writes about the case of Tony Martin, who was convicted of murdering a 16-year old burglar. Derbyshire feels that Martin's imprisonment is "preposterous". Glenn Reynolds, in a rather overwrought column goes further, declaring Martin to be a "political prisoner" and wants Amnesty International to weigh in. Unfortunately, Reynolds and Derbyshire have uncritically accepted the Martin's defense lawyers version of the events, apparently without checking…
tlambert | June 1, 2003In chapter 3 of More Guns, Less Crime Lott presents an analysis based on two exit polls of gun ownership (conducted in 1988 and 1996) that purports to show that a 1% increase in a state's gun ownership causes a 4.1% decrease in the violent crime rate and a 3.2% decrease in auto theft.
Lott's two polls indicate that gun ownership increased by a remarkable 50% in just eight years, from 26% to 39%. However, this is contradicted by all other surveys on gun ownership. The best of these are the GSS surveys which actually show a modest decline over that period.
Even Lott found a 50%…