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tlambert | January 26, 2004 Kevin Drum is dismayed that the Economist has printed a letter from Lott:
Contrary to your claims of the Americanisation of armed robbery in Britain, one could only hope that robbery in England and Wales was truly becoming Americanised ("You're history", January 3rd). The International Crime Victimisation Survey shows that for 2000, the latest year available, the robbery rate in England and Wales was twice America's rate.
Equally tellingly, your figure shows that armed robberies stopped falling in England and Wales in 1997 and started rising…
tlambert | January 22, 2004The Journalist's Guide to Gun Policy Scholars and Second Amendment Scholars is a site that provides journalists with a list of "credible, articulate scholars" to consult about gun policy questions. It used to contain a listing for John R. Lott Jr, who was available to give his special insight into "Women and Gun Issues" as well as other gun issues. The site's maintainer, Eugene Volokh, invites visitors to tell him "how this guide can be made more useful". I don't think anyone should be recommending Lott to journalists, so I wrote to Volokh suggesting…
tlambert | January 15, 2004Lott has a post (scroll to 1/10/04 entry on his blog) on the meaningless poll that discussed earlier. Lott's headline is:
A BBC Poll Shows that Most British Want a Law authorizing homeowners to use any means to defend their home from intruders
Of course, as I explained earlier phone-in polls are not at all representative of the population. Nor in any case was there majority support for the shoot a burglar law, which received 37% of the votes.
Lott links to a post by Eric Rasmussen, who also seems to think that the poll is representative of public opinion in Britain…
tlambert | January 15, 2004Michael Peckham has an interesting post looking at Bellesiles and Lott and how they relate to other research frauds. He thinks that they might serve as examples that deter others from research fraud.
tlambert | January 9, 2004 In a post on his blog Keith Burgess-Jackson wrote:
First, studies by law professor John Lott and others show that private gun-ownership reduces crime rates. This may be counterintuitive, but it's true. There would be more crime than there is if guns were banned.
In an attempt to set him straight, I emailed him and pointed out that Lott's studies had been refuted by better and more extensive work by Ayres and Donohue and gave him a link to my comments on Lott. Instead of responding to any of the points I made, he replied:
You sound like a gun-hater.
I wrote back…
tlambert | December 31, 2003Will Baude has asked Julian Sanchez 20 questions, including a couple about Lott. When asked if Lott is a liar or not, he wrote:
That depends on whether you count as a liar someone who's convinced himself that he's telling the truth: I think he may have. I guess there's no rock solid proof that he's lied, just some highly suspicious circumstantial evidence... let's just say that at this point, if I read him claiming that there are 60 seconds in a minute, I'd want to double-check it.
tlambert | December 22, 2003Say Uncle writes:
Lott's credibility issues have essentially damaged any real positive impact his research may have had on the gun debate. It's a pity Lott and I are on the same side.
He's not as bad as Bellesiles (who Tim is hard on as well) but when comparing fraud with sloppiness, no one really wins. Tim is right, Lott is on Lott's side.
In comments, Kevin Baker (of Smallest Minority) agrees with Say Uncle.
tlambert | December 16, 2003Ken Miles links to my posts on Lott's anonymous reviews and writes:
Tim Lambert has destroyed any possible remnants of John Lott's credibility.
tlambert | December 15, 2003Kevin Drum links to the latest installments in my exposure of Lott's sock puppetry and generously nominates me for Best Single Issue Blog in the Koufax awards. In a clarification of the rules, John Lott's blog was ruled ineligible for "Best Group Blog" because "A group blog requires more than one actual person."
tlambert | December 5, 2003Congratulations to John Lott for making number 16 on Jesse Taylor's list of the Twenty Most Annoying Conservatives of 2003. Well done!
tlambert | October 29, 2003 Kevin Connors admits that he has been "quite remiss in following the efforts to debunk Prof. Lott's work", but unfamiliarity with the case isn't going to stop him from having an opinion on the matter. Connors takes issue with Brian Linse's description of Lott's work as fraudulent:
simply because a theory is flawed, that constitutes no grounds for labeling it fraudulent.
If Connors had been following the case against Lott he would know that it isn't just that his work is flawed (that was shown long ago) but that it is dishonest. After correcting his coding…
tlambert | October 15, 2003 Chris Mooney has a couple of comments on Lott's response to his article.
You can also read comments from Nick Confessore on Tapped and Atrios.
Update: And Randy Barnett repeats his call for an independent panel to assess the merits of this controversy.
tlambert | October 14, 2003 Mark Kleiman writes:
What seems to me even more striking, though Mooney doesn't mention it, is the difference in the way the two are treated in the mainstream press: while no news article about Bellesiles could fail to mention the controversy about Arming America, Lott---who made up an on-line persona who praised him to the skies and claimed on his behalf academic appointments the real John Lott never received, and who still claims to have done a survey with 2000 respondents which reached an utterly implausible finding and of which no evidentiary trace can be found---still gets treated as…
tlambert | October 3, 2003 You have to scroll down towards the end of this monster posting. Zycher has proven to be profoundly careless with his facts in his post, which makes this comment of his rather self-referential:
The modern art of blogging---of which you are one of the truly prominent practitioners---has many virtues, among them the stimulation of discussion and the ability to correct errors and set records straight quickly. But among those virtues one searches in vain for carefulness; the familiar trade offs are heavily weighted toward edginess and speed.
I can only hope…
tlambert | October 3, 2003 Tyler Cowen reacts to the calls from Mark Kleiman, Glenn Reynolds and Randy Barnett for a panel to investigate Lott's conduct:
My first reaction is to suggest that we already have such a panel every time John, or anyone else, submits a manuscript to a refereed journal on the topic.
Cowen seems to believe that the purpose of the panel would be to investigate whether Lott was correct in his "More guns, Less Crime" research. There is already a panel examining that question. It is the National Academy of Sciences panel on firearms research. Lott mounted a…
tlambert | October 3, 2003 Randy Barnett adds his voice to those calling for the American Enterprise Institute to conduct an investigation into Lott's conduct. He also writes:
Since Jim Lindgren's unsuccessful effort to verify some of Lott's claims from the criticisms of Tim Lambert, I have not defended Lott publicly in any way. Nor would I now rely on his empirical conclusions absent some outside examination of the sort that was eventually given the work of Michael Bellesiles.
Ralph Luker writes
Lott's sponsors, primarily the American Enterprise Institute, but also the…
tlambert | September 16, 2003 ArchPundit writes:
The simple question to Lott is why did he stop correcting for clustering in the observations. Hear the silence?
tlambert | September 15, 2003Alan Schussman has a thoughtful post on the issues of how scientists should treat their data and how it relates to Lott's conduct.
tlambert | September 5, 2003 Jeff Soyer has a post where he is taken in by a Lott opinion piece. He quotes Lott:
In a new book, The Bias Against Guns, Bill Landes of the University of Chicago Law School and I examine multiple-victim public shootings in the United States from 1977 to 1999 and find that when states passed right-to-carry laws, these attacks fell by 60 percent. Deaths and injuries from multiple-victim public shootings fell on average by 78 percent.
Exactly. I know there has been some minor controversy about his statistics of late but even if we cut in-half his pro-gun figures,…
tlambert | September 4, 2003 Tom Spencer, commenting on Duncan's comments that I posted yesterday, writes:
Unfortunately folks, as you well know, the damage is already done. We've got right-to-carry laws in the vast majority of states (mine being one of the notable exceptions of course) and there's not much we can do about it at this point.
Meanwhile, Eric Rasmussen commenting on John Donohue's "The Final Bullet in the Body of the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis" is more sceptical---he'd like to see more evidence that Lott's work actually influenced the politicians who passed…