Misc
tlambert | February 7, 2004 The Wall Street Journal has published an op-ed by Kimberley Strassel who writes about Bellesiles:
Mr. Bellesiles, when asked to explain, provided ever-more outlandish excuses: that his notes had been lost in a flood, that his Web site had been hacked, that he couldn't remember where he'd found certain documents.
which lambasts Bellesiles for his latest defence, a pamphlet entitled "Weighed in an Even Balance" and which is critical of Soft Skull Press for publishing the pamphlet and reissuing Bellesiles' discredited book. I don't think Bellesiles' pamphlet successfully…
tlambert | December 22, 2003 The last time I looked at the reviews of More Guns, Less Crime at Amazon.com I noted how, after a negative review was posted, Lott would post a five-star review to push the negative review off the front page. On December 11, someone posted a negative review of More Guns, Less Crime, pointing out that several of the reviews were written by Lott. The very next day two five-star reviews were posted, pushing the negative review down the page.
Powerful evidence for reducing crime, December 12, 2003 Reviewer: Greg Kopp (see more about me) from Garfield…
tlambert | December 15, 2003 Howard Nemerov has a post defending Lott and responding to Chris Mooney's Mother Jones article. Unfortunately, he gets his facts wrong, leaves out inconvenient facts and indulges in fallacious arguments. I'll go through his post and correct these, but first some general comments.
Even though his article is a response to Chris Mooney's article Nemerov does not link to Mooney's piece. If he did, his reader's might have been able to discover how badly Nemerov misrepresents the article.
Nemerov tries to pretend that the dispute is just about politics. He doesn't mention any critic…
tlambert | September 21, 2003 Alex Tabarrok has some more on the question of whether Iraqis were well armed while Saddam was in power. (My earlier comments are here.)
He points to a New York Times article that states: "Mr. Hussein, never one to tolerate competition, forbade private citizens to carry weapons, effectively outlawing the security industry.", and suggests that contradicts an earlier New York Times article that reported that guns were easy and legal to obtain in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Tabarrok concludes:
Clearly, the New York Times is wrong. But where does the truth…
tlambert | September 7, 2003The Federalist Society is sending Lott on a speaking tour. They asked Saul Cornell to debate Lott. This is what he sent them:
Lott has been accused of research fraud and has lied on a host of other topics related to his research, including his participation in Internet discussions under a false female identity (cyber-cross dressing---very un-Federalist Society if you ask me---can you imagine Publius in drag?) I would gladly debate with any serious academic on this or other topics, but I have a general rule about not sharing the stage with frauds. In fact no serious scholar would…
tlambert | August 10, 2003Lott (along with Eli Lehrer) has an editorial in the Washington Times which claims that the 1976 gun ban caused crime to increase.
D.C. residents need more protection: Crime has risen significantly since 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. In fact, the murder rate after 1976 has never fallen back to what it was in 1976. Robberies and overall violent crime changed just as dramatically…
tlambert | July 25, 2003Vladimir Kushnir describes how Symantec's censorware blocks access to many pro-gun websites such as nra.org, under the category 'Weapons'. I checked, and he has accurately described which sites are blocked. (Though the Lott site that is blocked is actually a collection of Lott's articles---Lott's own site is not blocked.) I agree with Kushnir that most people would not expect 'Weapons' (blocked by default) would block access to sites like gunscholar.com.
Kushnir also found that many more pro-gun sites were blocked than pro-control sites. I found…
tlambert | July 21, 2003Last week I commented on Lott's LA Times editorial where he claimed that
Examining all the multiple-victim public shootings in the United States from 1977 to 1999 shows that on average, states that adopt right-to-carry laws experience a 60% drop in the rates at which the attacks occur, and a 78% drop in the rates at which people are killed or injured from such attacks.
I pointed out that he once again failed to mention the results in Duwe, Kovandzic and Moody. Homicide Studies 2002 6:4. Here is the abstract:
Right-to-carry (RTC) laws mandate that concealed weapon…
tlambert | July 15, 2003Lott has an op-ed in the Kansas City Star which is recycled from a previous op-ed in the Columbus Dispatch that I commented on here. He has made an interesting change---in earlier versions he wrote:
Other research, by David Olson at Loyola University and Michael Maltz at the University of Illinois, found that when law-abiding citizens carried concealed handguns, criminals were much less likely to carry guns. In fact, they found gun murders fell by 20 percent.
This prompted a rebuke from Michael Maltz, who wrote:
In an effort to promote laws permitting the carrying of…
tlambert | July 12, 2003A reader reminds me of another problem with Lott's attack on UN gun control efforts that I discussed yesterday. Lott argues that the UN's regulations would prevent people from obtaining small arms to resist totalitarian regimes. This is rather undercut by the Iraqi experience. Tim Noah observes that Iraqis seemed to have been well armed without ever overthrowing a repressive dictatorship. Also of interest are follow-up postings by Tim Noah and Jim Henley and the ensuing blogspace discussion ably covered by Henley here.
tlambert | July 10, 2003In response to my comments about Potemra's review of The Bias Against Guns, Paul Blackman points out that Lott actually mentions the Second Amendment twice in his book. I've corrected my earlier posting to say "barely even mentions" instead of "never mentions".
The first mention is when Lott quotes Benjamin Civiletti:
"The nation can no longer afford to let the gun lobby's distortion of the Constitution cripple every reasonable attempt to implement an effective national policy towards guns and crime."
Lott does not dispute Civiletti's interpretation of the Constitution…
tlambert | July 10, 2003In footnote 40 of his article The Impact of Concealed-Carry Laws (in Evaluating Gun Policy), John Donohue comments on Lott's claims about multiple-victim public shootings:
In the wake of a recent school shooting in Germany that killed 14, Lott summarized his finding from the Lott and Landes study: "multiple-victim public shootings fell on average by 78 percent in states that passed [right-to-carry] laws." John Lott, "Gun Control Misfires in Europe," Wall Street Journal, April 30, 2002, A16. Although the results may at first seem persuasive, there is a major…
tlambert | July 8, 2003In the July 14 issue of National Review Michael Potemra has a review of The Bias Against Guns. He writes:
Each of us has a favorite part of the Bill of Rights; for me---as for many others---it's the First Amendment. But a good rule of thumb is to consider that particular freedom most important which, at a particular time, is most under attack. And that's why John R. Lott Jr. of the American Enterprise Institute deserves the status of Hero of the Constitution in our time: He stands up for the embattled Second Amendment, the section of the Bill of Rights most hated…
tlambert | June 25, 2003Lott has an editorial arguing that the US army would be better off if it didn't disarm Iraqi civilians. Kathy Kinsley agrees. What is notable about his piece is what he doesn't cite. In arguing that American soldiers would be better off if more Iraqi civilians had guns he doesn't cite his own research on concealed carry. This is quite possibly because while he won't admit to making the coding errors, he knows that when they are corrected his results go away.
Instead he cites Mustard's paper that found a correlation between concealed carry laws and reduced police…
tlambert | June 3, 2003Lott has responded to parts of my post yesterday.
1) "Why do you use the government's survey estimate for the number of crimes committed with guns but use other surveys in your two books for estimates on the number of defensive gun uses?"
The problem with the survey from the Bureau of Justice Statistics is that "virtually none of the victims who use guns defensively tell interviewers about it in the [National Crime Victimization Survey]" (Kleck, Targeting Guns, p. 2250. People aren't allowed to say whether they have used a gun defensively unless they…
tlambert | June 2, 2003Lott has posted a transcript of the AEI event to publicize The Bias Against Guns. I'll try to correct some of the false statements in the transcript:
In 2001, according to government survey evidence, there were about 450,000 crimes that were committed with guns. Of those, there were about 8,000 gun murders. Yet our best estimates indicate that last year Americans also used guns defensively, a little bit over 2 million times a year. Ninety-five percent or so of the time, simply brandishing a gun was sufficient to stop an attack.
Surveys that ask about both…
tlambert | May 31, 2003In his interview in the Illinois Leader Lott says:
"If you look at the national news reports for ABC, NBC and CBS during 2001, they had about 190,000 words of contemporaneous gun crimes stories on their television morning and evening news reports. The average story is only 250 words or so. During that whole year there was not one single mention of people using their guns defensively, to either protect themselves or someone else."
An alert reader points out that Lott seems to have missed this story:
Take, for example, the question of how often guns are used for self-…
tlambert | May 30, 2003Several people have commented on the irony of Lott attacking the New York Times for a "Pattern of Deceit", but let's look at what he says in his article:
As an example, take the major 20,000 word series on "rampage killings" the Times published during 2000.
The paper declared that the evidence they compiled "confirmed the public perception that they appear to be increasing." Indeed, the Times found that exactly 100 such attacks took place during the 50 years from 1949 to 1999, 51 of which occurred after the beginning of 1995. Their conclusion: "…
tlambert | May 22, 2003 Lott has written an op-ed where he criticizes the New York Times for a "pattern of deceit".
tlambert | May 19, 2003Jeff Johnson of CNSNews.com describes an AEI event to publicise The Bias Against Guns. Lott repeats his version of the Appalachian Law School shootings, as usual not mentioning that the shooting stopped because the shooter ran out of ammunition and not mentioning that the armed students were off-duty police officers.
Lott also attacked University of Chicago professor Mark Duggan who published a paper, "More Guns, More Crime" in the Journal of Political Economy (CIX p 1086-1114):
He pointed to a recent paper that used subscription to the third-most…