Misc

Lott has an op-ed in The Plain Dealer where he continues to mislead: My new book, "The Bias Against Guns," examines multiple-victim public shootings in the United States from 1977 to 1999 and finds 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. Lott does not mention here, or in his new book, this paper: Duwe, Kovandzic and Moody, "The Impact of Right-to-Carry Concealed Firearm Laws on Mass Public Shootings" Homicide Studies Journal, 6:4 pp…

In Lott's appearance on KSFO he talked about the Appalachian Law School shooting and described the two armed off-duty police officers who apprehended the shooter as "two students, one with a former law enforcement background". Lott knows full well (as this thread demonstrates) that both of them were current police officers. And they didn't stop the shooting---the shooter had run out of ammunition. Lott also claimed that British gun control in the 20s, 50s and 90s was followed by an increase in crime in each case. I have data for homicide from 1857…

The Journalist's Guide to Gun Policy Scholars and Second Amendment Scholars is a directory of pro-gun scholars. It is grouped into sections by specialty. So who are the experts with special expertise in Women and Gun Issues? Women and Gun Issues Dr. John Lott American Enterprise Institute Dr. Helen Smith Southeastern Psych. Servs. Prof. Mary Zeiss Stange Skidmore College Prof. Carol Oyster U. of Wisconsin Psych.

Ted Barlow thinks that Mac Diva overstates her case against Lott's views on non-gun issues. I agree with him. While it is relevant to note that Lott's research always seems to produce results supporting a right-wing agenda, in most of those issues he does not indulge in advocacy. You can't say that he thinks that woman's suffrage was detrimental because he produces a study purporting to show that it made the government bigger (something that Lott would consider bad). Lott might believe that giving women the vote had some benefit that outweighed any costs. In…

BuzzFlash has an interesting story which details some more examples of apparent dishonesty by Lott. I was able to check one of them myself: Mary Rosh's defence of Lott's statement that the "the worst thing people can expect from dioxin is a bad rash". Rosh argues that this isn't Lott's claim, but that of Michael Fumento, whose book Lott was reviewing. However, if you read Lott's review, it is quite clear that he makes the claim his own. And if you read Fumento's book, you will also see that Lott exaggerates Fumento's position. Fumento argues (convincingly,…

Some commentators have been saying that the 98% is the only dodgy thing Lott has done. Actually there are plenty more. For another example, look at how he fudged a graph in More Guns, Less Crime.

I should add one caution to my comments about Lott's "ten years" claim yesterday. It is possible that the reporter misunderstood and/or misquoted Lott.

If you want to see another example of Lott's carelessness towards facts, consider this article, published a few days ago: But, where Vernick and Hepburn said they were unable to find any attribution to the '20,000' statistic, Lott said the proof is readily available in a compendium prepared twice a year by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. He did say the gun law information takes a tremendous amount of time and energy to compile. "About ten years," Lott said, "somebody actually took the time to go and do this." Lott said final analysis of the B…

Gun Control Advocates Purvey Deadly Myths Wall Street Journal, 11 Nov. 1998 By John R. Lott Jr. The family gun is more likely to kill you or someone you know than to kill in self-defense. The 1993 study yielding such numbers, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, never actually inquired as to whose gun was used in the killing. Instead, if a household owned a gun and if a person in that household or someone he knew was shot to death while in the home, the gun in the household was blamed. In fact, virtual- ly all the killings in the study were committed…

Gun Control Advocates Purvey Deadly Myths Wall Street Journal, 11 Nov. 1998 By John R. Lott JR. The U.S. has a high murder rate because Americans own so many guns. There is no international evidence backing this up. The Swiss, New Zealanders and Finns all own guns as frequently as Americans, yet in 1995 Switzerland had a murder rate 40% lower than Germany's, and New Zealand had one lower than Australia's. Fin- land and Sweden have very different gun ownership rates, but very similar murder rates. Israel, with a higher gun ownership rate than the U.S., has a…