More Guns Less Crime
tlambert | October 13, 2003 Mother Jones has posted Chris Mooney's interview with Lott. Definitely worth reading. First read Mooney's commentry and follow the links to the transcripts.
tlambert | October 13, 2003Chris Mooney has published an article on Lott in Mother Jones. The whole article is well worth reading, but the way that Lott kept changing his story about the coding errors is particularly interesting:
In the face of this evidence, how can Lott continue to claim the coding errors don't matter? In an interview conducted on August 18, Lott told me that he had posted "corrected" tables on his website for all to see. But when I downloaded Lott's "corrected" version of the contested table, it showed the same numerical values as that of Donohue and Ayres---…
tlambert | September 25, 2003 Mark Kleiman has posted an email from Michael Maltz with some comments on Lott and his research. An extract:
It seems that most of Lott's critics and supporters forgot about what I feel is the most damaging lie he told while hiding behind the skirts of his fictitious Internet persona Mary Rosh: s/he described himself as "a chaired professor" at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Had s/he forgotten that he was never even awarded as much as a stool? One can be disgusted by his unfairly lashing out at his critics while in drag, calling them liars who hide behind…
tlambert | September 14, 2003 Eric Helland and Alexander Taborrak have a new paper "Using Placebo Laws to Test More Guns, Less Crime : A Note". I commented on their paper back in May, but here is Lott's take (in full, 8/22/03 blog entry):
A new research paper has an new important approach towards estimating statistical significance. Professors Eric Helland and Alex Tabarrok conclude that:
"the cross equation restrictions implied by the Lott-Mustard theory are strongly supported."
"Surprisingly, therefore, we conclude, that there is considerable support for the…
tlambert | September 13, 2003 Andrew Chamberlain observes "Once again, economist John Lott has been busted for lying."
Julian Sanchez writes about Lott: "It's long past time for people who care about gun rights to cut this albatross from our necks."
William Quick says that "it doesn't look good for Lott at the moment", but asks for a simple explanation. I recommend Kevin Drum's summary.
tlambert | September 12, 2003 Kevin Drum has an excellent summary of Lott's cheating with his models and his attempt at a coverup. He concludes that Lott should be fired forthwith. Niraj agrees, as Tom Spencer.
Atrios says that Lott's work on the Florida election is even more dishonest than his "More Guns, Less Crime" work.
skippy is amused by Lott's apparent use of time travel. Tapped and buzzflash link here and send me many visitors.
Glenn Reynolds is wavering---he now says that he would quite reluctant to rely on Lott's work.
tlambert | August 28, 2003 In Lott's 8/20 blog entry he writes:
There is a pretty obvious reason why these guys have choosen to publish their work in nonrefereed publications. Despite their continuing claims to the press, Ayres and Donohue's own papers do NOT provide any statistically significant evidence that violent crimes increase (for a brief discussion see point 2 here). Even most of their own results show that violent crime rates decline after right-to-carry laws are passed.
And this is his brief discussion:
the bottom line is that Ayres and Donohue fail to discuss…
tlambert | August 27, 2003 Tom Wright demonstrates perfectly the misleading nature of Lott's postings on the coding errors:
He also claims that the 100's of errors claimed for the study could make a difference without mentioning that these errors were corrected and the study still showed the same results to within thousandths of a percent of the original result. This is like claiming an elephant is a mouse because the claimed multi-ton weight was off by a few grams.
You see, while Lott admits that the "estimates do change somewhat", he does not tell you how much they change.…
tlambert | August 26, 2003 In the posting where he finally admitted that he had made hundreds of coding errors, Lott insinuated that Ayres and Donohue had refused to release their data and that their results were not reproducible.
Unlike Ayres and Donohue, I have endeavored to make the data readily available in a timely manner and to explain how it was constructed.
...
Ayres has also declined my requests for his data in the past, and my attempt to reconstruct what data is publicly available did not produce the same results that he claimed to obtain (e.g., p. 257, fn. 28).
Actually the…
tlambert | August 25, 2003In his statement on the coding errors Lott tries to downplay the significance of the errors:
Minor coding errors were discovered in the data set after it was first given out. The files available for downloading on this site have the corrected results using the statistical county level tests employed in Ayres and Donohue's paper ("Shooting Down the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis"). The corrections involved a few thousandths of one percent of the data entries and occurred for observations after 1996. There were well over 70,000 observations and over a hundred variables available in the…
tlambert | August 19, 2003 Ayres and Donohue have sent a letter to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, replying to Lott's 21 July letter. I agree with their description of Lott's behaviour as dishonest.
On July 21, 2003, researcher John Lott wrote a letter to the editor in which he tried to shore up support for his now discredited theory that state adoption of laws allowing citizens to carry concealed handguns will lower crime. Although he refuses to acknowledge this fact, we showed in a recent article published in the Stanford Law Review that when the coding errors in his own data set are corrected, his own…
tlambert | August 18, 2003 A study by Kovandzic and Marvell has been published in July issue of Criminology and Public Policy. (A draft of their paper is here.) From the journal's news release about their findings:
In the recently published study "Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns: Crime Control through Gun Decontrol?," Kovandzic and Marvell examine what, if any, impact Florida's right-to-carry law has had on its rate of violent crime. They find that the 1987 passage of Florida's RTC law appears to have had no statistically significant effect on violent crime. They proffer…
tlambert | July 18, 2003On July 12 The Columbus Dispatch published a letter from Paul van Doorn replying to an earlier letter from David Mayer that I commented on. Here is an extract (hyperlinks added by me):
Mayer claimed the research of economist John Lott establishes that "violent-crime rates fall after right-to-carry laws are adopted."
Lott is the darling of the pro-gun movement; he has written two books based upon studies he has conducted on crime rates and gun laws and frequently testifies before legislative bodies that statistical evidence establishes that laws permitting the carrying of concealed…
tlambert | June 22, 2003John Quiggin comments on this Gun Control Australia press release attacking John Whitley (see also Eugene Volokh's comments). Ditto on Quiggin's Voltaire/JS Mill allusions, but I think everybody is paying too much attention to this. I believe that they may have made their attack on academic freedom just to generate some publicity and controversy. You can read Whitley's response to them here---note that he ignores that part of the press release.
Quiggin also writes:
Sadly for Whitley, I think anyone associated with John Lott is going to have a hard time getting ARC…
tlambert | June 16, 2003Lott has an update to his 6/13/03 post where he responds to this post. He writes:
An e-mailer asks about whether the Ayres and Donohue piece in the American Law and Economics Review was refereed. While the original papers in that journal are indeed refereed, their piece was a review article and my understanding from Ayres was that it was not refereed.
It seems that Lott is unable to admit to even the smallest error. He claimed that they had not published it in a refereed journal, when in fact they had. Instead of admitting to the error he pretends…
tlambert | June 13, 2003Lott's 6/13/03 entry on his blog links to a letter from David Mayer printed in the Columbus Dispatch replying to a letter from Donohue. Mayer asserts:
The recent letter by Stanford law professor John Donohue (June 7) nicely illustrates the propensity of gun-control advocates to play games with statistics and to engage in ad hominem attacks. In this case, Professor Donohue unfairly attacks economist John Lott, whose research has helped dispel the myths about guns that anti-gun fanatics continue to propagate.
Apparently Mayer is unaware what an ad hominem…
tlambert | June 11, 2003In his 6/9/03 posting, Lott claims that Donohue has made a "large number of easily identifiable mistakes". Even if true, such mistakes pale into insignificance compared with the coding errors that Lott made but will not admit to, but let's examine Lott's claims and see how many mistakes he has successfully identified:
he implies that David Olson's paper was so flawed that Olson and Maltz had to withdraw the paper.
Lott has correctly identified a slip up by Donohue, since the paper has not been withdrawn. I checked with Donohue and he informs me that what he…
tlambert | June 10, 2003I asked Ben Horwich, the president of volume 55 of the Stanford Law Review to comment on Lott's latest complaints<.phpa>. He writes:
I did not categorically promise Lott that we'd run a verbatim statement by Plassmann and Whitley. I did express my interest in working with them to clear up the confusion. I think that's the crux of the misunderstanding.
The statement that did run was prepared in consultation with Plassmann and Whitley; indeed, they provided the original draft. Of course, it's modified a great deal from that version, but I wanted to print something that…
tlambert | June 9, 2003Lott has a new posting where he has some more about the important matter of the coding errors in his data. Sandwiched between some more complaints about unfair the Stanford Law Review has been and some imaginary errors in Ayres and Donohue, we have:
Of course, this is nothing new with their misleading attacks on David Mustard, where minor coding errors did not change what he had written. (Instead of letting David correct a small mistake which did not fundamentally change the results, David was forced to cut out what would have been a damaging evidence…
tlambert | June 8, 2003 This is one of the graphs that Lott presented to the National Academy of Sciences Panel in 2002. David Mustard's originally included it in his contribution to Evaluating Gun Policy, but it was removed after Donohue showed him that it was the product of coding errors made by Lott. Later graphs produced by Lott look quite different---as we saw yesterday, this seems to be all the acknowledgment you get from Lott when he makes an error.
Notice how the graph shows crime rates falling sharply and immediately after carry laws were adopted. These results were much…