safe-storage
tlambert | January 31, 2008In a paper claiming that safe-storage gun laws increase crime and do not decrease accidental deaths, Lott and Whitley:
The Cummings et al., supra note 15, research provides evidence of a
23 percent drop in juvenile accidental gun deaths after the passage of
safe-storage laws. Juvenile accidental gun deaths did decline after
the passage of the law, but what Cummings et al. miss is that these
accidental deaths declined even faster in the states without these
laws. While the Cummings et al. piece examined national data, it did
not use fixed year effects, which would have allowed them to test…
tlambert | January 15, 2008John Lott, in the National Review Online writes:
Nor does it really matter that the only academic research on the impact of trigger locks on crime finds that states that require guns be locked up and unloaded face a five-percent increase in murder and a 12 percent increase in rape. Criminals are more likely to attack people in their homes, and those attacks are more likely to be successful. Since the potential of armed victims deters criminals, storing a gun locked and unloaded actually encourages crime.
Lott falsely claims that his own paper with Whitley is the only academic research on the…
tlambert | February 22, 2006
Terence is justifiably annoyed that his tax dollars are being spent on having John Lott give a keynote speech on firearms safety at a conference in New Zealand. Lott is going to claim that safe storage laws increase crime. I don't know if he will continue to misrepresent the research that contradicts his claims.
We also have this disingenuous claim from Lott:
The [Green Party] has described one of the speakers, John Lott, as the world's most controversial pro-gun researcher. But Lott says he is not sure how he gained such a title. He says that overall gun control usually causes more…
tlambert | June 15, 2003Earlier I observed that Lott had claimed that a paper by Cummings et al that found a significant decline in juvenile accidental gun deaths following the introduction of safe storage laws was
widely discredited because the researchers never factored in that accidental gun deaths have been falling everywhere for decades.
When I pointed out that their paper clearly stated that they had controlled for national trends by using fixed effects, Lott responded with:
We had been unable to replicate their claimed results using fixed effects and the only way we could get…
tlambert | May 30, 2003In Lott's latest entry he has given up trying to support his claim that
"the sensible girl ran for where the family guns were stored. But they were locked up tight."
and responded to this post, where I pointed out that Cummings et al clearly stated that they controlled for national trends, but Lott none the less dismisses their results, claiming that they did not control for national trends. Lott now writes:
We had been unable to replicate their claimed results using fixed effects and the only way we could get something similar was without fixed effects…
tlambert | May 27, 2003The Fox News story that Lott cites contains some other falsehoods:
For several years, gun control advocates have been quoting a study that reached a very different conclusion. University of Washington doctors claimed that in a dozen states which had safe storage laws, 39 children's lives were saved.
But the study has been widely discredited because the researchers never factored in that accidental gun deaths have been falling everywhere for decades.
The author of the article does not say where he got the claim that the study was "widely discredited" because they didn't…