John Lott sues "Freakonomics" author Steven Levitt

[sterling180]

Okay for once and all, Im going to explain why these acts of Parliament,came into force:

1988 Firearm Ammendment Act:A modification of the original 1968 act,that was ammended in 1988 to ban the following:assault weapons,pump and semi-auto centrefire rifles.
Reasons for banning:1:Assault weapons are inapropriate for civillian use,dangerous,nothing but anti-human weapons,etc,etc.2:Not enough people owned them on a license or wanted them anyway-so the bright Tories banned them outright,along with the assault weapons.

1997/8 Firearm Ammendment Acts: Modifications to both previous acts than banned the following:All handguns,except long-barrelled pistols and revolvers and those that qualified as Section 7 antique pistols.All match pistols and rimfire were added,because they were classed as standard-pistols.

Reasons for banning: GCN wanted centrefire pistols banned,because they were used by Thomas Hamilton to kill the children at Dunblane primary school and they wanted to prevent shooters from owning,what they percieved to be "unnessessary weapons" and wanted "sensible gun laws" introduced,to prevent further massacres,from occurring again, in the future-using handguns.

When the GCN learned that match pistols and rimfire pistols were still legal they pressured the Labour government into banning them,so the anti-gunners in Labour agreed.However Labour is considering re-instating pistols because of the Olympic games and that shooting-sports is a proven to be one of the safest sports around-despite what the anti-gunners say and think.

As for the banning of the match pistols,the GCN don't want them to be legal,because their legal status could undermine the GCNs policies and could cause the fall of the 1997 Firearm Ammendment Act.

Basically the present UK government doesn't trust citizens with weapons,because they feel not everyone will be responsible and non-violent with them as demonstrated by Thomas Hamilton and Micheal Ryan.But they do know why people want to shoot with them and are aware of the governing bodies,that administer the various shooting-disciplines.

Also the Labour Party and its leader-the current PM -is Scottish by origin and sympathised with the victims of Dunblane and their families.Labour gets alot of votes from Scotland-which could affect it's term in power and the PMs term in office.

 

[agricola]

Sterling,

The 1988 Act came in because of Hungerford, not because the Tories felt like it - they brought it in because of the pressure that was upon them to do something about it.

Also the 1997 Act was brought in by the then extremely weak Tory government under John Major, and it was a manifesto promise of New Labour (then in opposition backed by the Snowdrop Campaign/GCN) that would close the "loophole", which as you rightly state came in in 1998.

I would also be utterly amazed if the Labour Government, in its current dire straits, reversed the 1998 Act. Reason does not enter into the debate when it comes to firearms in this country, especially when the Government are getting battered from all sides.

 

[Art Eatman]

Me, I don't care about the whys and wherefores of England and its gun laws. As near as I can tell, human behavior there doesn't match most of the US:

Three neutral to mildly anti-gun reasearchers, at least two of whom were statisticians, spent a few years studying gun laws and gun-associated crimes in Florida. The primary conclusion was that no gun control law there had ever affected crime rates. That study's results were published in 1985: Wright, Rossi and Daly, "Under the Gun", Univ. of Fla. press.

Then came statistician Gary Kleck of florida State University, a card-carrying ACLU member who did the largest telephone survey in the U.S.--at least at that time--and provided the range of figures of 800,000 to as many as 2,000,000 instances per year of the use of a firearm to avoid some criminal act. This was at a time when the use of guns in crimes of all sorts ran about 600,000 per year, per federal government info.

Somewhere along about the time of Klecks publishing his findings, the Florida legislature passed its concealed handgun laws.

Violence towards individuals slacked off notablY, per press releases from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE). About that time, attacks on tourists at highway rest stops and on rent-a-car folks leaving airports began to rise. When asked about their actions and targets, various criminals commented that they couldn't take a chance with Florida residents being armed, but that tourists would not be armed--particularly those arriving by airplane. If the conclusions from that are not obvious to you, go to the Chaplain and get your TS card punched.

For all practical purposes, although that one major study by Lott is helpful, it merely suppports earlier findings. The data from the FDLE provides real-world results of CHL.

We know from published data from the FDLE and the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) that the crime rate among CHL holders is near miniscule. From the standpoint of violence it's right at "statistically insignificant", as is said. We thus know that no harm is done to society from having the CHL system.

My opinion of the desirability of having a system of concealed carry throughout the United States follows an often-heard justification for other views: "If it will save just one life!"

, Art

 

[sterling180]

Agricola,-I understand that public/media and police pressure was on the Tories in 1987,to ban assault weapons,but they as polititions had a choice and they chose the easy way out,by banning SLRs of all types to win hearts and minds-possibly for the 1987 General Election.They didn't seem to give much of a stuff about those who had expensive M14s,G3s,AR-15s and PSG1s-it was a case of "too bad,its banned now".

By the way I understood very well that the Tories didn't ban SLRs because they "felt like it."If that was the case,then they could have banned them in the 1970s.A combination of pressure from various sources,the Hungerford massacre-in terms of the death toll-and the 1987 General Election,all were factors that contributed to the ban.

The Tories could have still made exeptions to the ban by allowing sporting centrefire pumps and semi's,but they included them,despite the fact that they were used by farmers,deerstalkers,pest-controllers,etc.

.22 pumps and SLRs were exempted from the ban,because they were popular-and I have read this before on the internet.

However they still allowed pistols to be legal-but that didn't last long.

The Tories themselves voted amongst themselves in 1987,as to whether or not SLRs,should be banned and guess what it seemed that quite alot of MPs in the Tory Party,were horrified at the devestation caused by Micheal Ryan,so they voted to ban them outright-in the hope of preventing another gun massacre.But it certainly didn't.

By the way the content in the above paragraphs information came from one the UK NRAs documents,that is available online.

No talk, a few years after, of reinstating SLRs/Pump centrefires to section 1 status,no Tories were quite happy with the way things were.

A similar policy was adopted 10 years later,to ban handguns,when the weak Tories tried to win hearts and minds and secure more votes,than the popular Labour Party, in the 1997 General Election.John Major and Micheal Howard even admitted that it was the wrong decision to of made in 1996 and its a case of:guess what guys, its too little too late,you sacrificed our rights to pistols to in a desperate attempt to gain votes.How typical of you and your party.

 

[Carl N. Brown]

To the issue of John Lott's lawsuit against the book
Freakonomics:

Side note: the Publisher Weekly and Washington Post announcements
of Dubner and Levitt's Freakonomics do not mention Lott or guns.

The book does state:

According to Levitt's book: "When other scholars have tried
to replicate [Lott's] results, they found that right-to-carry
laws simply don't bring down crime."

But according to Lott's lawsuit: "In fact, every time that an
economist or other researcher has replicated Lott's research,
he or she has confirmed Lott's conclusion."

Soon after the publication of Lott's More Guns, Less Crime
Lott provided his data sets to thirty-seven scholars,
thirty-four replicated his results, and three who used
different weighting of variables got minor differences
in results.

Lott's critics like Tim Lambert regard the three as trumping
the thirty-four: falsus in uno falsus in omnibus and all
that. "Lambert also notes that Lott has repeatedly generated
estimates based on data sets flawed by coding errors and
refused to acknowledge these problems when the errors were
brought to his attention."--Yale Law Review. At first I thought
Lott's data was flawed and he refused to answer critics. It
turns out, the critic said Lott's coding of his regression
was flawed, not that the dataset was flawed: the critic used
Lott's data set, fer cryin' out loud. And Lott pointed out
what he considered errors in the way the critic weighted
variables in his regression: scarcely refusing to acknowledge
a problem.

John Donohue (Stanford Law School) and Ian Ayres (Yale Law
School) have been more critical of Lott's results than anyone
else: their analysis of CCW shows some increase in some crimes
and some decrease in other crimes dependent on time and place:
their increases and decreases are very small and do not
support claims that CCW causes a net increase in crime and
do not support the claims that Lott misrepresented his
original data or that he deliberately miscoded his original
regressions.

The NAS in the past claimed that guns were bad and gun
control was good. The fact that most researchers who take
the Lott-Mustard survey data and apply his regressions have
confirmed the More Guns, Less Crime thesis, has led the NAS
to back a different weighting of the regression to claim
More Guns, Little or No Effect, and to claim that now, after
all, none of the gun control policies can be proven to have
more benefits than costs. How this reflects badly on Lott
and cheers his critics is hard for me to see.

The justification in US law for gun control is largely
crime control. Guns are not treated like cars, poisons or
explosives as dangerous but useful things that need
regulation but not prohibition: the popular title for the
1934 National Firearms Act is the "Gangster Weapon Act."
The New York State supreme court ruled that under the 1911
Sullivan Act New York City could not issue target shooters
permits, only carry or on-premises self-defense permits.
The simplistic drumbeat of the last century has been
guns=bad gunowner=badguy and "if its against guns, it's
gotta be good."

The latest NAS release is a sea change in the academic
view of guns and gun control. Make no mistake: academia
is knee-jerk liberal and pro-gun control: academia hailed
Michael Bellesiles' revisionist gun denial history
"Arming America" and sneered at what they considered
right-wing pro-gun critics like "amateur historian"
Clayton Cramer, who pointed out at the Columbia U
Conservative Club several serious falsifications in
"Arming AMerica" the very night that Michael "The NRA's
Worst Nightmare" Bellesiles was awarded the Columbia U
Bancroft Prize. But when liberal, pro-gun control academics
started to defend Bellesiles from critics, but found
instead lie after lie, Bellesiles' defenders dwindled
away, the publisher refused to reissue the book as too
flawed to salvage even with revisions, Emory U pulled
his tenured professorship after a major investigation,
and Columbia revoked his Bancroft Prize for Arming
America, the first time that that has happened. But
Academia paid no heed to criticism of Bellesiles, until
it came from self-identified liberal, antigun academics
who openly wished Bellesiles was right. Academia is
still dominated by the liberal antigun ideology, which
perhaps explains the vitriol directed at Lott.

Lott and Levitt disagree on more than the more guns, less
crime thesis and this may color or cloud things. Lott
considers Levitt "rabidly anti-gun" and Levitt denies being
rabid or antigun. (Of course, after seeing "Old Yeller" if
I were rabid I would be antigun myself.) Levitt believes
that increased abortion after Roe v Wade brought down crime
by reducing the crime-prone demographic: unwanted poor kids
in single parent households.

So when Florida passed right-to-carry, then the crime rate
went down, the causation was .... abortion. Florida muggers
and carjackers started avoiding cars with Florida state tags
and started targeting cars with tourist rental tags or
out-of-state tags because of .... abortion (not because over
100,000 Florida residents had CCW licenses). When the majority
of 1,874 convicts told James D. Wright the thing they feared
most was being shot by a victim, they were actually afraid
of .... abortion. (OK, I am being snarky; what else is new?)

Levitt and his co-author often appear to throw out ideas to be
shocking and to make one pause and "think outside the box."
Lott is also known for doing the same: his stance on guns and
crime is shocking and outside-the-box for an academician.

While Levitt seems not to believe that CCW reduces crime,
his book Freakonomics also says gun control has no effect
on crime either.

My prediction in all this is that more copies of Levitt's
Freakonomics and Lott's The Bias Against Guns will be sold
as a result of this controversey.

 

[agricola]

Carl,

All of which is the usual fluster thrown up when Lott is scrutinized.

For a start, even that article, which is broadly pro-Lott, recognizes that it wasnt the case that "every time that an economist or other researcher has replicated Lott's research, he or she has confirmed Lott's conclusion".

Secondly, the issue is restricted by you to MGLC, but you then use a quote from Tim Lambert:

Lambert also notes that Lott has repeatedly generated estimates based on data sets flawed by coding errors and refused to acknowledge these problems when the errors were brought to his attention.

Lamberts criticisms of Lott's data sets are aimed at a later paper (one he co-authored with Plassman and Whitley but then distanced himself from), not MGLC. Lambert has a complete list of these shenanigans here:

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2006/01/yet_another_attempt_by_lott_to.php

Where Lambert (and others including Lindgren (who took the time to listen to Lott's side of the story) and Duncan) have criticized MGLC is mainly over the issue of the missing survey data and the 98% claim, a claim which is made more attractive by the fact that Lott used the figure before the survey he claims occured had finished, to say nothing of the almost complete absence of evidence that the survey was actually done. This and other errors are listed below:

http://timlambert.org/guns/lott/Lotts_of_Errors.html

Defenders of Lott point out that the 98% reference is but one sentence in MGLC, but Lott himself used that statistic a great deal before all the controversy broke in a lot of op-eds, and it still gets mentioned a great deal by those referencing the book.

Its immaterial that Lott is right or wrong if the methods he has used are fraudulent. Sadly (for him) the Courts are rather good at exposing the truth of such matters - if this gets as far as a Courtroom.

 

[Carl N. Brown]

According to Levitt's book: "When other scholars have tried to replicate
[Lott's] results, they found that right-to-carry laws simply don't bring
down crime."

That is the statement in Levitt's book that is being challenged.
The replication of Lott's right-to-carry results has been done
by other researchers using Lott's data and math; by weighting
the regression, some have gotten slightly different results.
So other scholars have replicated Lott's results and other
scholars have not. Both ways. The Ayers and Donohue results
showed minor increases here and minor decreases there.

Someone told me that progunners' rights should not be dependent
on statistics. By the same token, antigunners would not accept
statistics either. I seriously doubt if Anne Pearston or Rebecca
Peters would concede to any statistics supporting RKBA or CCW.
So betting the baby on anyone's stats is foolishm and
Lott is just one out of Kleck, Wright, Rossi, Kates, Et Alia.

Defenders of Lott point out that the 98% reference is but one sentence in MGLC
Yes, in his investigation of the survey, James Lindgren said he and Otis
Dudley Duncan agreed with the statement someone made that the 98%
stat was just one sentence and was not critical to the right-to-carry
argument in MoGuLeCr.

The teapot tempest over the Ayers and Donohue vs Plassman, Whitley and
Lott articles reaches hurricane porportions only by applying a lot of spin.

It is true that Lott has damaged himself by publishing the 98% result
with the dataset AWOL, using the ludicruous pseudonym, etc.,

I do not know which would be worse to witness in court: John Lott defending
Mary Rosh, or Tim Lambert reading into the record his Lord of the Rings
parody featuring Lott as The Gollum. Hopefully, rules of evidence would
be restricted to issue at hand.

 

[Carl N. Brown]

Lott is just one out of Kleck, Wright, Rossi, Kates, Et Alia.

For those who might have heard of the others, but wonder
about whos is Et Alia?

Et Alia is a modern descendant of the ancient philosopher Ibidus.
H.P. Lovecraft wrote a biography of Ibidus after reading a student
paper remarking on the widespread quotes attributed to Ibidus.
Ibidus, who is also known by his knickname Ibid, was a contemporary
of Op Cite, another widely quoted ancient Academician. I believe
that Academicia was located somewhere on the trade route between
Imperial Rome and Ancient Athens.

 

[agricola]

Carl,

i) Lambert isnt being sued - why would he be in Court?;

ii) No-one, except from Lott and a few of his defenders, is making this into an issue of pro- vs anti-gun (as you noted, Lott is the person who labelled Levitt "rabidly antigun", anonymously) and an argument on the relative merits of gun rights / gun control. If he (and they) do manage to make it into that then, when he is publicly exposed, one would have thought there would be quite a bit of fallout;

iii) the 98% isnt critical in MGLC, but Lott himself highlighted it repeatedly, and its an issue about which (as Lambert has shown) he has been dishonest - his first reference to it being before the survey was completed (Lott himself told Lindgren the survey was done over three months in early 1997, the first mention by Lott was on Feb 6 1997, and the survey was not referred to in the first edition of MGLC). The dataset isnt AWOL, in all likelyhood it didnt exist because the survey was never done, which is why people focus on it.

iv) finally did you read the links? The debate over the Plassman/Whitley (Lott) paper focuses more on Lott's attempts to distance himself from it when the data was examined, and then his clumsy attempts to surreptitiously "fix" the data and claim it was never broken in the first place, than any debate over the wider issue at hand.

 

[eghad]

He points out that carrying guns has no statistical impact on crime one way or another.

It has a very big effect on statistics. If legally used for self defense it might prevent that person from becoming a homicide statistic in the FBI Uniform Crime reports..

Armed Citizen: 1, Criminal: 0 looks like a mighty good statistic to me even if only 1 citizens life is saved.

I dont think the Criminals read too much...but an armed citizens weapon is like braille to a blind man when a criminal sees it.

 

[ArmandTanzarian]

Hasn't Lott's work been throughly discredited by scholars?

Absolutely NOT. It's held up to intense scholarly scrutiny, IINM. It's multiple-regression-analyzed to control for variables, and otherwise impeccable in every way.

I Believe his work is at best misleading, and in truth more likley wishful thinking.

I believe you would be incorrect on that score. If you read his works, he explains in excruciating detail how his work has stood up to the attempted 'criticisms' of it. Get More Guns Less Crime - it's not too much money, and highly interesting (to me anyway).

He only looks at part of the data to show his conclusion, when it fact if one takes all the data collected it proves guns have little effect on crime.

That's just not correct, I don't think. The data he looks at is highly relevant, both time and geography wise, and statistically significant enough from which to draw conclusions, and as regression-analyzed for variables. He proved conclusively that shall issue concealed carry laws, on a state-by-state and county-by-county basis, reduced the rates of violent crimes overall *significantly* (rape, robbery, murder, aggravated assault), while slightly increasing property crimes, as compared to before passage

By sueing the writer he is proving he is very full of himself.

Yes, and he should be, as his work has been, from a statistical/social scientific perspective, impeccable, as mentioned.

And yes, he was a blithering idiot for pretending to be the fictional "Mary Rosh" and anonymously lauding his own works online, but that nevertheless does not directly impugn his scholarly analysis of CCW laws.

 

[agricola]

There is nothing wrong with Lotts work! Everyone else is lying!

 

[Carl N. Brown]

If I had a picture of Cotton Mather I would answer that one.












It is funny, tho.,Even tho I don't think Lott, Ayeres or Donohue are liars.
Having differences of opinion is not telling falsehoods with intent to deceive.
My gut feeling is that academicia does not want to look at the
possibility that on the whole gun control has done more harm than good,
and the great antigun crusade has been a net loss for public safety.

 

[agricola]

Carl,

I dont think Ayres and Donaghue are liars (indeed has anyone accused them of being?), but there are some issues around Lott that would suggest dishonesty, as has been highlighted. Also, the issue around gun control and its statistical success is irrelevant, whats important is whether he is guilty or not of the allegations Lambert and others have made.

What is somewhat concerning is the way people blindly back him because of his stance, as ArmandTanzarians post just showed, if he isnt another sock puppet.

 

[Carl N. Brown]

Thread: John Lott sues "Freakonomics" author Steven Levitt

Your summation of the charges against him {Lott} are simplistic to say the least, ...

It is the nature of summations to be simplistic, just as water is wet and rock is hard.

Finally, I dont see what relevance the law in Tennessee is to
this debate, ....

Germane to the subject of More Guns, Less Crime, Section 26 of the Tennessee
Constitution both guarantees the right of the citizen to keep and bear
arms and reserves the authority of the state to regulate wearing of
arms in public. So it is relevant to the subject.

Me, I don't care about the whys and wherefores of England and its gun laws.

With IANASA seeking to impose IANSA/GCN style gun laws on US citizens
through an international UN treaty, you should not only care, but
as Geena Davis warns in "The Fly" Be afraid, be very afraid.

the issue is restricted by you {CNB} to MGLC, but you then use a quote
from Tim Lambert:

Lambert also notes that Lott has repeatedly generated estimates
based on data sets flawed by coding errors and refused to
acknowledge these problems when the errors were brought to
his attention.

Lambert's criticisms of Lott's data sets are aimed at a later paper
(one he co-authored with Plassman and Whitley but then distanced
himself from), not MGLC. Lambert has a complete list of these
shenanigans here: at link to lambert deltoid

(The quote was from a Yale Law Review article referencing Lambert.)
That later paper, in response to Ayres and Donohue's "Shooting Down
the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis," was Lott, Plassmanm
and Whitley's "Confirming More Guns, Less Crime" so even if
I did restrict the issue to MoGuLeCr, so what? You asked me:
did you read the links? I ask you: did you read the links?

I lost patience with Tim Lambert back when I was lurking at History News
Network. I do not bump his website hit count if I can find articles
elsewhere, especially at their original sources free of his spin.
I am beginning to move from snarky to cranky.

long post, five parts

1. my opinion
2. Media Law Prof BLOG Lott Sues Levitt, 20 April 2006
3. ABSTRACT Confirming More Guns, Less Crime, Lott, Plassman, Whitley, 9 Jan 2003
4. ABSTRACT Latest More Guns, Less Crime Misfires, Donohue, Ayres, April 2003
5. EXTRACT Chronicle of Higher Education on Lott, Donohue, Ayres,
Plassman, Whitley, and Lindgren [/b]

my opinion

The claims in Freakonomics outlined in the Media Law Prof Blog
suggest to me that Steven Levitt, by implying
- that all other scholars who tested Lott's hypothesis got different results,
and by stating
- that the Journal of Law and Economics special issue was NOT peer reviewed when it WAS, and
- that Lott put in only work from those who supported him whem he solicited an article from Levitt himself,
that Steven Levitt allowed his zeal to lead him to cross the line or
pop culture co-author Dubner negligently "jazzed-up" what Levitt
originally wrote for mass market appeal, again just my opinion,
folks, ferwadeveritswerth.

The Abstracts on the Lott, Plassman, Whitley article and the
Donohue, Ayres article and the Chronicle of Higher Education
extract indicate to me that Levitt's Freakonomics claim is
not backed by other critics of Lott, at least to the extent of
saying that his results have not been replicated by researchers.
That is Levitt and Dubner.

Ayres and Donohue do miss a point long made by right-to-carry
(RTC) supporters: it is expected that RTC will force criminals
from people-crime to property-crime, substituting
- car-theft for car-jacking,
- burglary for home invasion, and
- larceny of goods for robbery of people.
The expected result of RTC is not and has not been a drop in
property-crime; if fact, it has long been predicted that RTC
would cause a rise in property-crime as robbers of people became
thieves of property.*

Donohue does acknowledge one thing:
No scholars now claim that legalizing concealed weapons causes
a major increase in crime.
NO RIVERS OF BLOOD OVERFLOWING THE GUTTERS FROM WILD WEST
SHOOT OUTS AS THE TATTERS OF CIVILIZATION DESCEND INTO A
HOBBESIAN MAELSTROM OF BRUTAL "LORD OF THE FLIES" ANARCHY????
No, just a small increase in property-crime, as criminals try to
avoid being shot. RTC supporters (Ayoob, Cooper, Jordan) have always
claimed RTF would reduce crimes against the person, not property.

Before Lott, it was common in academia to claim that legalizing
concealed weapons would cause a major increase in crime.
There has been a sea-change, people, wake up and smell the surf
spray in the morning: it smells like .... Victoria.
----------------------
*If policy-makers value the slight increase in the monetary cost
of property-crime over the slight decrease in the monetary cost of
people-crime, frelle them. ;evil;

Media Law Prof Blog

A Member of the Law Professor Blogs Network

April 20, 2006

Lott (More Guns, Less Crime)

Sues Levitt (Freakonomics)

Over Book's Statements, Email

John Lott, the author of More Guns, Less Crime has sued
Steven Levitt over statements Levitt made in Freakonomics,
the book he wrote with Steven Dubner, as well as an email
that Levitt sent last year in which Lott claims Levitt
defamed him. Lott's complaint cites this passage from
Freakonomics as an example of the type of defamatory
statements made in the book concerning Lott and his
research:

Levitt in Feakonimics
Then there was the troubling allegation that Lott actually
invented some of the survey data that supports his more
guns/less crime theory. Regardless of whether the data were
faked, Lott's admittedly intriguing hypothesis doesn't seem
to be true. When other scholars have tried to replicate his
results, they found that right-to-carry laws simply don't
bring down crime.

The email of which Lott complains occurred during the
following exchange. John McCall, a Texas economist, emailed
Levitt concerning the question of replication of Lott's
research, saying (according to the complaint):

John McCall to Levitt
"You also state that others have tried to replicate
[Lott's] research and have failed. Please supply me with
appropriate citations so that I might check for myself."
Lott's complaint
In a subsequent e-mail, McCall referred to a special issue
of The Journal of Law & Economics..., which contains a
collection of scholarly articles, including one by Lott...
an article that also addresses right-to-carry laws....
After discussion with the editors, Lott raised the funds
to pay the journal's printing and mailing costs....
In his e-mail, McCall stated as follows;
John McCall to Levitt
I went to the website you recommended--have not gone after
the round table proceedings yet--I also found the following
citations--have not read any of them yet, but it appears they
all replicate Lott's research. The Journal of Law and Economics
is not chopped liver....
Lott's complaint
Levitt responded by e-mail that same day and stated as follows:
Steven Levitt to McCall
It was not a peer referred edition of the Journal. For $15,000
he was able to buy an issue and put in only work that supported
him. My best friend was the editor and was outraged the press
let Lott do this....
Lott's complaint
The foregoing allegations are false and defamatory.
The Special Issue was, in fact, peer reviewed. Levitt knew it
was peer reviewed because Lott asked him to contribute an
article and told him that the papers would be peer reviewed....
Levitt's statement that "For $15,000 [Lott] was able to buy
an issue and put in only work that supported him" is also
false and defamatory. Lott did not "buy" the issue nor did
he "put in only work that supported him"...

April 20, 2006

===============================================================

ABSTRACT
Confirming More Guns, Less Crime

By John R. Lott Jr., Florenz Plassman, John Whitley
Posted: Thursday, January 9, 2003

PAPERS AND STUDIES
SSRN Electronic Paper Collection
Publication Date: January 9, 2003

Available from the Social Science Research Network.

John R. Lott, Jr., is a resident scholar at AEI. Florenz Plassmann
is part of the Department of Economics at the State University of
New York at Binghamton. John Whitley is part of the School of
Economics at the University of Adelaide.

Confirming More Guns, Less Crime

JOHN R. LOTT Jr.
American Enterprise Institute (AEI)
FLORENZ PLASSMANN
State University of New York - Department of Economics
JOHN E. WHITLEY
University of Adelaide - School of Economics
------------------------------------------------------
December 9, 2002

Abstract:
Analyzing county level data for the entire United States from
1977 to 2000, we find annual reductions in murder rates between
1.5 and 2.3 percent for each additional year that a right-to-carry
law is in effect. For the first five years that such a law is in
effect, the total benefit from reduced crimes usually ranges
between about $2 billion and $3 billion per year.

Ayres and Donohue have simply misread their own results. Their
own most generalized specification that breaks down the impact
of the law on a year-by-year basis shows large crime reducing
benefits. Virtually none of their claims that their county level
hybrid model implies initial significant increases in crime are
correct. Overall, the vast majority of their estimates based on
data up to 1997 actually demonstrate that right-to-carry laws
produce substantial crime reducing benefits. We show that their
models also do an extremely poor job of predicting the changes
in crime rates after 1997.

Working Paper Series

Suggested Citation
Lott, John R., Plassmann, Florenz and Whitley, John E.,
"Confirming More Guns, Less Crime" (December 9, 2002).
Available at SSRN:
http://ssrn.com/abstract=372361 or DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.372361

===============================================================

ABSTRACT
The Latest Misfires in Support of the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis

JOHN J. DONOHUE III
Yale Law School; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
IAN AYRES
Yale Law School; Yale School of Management
------------------------------------------
April 2003

Stanford Law and Economics Olin Working Paper No. 253;
Yale Law & Economics Research Paper No. 278; Yale Law School,
Public Law Working Paper No. 53

Abstract:
John Lott, Florenz Plassman, and John Whitley ("LPW") have
criticized our article, Shooting Down the More Guns, Less Crime
Hypothesis, by arguing that some aggregated statistical models
that we criticized support their "more guns, less crime" claim
(which leads them to say we "misread" our results) and by
offering new regressions on an expanded county data set. We
maintain, however, as we did in our original article, that the
aggregated models favored by LPW are flawed by a serious
selection effect problem (and in any event we show that the
findings LPW point to are undermined by controls for pre-existing
state trends in crime). Indeed, we illustrate that simply
dropping the states that adopted concealed carry laws during
the crack epidemic leads to estimates that concealed carry laws
strongly increase crime (which underscores the importance of
the omitted crack phenomenon in driving the initial Lott and
Mustard results). Moreover, we discovered that the ostensibly
supportive results obtained by LPW after extending their county
set to 2000 were caused by some mis-coding errors they made in
extending their data. When we correct these errors, their
findings are reversed: LPW's preferred spline model fails to
generate a statistically significant effect for any crime
category, while the only significant results in the other
possible models show the laws to be associated with increases
in various property crimes (and in one case for rape).

The running head in the journal for "The Latest Misfires in
Support of the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis" was
"Latest More Guns, Less Crime Misfires."

===============================================================

begin: EXTRACT Chronicle of Higher Education

. . . . .

In the years since Mr. Lott's first publication, at least six
scholars have published studies that tend to confirm his findings,
while at least four other studies have tended to cast doubt on
his findings. Mr. Donohue noted in an interview that Mr. Lott's
research has convinced his peers of at least one point:
Donohue
No scholars now claim that legalizing concealed weapons
causes a major increase in crime.
Even Mr. Donohue's analysis, which is highly critical of Mr.
Lott's, finds only "modest pernicious effects," in his words.

Mr. Lott's 1997 paper on gun policy was, "to that point, the most
important piece of empirical research that has ever been done in
the social sciences," says Jeffrey S. Parker, a professor of law
at George Mason University. "I doubt that even Ayres and Donohue
would dispute that point."

Mr. Ayres and Mr. Donohue's critique of Mr. Lott's scholarship
runs as follows: The models used by Mr. Lott and his co-authors
have not taken sufficient account of the broad differences
between states that permit the concealed carrying of guns and
those that do not.

In particular, Mr. Ayres and Mr. Donohue suggest that the spike
in murders associated with the crack-cocaine epidemic of the
late 1980s was concentrated in urban areas in states with
restrictive gun laws, while states that permitted people to
carry concealed weapons in the 1980s tended to be relatively
rural and unaffected by drug violence.

That imbalance, Mr. Ayres and Mr. Donohue say, has given the
right-to-carry states an artificial boost in studies by
Mr. Lott and his allies.

In their reply, Mr. Plassmann and Mr. Whitley argue that their
opponents' own data, when properly read, demonstrate immediate
state-level benefits from the legalization of concealed weapons.
They also present new county-level data for the period 1977-2000,
which they say further supports the more-guns, less-crime thesis,
whether one uses their opponents' preferred statistical
techniques or their own.

It is here, in this new 1977-2000 data set, that Mr. Ayres and
Mr. Donohue claim to have identified a serious set of coding
errors. Mr. Plassmann and Mr. Whitley failed to assign dummy
variables (which researchers use as place holders, to stand for
meaningful variables that they may have neglected to identify)
for the states of Alaska, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania for
certain years in their calculations.

Correcting those errors, Mr. Ayres and Mr. Donohue write,
"completely reverse" the paper's conclusions and "restore
the conclusion that concealed-carry laws were associated with
increases in crime (or no effect) for all crime categories." . . .

Mr. Lott replies that the alleged coding errors are irrelevant
to the larger debate. "Whether one believes the regressions in
the Plassmann and Whitley piece or not, just looking at Ayres
and Donohue's own results -- you can't look at the graphs that
Plassmann and Whitley have of Ayres and Donohue's results and
not see a significant drop in violent crime."

"The basic results are not fragile," Mr. Whitley writes in an
e-mail message. "Minor errors in coding would not undermine
them (and an entire literature)." Mr. Whitley says that he could
not reply to the charges in detail because he had not yet had
time to carefully review Mr. Ayres and Mr. Donohue's comments.
Because the allegations appear in a law review rather than a
peer-reviewed academic journal, no third-party scholars have
reviewed the claim of coding errors.

Six tables that derive from the same allegedly miscoded data
set appear in Mr. Lott's new book, The Bias Against Guns:
Why Almost Everything You've Heard About Gun Control Is Wrong
(Regnery, 2003). James Lindgren, a professor of law at
Northwestern University, says, "If Donohue and Ayres's account
is as it appears -- and I'm not in a position to judge that --
then Lott should withdraw the book for revision."

Mr. Lindgren adds that he believes it extremely unlikely that
any coding errors were the result of a conscious intent to
distort the study's findings. He notes that Mr. Lott has not
only shared his data sets with other scholars, but has made
them generally available to the public on his Web site.
"You tend not to do that if you've intentionally miscoded
your variables," he says.

. . . .. .

Chronicle of Higher Education EXTRACT end

 

[agricola]

Carl,

i) Tennessee legislation was not relevant to that portion of the debate where we were discussing UK legislation, Tennessee not being part of the United Kingdom;

ii) the extract you mention for Lott, Plassman and Whitley is the actual paper that Lott denied having co-authored after errors were found within it and he was caught altering dates and tables (Plassman and Whitley now claim he just "helped them out with it"). This can be checked out here (in Lott's own words) -

http://johnrlott.tripod.com/other/MediaMatters012506.html

iii) the data set in the Plassman, Whitley and Lott article is actually from Appendix 1 of The Bias against Guns, which you would have known if you had read the links. This is not the same data as that in MGLC, which your quote suggested that it was.

iv) Your summation of the lawsuit is laughably wrong. Firstly:

The claims in Freakonomics outlined in the Media Law Prof Blog
suggest to me that Steven Levitt, by implying

- that all other scholars who tested Lott's hypothesis got different results

This is some miles away from what he - and it was quoted on the very first post on this thread, so you have no excuse - actually said (and what the lawsuit actually says):

"When other scholars have tried to replicate [Lott's] results, they found that right-to-carry laws simply don't bring down crime."

This in itself is interesting because of what Lott didnt consider false and damaging. The above sentence comes from a paragraph which I reproduce below:

Then there is the troubling allegation that Lott actually invented some of the survey data that support his more-guns/less-crime theory. Regardless of whether the data were faked, Lott's admittedly intriguing hypothesis doesn't seem to be true. When other scholars have tried to replicate his results, they found that right-to-carry laws simply don't bring down crime.

Lott doesnt consider the repeating, in print, of an unproven allegation that he made up statistics (referring of course to the 98% controversy) to be false and damaging?

http://www.overlawyered.com/lott_complaint.pdf/Lott v Levitt.pdf

Secondly:

- that the Journal of Law and Economics special issue was NOT peer reviewed when it WAS

There is some debate as to whether it was peer-reviewed:

Mr. Lott's lawsuit has a second component, which hinges not on the meaning of "replicate" but on the meaning of "peer-refereed." In May 2005, Mr. Levitt exchanged e-mail messages with John J. McCall, a professor emeritus of economics at the University of California at Los Angeles, where Mr. Lott earned his degree. Mr. McCall had suggested that the Freakonomics passage was unfair and asked Mr. Levitt why he had not cited various scholarly papers that support Mr. Lott's theory.

In particular, Mr. McCall pointed to several papers that appeared in a supplemental issue of The Journal of Law and Economics in 2001. Mr. Levitt replied: "It was not a peer-refereed edition of the Journal. For $15,000 he was able to buy an issue and put in only work that supported him. My best friend was the editor and was outraged the press let Lott do this."

That statement was false and defamatory, Mr. Lott charged.

If you're wondering whether a private e-mail message can be libelous, the answer is yes. Courts have generally found that an e-mail message, even if sent to just one person, falls under defamation law, explained David A. Anderson, a professor of law at the University of Texas at Austin. "As long as it's an e-mail to a third person, it counts as publication," he said. "If Levitt had just said these things in an e-mail directly to Lott, there would be no publication and there could be no claim for defamation."

It might have been better for Mr. Levitt to have explained to Mr. McCall why he believed that the journal articles were weak rather than to have dismissed them as "not peer-refereed." But was his e-mail message essentially false?

All of the papers in question were originally presented at a 1999 conference sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute and Yale University's Center for Law, Economics, and Public Policy. Mr. Lott, who was then a senior research scholar at Yale, was the primary organizer. In his lawsuit, he says he invited critics of his theory, including Mr. Levitt, to speak at the conference. Mr. Levitt, who did not speak there, did not reply to The Chronicle's question about the matter.

As is fairly routine, Mr. Lott arranged for the papers to be published in a special issue of The Journal of Law and Economics, provided that he cover its printing and postage costs. The papers were sent out to anonymous peer referees before publication.

In "symposium" issues of journals, there is a tacit understanding that all, or nearly all, of the papers will be published, said Jeffrey A. Miron, a visiting professor of economics at Harvard who participated in the conference. "The rate at which the journal accepts these papers and chooses to publish them is 90 to 100 percent," he said. "So it's not refereed in the same way, or subject to the same standards, as if you submit something cold to The Journal of Law and Economics." (The journal's normal acceptance rate is less than 10 percent.)

Mr. Miron said Mr. Levitt's characterization of the issue as "not peer-refereed" was an exaggeration but not an outrageous untruth, and Mr. Miron doubts Mr. Lott will win on this point in court.

from http://www.google.co.uk/search?hs=x...of+Law+and+Economics"++Lott&btnG=Search&meta=
(fifth entry, select the google cached page of the chronicle)

 

[agricola]

to continue:

The Abstracts on the Lott, Plassman, Whitley article and the
Donohue, Ayres article and the Chronicle of Higher Education
extract indicate to me that Levitt's Freakonomics claim is
not backed by other critics of Lott, at least to the extent of
saying that his results have not been replicated by researchers.
That is Levitt and Dubner.

and Lambert, the late Otis Dudley Duncan, and at least eight other peer-reviewed papers -

It is far from clear, however, that "replicate" is in fact consistently used by social scientists in the way Mr. Lott and Mr. Moody say it is used. Mr. Levitt, who declined to comment for this article, will almost certainly tell the court that in Freakonomics he was using "replicate" in a looser sense, meaning something like "confirm."

If that is the case, the Freakonomics passage might be unfair -- Mr. Moody has counted nine peer-reviewed papers that support Mr. Lott's theory, versus eight that do not -- but it would not be defamatory in the specific way that Mr. Lott claims in his lawsuit.

from http://www.google.co.uk/search?hs=x...of+Law+and+Economics"++Lott&btnG=Search&meta= (fifth one, the Google cached Chronicle entry)

finally:

Ayres and Donohue do miss a point long made by right-to-carry
(RTC) supporters: it is expected that RTC will force criminals
from people-crime to property-crime, substituting
- car-theft for car-jacking,
- burglary for home invasion, and
- larceny of goods for robbery of people.
The expected result of RTC is not and has not been a drop in
property-crime; if fact, it has long been predicted that RTC
would cause a rise in property-crime as robbers of people became
thieves of property.

Which is all an irrelevance as to the debate over the quality of Lotts work.

 

[Carl N. Brown]

I) Tennessee became a state in 1792 when the British Bill of
Rights 1688 was a fond memory; Tennessee Constitution Section 26
(rev. 1870) is relevant to the Anglo-American tradition of RKBA.

II) As I recall, I was linked to my PDF of the Lott, Plassman, Whitley
paper via Lott's website, a very strange denial to say the least.

III) It is my understanding that the dataset in AD, LPW and
Bias is the MoGuLeCr dataset extended by county
data since the original publication of MoGuLeCr. Same
hypothesis, extended dataset.

IV) All my summations are laughably wrong to you. Nothing new.
(Yes, my old summation of UK gun law was off-base factually.)


The paragraph in your post #66 from Freakonomics was previously
in my post #39. Calling the controversy over the missing survey/98%
statistic a "troubling allegation" is fair and is not a "false"
statement because it is an allegation, it is troubling and the issue
is not settled. Even Lambert said the 98% stat was not central to
the MoGuLeCr hypothesis (that right-to-carry laws reduce crime) and
Duncan and Lindgren agreed with that.

The "false and damaging" statement central to the MoGuLeCr hypothesis
is Levitt or Dubner stating without qualifiers:
"When other scholars have tried to replicate his results, they
found that right-to-carry laws simply don't bring down crime."
Other scholars have tested Lott's data and hyppothesis and many
did not just try they did replicate his results, so that
flat declaration is "false" in my view; whether it is "damaging"
under the law is another issue. A few weasel words and Dubner or
Levitt could have covered their derierres on that one.

The acceptance rate of new journal articles is irrelevant to the
peer-review referee status of symposia articles. It was my
understanding that articles in symposium issues of journals are
almost always published because the articles are usually reprints
or revisions of articles that have previously been published
subject to peer-review or referee. If the papers were indeed
"sent out to anonymous peer referees before publication," then
Levitt was "exaggerating" in telling McCall the issue was not
peer-refereed.

Whether you agree with Lott and the nine peer-reviewed papers
that support his theory, or with Levitt and eight that do not
(the nine and eight counted by Carl Moody), Lott, more or less,
has forced a radical change in the standard academic view of
the impact of right-to-carry on crime rates.

For the fifty years I have followed this issue, gun control
advocates have claimed that guns are useless in self-defense,
that an assailant would just take a gun away from a woman and
shoot her with it, and that guns should be banned as the root
of all evil and crime. In the 2004 Kings College Great Gun
Debate Rebecca Peters declared a UN treaty should not allow
women to defend themselves because guns just escalate violence.

I have known several women who defended themselves with guns:
the assailants left the premises without a single shot being
fired; these incidents lead to a burglar immediately arrested
(held by victims at gunpoint for police) and a home invader who
fled later arrested. One incident very probably prevented a
gang rape. In one case, a woman did get in trouble: she was
charged with illegally "going armed" but the judge dismissed that
charge on state constitutional RKBA grounds. So when John Lott
says that guns in the hands of the lawabiding prevent more crimes
than they cause and that 98% (1997) or 95% (2002) of self defense
is brandishing only, my gut reaction is that Lott is closer to
the truth than his critics.

-------------------------------
The font used in Table 1C of the Ayers-Donohue article is missing
in the PDF that I downloaded; that implies a last minute edit and
update, a typical SNAFU in electronic publishing, but if it appeared
in a Lott article PDF I would expect Lambert to make a mountainous
blog about it (my cynicism).

 

[agricola]

Carl,

i) For the last time, the state of the law in Tennessee is irrelevant to the UK, because (as you note) the Constitution was drawn up after the War of Independence. It may have been inspired by 1688, but given as you raised it when talking about events that have happened in the last seventy years, its irrelevant;

ii) Lott has denied being the author of the P+W(L) paper, as you would have known had you clicked on the link. I repeat it once again:

1) "Lott and two coauthors produced a statistical model ("Model 1") that showed significant crime decreases when states passed concealed carry gun laws."


-- The paper that is being referred to here was published by Florenz Plassmann and John Whitley in the Stanford Law Review. I was not an author on their published article. I had helped them on this project and I regard their paper as overall very well done, but dropped out before publication (see Plassmann's statement on the fact that John Lott helped us out on" it, their paper also has a footnote making a similar statement). Florenz's work in this and several papers on count data is not given the attention it deserves, but overall Plassmann and Whitley provide a devastating critique of the Aryes and Donohue paper.

http://johnrlott.tripod.com/other/MediaMatters012506.html

Please note that repeatedly throughout his argument (while he states he helped them with it) he nowhere states that he co-authored it (in fact denies it, as shown above), which is so clear that even you recognize that he did do so. Interestingly, Plassman provides an alternate version:

Dr. Lott had asked that his name be removed because he would not agree to changes in the paper that the Stanford Law Review mandated to accommodate a late changes in the original A&D article ("Shooting Down the 'More Guns, Less Crime' Hypothesis"). Specifically, we were given an ultimatum to either: (A) agree to the changes and our paper would be published in the Stanford Law Review, or (B) the Stanford Law Review would publish only A&D's original paper but neither our paper nor A&D's reply. These changes violated an agreement that we had reached with the Stanford Law Review about the editorial process and constituted a "final straw" to Dr. Lott in what had been a grueling editorial process.

Although Dr. Lott was prepared to withdraw the paper from the Stanford Law Review at this point and attempt publication elsewhere, he did not want to impose the cost on his junior coauthors of possibly losing the publication and generously offered to withdraw his name from the paper. Although we (Plassmann and Whitley) fully understood and agreed with Dr. Lott?s dissatisfaction, we decided to accept his offer, to accept the mandated changes to our paper, and to proceed with publication.

http://johnrlott.tripod.com/postsbyday/6-9-03.html

So Lott did coauthor it, then he dropped out to spare his coauthors cost, and finally he didnt coauthor it, just helped them out. Given the importance exact phraseology is to his lawsuit, you would think he would practice what he preaches. For those who are interested, Tim Lambert has the reason why Lott removed himself from the article - as the email on the link below shows:

http://timlambert.org/2003/04/0430/

The actual word he demanded be changed:

http://timlambert.org/2003/05/0507/#comments

iii) Lambert's quote is clearly talking about the controversy surrounding the Plassman/Whitley (Lott) paper, as the link demonstrated. The fact that the data in that paper is partly the same data Lott used in MGLC, together with Ayre's and Donohue's expansion, is irrelevant - Lott having made a mistake, then tried to cover it up.

iv)

"When other scholars have tried to replicate his results, they
found that right-to-carry laws simply don't bring down crime."

Other scholars have tested Lott's data and hyppothesis and many
did not just try they did replicate his results, so that
flat declaration is "false" in my view; whether it is "damaging"
under the law is another issue. A few weasel words and Dubner or
Levitt could have covered their derierres on that one.

This is what I find laughable. Firstly, Ayres and Donohue tested his hypothesis using expanded data, and came to the conclusion that he was wrong. Secondly, even you state people tested his hypothesis and came to the conclusion he was wrong:

Whether you agree with Lott and the nine peer-reviewed papers
that support his theory, or with Levitt and eight that do not
(the nine and eight counted by Carl Moody), Lott, more or less,
has forced a radical change in the standard academic view of
the impact of right-to-carry on crime rates.

Lott's lawsuit rests on two things. Firstly, that other scholars did not try "to replicate his results, they found that right-to-carry laws simply don't bring down crime". As you have demonstrated, more than a few other scholars tested his hypothesis and found that right-to-carry laws didnt bring down crime. Secondly, that Levitt was defamatory when he said:

"It was not a peer-refereed edition of the Journal. For $15,000 he was able to buy an issue and put in only work that supported him. My best friend was the editor and was outraged the press let Lott do this."

As has been shown, it was not a "peer-refereed" edition of that particular journal, at least not in the normal sense of the word. Lott did pay the printing costs. Whether he put in work that only supported him is something that can only be seen by looking at the paper, though given how Lott has acted in other situations - such as with the Stanford Law Review - it is not beyond belief. If Levitt's best friend was the editor, and was outraged that the press let Lott do it, then we will find out if this ever gets to trial.

 

[Carl N. Brown]

I dont think Ayres and Donaghue are liars
(indeed has anyone accused them of being?)

In Post #62 Bagdad Bob said:
"There is nothing wrong with Lotts work! Everyone else is lying!"

August 4th, 2003, 05:45 PM #23
agricola
Senior Member
Join Date: Dec 2002
Posts: 1,725

and they say satire is dead

Dunno if anyone remembers but i had a brief email correspondance with
John Lott in the TFL days - he was polite and helpful, so why he did
the Rosh thing is a mystery to me.

What happened?

----------------------------------------------
ERRATUM: The font problem in Ayres-Donohue PDF is in FIGURE 1C;
I may have reported the error as in Table 1C.
----------------------------------------------

This will get back to Freakonomics. Eventually.

Since Freakonomics author Steven Levitt is a co-author with
John J. Donohue III, perhaps the Ayers-Donohue articles are
relevant to the credibility of Freakonomics after all.

Confirming More Guns, Less Crime
John R. Lott, Jr., Florenz Plassmann and John Whitley
December 9, 2002

IV. Evaluating Some General Claims Made by Ayres and Donohue
A) Has previous work acknowledged both the costs and benefits of guns?

"[Lott and Mustard] never acknowledge cases on the other side of the
ledger where the presence of guns almost certainly led to killings.
For example, the nightmare scenario for those asserting the value of
defensive use of guns is not mentioned: the case of the Japanese
exchange student, Yoshihiro Hattori, on his way to a Halloween party
in October of 1992 who mistakenly approached the wrong house and was
shot to death by the owner Rodney Peairs." -- Ayres and Donohue, p. 6.

This is Ayres and Donohue's first criticism and they frequently revisit
the claim that Lott and Mustard ignore the costs of guns. Yet, Lott
reports exactly this story about the Japanese college student on page 1
of his book and refers to it as showing "how defensive gun use can go
tragically wrong." Lott and Mustard's original paper also describes this
same incident on page 2. Lott's book also explicitly notes many gun
crimes and repeatedly discusses how one must analyze the "net effect" of guns.

The Latest Misfires in Support of the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis
Ian Ayres & John J. Donohue III
STANFORD LAW REVIEW Vol. 55:1371

We do confess error on one small point, though. We stated in a
footnote that the nightmare scenario of the unlawful shooting death of
a sixteen-year-old Japanese exchange student on his way to a Halloween
party was not mentioned by Lott and Mustard. See Ayres & Donohue,
supra note 1, at 1200 n.12. We should have said that, although they
mentioned the incident in passing, Lott and Mustard inaccurately stated
that the killing was not found to be unlawful. See John R. Lott, Jr.
& David B. Mustard, Crime, Deterrence, and Right-to-Carry Concealed
Handguns, 26 J. LEGAL STUD. 1, 2-3 (1997). Although the killer was not
convicted of criminal homicide in that case, he was deemed to have acted
tortiously and a substantial civil judgment was levied against him, as
our footnote 12 noted. Ayres & Donohue, supra note 1, at 1200 n.12.
Hence, the shooting was indeed unlawful. Although we had actually
pointed this out to John Lott prior to the publication of the original
Lott and Mustard paper, the error was not corrected.

Ayres and Donohue "confess error on one small point" but then
laboriously try to turn that point around and accuse Lott of
not correcting what they considered an error. In MoGuLeCr 2nd Ed
Page 2 Introduction, Lott wrote that the criminal court did not
find the shooting to be criminal. A-D claim that the fact
the shooter was found liable in civil court made the shooting
unlawful and that by reporting the criminal court finding
of not criminal, Lott was in error.

The killing was found not criminal in criminal court: the shooter
was motivated by a fear of death or bodily harm. The death was
found tortiously wrongful in civil court: the college student was
knocking on a backdoor Halloween night at the wrong address.
This was a classic lawful killing but wrongful death case.
The killing of the Japanese student is used by self-defense
instructors as a cautionary tale, and by gun control advocates
as an international cause celebre.

Lott uses this incident to introduce the statistic that annually
there are 30 mistaken deaths by civilians and 330 accidental deaths
by policemen. This point has been commented on widely by reviewers
and analysts of MoGuLeCr. For Ayres and Donohue to miss this is the
kind of sloppiness in research used to skewer Lott by his critics:
pages 1 and 2 of MoGuLeCr discusses an incident that A-D claim L-M
did not mention.

One, the incident that A-D claim is "not mentioned" by L-M
is actually cited to raise major points on two pages of the
Introduction.

Two, a finding of not criminal in criminal court and a finding of
wrongful in civil court does not make the act itself unlawful.
Tragic, a nightmare scenario, tortious, but not criminal.

"General Claims Made by Ayres and Donohue
A) Has previous work acknowledged both the costs and benefits of guns?"
A-D then accuse L-M of ignoring costs of guns.

o Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology Fall, 1995, Northwestern
University, School of Law; Guns and Violence Symposium, Page 188.
A Tribute to a View I Have Opposed, by Marvin E. Wolfgang, shows
that benefits of guns have largely been ignored in the academic
literature on guns and that only costs were considered in the past.

o In a National Academy of Sciences workshop Lott asked the other
participants, according to the tape transcript: "How many people are
speakers here? How many of those people who are speakers think that
on net gun regulations probably cause more problems than good?"
Virtually all the hands went down.

My conclusion?
+ L-M consider both costs and benefits in MoGuLeCr.
- Academia has traditionally been biased toward the view that guns
are all cost and no benefit.
o L-M are guilty of academic heresy by considering benefits of guns.

?Freakonomics represents the level of academic criticism of Lott?
This BS generates sympathy for Lott.

 

[agricola]

Carl,

i) Lott was polite and helpful over that conversation, and I am struggling to find where I said he was neither of those things. As an aside, Jim March had a similar conversation with him where he was polite, if less helpful -

http://www.thehighroad.org/showthread.php?t=81258&highlight="john+lott"

Of course, suing someone over an academic dispute, and a slander in an email, is neither polite or helpful, especially when Lott himself slandered Levitt prior to the NAS study.

ii) Donohue's position is relevant to Freakonomics and the lawsuit, in that he is a scholar, who attempted to replicate Lott's work, and found his hypothesis to be false. Therefore, thats part of Lott's lawsuit falls down;

iii) To quote you:

In a National Academy of Sciences workshop Lott asked the other
participants, according to the tape transcript: "How many people are
speakers here? How many of those people who are speakers think that
on net gun regulations probably cause more problems than good?"
Virtually all the hands went down.

That is actually arse-about-face. Lott initially claimed the scene went like this:

Unfortunately, this is not the only stacked National Academy of Sciences panel. During August 2002, I was asked to participate in a National Academy of Sciences day long workshop on “Children, Youth, and Gun Violence.” I was one of the last people invited for the September 18 meeting. Despite my concerns that I was being included simply so that they could claim that had a “balanced panel,” I was assured by the staff person who invited me, Mary Ellen O’Connell, that the workshop would be balanced. I only attended my session, and at the beginning of my talk I asked the audience of over a hundred people: “How many people here are presenters?” About twenty-five people raised their hands. I then asked of those who were presenters: “How many of you think that it might be possible, not for sure, but just possible, that existing gun control produces more problems than benefits?” All the hands went down. Not one of the presenters was even willing to acknowledge the possibility. Even worse than the bias, the problem was that the academy was unwilling to even acknowledge their biases and were unwilling to engage in a balanced debate.

It was only when the fact that an audio transcript of it was found on the web that he revised it back. Ironically, one of the first people to call Lott on this was Tim Lambert:

http://timlambert.org/index.php?s=national+academy+of+science&submit=Search&paged=2

 

[Carl N. Brown]

Either version of the NAS workshop story supports my
conclusion "- Academia has traditionally been biased
toward the view that guns are all cost and no benefit."
How is that bass ackwards?

 

[agricola]

Carl,

I wasnt referring to your theory, but rather that story you came up with (ironically once again showing Lott in a bad light).

In any case, I would hardly equate "Academia has traditionally been biased toward the view that guns are all cost and no benefit" with "How many people are speakers here? How many of those people who are speakers think that on net gun regulations probably cause more problems than good?", and to try and prove it from one example is bound to run into problems.

Like everything else, individual academics have probably at some stage looked at the issue from all standpoints, however much certain people would like to claim that they were the first or most important.

 

[Carl N. Brown]

The history of the Bellesiles scandal impressed on me that
academia is knee-jerk "if it's against guns it's gotta be good."
The `balance' of the NAS panel was one example to confirm
that impression.

 

[agricola]

Carl,

Actually the Bellisiles scandal demonstrates how academia cant be summed up as being pro- or anti- an issue, because it is so diverse a community.

The article where Bellisiles' theory (ie: before Arming America) was initially aired was subject to scrutiny by the Crime and Justice Network of the Social Science History Association, where they came to the conclusion that the work hadnt been peer-reviewed (because of problems they had identified through examining it, and because they would have been the persons asked to peer-review it).

The Organization of American Historians, however, was less critical and awarded it high marks, as have several bodies since.

Jim Lindgren sums the duality of the initial response to Bellisile's work best:

...those who are most expert on the subject of guns in early America or tend to understand numbers best were most skeptical about Bellesiles’s work, while those who know less about guns or less about numbers were most enamored of it

http://hnn.us/articles/930.html

What is of course worth remembering is that, once Bellisiles had been exposed as a fraud, he was effectively sacked, his academic prize was taken from him and he was widely recognized for what he was.

However Lott, against whom very similar, well documented claims have been made, remains cited as a source by many.