The US is not in a bubble

[Tommygunn]

The Joyce Foundation says Lott made it all up. Yeah I do not trust any of them.

Did Lott make up Gary Kleck's study too? There are CDC and FBI studies that support Lott, atleast from the point of his basic theory if not absolute numbers.
We all need to keep in mind that many antigun studies only count events in which the citizen shot an attacker. They don't count what is the preponderance of defense events; when the presence of a gun deters a violent criminal and he is either apprehended, or runs away.
This is a trick to minimize the apparent effectiveness of guns as implements of defense.

I also don't think it's very wise to get caught up in specific numbers. Are there 500,000 uses each year .... or 2,000,000? As I said in an earlier post, I'm dubious of the 2,000,000 number. But even the 500,000 is over twelve times the number of gun deaths each year.

 

[CapnMac]

In a way, the US is in a "bubble." A bubble created by a ninnyhammer press that will not shut up about how dangerous it is in our nation. This despite how small the overall percentage probability is of any one American being shot dead. Or the rather small number versus 100,000, which listing has the US below the top 10. There are far more dangerous nations (I'm looking at you, Honduras) out there. Hear about them in the news? Not a peep.

Hear about the four most dangerous cities in the US, not really. Or, that discounting the top 10 deadliest cities, the US drops to around 40th on the list per 100,000. Same way we don't hear that you are twice as likely to be killed in a car accident (and something like 15x more likely to be maimed). Or that you are near 40 times more likely to die from heart & lung diseases. Oops.

Perhaps we are reaching a time where the "bubble" needs bursting.

 

[Jammersix]

The problem is that reality includes the ten.

 

[Carl N. Brown]

"What we need is studies conducted by folks without the controversy"
https://www.armedwithreason.com/shooting-down-the-gun-lobbys-favorite-academic-a-lott-of-lies/

Evan DeFilippis, Devin Hughes, "The GOP's favorite gun "academic" is a fraud", ThinkProgress, 12 Aug 2016.

That article is about the level of Media Matters and Tim Lambert on Lott: biased, stale, and not actually refuting Lott's research, basically ad hominem personal attacks or Oh, look over there, a squirrel! ThinkProgress (no space) is described as "a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund (CAP Action), a progressive public policy research and advocacy organization." That hit piece on Lott is op-ed advocacy level; it is not an academic grade critique.

I have seen the same kind of Media Matters-style criticism directed at Lott aimed at Don B.Kates and Gary Kleck. I have noticed a policy of benign neglect aimed at James D. Wright and Peter Rossi (Under the Gun, Armed and Comsidered Dangerous) two liberal academics hired by the Carter Admin to study gun violence who have turned in research doubting their own apriori assumptions on guns and gun control).

If we accept only academics approved by the ban-the-gun crowd, we might be allowed to quote John Donohue or Michael Bellesiles.

Some points on Lott and his critics:

John Lott's More Guns, Less Crime was published by the University of Chicago Press after being peer reviewed (refereed by qualified academics and edited by Lott to their satisfaction) before publication in 1998, was expanded and published again after peer review in a 2nd edition in 2000, and was updated and published in a 3rd edition in 2010, again by U Chicago Press after peer review.

Three editions by a university press under peer review is not the publishing record one gets for a fraud. Lott has published empirical research on a variety of subjects in peer reviewed academic journals, including several articles under JEL subject code K42: impact of law on illegal behavior.

Lott's most cited critic at Wikipedia was Tim Lambert described by Lott critic John J. Donohue III as a "talented Australian professor". Lambert was a Lecturer on computer graphics (CG) at UNSW 1988-2012, briefly Adjunct Lecturer on CG at Macquarrie U, then 2013-on software engineer at Google. He did not hold a professorship. His academic publications have been on CG. He has blogged opinions on a variety of hobby subjects, including gun control, but never published on those subjects in the academic press.

Lambert accused Wikipedia editors Purtilo, Al Lowe,* and others of being John Lott sockpuppet accounts after they corrected the John Lott article. Lambert replaced their Wikipedia user pages with his claim that they were John Lott. Prof Jim Purtilo of the University of Maryland (UMd) Computer Science Department (CSD) published a history of his interaction with Lambert as a warning against using Wikipedia as a source.**

Lambert was asked by Jimbo Wales (co-founder of Wikipedia) to stop editing the Lott article because of his conflicit of interest (Lambert ran a separate blog criticizing Lott and was not editing from a neutral point of view).

Answering Jimbo Wales, Lambert accused Jim Purtilo of hiring Lott to lecture on CS at UMd when Lott had no qualifications in CS. (Lambert finally recognized Purtilo was not Lott.) I did a check myself. Lott had been hired by the UMd Foundation to lecture on law, government, and economics, subjects on which Lott had a peer-reviewed academic track record; UMd public records of faculty and staff showed Lott lecturing on those subjects during his time at UMd and did not show him working in the CSD.

How did Lambert mistakenly deduce Purtilo had hired Lott for UMd CSD? Lambert found a Wayback Machine archive showing Lott's office and phone numbers at UMd Van Williams Hall listed under the CSD. (About a week before Lott moved into UMd.) A commentator in a student newsletter had complained that Purtilo of the CSD had helped Lott move onto UMd campus. Those two data points were the basis of Lambert's leap to the conclusion Purtilo had hired Lott for CS. Duh.

I truly believe that Gun Control Derangement (GCD) is a mental defect and is responsible for a lot of Lott criticism.

Anyone going against the common (and mistaken) "wisdom" on impact of gun law on bad behavior by bad people is going to be controversial in the eyes of gun control advocates.

I don't think it would hurt to have a Professor Challenger or Bernard Quatermass on our side.


________
* Wikipedia editor Al Lowe is Albert Lowe of Pink Pistols, THR's own "Big Gay Al".

** https://seam.cs.umd.edu/WikipediaStudy/

 

[Tommygunn]

I gotta say I love that Professor Challenger / Bernard Quatermass reference!!!

 

[Jammersix]

Real academics don't use sock puppets.