wally said: Didn't John Lott start out as an anti and planned the definitive study to show we needed strict gun control but the actual facts convinced him otherwise?
John Lott has recounted that he generally accepted the "conventional wisdom" that guns were bad and gun control was good. For a class at Wharton College he let the students propose the next subject. They chose guns and their control. When he started evaluating gun control research for the project, he found that most of it was opinion-editorial quality and did not meet academic standards. That brought him around to doing his own research, which made him recognize that guns can be good, and that gun control was largely useless against criminals. The co-author of his first peer-reviewed academic research article on defensive gun use was David Mustard. Mustard has admitted that he too accepted the "conventional wisdom" on gun control but researching the issue changed his mind, too.
Going back to 1977, the Carter administration hired sociologist James D. Wright to study guns, crime and violence in America. He started as accepting the liberal position on gun control without question. Same thing for his co-author, Peter Rossi. Their research changed their minds on the subject. Their study became "Under the Gun" which is a great resource used by pro-gun rights people. Wright and Rossi also did the first prison inmate survey on gun use by felons "Armed and Considered Dangerous" which skewered a lot of political myths about guns and crime.
That makes the list Gary Kleck, James D. Wright, Peter Rossi, John Lott and David Mustard, who believed the conventional wisdom on gun control, before they studied the issue honestly, and changed their minds. I believe though that Lott is the only one that is a political conservative. Kleck, Wright and Rossi self-identified as liberal. Gun researcher and gun advocate Don B. Kates was politically liberal but was pro-gun rights and anti-gun control from the get-go.
On opening point, my summary:
The study used by Barack Obama to claim the US with 5% of the world population has 31% of the mass shootings was an unpublished research paper by Adam Lankford.
Lankford claimed to cover all mass public shootings from 1966 to 2012, 90 in the US vs 202 in the rest of the world. in 47 years, built on a database from NYPD. When other researchers have asked to see his data and sources,Lankford declined. He does claim he started with a 2012 NYPD report and followed their methodology. The NYPD report itself warns they "limited Internet searches to english language sites, creating a strong sampling bias against international incidents". NYPD admitted their study was a sample of mass shootings in the US and the world and admitted under-counting foreign mass shootings. NYPD did not claim to be complete.
Another study of 1998 to 2012 years with internet access to foreign news and government sources, using the NYPD definition of mass public shooting, and trying to be complete, found 1,423 foreign mass public shootings in those 15 years. Excluding foreign incidents that might be considered warfare, comparing "civilian" mass public shootings only, US has 1.43% of the worlds mass shooters, and 2.1% of the number killed in mass shootings, much less than the US 4.6% of the world's population. The US standing in civilian mass public shootings is 56th out of 86 countries. Crime Prevention Research Center operated by John Lott publishes their data, sources, and methods for examination by other researchers.
