Why A "Good Guy with a Gun" is Bullshit

[2aguy]

How more guns treat police:

More Police Are Killed in States With More Guns, Study Finds

Police officers are most likely to be killed in states where the most people own guns, a new study finds.

The report is sure to be controversial, but it adds a new dimension to a conversation that's recently been focused more on police shootings of unarmed Americans.

This study looks at who's killing the cops, and it's overwhelmingly people with private guns, David Swedler of the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health found.

"Officers are three times more likely to be murdered on the job in high gun ownership states in comparison with low gun ownership states. That was the big wow for me."

More anti-gun activism disguised as research....

Fraudulent study in the American Journal of Public Health inaccurately claims that states with more guns have more police deaths - Crime Prevention Research Center

Unfortunately, the American Journal of Public Health study doesn’t account for this last concern, and their results are extremely sensitive to this error. Here is a simple version of their regression explaining the number of police officers feloniously killed over the years from 1996 to 2013, but without accounting for the time effects that we just discussed. Before going through the results, the media coverage of this study is incorrect in claiming that more guns are associated with more police killings. What the journal article actually measures is not the gun ownership, but the percentage of suicides committed with guns (fsdsuicides). This regression looks at the total number of police feloniously murdered with their measure of “gun ownership” and the number of police officers. In this regression it appears that a one percentage point increase in the percent of suicides committed with guns increase, there is a significant 1.8 percent increase in the total number of police killed.





Just accounting for the changes in crime rates over time, completely reverses the claims made in the American Journal of Public Health. It now appears that a one percentage point increase in the percent of suicides committed with guns increase, there is a significant 2.25 percent decrease in the total number of police killed.

Not credible.
Gun Researcher John Lott Offers False Firearm Statistics Days Before Congressional Appearance

Wow...you used mediamatters......are there any anti-gun groups you don't use?

 

[daws101]

Funny I think I said that about your shit long ago.
I win

With those exact words?

You lost this before you were born.

I've said that before .
Originally is not in your extremely limited skill set.

Your re-posting happens in the post right after mine, so you are comparing apples and the empty hole between your ears.

Yawn. ..

There's that loser crap again....

Lol!

 

[martybegan]

With those exact words?

You lost this before you were born.

I've said that before .
Originally is not in your extremely limited skill set.

Your re-posting happens in the post right after mine, so you are comparing apples and the empty hole between your ears.

Yawn. ..

There's that loser crap again....

Lol!

Wanker.

 

[daws101]

How more guns treat police:

More Police Are Killed in States With More Guns, Study Finds

Police officers are most likely to be killed in states where the most people own guns, a new study finds.

The report is sure to be controversial, but it adds a new dimension to a conversation that's recently been focused more on police shootings of unarmed Americans.

This study looks at who's killing the cops, and it's overwhelmingly people with private guns, David Swedler of the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health found.

"Officers are three times more likely to be murdered on the job in high gun ownership states in comparison with low gun ownership states. That was the big wow for me."

More anti-gun activism disguised as research....

Fraudulent study in the American Journal of Public Health inaccurately claims that states with more guns have more police deaths - Crime Prevention Research Center

Unfortunately, the American Journal of Public Health study doesn’t account for this last concern, and their results are extremely sensitive to this error. Here is a simple version of their regression explaining the number of police officers feloniously killed over the years from 1996 to 2013, but without accounting for the time effects that we just discussed. Before going through the results, the media coverage of this study is incorrect in claiming that more guns are associated with more police killings. What the journal article actually measures is not the gun ownership, but the percentage of suicides committed with guns (fsdsuicides). This regression looks at the total number of police feloniously murdered with their measure of “gun ownership” and the number of police officers. In this regression it appears that a one percentage point increase in the percent of suicides committed with guns increase, there is a significant 1.8 percent increase in the total number of police killed.





Just accounting for the changes in crime rates over time, completely reverses the claims made in the American Journal of Public Health. It now appears that a one percentage point increase in the percent of suicides committed with guns increase, there is a significant 2.25 percent decrease in the total number of police killed.

Not credible.
Gun Researcher John Lott Offers False Firearm Statistics Days Before Congressional Appearance

Wow...you used mediamatters......are there any anti-gun groups you don't use?

It's called credibility.
Something you know nothing about.

 

[2aguy]

Shooting Down the Gun Lobby’s Favorite “Academic”: A Lott of Lies

Yeah...the anti-gunners hate Dr. Lott....he exposed the fact that nothing they say about guns is true or accurate.....

Here is his defense against all of the attempts to smear him...


Response to Malkin's Op-ed

 

[daws101]

I've said that before .
Originally is not in your extremely limited skill set.

Your re-posting happens in the post right after mine, so you are comparing apples and the empty hole between your ears.

Yawn. ..

There's that loser crap again....

Lol!

Wanker.

 

[2aguy]

Shooting Down the Gun Lobby’s Favorite “Academic”: A Lott of Lies

Yeah...the anti-gunners hate Dr. Lott....he exposed the fact that nothing they say about guns is true or accurate.....

Here is his defense against all of the attempts to smear him...


Response to Malkin's Op-ed

Response to Malkin's Op-ed

Response to Malkin's Op-ed


Below is Malkin’s op-ed with commentary by me (my comments are indented and in italics and start at the bottom of the page with the numbered responses corresponding to the numbers in the supporting document). (Note that two other discussions on this issue have been posted since February 2003 and involve a general discussion of the two other polls that ask about brandishing that have been done over the previous two decades as well a response to other attacks are available at the bottom of the page found here.) Despite being sent this information several times, she has not responded to any of these points. Steve Malzberg and Karen Hunter, co-hosts of a morning drive time show on WWRL (1600 AM) in New York, offered to let Malkin discuss these claims with me on the air, but she was unwilling to participate. It is disappointing that she will make allegations in print and on radio shows, but that she is unwilling to defend these assertions when I am present.


The general evidence for the survey is available here. The beginning of that document provides a brief abstract of the primary points.

An overview of the evidence is this: A) The survey was redone and the redone somewhat smaller survey produced similar results. In fact that survey data was already available at www.johnlott.org when Malkin wrote her piece.
B) The survey results in the single paragraphs in the two books where I have referenced this survey data was biased against the claim that I was making. I argued that the simple defensive brandishing or warning shots are not news worthy. The higher the rate of defensive brandishing or warning shots, the easier it is to explain why the media is not biased when it doesn't cover most defensive gun uses. If I wanted to show that the media was more biased, I should have used the surveys with lower defensive brandishing rates. I have also explained why the length of the time people are asked to recall events over can explain the difference in the four surveys on brandishing that have been done over the last twenty years (two designed by me and two by Gary Kleck).
C) Two people who took the survey have said that they took it. One person, James Hamilton, was interviewed by Professor Jeff Parker at GMU. As to the second person who took the survey, James Lindgren claims that David Gross took a different 1996 survey, but Gross's statements as well as the survey data from the 1996 survey indicate that Gross took my 1997 survey. The data from the 1996 survey is available from me or from the ICPSR under Hemenway's name. Other people were able to confirm various other aspects, such as the timing of when the survey was done and that I talked to people at the time of the survey. I have also supplied my tax records from 1997 to Joe Olson a tax law professor and other professors that show large payments for research assistants. Many others have confirmed many other aspects of what happened.
Bottom line: Science involves replication and I have always made my data available to others. In this case, I redid the survey and made that data available to anyone who wants access to it.

The other Lott controversy
Michelle Malkin
February 5, 2003

For those few of us in the mainstream media who openly support Second Amendment rights, research scholar John Lott has been -- or rather, had been -- an absolute godsend.

Armed with top-notch credentials (including stints at Stanford, Rice, UCLA, Wharton, Cornell, the University of Chicago and Yale), Lott took on the entrenched anti-gun bias of the ivory tower with seemingly meticulous scholarship. His best-selling 1998 book, "More Guns, Less Crime," provided analysis of FBI crime data that showed a groundbreaking correlation between concealed-weapons laws and reduced violent crime rates.

I met Lott briefly after a seminar at the University of Washington in Seattle several years ago and was deeply impressed by his intellectual rigor. Lott responded directly and extensively to critics' arguments. He made his data accessible to many other researchers.

But as he prepares to release a new book, "Bias Against Guns," next month, Lott must grapple with an emerging controversy -- brought to the public eye by the blogosphere -- that goes to the heart of his academic integrity.

The most disturbing charge, first raised by retired University of California, Santa Barbara professor Otis Dudley Duncan and pursued by Australian computer programmer Tim Lambert, is that Lott fabricated a study claiming that 98 percent of defensive gun uses involved mere brandishing, as opposed to shooting.

When Lott cited the statistic peripherally on page three of his book, he attributed it to "national surveys." In the second edition, he changed the citation to "a national survey that I conducted." He has also incorrectly attributed the figure to newspaper polls and Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck.


1) The reference to the survey involves one number in one sentence in my book. Compared to the 98 percent number there was an earlier survey by Kleck that found 92 percent of defensive gun uses involved brandishing and warning shots and because the survey was asking people about events that occurred over a long period of time it is likely that it over emphasized more dramatic responses. (My number that is directly comparable to the 92 percent estimate is about 99 percent.) My point in the book was that defensive gun use rarely involves more “newsworthy” events where the attacker is killed and either survey would have made the general point. A general discussion of the different methodologies is provided here.


I never attributed my survey results to Kleck. What happened was that Dave Kopel from the Independence Institute took an op-ed that I had in the Rocky Mountain News and edited it for his web site. In the editing he added the incorrect reference to Kleck. (Statements from Kopel and others are provided in the supporting documents ). The two pieces are identical except for the reference to Kleck. As to the claim that I attributed the number to newspaper polls, that claim involves a misreading of two different sentences in an op-ed (see the material addressed in the second half of the link to point (1)). As to using the plural, that was an error. Given the years that have passed since I wrote the sentence, I cannot remember exactly what I had in my mind but the most plausible explanation is that I was describing what findings had been generated by the polls, in other words I was thinking of them as a collective body of research. I had been planning on including more of a discussion on the survey in the book, just as I have in my book that came out early this year, but I had a hard disk crash (see response (2)) and I lost part of the book along with the data.

More importantly, the survey results that I used were biased against the claim that I was making. The relevant discussions in both of my books focus on media bias and the point was that the lack of coverage of defense gun uses is understandable if most uses simply involve brandishing where no one is harmed, no shots fired, no dead bodies on the ground, no crime actually committed. If others believe that the actual rate of brandishing is lower and I had used the results of Kleck, it becomes MORE difficult to explain the lack of news coverage of defensive gun uses. The two short discussions that I have on this issue in my two books thus choose results that are BIASED AGAINST the overall point that I am making, that the media is biased against guns.

Some issues involving the source for Malkin's claims can be found here, here, and here.


Last fall, Northwestern University law professor James Lindgren volunteered to investigate the claimed existence of Lott's 1997 telephone survey of 2,424 people. "I thought it would be exceedingly simple to establish" that the research had been done, Lindgren wrote in his report.

Unfortunately, Malkin fails to mention that Lindgren is not an unbiased observer since I had written a journal article in Journal of Law & Politics critiquing some of his work months before he "volunteered to investigate" these claims.
It was not simple. Lott claims to have lost all of his data due to a computer crash.


2) As to the “claim” that I lost my data in a computer crash on July 3, 1997, I have offered Malkin the statements from nine academics (statements attached), four of whom I was co-authoring papers with at the time and who remember quite vividly also losing the data that we had on various projects. David Mustard at the University of Georgia spent considerable time during 1997 helping me replace gun crime data. Other academics worked with me to replace data on our other projects. Just so it is clear, this computer crash basically cost me all my data on all my projects up to that point in time, including all the data and word files for my book, More Guns, Less Crime, and numerous papers that were under review at journals. The next couple of years were hell trying to replace things and the data for this survey which ended up being one sentence in the book, was not of particular importance. However, all the data was replaced, including not only the large county level data, the state level data, as well as the survey data, when the survey was redone.
He financed the survey himself and kept no financial records.


* Unlike many academics, I have never asked for government support for my research. Nothing different or unusual was done in this case. While we still have the tax forms that we filed that show we made large expenditures on research assistants that year, my wife keeps our financial documents for the three years required by the IRS. I have provided my tax records from that year to several professors. Among them is a tax expert, Professor Joe Olson, at Hamline University in Minnesota, and he can verify this information. I have checked with the bank that we had an account with, but they only keep records five years back. Since wild claims have been made about the costs of the survey, some notion of its scope would be useful. The survey was structured so that over 90 percent of those questioned would only have to answer three short questions and those were usually completed in under 30 seconds. Less than one percent of those surveyed would actually answer as many as seven questions and even in that case the survey only took about two minutes. The appendix in The Bias Against Guns provides a description of the survey when it was replicated.
He has forgotten the names of the students who allegedly helped with the survey and who supposedly dialed thousands of survey respondents long-distance from their own dorm rooms using survey software Lott can't identify or produce.


* I have hired lots of student RAs over the years. Since I have been at AEI in the last couple of years I have had around 25 people work for me on various projects. The students in question worked for me during the very beginning of 1997. While I can usually reconstruct who has worked for me, it requires that I have that material written down. The information on these students was lost in the hard disk crash and given that I had lost data for other projects such as three revise-and-resubmits that I had at the Journal of Political Economy it was not a particularly high priority.


Mod Edit: Please only post a portion of the article, do not post entire articles.

 

[daws101]

Shooting Down the Gun Lobby’s Favorite “Academic”: A Lott of Lies

Yeah...the anti-gunners hate Dr. Lott....he exposed the fact that nothing they say about guns is true or accurate.....

Here is his defense against all of the attempts to smear him...


Response to Malkin's Op-ed

A rebuttal from a not credible jerk off is meaningless.

 

[Brain357]

Shooting Down the Gun Lobby’s Favorite “Academic”: A Lott of Lies

Yeah...the anti-gunners hate Dr. Lott....he exposed the fact that nothing they say about guns is true or accurate.....

Here is his defense against all of the attempts to smear him...


Response to Malkin's Op-ed

Lott defends Lott. No academic defends Lott. He is a joke.

 

[2aguy]

Shooting Down the Gun Lobby’s Favorite “Academic”: A Lott of Lies

Moron...do you realize that gun murder rates have dropped since the 1990s....as we bought more and more guns....that Lott's premise, that more guns = less crime has actually been proven true over the last 20 years...

That in the 1990s we had about 2 million people carrying guns for self defense, now we have over 13 million, and the actual crime rate, the gun murder rate, and the violent crime rate has gone down, not up.....

That is a fact......you are wrong.....Lott was right.

 

[2aguy]

Shooting Down the Gun Lobby’s Favorite “Academic”: A Lott of Lies

Yeah...the anti-gunners hate Dr. Lott....he exposed the fact that nothing they say about guns is true or accurate.....

Here is his defense against all of the attempts to smear him...


Response to Malkin's Op-ed

Lott defends Lott. No academic defends Lott. He is a joke.

You didn't read the post.....he cites people defending him asswipe....


3) I have statements from two people who took the survey and other confirmatory evidence. As to the written material, being asked for written material six years after the survey is a long time. After the survey was done, the material was kept on my computer. In addition, I have moved three times (Chicago to Yale to Pennsylvania to AEI) as well as changed offices at Chicago and Yale since the summer of 1997. Yet, besides the statements from the academics who can verify the hard disk crash as well as the statement of those who participated in the survey, I do have statements David Mustard, who I had talked to numerous times about doing the survey with me during 1996 and who remembers after that us talking about the survey after it was completed. He is “fairly confident” that those conversations took place during 1997. John Whitley and Geoff Huck also have some recollections. Russell Roberts, now a professor at George Mason, was someone else that I talked to about the survey, but he simply can’t remember one way of the other. I didn’t talk to people other than co-authors about the survey and the research that I was doing on guns generally. This is because of the often great hostility to my gun work and also because I didn’t want to give those who disliked me a heads-up on what I was doing. I did have the questions from the survey and they were reused in the replicated survey in 2002.
After Lindgren's report was published, a Minnesota gun rights activist named David Gross came forward, claiming he was surveyed in 1997. Some have said that Gross's account proves that the survey was done. I think skepticism is warranted.

 

[martybegan]

Your re-posting happens in the post right after mine, so you are comparing apples and the empty hole between your ears.

Yawn. ..

There's that loser crap again....

Lol!

Wanker.

Me dancing every time you post back.

 

[Brain357]

Shooting Down the Gun Lobby’s Favorite “Academic”: A Lott of Lies

Moron...do you realize that gun murder rates have dropped since the 1990s....as we bought more and more guns....that Lott's premise, that more guns = less crime has actually been proven true over the last 20 years...

That in the 1990s we had about 2 million people carrying guns for self defense, now we have over 13 million, and the actual crime rate, the gun murder rate, and the violent crime rate has gone down, not up.....

That is a fact......you are wrong.....Lott was right.

How are things looking this year? Last year didn't seem so good either.

 

[2aguy]

Shooting Down the Gun Lobby’s Favorite “Academic”: A Lott of Lies

Yeah...the anti-gunners hate Dr. Lott....he exposed the fact that nothing they say about guns is true or accurate.....

Here is his defense against all of the attempts to smear him...


Response to Malkin's Op-ed

Lott defends Lott. No academic defends Lott. He is a joke.

And this guy defends Lott...moron...

http://www.nap.edu/read/10881/chapter/13

In addition, with only a few exceptions, the studies cited in Chapter 6, including those by Lott’s critics, do not show that the passage of RTC laws drives the crime rates up (as might be the case if one supposed that newly armed people went about looking for someone to shoot). The direct evidence that such shooting sprees occur is nonexistent.

The indirect evidence, as found in papers by Black and Nagin and Ayres and Donohue [cited inChapter 6], is controversial. Indeed, the Ayres and Donohue paper shows that there was a “statistically significant downward shift in the trend” of the murder rate (Chapter 6, page 135).


This suggests to me that for people interested in RTC laws, the best evidence we have is that they impose no costs but may confer benefits. That conclusion might be very useful to authorities who contemplate the enactment of RTC laws.

 

[2aguy]

Shooting Down the Gun Lobby’s Favorite “Academic”: A Lott of Lies

Moron...do you realize that gun murder rates have dropped since the 1990s....as we bought more and more guns....that Lott's premise, that more guns = less crime has actually been proven true over the last 20 years...

That in the 1990s we had about 2 million people carrying guns for self defense, now we have over 13 million, and the actual crime rate, the gun murder rate, and the violent crime rate has gone down, not up.....

That is a fact......you are wrong.....Lott was right.

How are things looking this year? Last year didn't seem so good either.

If obama would actually prosecute criminals instead of sympathizing with them and if he would stop releasing violent felons from prison the crime rate would go down....and if he would stop supporting cop hating groups like black lies matter you would keep blacks from murdering police officers......like this sniper and his buddies....

 

[Brain357]

Shooting Down the Gun Lobby’s Favorite “Academic”: A Lott of Lies

Yeah...the anti-gunners hate Dr. Lott....he exposed the fact that nothing they say about guns is true or accurate.....

Here is his defense against all of the attempts to smear him...


Response to Malkin's Op-ed

Lott defends Lott. No academic defends Lott. He is a joke.

And this guy defends Lott...moron...

http://www.nap.edu/read/10881/chapter/13

In addition, with only a few exceptions, the studies cited in Chapter 6, including those by Lott’s critics, do not show that the passage of RTC laws drives the crime rates up (as might be the case if one supposed that newly armed people went about looking for someone to shoot). The direct evidence that such shooting sprees occur is nonexistent.

The indirect evidence, as found in papers by Black and Nagin and Ayres and Donohue [cited inChapter 6], is controversial. Indeed, the Ayres and Donohue paper shows that there was a “statistically significant downward shift in the trend” of the murder rate (Chapter 6, page 135).


This suggests to me that for people interested in RTC laws, the best evidence we have is that they impose no costs but may confer benefits. That conclusion might be very useful to authorities who contemplate the enactment of RTC laws.

Funny a dead guy is all you have. But the reality is even he did not:

The National Academy of Sciences panel that reported on several gun control issues in 2004 looked at Right-To-Carry laws in Chapter 6 and endorsed neither the Lott & Mustard (1997) level and trend models as definite proof nor the Ayres & Donohue (2003) hybrid model as definite refutation of Lott's thesis: the majority of the panel concluded that econometrics could not decide the issue, suggesting instead alternate research, such as a survey of felons to determine if RTC changed their behavior.[72] The criminologist on the NAS panel, James Q. Wilson, wrote a dissent from the econometricians' conclusion. Wilson noted in the report that all the panel's estimates on murder rates supported Lott's conclusion on the effect of RTC on murder.[73] The Committee responded that "[w]hile it is true that most of the reported estimates [of the policy on murder rates] are negative, several are positive and many are statistically insignificant."[74] They further noted that the full committee, including Wilson, agreed that there was not convincing evidence that RTC policies had an impact on other kinds of violent crime.

 

[Brain357]

Shooting Down the Gun Lobby’s Favorite “Academic”: A Lott of Lies

Moron...do you realize that gun murder rates have dropped since the 1990s....as we bought more and more guns....that Lott's premise, that more guns = less crime has actually been proven true over the last 20 years...

That in the 1990s we had about 2 million people carrying guns for self defense, now we have over 13 million, and the actual crime rate, the gun murder rate, and the violent crime rate has gone down, not up.....

That is a fact......you are wrong.....Lott was right.

How are things looking this year? Last year didn't seem so good either.

If obama would actually prosecute criminals instead of sympathizing with them and if he would stop releasing violent felons from prison the crime rate would go down....and if he would stop supporting cop hating groups like black lies matter you would keep blacks from murdering police officers......like this sniper and his buddies....

Our jails are full.

 

[2aguy]

Shooting Down the Gun Lobby’s Favorite “Academic”: A Lott of Lies

Yeah...the anti-gunners hate Dr. Lott....he exposed the fact that nothing they say about guns is true or accurate.....

Here is his defense against all of the attempts to smear him...


Response to Malkin's Op-ed

Lott defends Lott. No academic defends Lott. He is a joke.

And this guy defends Lott...moron...

http://www.nap.edu/read/10881/chapter/13

In addition, with only a few exceptions, the studies cited in Chapter 6, including those by Lott’s critics, do not show that the passage of RTC laws drives the crime rates up (as might be the case if one supposed that newly armed people went about looking for someone to shoot). The direct evidence that such shooting sprees occur is nonexistent.

The indirect evidence, as found in papers by Black and Nagin and Ayres and Donohue [cited inChapter 6], is controversial. Indeed, the Ayres and Donohue paper shows that there was a “statistically significant downward shift in the trend” of the murder rate (Chapter 6, page 135).


This suggests to me that for people interested in RTC laws, the best evidence we have is that they impose no costs but may confer benefits. That conclusion might be very useful to authorities who contemplate the enactment of RTC laws.

Funny a dead guy is all you have. But the reality is even he did not:

The National Academy of Sciences panel that reported on several gun control issues in 2004 looked at Right-To-Carry laws in Chapter 6 and endorsed neither the Lott & Mustard (1997) level and trend models as definite proof nor the Ayres & Donohue (2003) hybrid model as definite refutation of Lott's thesis: the majority of the panel concluded that econometrics could not decide the issue, suggesting instead alternate research, such as a survey of felons to determine if RTC changed their behavior.[72] The criminologist on the NAS panel, James Q. Wilson, wrote a dissent from the econometricians' conclusion. Wilson noted in the report that all the panel's estimates on murder rates supported Lott's conclusion on the effect of RTC on murder.[73] The Committee responded that "[w]hile it is true that most of the reported estimates [of the policy on murder rates] are negative, several are positive and many are statistically insignificant."[74] They further noted that the full committee, including Wilson, agreed that there was not convincing evidence that RTC policies had an impact on other kinds of violent crime.

Here you go twit......

http://www.nap.edu/read/10881/chapter/13#271

Appendix A
Dissent
James Q. Wilson

The thrust of Chapter 6 of the committee’s report is that studies purporting to show a relationship between right-to-carry (RTC) laws and crime rates are fragile. Though I am not an econometrician, I am struck by the fact that most studies of the effect of policy changes on crime rates are fragile in this sense: Different authors produce different results, and sometimes contradictory ones. This has been true of studies of the effect on crime rates of incapacitation (that is, taking criminals off the street), deterrence (that is, increasing the likelihood of conviction and imprisonment), and capital punishment. In my view, committees of the National Research Council that have dealt with these earlier studies have attempted, not simply to show that different authors have reached different conclusions, but to suggest which lines of inquiry, including data and models, are most likely to produce more robust results.

That has not happened here. Chapter 6 seeks to show that fragile results exist but not to indicate what research strategies might improve our understanding of the effects, if any, of RTC laws. To do the latter would require the committee to analyze carefully not only the studies by John Lott but those done by both his supporters and his critics. Here, only the work by Lott and his coauthors is subject to close analysis.

If this analysis of Lott’s work showed that his findings are not supported by his data and models, then the conclusion that his results are fragile might be sufficient. But my reading of this chapter suggests that some of his results survive virtually every reanalysis done by the committee.

Lott argued that murder rates decline after the adoption of RTC laws even after allowing for the effect of other variables that affect crime rates.

Page 270
Suggested Citation: "Appendix A Dissent--James Q. Wilson." National Research Council. Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2004. doi:10.17226/10881.
×
Tables 6-1, 6-2, 6-5 (first row), 6-6 (first row), and 6-7 (first two rows). This confirmation includes both the original data period (1977-1992) used by Lott and data that run through 2000. In view of the confirmation of the findings that shall-issue laws drive down the murder rate, it is hard for me to understand why these claims are called “fragile.”

The only exceptions to this confirmation are, to me, quite puzzling. Tables 6-5 and 6-6 suggest that RTC laws have no effect on murder rates when no control variables are entered into the equations. These control variables (which include all of the social, demographic, and public policies other than RTC laws that might affect crime rates) are essential to understanding crime. Suppose Professor Jones wrote a paper saying that increasing the number of police in a city reduced the crime rate and Professor Smith wrote a rival paper saying that cities with few police officers have low crime rates. Suppose that neither Jones nor Smith used any control variables, such as income, unemployment, population density, or the frequency with which offenders are sent to prison in reaching their conclusions. If such papers were published, they would be rejected out of hand by the committee for the obvious reason that they failed to supply a complete account of the factors that affect the crime rate. One cannot explain crime rates just by observing the number of police in a city any more than one can explain them just by noting the existence of RTC laws.

It is not enough to say that it is hard to know the right set of control variables without calling into question the use of economics in analyzing public policy questions. All control variables are based on past studies and reasonable theories; any given selection is best evaluated by testing various controls in one’s equations.

In addition, with only a few exceptions, the studies cited in Chapter 6, including those by Lott’s critics, do not show that the passage of RTC laws drives the crime rates up (as might be the case if one supposed that newly armed people went about looking for someone to shoot). The direct evidence that such shooting sprees occur is nonexistent. The indirect evidence, as found in papers by Black and Nagin and Ayres and Donohue [cited in Chapter 6], is controversial. Indeed, the Ayres and Donohue paper shows that there was a “statistically significant downward shift in the trend” of the murder rate (Chapter 6, page 135). This suggests to me that for people interested in RTC laws, the best evidence we have is that they impose no costs but may confer benefits. That conclusion might be very useful to authorities who contemplate the enactment of RTC laws.

Finally, the committee suggests that extending the Lott model to include data through 2000 may show no effect on RTC laws on murder rates if one analyzes the data on a year-by-year basis (Table 6-7, rows three and four). I wish I knew enough econometrics to feel confident about this argument, but I confess that at first blush it strikes me as implausible. To me, Lott’s general argument is supported even though it is hard to assign its effect to a particular year. Estimating the effects of RTC laws by individual years reduces the number of observations and thus the likelihood of finding a statistically significant effect. It is possible that doing this is proper, but it strikes me that such an argument ought first to be tested in a peer-reviewed journal before it is used in this report as a sound strategy.

Even if the use of newer data calls into question the original Lott findings, a more reasonable conclusion is that Lott’s findings depend on crime rate trends. The committee correctly notes that between 1977 and 1992 crime rates were rising rapidly while between 1993 and 1997 they were declining. Lott’s original study was of the first time period. Suppose that his results are not as robust for the second period. The committee concludes that this shows that his model suffers from “specification errors” (page 141). Another and to me more plausible conclusion is that the effect of RTC laws on some crime rates is likely to be greater when those rates are rising than when they are falling. When crime rates are rising, public policy interventions (including deterrence, incapacitation, and RTC laws) are likely to make a difference because they create obstacles to the market and cultural forces that are driving crime rates up. But when crime rates are falling, such interventions may make less of a difference because they will be overwhelmed by market and cultural changes that make crime less attractive. This may or may not be a reasonable inference, but it is worthy of examination.

In sum, I find that the evidence presented by Lott and his supporters suggests that RTC laws do in fact help drive down the murder rate, though their effect on other crimes is ambiguous.

 

[Mertex]

Gun nuts won't believe this until it happens to them or someone in their family.....they can't figure out simple common sense things.

 

[daws101]

Shooting Down the Gun Lobby’s Favorite “Academic”: A Lott of Lies

Moron...do you realize that gun murder rates have dropped since the 1990s....as we bought more and more guns....that Lott's premise, that more guns = less crime has actually been proven true over the last 20 years...

That in the 1990s we had about 2 million people carrying guns for self defense, now we have over 13 million, and the actual crime rate, the gun murder rate, and the violent crime rate has gone down, not up.....

That is a fact......you are wrong.....Lott was right.

False!

What's Behind The Decline In Crime?

10 (Not Entirely Crazy) Theories Explaining the Great Crime Decline
The above reports debunk your bullshit.