2aguy
Diamond Member
- Jul 19, 2014
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they really hate what John Lott did for the 2nd Amendment in this country...he and Gary Kleck are their main targets for destruction...so of course they have to lie....
Mother Jones is latest left wing effort to discredit John Lott - Crime Prevention Research Center crimeresearch.org
1) "The National Research Council, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, assembled a panel to look into the impact of concealed-carry laws; 15 of 16 panel members concluded that the existing research, including Lott's, provided "no credible evidence" that right-to-carry laws had any effect on violent crime.â
The National Research Council report actually concluded as follows: âThe committee concludes that with the current evidence it is not possible to determine that there is a causal link between the passage of right-to-carry laws and crime rates.â The majority of the panel advocated that more money be available to academics to fund additional research. Lurie somehow manages not to mention that despite evaluating every gun law that has been studied, the Council found no evidence supporting that any law had any impact.
Right-to-carry laws were actually the only type of law where there was dissent. James Q. Wilson, who at the time was possibly the âmost influential criminal justice scholar of the 20th century,â concluded: âI find that the evidence presented by Lott and his supporters suggests that [right-to-carry] laws do in fact help drive down the murder rate.â
2) Were my results biased because the crack cocaine epidemic in the late 1980s and early 1990s?
My research from the very first work with David Mustard dealt with the crack cocaine issue. As Florenz Plassmann and John Whitley(Stanford Law Review, 2003) summarize the research:
"One of Ayres and Donohueâs greatest concerns is the apparent failure of previous research to account for the differential geographic impact of cocaine on crime. Lottâs book (and the Lott and Mustard paper) reported that including price data for cocaine did not alter the results. Using yearly county-level pricing data (as opposed to short-run changes in prices) has the advantage of picking up cost but not demand differences between counties, thus measuring the differences in availability across counties. Research conducted by Steve Bronars and John Lott examined the crime rates for neighboring counties . . . on either side of a state border. When the counties adopting the law experienced a drop in violent crime, neighboring counties directly on the other side of the border without right-to-carry laws experienced an increase. . . . Ayres and Donohue argue that different parts of the country may have experienced differential impacts from the crack epidemic. Yet, if there are two urban counties next to each other, how can the crack cocaine hypothesis explain why one urban county faces a crime increase from drugs, when the neighbor- ing urban county is experiencing a drop? Such isolation would be particularly surprising as criminals can easily move between these counties. . . . Even though Lott gave Ayres and Donohue the cocaine price data from 1977 to 1992, they have never reported using it.â
My third edition of More Guns, Less Crime in 2010 also used new data from Fryer et al that was published in Economic Inquiry that attempted to measure the impact of crack cocaine from 1980 to 2000.
The claim that the research supporting right-to-carry laws somehow ignores the potential impact on crime is simply wrong. Even worse, critics, such as Ayres and Donohue, who claim that the results could be explained away by the impact of crack cocaine have never provided any estimates that include this factor to show that is true.
Would it have been that difficult for Ms. Lurie to ask about this point if she were going to write about it? Alternatively, Lurie could have just looked in the appendix in More Guns, Less crime to see all the discussions of crack cocaine.
3) "When [Ayres and Donohue] extended their survey by five years, they found that more guns were linked to more crime, with right-to-carry states showing an eight percent increase in aggravated assault."
This is a simple counting error. Ayres and Donohue made the false claim, and Lurie never bothered to confirm it. The Second edition of More Guns, Less Crime, which was published in 2000, used data from 1977 to 1996. Ayres and Donohueâs 2003 paper used data from 1977 to 1997. I provided Ayres and Donohue my data from 1977 to 1996 and they added one year to the data. Adding that one year to the 20 that were already being examined didnât make a difference. They obtained somewhat different results because they used a different specification and misinterpreted their results.
In any case, even the first edition of More Guns, Less Crime had some estimates presented up through 1994. That means that Ayres and Donohue could only have added three years on top of what was in the first edition.
Again, either a fast look at either the second or third editions of More Guns, Less Crime would have let her realize that this claim of five years was incorrect.
there is more.....but only if you are really interested....
Mother Jones is latest left wing effort to discredit John Lott - Crime Prevention Research Center crimeresearch.org
1) "The National Research Council, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, assembled a panel to look into the impact of concealed-carry laws; 15 of 16 panel members concluded that the existing research, including Lott's, provided "no credible evidence" that right-to-carry laws had any effect on violent crime.â
The National Research Council report actually concluded as follows: âThe committee concludes that with the current evidence it is not possible to determine that there is a causal link between the passage of right-to-carry laws and crime rates.â The majority of the panel advocated that more money be available to academics to fund additional research. Lurie somehow manages not to mention that despite evaluating every gun law that has been studied, the Council found no evidence supporting that any law had any impact.
Right-to-carry laws were actually the only type of law where there was dissent. James Q. Wilson, who at the time was possibly the âmost influential criminal justice scholar of the 20th century,â concluded: âI find that the evidence presented by Lott and his supporters suggests that [right-to-carry] laws do in fact help drive down the murder rate.â
2) Were my results biased because the crack cocaine epidemic in the late 1980s and early 1990s?
My research from the very first work with David Mustard dealt with the crack cocaine issue. As Florenz Plassmann and John Whitley(Stanford Law Review, 2003) summarize the research:
"One of Ayres and Donohueâs greatest concerns is the apparent failure of previous research to account for the differential geographic impact of cocaine on crime. Lottâs book (and the Lott and Mustard paper) reported that including price data for cocaine did not alter the results. Using yearly county-level pricing data (as opposed to short-run changes in prices) has the advantage of picking up cost but not demand differences between counties, thus measuring the differences in availability across counties. Research conducted by Steve Bronars and John Lott examined the crime rates for neighboring counties . . . on either side of a state border. When the counties adopting the law experienced a drop in violent crime, neighboring counties directly on the other side of the border without right-to-carry laws experienced an increase. . . . Ayres and Donohue argue that different parts of the country may have experienced differential impacts from the crack epidemic. Yet, if there are two urban counties next to each other, how can the crack cocaine hypothesis explain why one urban county faces a crime increase from drugs, when the neighbor- ing urban county is experiencing a drop? Such isolation would be particularly surprising as criminals can easily move between these counties. . . . Even though Lott gave Ayres and Donohue the cocaine price data from 1977 to 1992, they have never reported using it.â
My third edition of More Guns, Less Crime in 2010 also used new data from Fryer et al that was published in Economic Inquiry that attempted to measure the impact of crack cocaine from 1980 to 2000.
The claim that the research supporting right-to-carry laws somehow ignores the potential impact on crime is simply wrong. Even worse, critics, such as Ayres and Donohue, who claim that the results could be explained away by the impact of crack cocaine have never provided any estimates that include this factor to show that is true.
Would it have been that difficult for Ms. Lurie to ask about this point if she were going to write about it? Alternatively, Lurie could have just looked in the appendix in More Guns, Less crime to see all the discussions of crack cocaine.
3) "When [Ayres and Donohue] extended their survey by five years, they found that more guns were linked to more crime, with right-to-carry states showing an eight percent increase in aggravated assault."
This is a simple counting error. Ayres and Donohue made the false claim, and Lurie never bothered to confirm it. The Second edition of More Guns, Less Crime, which was published in 2000, used data from 1977 to 1996. Ayres and Donohueâs 2003 paper used data from 1977 to 1997. I provided Ayres and Donohue my data from 1977 to 1996 and they added one year to the data. Adding that one year to the 20 that were already being examined didnât make a difference. They obtained somewhat different results because they used a different specification and misinterpreted their results.
In any case, even the first edition of More Guns, Less Crime had some estimates presented up through 1994. That means that Ayres and Donohue could only have added three years on top of what was in the first edition.
Again, either a fast look at either the second or third editions of More Guns, Less Crime would have let her realize that this claim of five years was incorrect.
there is more.....but only if you are really interested....
