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.
Me dancing every time you post back.
