A couple of weeks ago Xrlq wrote about me:

He’s the Australian blogger who aspires to do to John Lott what Clayton Cramer did to Michael Bellesiles. Unfortunately, he doesn’t do a very good job; while Cramer uncovered overwhelming evidence Bellesiles’s fundamental research was fabricated, the best Lambert has been able to do is to uncover a few really stupid things Lott has done on a few isolated occasions. The rest of his rebuttals consist of gratuitous attacks on Lott personally.

Tim Lambert’s ‘Hat of the Day award has been revoked and conferred on me, instead, for having issued it in the first place. That will teach me to issue ‘Hats to bloggers.

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Kevin Drum is rather annoyed than the LA Times has published an op-ed by Lott. Lott’s argument is that if someone doesn’t answer a question he can attribute to them whatever answer is most damaging to them. If we applied the same standard to Lott, then since he never answered my question as to why he removed the clustering correction from his model, we could assume that the answer was “I was trying to cook the results”.

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Contrary to your claims of the Americanisation of armed robbery in Britain, one could only hope that robbery in England and Wales was truly becoming Americanised (“You’re history”, January 3rd). The International Crime Victimisation Survey shows that for 2000, the latest year available, the robbery rate in England and Wales was twice America’s rate.

Equally tellingly, your figure shows that armed robberies stopped falling in England and Wales in 1997 and started rising dramatically almost immediately afterwards. Was not the 1997 handgun ban in Britain supposed to reduce armed robberies? By contrast, American robbery rates have fallen during the 1990s just as more and more Americans have been able to carry concealed handguns for protection.

Lott is up to his usual tricks in his letter. First, although the article was about armed robbery, he compares the English and American robbery rates, instead of the firearm robbery rates. That makes an enormous difference. In the US, 40% of robberies involve firearms, while in England the figure is 4% (see section 3.20). I don’t think that we should hope that the 4% figure turns into 40%.

Second, he tries to blame the increase in firearms robberies after 1997 on the handgun ban and misstates the purpose of the ban. The ban was a response to the shootings at Dunblane and was intended to prevent something like that happening again. Nor is their a plausible mechanism for it to have increased firearms robberies.

Third, while robbery rates have fallen in the 90s in the US, Lott does not mention that they fell the most in the states that did not make it easier for people to carry concealed guns.

The address for letters to the Economist is letters@economist.com.

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A BBC Poll Shows that Most British Want a Law authorizing homeowners to use any means to defend their home from intruders

Lott links to a post by Eric Rasmussen, who also seems to think that the poll is representative of public opinion in Britain. Sigh.

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In a post on his blog Keith Burgess-Jackson wrote:

First, studies by law professor John Lott and others show that private gun-ownership reduces crime rates. This may be counterintuitive, but it’s true. There would be more crime than there is if guns were banned.

You sound like a gun-hater.

I have more faith in John Lott than I do in you, that’s for sure.

In an article called “More Statistics, Less Persuasion: A Cultural Theory of Gun Risk Perceptions”, published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Dan Kahan and Donald Braman argue that the whole debate between Lott and his critics is a waste of time because most people behave like Burgess-Jackson towards empirical evidence on gun issues. Kahan and Braman write:

individuals can be expected to credit or dismiss empirical evidence on gun control risks depending on whether it coheres or conflicts with their cultural values.

Anyway, my take on all this: Kahan and Braman are wrong, but so is Lott. For details, read on.

The empirical evidence for Kahan and Braman’s claim is an analysis of GSS data where they find that cultural values (for example, whether a person values individualism more or less) have a statistically significant correlation with whether that person supports gun control. They conclude that all the statistical analysis by Lott and his critics is a waste of time:

Rather than focusing on quantifying the impact of gun control laws on crime, then, academics and others who want to contribute to resolving the gun debate should dedicate themselves to constructing a new expressive idiom that will allow citizens to debate the cultural issues that divide them in an open and constructive way.

I believe that their conclusion is in error—just because cultural values affect attitudes towards gun control it does not follow at all that information about the costs and benefits of gun control would not also affect attitudes. There is also something curiously self-defeating about using statistics to persuade you that statistics can’t persuade you. If you are persuaded by their statistics then that proves them wrong. (Of course, they come back with: “You weren’t persuaded by our statistics. That proves us right!”)

The first commentary, by Cook and Ludwig, pretty much says what I think—that showing that cultural values matter doesn’t show that other things don’t matter as well.

The next one, by Fremling and Lott argues that Kahan and Braman’s results really show that cultural values don’t matter. They observe that adding variables for cultural values in the model increases r² (What is r²?) by only 1.6 percentage points, and argue:

Thus, Kahan and Braman prove the opposite of what they intended. Instead of demonstrating that people’s views of social order explain a lot of the variation in positions on gun control, they show that these views matter very little. …

It is very interesting that Kahan and Braman find that attitudes on guns are so little explained by attitudes in other areas. …

We think Kahan and Braman should revise their conclusion and take credit for this interesting finding.

I think that Fremling and Lott’s argument makes a fetish out of r², but let’s accept it and see where it takes us. How much does including the variable for carry laws increase r² in Lott’s “More Guns, Less Crime” models? In his famous Table 3a Lott reports r² values for three different models involving carry laws, but he doesn’t tell us what the r² values are if you don’t include any variable for carry laws. If the amount of increase in r² is as important as he claims above, it is rather odd that he did not report this interesting statistic. No matter, I have the numbers here. The carry law makes no noticable change to r² for almost all models—in a few instances it increases r² by a tiny 0.01. In any case, the increase is much less than what Kahan and Braman got in their models. So when can we expect to see the following from Fremling and Lott?

Thus, Lott proves the opposite of what he intended. Instead of demonstrating that carry laws make an important difference to crime rates he shows that these laws matter very little. …

It is very interesting that Lott finds that changes in crime rates are so little explained by carry laws.

We think Lott should revise his conclusion and take credit for this interesting finding.

Update: Dan Kahan responds:

We didn’t mean to imply that the empirical debate is a “waste of time,” just that it isn’t suited to promoting a stable resolution of the gun debate through democratic politics. But since enough people misunderstood us on this point (we must not have been careful enough), we wrote the “Cultural Cognition” follow up, which clarifies that issue and which also addresses the Cook/Ludwig/Lambert claim that culture *and* empirics can both matter at the same time. Instead of drafting a new response to your blog, I would rather refer people to the “Cultural Cognition” paper, subject to the proviso that it is a draft (the simulations are being made more complicated and interesting, although we are pretty happy with our narrative account of the social and psychological mechanisms that constrain individuals’ acceptance of factual beliefs that disappoint their cultural commitments).

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Last month I detailed how Lott posted at least six and probably ten five-star reviews of his books to Amazon.com. Well, it may be that Lott isn’t the only conservative author who does this. Someone posting as “A reader from New York, NY” (which is where Coulter lives), has posted many five-star reviews of Ann Coulter’s books at Amazon.com. Each of these reviews is actually a detailed response to points raised in negative reviews. The writing style is similar to Coulter’s and the reviewer seems to have an uncanny insight into Coulter’s thought processes. The Nameless Blogger has the story.

Now, it is possible that Coulter has a fan in NY who has copied her style and has made a hobby of anonymously defending her in the Amazon.com and that fan knows how Coulter thinks, but I suspect that the “reader from New York, NY” is actually Coulter.

Update: The “reader from New York, NY” is denying everything:

I wrote that review (I am an Amazon customer dating back to 1999) and I am not Ann Coulter. The behind the scenes techies at Amazon can verify this (if they’re so inclined). And, except as a reader of her books, I have no connection to Coulter whatsoever. Try getting the facts, instead of inventing them off the top of your head, before shooting off your mouth.

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That depends on whether you count as a liar someone who’s convinced himself that he’s telling the truth: I think he may have. I guess there’s no rock solid proof that he’s lied, just some highly suspicious circumstantial evidence… let’s just say that at this point, if I read him claiming that there are 60 seconds in a minute, I’d want to double-check it.

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Lott’s credibility issues have essentially damaged any real positive impact his research may have had on the gun debate. It’s a pity Lott and I are on the same side.

He’s not as bad as Bellisiles (who Tim is hard on as well) but when comparing fraud with sloppiness, no one really wins. Tim is right, Lott is on Lott’s side.

In comments, Kevin Baker (of Smallest Minority) agrees with Say Uncle.

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Tim Lambert has destroyed any possible remnants of John Lott’s credibility.

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Fellow Lott-sockpuppet exposer Julian Sanchez links to the story of Washingtonian.

Fellow Blosxom bloggers Brutal Hugs link to my exposure of Lott’s anonymous Amazon reviews and write:

The Brutal Hugs team is pretty varied in its views of guns, but thanks to Deltoid, even the NRA-defender among us thinks Lott should just pack it in.

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Benjamin Wallace-Wells has a most interesting article in the Washington Monthly about the intellectual decline of AEI. His first example is the case of John Lott. He writes:

Had Lott been in academia, he would almost certainly have lost his job—as did Michael Bellesiles, the Bancroft Prize-winning liberal historian from Emory University, who resigned after a panel found he had faked data purporting to show that fewer Americans had actually possessed guns in the 19th century than historians had previously thought. But AEI is not a university. It is a conservative think tank, operating in a world where penalties for bad scholarship hardly exist. AEI did not fire Lott, or reprimand him, or even investigate him. The institute’s president, Christopher DeMuth, repeatedly refused to even answer reporters’ questions about the incident. Indeed, several AEI fellows had warned DeMuth of their suspicions on Lott’s lack of scholarly honesty back when AEI was recruiting him in 2000. DeMuth hired Lott anyway. In an email to The Washington Monthly, DeMuth defended Lott and questioned critiques of his work, adding, “We welcome and encourage challenges to our research rather than regarding them as cause for empaneling boards of investigation.”

So there’s the answer from the AEI to all the calls for them to investigate Lott’s conduct: “Nope, we don’t care”.

A Matt Bai article published in Newsweek in 2001 has some more relevant information about Lott’s recruitment at the AEI:

Look at John Lott’s 31-page resume, and you’ll see that he got his Ph.D. from UCLA by the time he was 26. At 31, he was chief economist for the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Not bad. But then you’ll see that he’s been shown the door at some of the nation’s finest schools.

There were brief stints at Texas A&M;, Rice, UCLA. Four years at Wharton, four harsh winters at U. of Chicago. Most recently, Lott managed to catch on at Yale Law, doing research from a basement office that even the receptionist can’t find. He’s applied for literally hundreds of tenure-track jobs and received just one offer—in Australia.

Note: Wallace-Wells gets the sequence of the events in the Lott saga a little wrong in his article. Mary Rosh was before Ayres and Donohue published their paper, and the NAS panel was set up even earlier (and it’s examining firearms research in general, not just Lott’s work).

PS: Yes, I’m real glad he didn’t take up the job offer here in Australia.

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On Nov 1 the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published on op-ed by Gregory Stanford who wrote:

Here’s the true question: Do guns in the hands of private citizens with clean records do more good than harm?

Notably, the officials who deal with the nitty-gritty of crime—that is, the state’s sheriffs and police chiefs—overwhelmingly believe a concealed-carry law would hurt much more than it would help. Listen to Ozaukee County Sheriff Maury Straub, who told this paper: “As sheriff, I know of very few people who have had to protect their lives or the lives of others by deadly force.”

In short, the use of private guns to stop crimes is rare; the misuse of guns, on the other hand, is an everyday occurrence somewhere in the state even by people who lawfully possess them.

Avid gun fans subscribe to a world view in which just the opposite is true: Gun-toting, law-abiding citizens are frequently John Waynes to the rescue, busting up crimes and rarely falling prey to the dark side of human nature. But this outlook is sheer fantasy.

An academician, John Lott, has fed this fantasy with a 1998 book titled “More Guns, Less Crime,” which purported to show that the crime rate goes down when the number of concealed weapons goes up. This book has flunked peer review, however. Independent scholars from many disciplines have debunked it. And questions have emerged of late about whether Lott made up a key survey on which his argument rests.

On Nov 14, the Journal Sentinel published a reply from Lott:

Opinion pieces in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel have mischaracterized the debate over concealed carry as well as my own research. One column made it appear as though the academic debate is between “the work of one man,” myself, and a couple of critics. That is not the case.

Academics who have published refereed research in academic journals showing that right-to-carry laws reduce violent crime include: Carlisle Moody, David B. Mustard, John E. Whitley and David E. Olson, among others. While some studies claim the laws produce no change in violent crime rates, among all the national studies that have been done, no refereed academic publication concluded that these laws produce a significant increase in violent crime.

Notice the insertion of the word “refereed” so he can avoid mentioning Ayres and Donohue’s demolition of his work. Ayres and Donohue published it in a law journal which are usually not refereed. Apparently Lott doesn’t think anything published in a law journal should count as research. There has been more than enough time for Lott to point out any error in Ayres and Donohue, so the word “refereed” is just Lott’s way of dodging inconvenient results.

His summary of the research is also misleading. He tries to make it appear that there is independent confirmation of his results, but Whitley and Mustard are his co-authors and Moody based his work on Lott’s data and models. The only independent result was Olson’s and Olson’s co-author, Michael Maltz has repudiated that result because it was based on bad data.

Lott also writes:

As to Gregory Stanford’s bogus claim that I “made up a key survey,” that assertion involves one number in one sentence in the book filled with thousands of numbers. A computer crash destroyed the data file for that number, but the survey was replicated, and I obtained very similar results.

Oh, and the page for sending a letter to the Journal Sentinel is here.

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In on op-ed in the Southeast Missourian, Peter Kinder, president pro tem of the Missouri Senate writes

Author and researcher John Lott wrote a book entitled “More Guns, Less Crime” that makes the case. His work hasn’t been effectively refuted.

Perhaps some reader could write a letter to the editor correcting Kinder’s erroneous statement?

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