Deltoid

The Washington Times has a story about a Lott related Internet impersonation, but it’s not about Mary Rosh. The Washington Times considers the Lott parody site askjohnlott.org to be a more important story than Mary Rosh. That site contains answers like this:

Q: I want to get roughly ten hand guns for my friend’s 50th birthday party, but I really don’t want the police to know about this. Is there any way for me to do this without getting reported?

A: Hopefully, you haven’t saved this for the last minute. By law, licensed gun dealers must report to federal law enforcement whenever someone buys two or more handguns in 5 business days. So, if you have two months before the party, you can just buy one gun every six days, and you shouldn’t have any problem at all.

I would think that it is pretty obvious that they are making fun of Lott, but some people might not realize that, so it would be better if the site contained a disclaimer in small print like the HCI Parody Site.

They also appear to have purchased advertising on Google for searches for “John Lott“. (Look at the sponsored links on the right.)

A Whois search on the domain returns some obviously fake information:

Registrant Name:Mary Rosh
Registrant Organization:Center for Truth
Registrant Street1:380 Main Street
Registrant City:Washington DC
Registrant State/Province:New York
Registrant Postal Code:10012
Registrant Country:US
Registrant Phone:+1.9179132591
Registrant Email:maryrosh@mail.com

Brad Delong points us to a New York Times profile on “rabidly anti-gun” Steven Levitt. The whole thing is worth reading, but this part is especially interesting to me:

The year after he was hired, his wife gave birth to their first child, Andrew. One day, just after Andrew turned a year old, he came down with a slight fever. The doctor diagnosed an ear infection. When he started vomiting the next morning, his parents took him to the hospital. A few days later he was dead of pneumococcal meningitis.

… And not surprisingly for a scholar who pursues real-life subjects, the death also informed Levitt’s work.

He and Jeannette joined a support group for grieving parents. Levitt was struck by how many children had drowned in swimming pools. They were the kinds of deaths that don’t make the newspaper—unlike, for instance, a child who dies while playing with a gun.

Levitt was curious and went looking for numbers that would tell the story. He wrote up the results as an op-ed article for The Chicago Sun-Times. It featured the sort of plangent counterintuition for which he has become famous: “If you own a gun and have a swimming pool in the yard, the swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.”

In The Bias Against Guns, after writing that Levitt had been described as “rabidly anti-gun”, Lott wrote:

Levitt apparently tried to overcome this image by writing his first op-ed about a week before his name was publicly nominated for the panel. Given that panel members are supposed to not have strong views on the topic that they are studying, it was strange that Levitt would write his first op-ed piece at this time. The op-ed argued that swimming pools posed a greater risk to children than guns, but it is hard to understand why he would choose this very time to write his very first op-ed on this particular topic when this would normally be considered the least appropriate time to do so. When I raised concerns about Levitt’s strong opposition to guns to John Pepper, who was serving as the staff director for the panel, Pepper pointed to the op-ed piece that Levitt had written as evidence that Levitt believed the same things that I believed on guns. Personally knowing Levitt, I know that was not true and one could point to several of Levitt’s academic papers. But the op-ed served its purpose.

(Actually the op-ed was written the previous year and Pepper disputes Lott’s account of their conversation.)

It is obvious if you read the op-ed that Levitt wrote it to try to help prevent another parent suffering a loss like his, but according to Lott it was written to cover up Levitt’s true beliefs about guns. In a radio interview, Lott once said:

“I have five kids. I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose any of them”

Try asking Steve Levitt, Dr Lott.

Jeff Johnson of CNSNews.com has a story about askjohnlott.org and suggests that the wags behind the site might by guilty of “identity theft” and wire fraud:

“Fraud by wire, radio, or television” (18 U.S.C. 1343) is a federal crime:

“Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio, or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings, signs, signals, pictures, or sounds for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned … or both.”

Depending on the circumstances involved, the crime is punishable by fines of up to $1,000,000 and imprisoned for up to 30 years.

Johnson provides us with a link to the law, which actually says:

Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio, or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings, signs, signals, pictures, or sounds for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both. If the violation affects a financial institution, such person shall be fined not more than $1,000,000 or imprisoned not more than 30 years, or both.

Lott is not a financial institution, so the “30 years” is not at all relevant, but Johnson’s clever edit made it look like it was. In any case they don’t seem to be trying to obtain money or property so if they are in trouble with this law, then so is Lott for his Mary Rosh deceptions.

As I said before, the site should include a disclaimer identifying it as a parody, but how can you believe that they are seriously trying to pass themselves off as Lott when you see them tweak the nose of a Lott supporter like this:

“This is not John Lott’s website,” one angry reader familiar with Lott’s true positions wrote to the site’s author. “Why are you pretending to be a website actually run by Dr. Lott?”

The reader was even angrier when he received what he called an “outrageous” response.

“Why are you pretending not to believe this site? I believe, if you look at my track record, you’ll see that everything I’ve [sic] done in my entire career has been upfront and straightforward,” the Lott imposter wrote. “Why have you decided now to question me?”

Meanwhile, pro-gun boards are all over the case, with discussion of denial of service attacks, and instructions on how to run up the site’s Google advertising bill.

Oh, and I called the phone number listed for askjohnlott.org and got the following message:

“You have reached Mary Rosh. Don’t be in a rosh and leave a nice long message.”

Timothy McGillicuty comments on Lott’s attack on Levitt:

To my immense amusement, an NRA nut named John Lott has attacked him for it because, as near as I can tell through the foam and spittle flying out of Lott’s mouth, he wrote the Op-Ed piece to hide the fact that he was anti-gun.

Roger Ailes posts on the Levitt piece and askjohnlott.org.

There is now a disclaimer at the bottom of every page at askjohnlott.org:

This site is not run by John Lott, he has no affiliation with it. It is run by Mary Rosh. John Lott used Mary Rosh to support his books in internet forums, and put false claims in her mouth. Now Mary Rosh has created this site, to show John Lott that parody is a two-way street. You can find out more about her at WhoIsMaryRosh.com.

I think that puts paid to the silly claim of “identity theft”.

askjohnlott.org now just contains the following text:

AskJohnLott.org was recently hacked by someone who values the Second Ammendment but not the First. Although we at AskJohnLott.org can understand why pro-gun extremists would be afraid of free speech, we believe that the entire Bill of Rights should be upheld.

Ask John Lott will be restored soon. In the meantime, the following sites provide information about the John Lott controversy:

Who Is Mary Rosh?

More Guns, More Crime

Tim Lambert’s weblog

Thanks, and long live the Bill of Rights!

This thread over at freerepublic.com has the text that was on the defaced page:

OK! I’ve got the site now! Now the tables have turned and they’re going to jail, without a penny to their names. Hey, can somebody help me, I don’t know John Lott’s email address, but let me know, because I’ve got the password now to this site!! Send me an email to SAVED@ASKJOHNLOTT.ORG. What kind of message should we leave to all those commie bastards…let me know what you think of this:

“If you mess with the 2nd amendment then we’ll mess with the 1st!”

[This was followed by ordering information for The Bias Against Guns ]

Earlier in the thread there was a post pointing out that the site was vulnerable. There was also speculation Jonah Peretti was behind johnlott.org.

Since johnlott.org now links to me, I should also note that I have no connection with the people behind the site and don’t know who they are.

And could people please use the word “cracker” to refer to someone who breaks into systems? We would like to reclaim the original meaning of “hacker“.

The Fifty Minute Hour has the best line so far on the whole “identity theft” flap:

John Lott is luckier than most victims of identity theft. After all, if one identity is stolen, he has another to fall back on.

If you didn’t get to see askjohnlott.org before it got defaced, Lott has saved a copy of it here.

Lott has a posting on his blog where he insists

few will think that the site was set up with the intention of making others think that it was a parody.

I don’t agree, but you can judge for yourself.

Jeff Johnson has another overblown story about askjohnlott.org. From the story:

“That’s like stealing money and then, when you get caught, saying you won’t steal anymore,” Lott said of the disclaimer Tuesday. “They’re not giving the money back that they have already stolen.”

No, it’s like telling a joke and then when some people don’t get it, explaining that it was a joke.

“They’re using my name, they’re taking it and using it in a way that I don’t agree with,” Lott said. “I think stealing is what it is.”

Well, that or parody.

Lott said Tuesday that posting a disclaimer after more than a month of misrepresentation “to cover their tracks” should not absolve the website’s creator, or anyone associated with it, from responsibility for their actions.

“I think it shows they realize that the secretive things they were doing are wrong,” he explained. “I don’t think that corrects the problems they’ve created by sending around these e-mails and having the misinformation up on the website for that period of time.”

Lott’s hardly in a postion to talk about responsibility. Four months ago Ayres and Donohue found serious coding errors in Lott’s data. Lott will not take responsibility for these errors or admit their existence or importance. And as for misinformation, look at the extent to which Lott has spread misinformation about defensive gun use.

“They were obviously doing this to get people to help fight certain policies that are going to be voted on in Congress,” he speculated, “and using my name to do it.”

Alternatively they did it to get a rise out of John Lott. The site was getting four or five hits a day last month. Now, thanks to the publicity Lott has given it, they’re getting 500 hits a day.

Jeff Johnson has an story on the defacement of askjohnlott.org (now restored, by the way), but apparently both Lott and Larry Pratt suspect that the defacement was staged:

“I think we have to assume that the owner of the fraudulent site that hijacked John Lott’s name is running scared,” Pratt speculated. “And certainly, until we know for sure, it’s a possibility that he may have hacked this to try to throw off the scent.”

However, as I noted yesterday, in this freeper thread someone observed that the site was vulnerable and it was defaced some time after that. Consider also the cheers and backslapping going on at freerepublic.com. I think it reasonable to suppose that some pro-gun person defaced the site.

Johnson also mischaracterizes two of the sites that askjohnlott.org links to:

The site now provides links to three websites, one of which is on the same domain name servers as the AskJohnLott.org site. The second links to an anti-Second Amendment web log hosted by a university lecturer in Australia

The first site, whoismaryrosh.com is not on the same name server as askjohnlott.org. The second site is this blog, which is not “anti-Second Amendment”. I’m somewhat critical of Lott, but if pro-gunners think that the Second Amendment depends on Lott in some way, then they are in a lot of trouble.

After askjohnlott linked here some people decided that obviously I must be behind the site and emailed me to let me know what they thought of me. Nope. Not me. Using false identities is not my style.

It was also suggested to me that Lott might have set up askjohnlott.org as a ploy to gain sympathy and to distract from the serious allegations that he faces. I don’t that this is at all likely. If Lott was behind it, the site would never have added the disclaimer.

So who is behind it? Well, Black People Love Us, What is Victoria’s Secret and Dog Island are satirical and parody sites that all happen to be on the same server as Ask John Lott. The group behind those sites is called Contagious Media, which is Jonah Peretti, his sister and his students. I think it is reasonable to conclude that askjohnlott is another parody from Contagious Media.

Iain Murray has a post where he insists that askjohnlott.org is not a parody, but

an attempt by persons to pass off the site as being by John Lott himself without revealing their own identities or motivations.

The only argument that he offers to support his claim that it was not a parody is this:

The homepage and the bio page look as if they could have been produced by John himself. It is only when one starts reading the FAQ that one becomes aware that things are a bit rum.

The FAQ includes stuff like this:

Q: I want to get roughly ten hand guns for my friend’s 50th birthday party, but I really don’t want the police to know about this. Is there any way for me to do this without getting reported?

A: Hopefully, you haven’t saved this for the last minute. By law, licensed gun dealers must report to federal law enforcement whenever someone buys two or more handguns in 5 business days. So, if you have two months before the party, you can just buy one gun every six days, and you shouldn’t have any problem at all.

It is possible that someone could read this and not realize that it was a parody, but it is not possible to believe that the author was trying to pass this off as a real question and answer.

Argue, if you will, that readers might not have realized that it was a parody, but it is ridiculous to claim that the passage above was not even intended to be a parody.

I also note that Iain Murray, as a subscriber to firearmsregprof, has been familiar with the Lott affair from the very beginning. He also possesses the statistical background to understand the survey and coding errors issues. It is very disappointing that his first blog entry on Lott is on this trivial matter instead of the important issues.

Murray also characterizes the parodist as “dishonest”, while describing Mary Rosh’s lies as unwise “tactics”. He excuses Lott’s misconduct because Lott suffered from ad hominem attacks. Well, Lott used to follow me around on Usenet making ad hominem attacks on me. Can I have a free pass too?

Scott Carlson at The Chronicle of Higher Education has a story (subscription required) about askjohnlott. He quotes Lott:

“Someone called me up a couple of weeks ago, very angry, claiming that they got an e-mail from me, telling them that I was advising them to do illegal things,” like buy guns illegally, he says. “I just thought the person was joking. After I was done talking to them, I found this crazy Web site.”

This doesn’t make sense. If the person believed that the email was from Lott, the natural thing would be to reply to it, not phone Lott. If they thought that it was from a fake on-line persona, then they wouldn’t have accused the real Lott of giving the advice.

I also get quoted:

Tim Lambert, a lecturer in computer science and engineering at the University of New South Wales, is one of Mr. Lott’s most persistent critics. He says the site was a “pretty silly attempt to bait Lott.”

“He rose to the bait, getting his friends at The Washington Times and CNSNews to publicize it,” Mr. Lambert says. “If Lott would have ignored the site, it would have gone away.”

While I was over at the Chronicle I came across a March 21 letter from Lott responding to a February article in the Chronicle. Lott writes:

Given the space that the article devoted to my use of a pseudonym in Internet chat rooms, I should note that I stopped using my own name because discussions often turned personal and resulted in people calling me at my office with threatening or obnoxious remarks. In retrospect, either I should not have participated in chat rooms or I should have continued to do so under my own name.

Unfortunately for Lott’s story, Google has archives of the discussions he was in and they never turned personal—everybody was polite to Lott. Indeed, in one of his postings Lott even complains about getting threatening phone calls, but not about phone calls from other Internet posters:

“You ought to see what happens to my telephone calls when someone like a Charles Schumer or Josh Sugarmann or Sara Brady makes this charge. I get lots of threatening telephone calls and letters. These calls don’t bother me, though they do greatly upset my wife.”

The registration details for askjohnlott.org have changed:

Registrant Name:Mary Rosh
Registrant Organization:Center For Truth
Registrant Street1:45 Main Street, 12th Floor
Registrant City:Brooklyn
Registrant State/Province:New York
Registrant Postal Code:11201
Registrant Country:US
Registrant Phone:+1.7182223892
Registrant FAX:+1.7182225621
Registrant Email:maryrosh@mail.com

Compare with those for contagiousmedia.org:

Peretti, Jonah
45 Main Street
12th Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11201
US

Kevin Drum writes

It’s one thing that Lott is still revered by the NRA, but why does the mainstream media still give him the time of day? He’s rather plainly a liar, and such an obvious one that it’s hardly a partisan attack to say so.

And why haven’t Eugene Volokh and Glenn Reynolds been following this? The Bellesiles defenders eventually faced up to the mountain of evidence against him and admitted that his book was bogus. When will the gun partisans finally do the same with Lott?

Joe Kelley is one who hasn’t given up on Lott citing him and claiming that the 1996 gun restrictions in Australia caused crime to increase. I was going to debunk his claims, but then I realized that I had already done so.

Kevin Drum observes that Lott evaded the question of whether correcting the hundreds of errors that he made eliminated his results. (And Lott’s son, Maxim, seems to have posted near the end of the comments.) After Drum posted, Lott emailed Glenn Reynolds, denying that the corrections eliminated his results. He also updated his posting by adding a paragraph that also denied that his results depended on the miscoded data. Later he updated it again, moving the discussion to a separate page and replacing it with a summery.

John See has an editorial in Madison’s Capital Times that is very critical of Lott, discussing Mary Rosh, the survey, and Ayres and Donohue’s analysis. Commenting on Lott’s claim to have conducted a survey that has vanished without a trace, he writes:

Many observers who conduct surveys, including myself, find this almost impossible to believe. We are still waiting for his colleagues to confirm that such a study took place.

Lott (along with Eli Lehrer) has an editorial in the Washington Times which claims that the 1976 gun ban caused crime to increase.

D.C. residents need more protection: Crime has risen significantly since the gun ban went into effect. In the five years before Washington’s ban in 1976, the murder rate fell from 37 to 27 per 100,000. In the five years after it went into effect, the murder rate rose back up to 35. In fact, the murder rate after 1976 has never fallen back to what it was in 1976. Robberies and overall violent crime changed just as dramatically. Robberies fell from 1,514 to 1,003 per 100,000 and then rose by over 63 percent, up to 1,635.

If you look at the graph you will see the trick that Lehrer and Lott have played. I’ve graphed the homicide and robbery rates for the ten years on either side of the law so you can see the trick Lott has used. (Data is from here.) Notice how the crime rates fluctuate from year to year. If you choose one year at random to represent the situation after the law was passed their is a good chance that it will be unrepresentative. Of course, they didn’t just choose one year at random. They chose 1981, which just happens to be the year that had the highest homicide and robbery rates of the ten following years. (And contrary to their claim, the murder rate in 1985 was below the 1976 rate.)

Also by presenting rates for just 1971 and 1976, they make it look as if the rates were decreasing before the law, instead of going up and down. The law was also in effect for only part of 1976, so that year is not a good choice to represent the situation before the law.

If you look at the graphs you will see that homicides tended to be lower after the law and robberies were about the same. Of course, just looking at the graphs only gives a rough idea of the possible effects of the law. This has been studied by several researchers. Loftin at al (NEJM 325:1615-1620) found significant decreases in firearms homicides and no significant change in non-firearms homicides. Kleck et al (Law & Society Review 30(2):361-380) disputed their findings, arguing that the law had no effect. Whoever is correct, there is no published support for Lehrer and Lott’s claim that the law caused crime increases.

Glenn Reynolds comments on the Ayres and Donohue’s letter on the coding errors.

Reynolds also states that he is reluctant to believe charges of dishonesty against Lott because some critics have made ad hominem charges against him, for example, that his research was funded by ammunition manufacturers. However, his academic critics never made such charges. I specifically noted that the funded-by-ammunition-manufacturers charge was an ad hominem as recently as a few days ago and wrote generally about other unfair attacks on Lott years ago.

Keneth Miles describes Lott and Lehrer’s claims that crime increased in Washington DC after the gun ban as an excellent example of cherry picking.

Earlier, I observed that the only justification Lott offered for another claim he made about DC crime, that Baghdad had fewer murders was “presumably Rumsfeld knows whether the number of murders is greater or less than 200 a month”. Wyeth has found that the Baghdad city morgue handled 470 gunshot deaths in July. For comparison, metropolitan Washington has a similar population to Baghdad and about 20 gunshot murders each month. It would seem that all the AK47s floating around Baghdad haven’t reduced crime that much.

Jeff Johnson of CNSNews.com has a fourth story about the Lott parody site askjohnlott.org. Johnson discusses the evidence that Jonah Peretti is involved with the site and quotes Lott:

“I don’t see how one can get around that [Peretti] either is running it, or he knows in detail exactly what’s happening with the website”

… Lott notes that, while the creator of the site now claims to have “regained control” of it from the hacker, the e-mail address the hacker posted on the site is still active and auto-replying to messages from the ContageousMedia.org mail server.

“It just makes it fairly suspicious to me that this person or group who is running AskJohnLott.org hacked their own site,” he charged.

While I suppose that is possible, the email address that the site cracker left was saved@askjohnlott.org, which the site owner would have regained control of when they regained control of the site.

Lott has a letter in the 21 July St Louis Post-Dispatch. He writes:

While some other studies claim the laws produce no change in violent-crime rates, among all the national studies that have been done there is not a single refereed academic publication that concluded these laws produce a significant increase in violent crime.

The Brookings Institution study that the Post-Dispatch cites was not published in a refereed journal. A version of that paper recently appeared in the Stanford Law Review, a student-edited, non-refereed journal.

Lott continues to avoid addressing the content of the paper by harping on peer review. If there is some serious flaw that peer review would have prevented, why won’t he tell us what it is?

That research finds a temporary small increase in violent crime, followed by a drop in crime.

This seriously misrepresents what Ayres and Donohue found, which was significant increases in crime in the majority of states that passed carry laws.

Yet next to that article in the same publication appears another study by Plassmann and Whitley, who examine three additional years worth of data and find “annual reductions in murder rates between 1.5 and 2.3 percent for each additional year that a right-to-carry law is in effect. … the total benefit from reduced crimes usually ranges between about $2 billion and $3 billion per year.”

And next to that article in the same publication appears a response by Ayres and Donohue that showed that the reductions claimed by Plassman and Whitley were the product of coding errors in Lott’s data, and that when the errors were corrected there were no significant reductions. Specifically, Table 3a of Plassmann and Whitley shows a reduction in murder of 2.0 percent each year in the Spline model. After correcting the coding errors, Ayres and Donohue found the figure was actually 1.0 percent (which is outside the range given by Lott above and not significant).

Lott was well aware of this back in April. How can he continue to pretend that the problem does not exist?

Lott has a letter in the 26 July Columbus Dispatch replying to an earlier letter from Paul van Doorn. Lott repeats his claim from his 21 July letter:

Yet, in the very same issue, another paper appeared by professors Plassmann and Whitley, who examined three additional years’ worth of data and found “annual reductions in murder rates between 1.5 and 2.3 percent for each additional year that a right-to-carry law is in effect. The total benefit from reduced crimes usually ranges between about $2 billion and $3 billion per year.”

Once more he pretends that he never miscoded his data.

Another example of the same sort of behaviour occurs later in his letter:

[van Doorn] was wrong that I attributed my survey work to other researchers.

So, Lott insists that he isn’t attributing the 98% number to the Los Angeles Times, Gallup, Roper, and Peter Hart here:

“There are surveys that have been done by the Los Angeles Times, Gallup, Roper, Peter Hart, about 15 national survey organizations in total that range from anything from 760,000 times a year to 3.6 million times a year people use guns defensively. About 98 percent of those simply involve people brandishing a gun and not using them.” (cite)

And he’s not attributing the 98% to “national surveys” here:

“If national surveys are correct, 98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack.” (cite)

and he isn’t attributing the 98% number to the Los Angeles Times, Gallup, and Peter Hart polls here:

“Polls by the Los Angeles Times, Gallup and Peter Hart Associates show that there are at least 760,000, and possibly as many as 3.6 million, defensive uses of guns per year. In 98 percent of the cases, such polls show, people simply brandish the weapon to stop an attack.” (cite)

And he isn’t attributing the 98% number to the Los Angeles Times, Gallup and Kleck polls here:

“There have been sixteen national surveys, everything from the Los Angeles Times, to Gallup, Gary Kleck from Florida State University, which show that over two million times a year people use guns defensively. The vast majority of times (98%) they merely have to brandish a gun and that is sufficient to cause the criminal to break off the attack.” (cite)

On 23 July, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune printed this letter from Heather Martens:

The ubiquitous John Lott appears on the Star Tribune’s editorial pages again, this time in the July 19 Short Cuts, describing his bogus survey that allegedly shows how amazingly effective guns are at deterring crime. Wow, 95 percent of the time, all a person has to do is brandish a handgun, and attackers disappear! Funny, the last time Lott wrote about his survey, the number was 98 percent.

In an op-ed piece to the Chicago Tribune in 1998, Lott first attributed the 98 percent number to surveys by the Los Angeles Times and Gallup. The online magazine Slate revealed that those surveys showed nothing of the sort. Lott later asserted that he did the survey himself. Asked to show evidence of his survey, Lott said he lost all the data when his computer crashed. He also admitted to the Washington Post that he had written many online defenses of his own work while posing as a woman named Mary Rosh. Bear in mind that Lott’s research is funded through the Olin Corp., parent company of Winchester, the largest ammunition manufacturer in the United States.

Lott’s fabrications have helped convince many states, including Minnesota, to adopt dangerous shall-issue concealed-carry laws.

Blatant fabrications like Lott’s are not harmless.

On 13 August the Star-Tribune printed this reply from Lott:

A July 23 letter implies that my research on right-to-carry laws is somehow alone in showing the benefits of such laws. Many other academics have published refereed academic articles showing that these laws reduce violent crime. There is not a single refereed academic journal publication that concludes these laws produce a significant increase in violent crime.

The letter also makes up an entire list of false ad hominem attacks. For instance, it puts forward long-discredited claims that my research was funded by ammunition makers. Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman examined these charges and found them baseless.

The claim that there was something “funny” regarding the slightly different survey estimates is also false. I cited that 95 percent of defensive gun uses involving simple brandishing rather than 98 percent because a new survey was conducted almost six years after the first one.

Once again Lott talks about “refereed” articles so he can avoid mentioning Ayres and Donohue’s work. Of course, Lott continues to reference his study on mass public shootings even though that was not published in an academic journal, let alone a refereed one, rather than than mention Duwe’s study, published in a refereed acadmic journal, which found that carry laws had no effect on such shootings.

Lott is correct when he describes the charge that he is funded by an ammunition maker as an ad hominem. While it is true that the Olin foundation gets much of its revenue from the Olin corporation and also is one of the funders of the AEI, the link is tenuous enough that it is most unlikely that they tell him what to write. However, Lott is incorrect when he claims that the other charges are “false ad hominem attacks”. Lott did attribute the 98% to other surveys. Those surveys did not say 98%. Lott did claim that he lost the data for his survey in a disk crash. And he did admit to posting as Mary Rosh.

And there is something funny about his changing estimates—on two occasions now he has given a 90% number, with no explanation for the change.

Lot has an article in the National Review Online where once more misleads his readers about what happened at the Appalachian School of Law:

“Last year, two law students with law-enforcement backgrounds as deputy sheriffs in another state stopped the shooting at the Appalachian Law School in Virginia. When the attack started the students ran to their cars, got their guns, pointed their guns at the attacker, ordered him to drop his gun, and then tackled him and held him until police were able to arrive.”

Lott implies that the law students were former deputies when they were actually deputies at that time. While the two students were armed, only one of them claimed to have pointed a gun at the attacker, and his account is disputed by other witnesses. Lott never mentions this fact. More details are here.

A study by Kovandzic and Marvell has been published in July issue of Criminology and Public Policy. (A draft of their paper is here.) From the journal’s news release about their findings:

In the recently published study “Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns: Crime Control through Gun Decontrol?,” Kovandzic and Marvell examine what, if any, impact Florida’s right-to-carry law has had on its rate of violent crime. They find that the 1987 passage of Florida’s RTC law appears to have had no statistically significant effect on violent crime. They proffer several explanations for the no-effect finding. First, they point out that few people have taken advantage of the concealed carry law? “despite millions of Floridians being eligible for permits… 12 years after the [RTC] law was in effect, there were only 248,O49 valid concealed weapons permits in Florida, representing 2.1% of the Florida adult population.” They further speculate that the benefits of allowing potential victims to carry concealed handguns might be cancelled out by an increased number of potential criminals securing permits to carry concealed handguns of their own. Kovandzic and Marvell conclude “there may be numerous reasons for state policymakers to support RTC laws, but the belief that these laws reduce crime should not be one of them.”

In one of two ‘reaction essays’ included in the same issue of Criminology & Public Policy, John J. Donohue of Stanford University calls the Kovandzic and Marvell finding “the final bullet in the body of the more guns, less crime hypothesis.”

Donohue’s essay is available here. He writes:

One article noted that Lott also points out that because the claim of coding errors appears in a law review, it has not been subject to review by third-party scholars, as would have been the case in a peer reviewed economics journal. David Glenn, Scholarly Debate Over Guns and Crime Rekindles as States Debate Legalization, The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 30, 2003. But Lott doesn’t need anyone else to evaluate the claim. He can simply look at the Ayres and Donohue paper and concede (or refute) the claim of coding error, and concede (or refute) that its correction eliminates his more guns, less crime result.

…

But more importantly, when someone’s work is being identified as erroneous because of mis-coding errors, one would think that the focus of attention should be directed at either correcting the errors or showing that they do not exist. On this most crucial matter, we have heard nothing from Lott, and we are anxious to hear his response. This is particularly true because the same errors that are found in the paper from which he has removed his name also are found in his newly published book, and because he continues to lobby on behalf of concealed carry laws claiming that they will reduce crime, when his own regressions (when corrected) show that that is not true.

Ayres and Donohue have sent a letter to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, replying to Lott’s 21 July letter. I agree with their description of Lott’s behaviour as dishonest.

On July 21, 2003, researcher John Lott wrote a letter to the editor in which he tried to shore up support for his now discredited theory that state adoption of laws allowing citizens to carry concealed handguns will lower crime.  Although he refuses to acknowledge this fact, we showed in a recent article published in the Stanford Law Review that when the coding errors in his own data set are corrected, his own regressions show no such drop in crime.  Lott tries to distract the readers by stating that our study illustrating his coding errors was only published in a law review, rather than in a peer-reviewed journal.  But since Lott knows that merely correcting his errors did eliminate his finding, it is dishonest for him not to concede the fact.  How can we assert that Lott knows that we correctly identified coding errors in his data?  Because he had put his data set on his own web page before we found his errors, and he has now gone in and quietly corrected the errors that we identified.  Lott should put an end to the charade and acknowledge that his own most recently published regressions, when corrected, offer no support for the more guns, less crime hypothesis.  As the latest, peer-reviewed, article on this topic by researchers Tomislav Kovandzic and Thomas Marvell states:  “we find no credible statistical evidence that increases in permit rate growth (and presumably more lawful gun carrying) leads to substantial reductions in violent crime, especially homicide.  Similar to Ayres and Donohue (2003), we find that our best, albeit admittedly imperfect, statistical evidence indicates that increases in permit rate growth may actually lead to slight increases in crime.”

Professor Ian Ayres, Yale Law School
Professor John Donohue, Stanford Law School

Lott has a reply to Ayres and Donohue’s letter. He has finally, at last, admitted that there were “a few hundred data entries that contained mistakes”. It is unfortunate that it has taken Lott four months to admit to something that he knew back in April. (Lott misleadingly claims that he had “previously discussed these issues” back in June, when all he did was make an oblique reference to “corrected results” with no indication of what the correction was.)

That disposes of the first question about the coding errors: “Were there coding errors as described by Ayres and Donohue?”. It is now agreed by both sides that Ayres and Donohue were correct on this point and Lott made hundreds of coding errors.

Now for the second question: “Does correcting his errors eliminate Lott’s findings?”. Alas, on this question Lott is silent, choosing instead to indulge in a lengthy discussion of whether the increase Ayres and Donohue found was statistically significant. Donohue was perfectly clear on this issue:

[Lott] can simply look at the Ayres and Donohue paper and concede (or refute) the claim of coding error, and concede (or refute) that its correction eliminates his more guns, less crime result.

It is most perplexing that Lott does not address this question.

Note also that this point is the reason why Ayres and Donohue found Lott to be dishonest:

But since Lott knows that merely correcting his errors did eliminate his finding, it is dishonest for him not to concede the fact.

I would have thought that when your honesty is being called into question, you would normally address the issue rather than discussing something else.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds, whose post finally got Lott to admit that he made the coding errors.

Update: After I wrote the above, Lott modified his Aug 20 posting and added the following paragraph:

As to the claim that “correcting his errors did eliminate his finding.” The data used in the Plassmann and Whitley paper can be downloaded at www.johnlott.org and one can readily see from the corrected tables and figures that this statement is false. For an additional discussion interested readers can also go here.

He did not note that this was an update, which is rather confusing to readers.

So, Lott is, at last, now disputing whether correcting his errors eliminates his findings. I will comment on this question later.

Further Update: He’s changed it again. The modified Aug 20 posting is now here, with a new entry claiming that his results survive the correction of the coding errors.

Inspired by Ron Davis’ comments on editing old posts and Justene Adamec’s excellent post on Blogging Loosely Applied Practices (BLAP) (hat tip: Kevin Drum) I have decided to adopt the BLAP. So:

1. I link to stuff I mention.
2. Once I have posted, I do not make substantive changes to the post, except for clearly labelled updates. Some lucky readers might see the post as I am editing it. It doesn’t count as posted till I stop editting it.
3. I credit other bloggers when I post about something that I found via their blog.
4. I reserve the right to edit comments left here for clarity and brevity, to fix typos, and to remove obscene or inflammatory language.
5. I put blogs in my blogroll if I read them regularly. If you examine my blogroll, it should be clear that I don’t agree with everyone on the roll.

In his statement on the coding errors Lott tries to downplay the significance of the errors:

Minor coding errors were discovered in the data set after it was first given out. The files available for downloading on this site have the corrected results using the statistical county level tests employed in Ayres and Donohue’s paper (”Shooting Down the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis”). The corrections involved a few thousandths of one percent of the data entries and occurred for observations after 1996. There were well over 70,000 observations and over a hundred variables available in the data set, we are dealing with a few hundred data entries that contained mistakes.

However, even one single error can make a dramatic difference to a least squares analysis. To demonstrate this I generated 1000 random observations, using years between 1981 and 2000 and a random value between 1 and 100. These are the red crosses in the graph to the left. I introduced just one error by changing the year of the last observation from 2000 to 0. This is a similar error to one of the few hundred coding errors Lott made. Note that one out of 1000 is a much smaller percentage than the percentage of coding errors in Lott’s miscoded data set. The green line is the fit to the data with the error. Correcting the error gives the dramatically different blue line. That one single error also changed the result from statistical insignificance to being significant at the 8% level.

In the posting where he finally admitted that he had made hundreds of coding errors, Lott insinuated that Ayres and Donohue had refused to release their data and that their results were not reproducible.

Unlike Ayres and Donohue, I have endeavored to make the data readily available in a timely manner and to explain how it was constructed.

…

Ayres has also declined my requests for his data in the past, and my attempt to reconstruct what data is publicly available did not produce the same results that he claimed to obtain (e.g., p. 257, fn. 28).

Actually the data for Ayres and Donohue’s paper is available here, and has been available since before the paper was published.

Lott’s second paragraph is also highly misleading. He is referring to Ayres and Levitt’s data on Lojack sales. If you read the paper that the data was used in, it is quite clear that the the sales data was commercial and confidential and that Lojack did not want it released. I’m sure that Ayres and Levitt would have had to agree not to release the data to any third party before Lojack provided it to them. The fact that they kept their word to Lojack gets transmuted by Lott to evidence of malfeasance on their part. And Lott’s claim that their results were not reproducible is ridiculous. Lott had absolutely no sales data for Lojack at all, so he made a pure guess as to what the sales where and found, surprise, surprise, that he got a different result to what Ayres and Levitt got using real data.

Several people have been misled by Lott on this issue, including Kevin P. in this Calpundit thread, Captain Holly in this thread at The Warren, and Tom Wright, who wrote:

They also refuse to supply their own data, when Lott freely offers his on the web for anyone to see, researcher, journalist or layperson.

Unfortunately, this is not the only time that Lott has made misleading claims about others not releasing their data. In More Guns, Less Crime, he claimed that Kellermann had not released the data for his case-control data on homicide, even though Kellermann had released the data. And even though Lott was shown how to get the data in 1998, he did not correct his false claim in the second edition of More Guns, Less Crime.

Tom Wright demonstrates perfectly the misleading nature of Lott’s postings on the coding errors:

He also claims that the 100’s of errors claimed for the study could make a difference without mentioning that these errors were corrected and the study still showed the same results to within thousandths of a percent of the original result. This is like claiming an elephant is a mouse because the claimed multi-ton weight was off by a few grams.

You see, while Lott admits that the “estimates do change somewhat”, he does not tell you how much they change. Instead he talks about how only a few thousands of one percent of the values were wrong, creating the impression that the estimates changed by that much. They did not. Lott does not tell you that they actually changed by more than a factor of two in some cases. It is not that easy to see this because the “corrected” tables are hard to find and in a password protected section of his web site. I have made a copy of one of them, so it can be compared with the ones in the original paper.

Wright also says:

Unfortunately, in the debate on guns, refusal to release data by pro-gun-control advocates is so common that I sometimes jump to conclusions. We still do not have the data or methodology for the commonly quoted canard that ‘10/11/15/16 children a day are killed by guns’. The number varies day to day.

Actually what is common is false claims by pro-gun folks that their opponents don’t release their data. The number of children killed with guns is easily obtained from the CDC here. The number given varies because the number of such deaths changes from year to year.

In Lott’s 8/20 blog entry he writes:

There is a pretty obvious reason why these guys have choosen to publish their work in nonrefereed publications. Despite their continuing claims to the press, Ayres and Donohue’s own papers do NOT provide any statistically significant evidence that violent crimes increase (for a brief discussion see point 2 here). Even most of their own results show that violent crime rates decline after right-to-carry laws are passed.

And this is his brief discussion:

the bottom line is that Ayres and Donohue fail to discuss the statistical significance of the overall effect. They simply note what way individual states go and discuss the weighted average for the effect, but there is no discussion of whether this average effect is statistically significant — and of course it is not. In statements from the LA Times to their letter to the Post-Dispatch, they claim that there is an increase, but they never offer any statistical evidence to support this claim.

If we examine Ayres and Donohue’s paper and look at table 13 (which they describe as their most definitive results), we find, contrary to Lott’s claim, that they do have statistically significant evidence of violent crime increases. With 24 states and 4 violent crime categories, there are 96 different tests. Of those, 25 show statistically significant increases and only 7 significant decreases. (Since there were 96 tests, by chance you would expect about 5 significant ones, with a less than 5% chance of 10 or more, so the 7 decreases are not really significant, while the 25 increases are.)

Another way to look at it is to compare the number of decreases with the number of increases. If there was no effect then the numbers should be roughly equal. However, increases outnumbered decreases by 68 to 28. (And yet Lott claims that most of their results show decreases.) There is only a 0.00003 chance of this happening if increases and decreases were equally likely, so once again we have a statistically significant result.

Lott’s claim that this is the “obvious” reason that they published in nonrefereed places also makes no sense whatsoever. Even if Lott’s claims about no significant increases was true (which it isn’t), how would publishing their research in a refereed journal have stopped them from making claims to the press?

In his book The Seven Myths of Gun Control, Richard Poe has an extensive account of the murders. He is much more careful with his facts than the other pro-gun writers who hang an attack on safe storage laws on the tragedy. He interviewed the mother of the victims and contradicts claims claims by Suprynowicz and Lott that

“the sensible girl ran for where the family guns were stored. But they were locked up tight.”

According to Poe, the gun was not locked, but stored unloaded on a high shelf. And she did not run to where the gun was stored. The killer was outside her bedroom door so she sensibly went out the window to get help.

Unfortunately, while presenting a more accurate account of the incident, Poe was misled by Lott about the media coverage, writing that Lott said that:

“all mention of guns and gun laws had been surgically removed from the story by the newswires. Lott says that an early account of the bloodbath distributed by one news service mentioned that there were guns in the house, that the children were trained and ready to use them, and that the guns had been put out of reach, in order to comply with the law. But subsequent accounts failed to include this information.”

The news story that mentioned the gun laws was not distributed and then suppressed by a newswire. It appeared in the Fresno Bee, not some wire service. Nor was it an “early account”. The murders occured on the 23rd. This story appeared on the 26th and was one of the last stories printed about the murders. I did a Factiva search on stories published in the week after the murders, and almost all appeared on the 24th and the 25th, with none at all after the 26th. Just like his claims about the shootings at the Appalachian School of Law, Lott’s claim that the media is deliberately suppressing facts is not supported by the evidence.

I left a comment on Poe’s blog, suggesting that he had been misled. In his response, Poe repeats the long debunked claim that my criticism of Lott is somehow meant as a payback for Bellesiles. He also insists that the “early account” reported by a news service is the August 26 Fresno Bee story, even though that did not appear in a wire service and appeared after all the wire service reports, and claims that there was a cover-up. As noted above, the evidence does not support his claims.