Clayton Cramer tells us that he doesn’t believe the criticism of Lott

because his opponents are clearly fierce anti-gun advocates, and not above a few tricks of their own.You read their work outside of the statistical area, and it’s clear that the are either not very careful thinkers, or are playing fast and loose.
Earlier, he told me:
I don’t know if you actually found Dr. Lott engaged in a lie or not, but I do know that your irrational desire to see victims disarmed and murdered by criminals puts you on my list of people not to bother with anymore.

Cramer doesn’t dispute any of the criticism of Lott made by John Donohue, or by Jim Lindgren, or by myself. Instead, he picks on two minor points in Donohue’s paper “The Final Bullet in the Body of the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis“. Cramer is trying to argue, not just that Donohue is wrong on these two small points, but that he is so wrong that it calls Donohue’s entire scholarship on Lott into question. Cramer faces a heavy burden here—he has to show not that there is a difference of opinion, or that Donohue made a mistake, but that no fair-minded person could have made such an error.

On the first point Cramer writes:

Donohue points to the recent example of actor Sean Penn, who has a California concealed weapon permit (apparently issued in violation of California law), and how two of his guns were stolen from his car. While Donohue acknowledges that Penn “succeeded in getting one of the relatively few gun permits in the non-RTC state of California,” raising this issue as part of a discussion of RTC laws makes no sense at all.
Cramer appears to have missed the reason why Donohue raised this issue, even though it was in the same paragraph:
By some estimates 1.5 million guns are stolen every year, which means that anything that increases gun ownership (and carrying a la Sean Penn) is likely to put more guns into the hands of criminals.

On the second point Cramer presents this passage from Donohue’s paper:

During the first 5 and one-half years of the Texas RTC law, the Violence Policy Center was able to identify that 41 permit holders were arrested for murder or attempted murder (the number would be too low if the researchers didn’t capture every permit holder in their count or if some permit holders committed murder and didn’t get arrested, and would be too high if some were falsely accused). The Violence Policy Center, License to Kill IV (June 2002). The current murder rate in the U.S. across all groups is roughly 5 per 100,000, so if one takes 150,000 as the average number of permits over the first five year period, one would expect roughly 7.5 murders per year from gun permit holders (if they killed at the same rate as the average American today), which totals 41 murders over the full period.
and proceeds to criticise it because the 41 permit holders arrested include attempted murders, those who don’t end up being convicted, those who did not use a gun and those who used a gun on their own property (where a carry permit was not relevant).

Now Cramer’s criticism would make sense if Donohue was arguing that the 41 murders and attempts were somehow enabled by the carry laws, but that is not the point of the passage. It is actually part of footnote 18, and footnote 18 is offered in support of this sentence:

But is it clear how concealed handgun laws could increase crime even if only 1 or 2 percent of the public goes to the trouble of getting a concealed gun permit and that group seems not to have unusually high rates of criminal involvement?18
That’s right, Donohue is arguing the opposite of what Cramer implied. It is not relevant whether the alleged criminals used guns or not if you are looking at how often permit holders commit crimes. Just as in his complaint about the reference to Sean Penn, Cramer seems to have just read a sentence or two and not looked at the surrounding context.

Cramer concludes:

If the claim is that John Lott has violated professional standards in how he has presented his information, Donohue is in no position to cast any stones. Using VPC’s information, while not discussing its serious shortcomings, is clearly misleading.
The important claim about Lott is not that he violated professional standards in how he presented his information (though he did that as well), but that he violated professional standards in how he conducted his research. It is professional misconduct to present a result (the famous 98% brandishing statistic) for which there is no supporting data. It is professional misconduct to present a result (the new, improved 95% brandishing statistic) based on a sample size of just seven. It is professional misconduct to modify your model just so you can contrive a significant result.

Donohue used the information from the VPC to argue that permit holders do not have a high level of criminal involvement. Donohue also noted the limitations of the VPC data when you used for that task. The shortcomings that Cramer complains about are only shortcomings if the data was used for another task, something that Donohue did not do. Cramer’s post was clearly misleading, using an out-of-context quote to imply that Donohue did something that he did not do. Using Cramer’s reasoning he is now in no position to throw stones at, say, Bellesiles.

Postscript: Both Kevin Baker and Greg, while accepting Cramer’s claim to have found errors in Donohue’s work, aren’t buying Cramer’s claim that this defeats the criticism of Lott.