Deltoid

If you want to see another example of Lott’s carelessness towards facts, consider this article, published a few days ago:

But, where Vernick and Hepburn said they were unable to find any attribution to the ‘20,000′ statistic, Lott said the proof is readily available in a compendium prepared twice a year by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. He did say the gun law information takes a tremendous amount of time and energy to compile.

“About ten years,” Lott said, “somebody actually took the time to go and do this.”

Lott said final analysis of the B.A.T.F. report found approximately 20,000 gun laws to exist in the U.S. and he suspects more federal, state and local laws were added or amended by lawmakers over the past decade.

Lott claims that it took someone ten years to count the number of laws in a compendium. In fact, using the power of random sampling, you could count them in an afternoon. All you have to do is choose some pages at random, count the number of laws on each of these pages, find the average and multiply by the total number of pages in the compendium.

Even if for some reason you wanted to count them all, it would not take ten years. If you generously allow ten seconds to count each law, it would take about a week of eight hour days to count 20,000 of them.

So, Lott either made up or mis-remembered the “ten years” story, but confidently related it to the reporter as if it was true. He also didn’t have the good sense to realize that his story was obviously untrue.

I should add one caution to my comments about Lott’s “ten years” claim yesterday. It is possible that the reporter misunderstood and/or misquoted Lott.

Some commentators have been saying that the 98% is the only dodgy thing Lott has done. Actually there are plenty more. For another example, look at how he fudged a graph in More Guns, Less Crime.

BuzzFlash has an interesting story which details some more examples of apparent dishonesty by Lott.

I was able to check one of them myself: Mary Rosh’s defence of Lott’s statement that the “the worst thing people can expect from dioxin is a bad rash”. Rosh argues that this isn’t Lott’s claim, but that of Michael Fumento, whose book Lott was reviewing. However, if you read Lott’s review, it is quite clear that he makes the claim his own. And if you read Fumento’s book, you will also see that Lott exaggerates Fumento’s position. Fumento argues (convincingly, in my opinion) that the dangers of dioxin have been grossly overstated, that while it might possibly be carcinogenic, the evidence for this is weak. But he is not saying that is safe to put it on your cornflakes.

Ted Barlow thinks that Mac Diva overstates her case against Lott’s views on non-gun issues. I agree with him. While it is relevant to note that Lott’s research always seems to produce results supporting a right-wing agenda, in most of those issues he does not indulge in advocacy. You can’t say that he thinks that woman’s suffrage was detrimental because he produces a study purporting to show that it made the government bigger (something that Lott would consider bad). Lott might believe that giving women the vote had some benefit that outweighed any costs. In any case, he is not out there arguing against votes for women like he is arguing against gun laws.

The Journalist’s Guide to Gun Policy Scholars and Second Amendment Scholars is a directory of pro-gun scholars. It is grouped into sections by specialty. So who are the experts with special expertise in Women and Gun Issues?

Women and Gun Issues
Dr. John Lott	American Enterprise Institute
Dr. Helen Smith	Southeastern Psych. Servs.
Prof. Mary Zeiss Stange	Skidmore College
Prof. Carol Oyster	U. of Wisconsin Psych.

In Lott’s appearance on KSFO he talked about the Appalachian Law School shooting and described the two armed off-duty police officers who apprehended the shooter as “two students, one with a former law enforcement background”. Lott knows full well (as this thread demonstrates) that both of them were current police officers. And they didn’t stop the shooting—the shooter had run out of ammunition.

Lott also claimed that British gun control in the 20s, 50s and 90s was followed by an increase in crime in each case. I have data for homicide from 1857 to 1993 and violent crime in the 90s. There was a modest decrease in the 20s, no apparent change in the 50s and a marked decline in the 90s. I’m not saying that gun control should get credit, but the results were pretty well the opposite of what Lott claimed.

Lott has an op-ed in The Plain Dealer where he continues to mislead:

My new book, “The Bias Against Guns,” examines multiple-victim public shootings in the United States from 1977 to 1999 and finds that when states passed right-to-carry laws, these attacks fell by 60 percent. Deaths and injuries from multiple-victim public shootings fell on average by 78 percent.

Lott does not mention here, or in his new book, this paper: Duwe, Kovandzic and Moody, “The Impact of Right-to-Carry Concealed Firearm Laws on Mass Public Shootings” Homicide Studies Journal, 6:4 pp 271-296 (2002). Duwe et al find no statistically significant impact of carry laws on mass public shootings. Even when they tried to replicate Lott’s results they could not find a significant effect.

People’s reaction to the horrific events displayed on TV is understandable, but the more than 2 million times each year that Americans use guns defensively are never discussed - even though this is five times as often as the 450,000 times that guns are used to commit crimes over the last couple of years.

Lott is cherry picking numbers from different surveys. Surveys that have measured both offensive and defensive gun uses (NCVS and Hemenway’s survey) find that offensive gun use is much more common. Otis Dudley Duncan’s paper “As Compared to What?” has much more on the comparisons between offensive and defensive uses.

Annual surveys of crime victims in the United States continually show that, when confronted by a criminal, people are safest if they have a gun.

The surveys do not show that.

Studies, such as one conducted recently by Jeff Miron at Boston University, which examined 44 countries, find that stricter gun control laws tend to lead to higher homicide rates.

The measure of gun control used in Miron’s study was a crude three point scale: No gun laws/Some controls/Complete ban. By this measure the US and the UK have exactly the same amount of gun control. Miron’s study provides no information about whether the US or the UK’s gun control regimes are preferable. And a correlation between gun control and homicide is also explained if more homicides lead to gun control laws.

Jeff Johnson of CNSNews.com describes an AEI event to publicise The Bias Against Guns. Lott repeats his version of the Appalachian Law School shootings, as usual not mentioning that the shooting stopped because the shooter ran out of ammunition and not mentioning that the armed students were off-duty police officers.

Lott also atttacked University of Chicago professor Mark Duggan who published a paper, “More Guns, More Crime” in the Journal of Political Economy (CIX p 1086-1114):

He pointed to a recent paper that used subscription to the third-most popular gun magazine in the U.S. as a measure of gun ownership. When subscription rates for the most popular and second-most popular magazines were used instead, the findings of the research were altered dramatically.

“If I was a referee, I would ask, Why only look at one magazine here? Why not the largest or the fifth largest?” Lott said. “The fact that it had not would make me pretty suspicious and unlikely to go ahead and publish the paper.”

Lott insinuates that Duggan cherry-picked his data to contrive his result, but in his paper Duggan explained his choice of magazine:

“In contrast to the three gun magazines with greater circulation (American Rifleman, American Hunter, and North American Hunter), sales data for this magazine are available annually at both the state and the county levels. More important, Guns & Ammo is focused relatively more on handguns than these other three magazines. Because handguns are the weapon of choice in the vast majority of firearms-related crimes and are more likely to be purchased for self-defense purposes than rifles or shotguns, this magazine is a more appropriate one for analyzing the dynamic realtionship between crime and gun ownership.”

Also at the AEI Event, Carl Moody criticized Lott for bypassing the normal peer review process in publishing results in his book, but said that this was more than compensated because:

“He makes the data available, which means he is probably not cheating. I’ve checked him out; he’s not cheating, and he uses all the requisite controls. “He does it right, and so, I tend to believe the results that John has published in the back of the book”

However, because he made the data available, Ayres and Donohue were able to find that Lott’s results were the product of systematic coding errors. These results were published in the back of the book and Lott is still ducking discussion of the errors.

Lott has written an op-ed where he criticizes the New York Times for a “pattern of deceit”.

Several people have commented on the irony of Lott attacking the New York Times for a “Pattern of Deceit”, but let’s look at what he says in his article:

As an example, take the major 20,000 word series on “rampage killings” the Times published during 2000.

The paper declared that the evidence they compiled “confirmed the public perception that they appear to be increasing.” Indeed, the Times found that exactly 100 such attacks took place during the 50 years from 1949 to 1999, 51 of which occurred after the beginning of 1995. Their conclusion: “the nation needs tighter gun laws for everyone.”

Observed a Flaw

Having done a lot of work on this topic (together with Bill Landes at the University of Chicago), I immediately noticed that the Times noted virtually all the cases during the second half of the 1990s, but omitted most of the cases prior to that.

While a side bar to one of the articles briefly cautions that the series “does not include every attack,” the omissions are so extremely skewed as to produce a nine-fold increase between the 1949 to 1994 and 1995 to 1999 periods.

The Times claimed that from 1977 to 1994 there was an annual average of only 2.6 attacks where at least one person was killed in a public multiple victim attack (not including robberies or political killings). Yet, what we found was an average of 17 per year.

However if you look at what the Times actually said (payment required), you find that they did not say that there were “exactly 100 attacks”, but rather

the database does not include every attack of this type over the last 50 years.

They did not say that there was a nine-fold increase in attacks and they did not say that “from 1977 to 1994 there was an annual average of only 2.6 attacks”, but rather

Yet there is a strong impression that they have become more common. In an effort to confirm the trend, The Times analyzed F.B.I. reports of all homicides since 1976. Each year there were 15,000 to 22,000 homicides, but very few involved three or more victims.

That universe shrank even more, to just a few dozen, when The Times weeded out those involving robbery or gang violence, and those in which the primary victim was a family member.

What is left is the closest thing there is to a census of rampage killings — about one-tenth of one percent of all killings.

And it shows that in the 1990’s, they increased.

Their number remained fairly consistent from 1976 to 1989, averaging about 23 a year, only once going above 30. But between 1990 and 1997, the last year for which data was available, the number averaged over 34, dipping below 30 only once, in 1994.

‘’In the early 90’s, for some reason, it increased, and seems to have a different level since,'’ said Steven Messner, a criminologist at the State University of New York at Albany, who reviewed the numbers at the request of The Times.

The New York Times article considered two different data sets. The one they used for trends as in the quote above was based on FBI data on all homicides. The other contained 100 cases where detailed information was obtained from media reports, and did not contain all cases of rampage killings (as they made clear). The cases that were in it were skewed towards the more recent ones. Lott pretended that they used the second data set to analyse trends even though it is quite obvious from the article that they did not.

In his interview in the Illinois Leader Lott says:

“If you look at the national news reports for ABC, NBC and CBS during 2001, they had about 190,000 words of contemporaneous gun crimes stories on their television morning and evening news reports. The average story is only 250 words or so. During that whole year there was not one single mention of people using their guns defensively, to either protect themselves or someone else.”

An alert reader points out that Lott seems to have missed this story:

Take, for example, the question of how often guns are used for self-defense.

Gun control advocates say firearms are used 108,000 times a year for self-defense.

Gun control opponents say the figure is as high as 2.5 million times a year.

and this:

“By far the safest course of action is to have a gun,” argues John Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime.

He says residents of high-crime areas should have guns as a deterrent, and that those guns should not be locked away but readily available for use as a defense.

And this:

John R. Lott Jr.
Bad things can happen with guns, but guns can also make it easier for people to defend themselves and prevent bad things from happening. Potential victims use guns more than 2 million times a year to stop violent crimes. Crimes are stopped by defensive gun uses about five times as frequently as crimes are committed with guns.

And this:

Both troopers, who were suspended without pay, pleaded innocent, saying the shooting was self-defense. Hogan and Kenna said they fired at the van thinking the driver was trying to run them over.

Special Prosecutor James J. Gerrow admitted in court last week part of the state?s theory was wrong and then asked Smithson to dismiss the attempted murder charge against Hogan.

Lott has posted a transcript of the AEI event to publicize The Bias Against Guns. I’ll try to correct some of the false statements in the transcript:

In 2001, according to government survey evidence, there were about 450,000 crimes that were committed with guns. Of those, there were about 8,000 gun murders. Yet our best estimates indicate that last year Americans also used guns defensively, a little bit over 2 million times a year. Ninety-five percent or so of the time, simply brandishing a gun was sufficient to stop an attack.

Surveys that ask about both offensive and defensive uses consistently find more offensive uses than defensive uses. Lott’s comparison uses numbers from different surveys that cannot possibly both be true. Lott’s brandishing number involves ignoring significantly lower numbers from several larger professionally conducted surveys in favour of an estimate from just seven defensive gun users in his own amateurish survey. And he didn’t even calculate the number correctly.

Basically you have about 190,000 words during 2001 on gun crime stories, and zero words being spent on any of those news broadcasts about people using guns to stop a crime or protect themselves or someone else.

Not true, as pointed out earlier. The coverage certainly is lop-sided but is is silly to infer a bias against guns from it, any more than you could infer a bias against aeroplanes because plane crashes get extensive coverage while all the occasions when lives have been saved by air rescues get much less coverage.

at the Appalachian Law School in Virginia, in which several people were killed. There were two students at the school who had law enforcement backgrounds, that when the attack started, they ran to their cars, got their pistols, came back, pointed their guns at the attacker, ordered him to drop his gun; when he did so, they tackled him and held him until police arrived.

Now, if you go and do a Nexis search, which is a computerized news search of news stories around the country, you find in the one week after the attack well over 200 separate stories about the incident. However, only four mention the students having a gun in any way, and only two of those four mention the students actually used their gun to stop the attack. The typical coverage was in the Washington Post, which said, “Students pounced on the gunman and held him until help arrived”; and New York Newsday, that said, “The attacker was restrained by the students.” There are others which say, “Students tackled the man while he was still armed.”

…

Tracy Bridges, one of these students, told me that he had talked to reporters at over 50 different news organizations

Lott is well aware, since he was involved in an extensive discussion on this matter, that the students didn’t just have a law enforcement background but were current police officers. That he is counting the same wire service story printed in many papers over and over again. That stories printed on the first day of coverage didn’t mention the gun because the first witnesses that were interviewed didn’t even know about it. That most stories printed on the next day were covering the aftermath of the shooting rather than the shooting itself. That Tracy Bridges did not talk to reporters at over 50 different news organizations.

Furthermore, several of the stories made it quite clear that the shooter was out of ammunition, but Lott has not mentioned this in any of his op-eds, talks or his book.

And given the recent troubles with the New York Times, one of the stories that I go through in the book involves a major series of over 20,000 words that the New York Times had on so-called rampage killings. These were killings in a public place, where two or more people were killed. And the Times had claimed that over the last 50 years there were a hundred of these cases; 51 of them had occurred within just the five years from 1995 to 1999. And the New York Times had said we’re having this massive explosion of these attacks and that it’s imperative that we go and adopt new and stricter gun control laws in order to try to deal with it, even though many of these cases didn’t involve guns being used in the attack.

You know, there’s a sidebar where the Times briefly mentions that the series “does not include every attack.” But the omissions are so extremely skewed here that they produce a ninefold increase in attacks between the 1949 and 1994 periods versus the ‘95 to ‘99 periods. And I don’t know anybody who has looked at this data who would claim that there was this huge increase that seemed to occur right in 1995.

As I detailed earlier, and as is obvious if you read the New York Times article, the Times did not say that there was a “huge increase” or a “massive explosion” in 1995. That’s Lott’s straw man.

When these [safe storage] laws get passed, you’ll see about a 5 to 6 percentage point drop in gun ownership that occurs right when they get passed. And over time, you’ll see a huge increase in the rate at which people store their guns locked and unloaded. It goes from about in the low 30 percent range to almost 70 percent within five years after these states pass these laws.

David Hemenway’s review points out that Lott’s claims here are based on a misuse of GSS data, which is not designed for state level analysis as Lott uses it here. He is also cherry picking which gun ownership survey to use.

I just–I mean, I–since you deal with studying the media, I could actually get some advice from you on that type of thing, because–you know, there’s a study that’s come out in the Stanford Law Review, that Carl was referring to, that they’d given to the L.A. Times kind of as an exclusive to write up something on. And I remember talking to the reporter, and she said, well, you know, you say this and they say this, how am I supposed to evaluate what’s right? And my response to some extent is, look, there may be some things that are more difficult for you to evaluate, you know, like what’s the right statistic to use here–your statistical test. But there are lots of things that should be very easy for you to evaluate.

So for example, this paper was generally criticizing the work that I’d done in the past, and the first criticism that they brought up is that Lott never mentions the cost of guns. You know, he only mentions the benefits. And then they go through and they say if Lott were, you know, a reasonable researcher he would mention a cost–for example, they have a 1992 case in Louisiana, where a Japanese exchange student was shot when he walked into the wrong back door of a house. And my point–and I went through some other ones, I maybe went through, like, four or five of them. And I said, you know, those are pretty easy things to check. You know, is it true that Lott’s work never mentions the cost of guns? And that’s simply not true. I mean, from the very first sentence in the books–I would go and point to them–that the first sentence would say a gun can prevent things from happening, it can also make it easier for bad things to happen. Or that, you know, this Japanese exchange student thing was on page 2 of “More Guns, Less Crime”–that very case that they were saying if Lott was reasonable, he would mention something like that.

The only reason why Ayres and Donohue’s paper contains that error is that Lott insisted on its restoration to the paper. In an email the editor wrote:

(2) p119 Hattori story —> Your insistence seems really pointless, because making them restore their original phrase serves no purpose other than giving you the chance to say that they’re wrong. I will ask Donohue to restore this one, but please take an objective look at your paper, and I think you will realize that none of your points are affected or diminished by this change.

Lott does not mention that Ayres and Donohue acknowledge the error and correct it in their reply. Nor does he mention that this is the only error that he was able to find in a 120 page paper. Nor does he mention that what they were trying to point out was that Lott and Mustard had erroneously claimed that the Hattori shooting was not “unlawful”. Nor has Lott acknowledged or corrected this error, even though they had pointed it out to him before the Lott and Mustard paper was published.

If reporters are looking for some non-technical thing they can check they could compare Lott’s claims with what the New York Times article actually said.

Also in the transcript we have Carl Moody saying:

The second cut is, as you say, is the data available to other researchers [inaudible], and the answer is no for Kellermann, so I think he’s lying. He’s refused repeated requests for his data. So, no, I don’t trust him and I don’t think anybody here in this room should trust him, or anywhere else, for that matter.

Kellermann’s data has been available from the ICPSR (study 6898) for six years now. You would have hoped that Moody would have taken at least a tiny bit of care with his facts before accusing Kellermann of lying. (And why hasn’t Moody accused Lott of lying about the 1997 survey—Lott has not released the data from that survey.) Oh, and Lott at least, is well aware that Kellermann has released his data but he did not correct Moody’s false statement.

Lott has responded to parts of my post yesterday.

1) “Why do you use the government’s survey estimate for the number of crimes committed with guns but use other surveys in your two books for estimates on the number of defensive gun uses?”

The problem with the survey from the Bureau of Justice Statistics is that “virtually none of the victims who use guns defensively tell interviewers about it in the [National Crime Victimization Survey]” (Kleck, Targeting Guns, p. 2250. People aren’t allowed to say whether they have used a gun defensively unless they indicate that they have had a crime committed against them. As many people who used a gun defensively may have prevented a crime, and thus have avoided an incident serious enough to be included in the set of events asked by the interviewer, many successful defensive gun uses would never be recorded.

The NCVS asks questions like “Did anyone TRY to rob you?” Certainly it would not count a case where the defender used a gun to scare off a suspicious looking character before he made a move, but that isn’t a defensive use, it’s assault with a deadly weapon.

2) “Is it accurate to describe the students who stopped the attack as having law enforcement backgrounds?”

The students were attending law school in Virginia and were on leave from their deputy sheriff jobs in another state, North Carolina.

As Lott is well aware from the discussion he was involved in, Bridges and Gross were police officers. Lott’s description of them as merely having a law enforcement background implies that they were former police officers.

3) Does the New York Times actually claim that the “rampage” killings were increasing during the 1990s?

The first article (April 9, 2000) in the series contains a massive table that shows very clearly that most of the attacks over the last 50 years supposedly occurred within the last five years.

“The series of articles published in The Times this week based on that research offered several new insights. Although such killings account for only one-tenth of 1 percent of all homicides, the series confirmed the public perception that they appear to be increasing.” Editorial, “A Closer Look at Rampage Killings,” New York Times, April 13, 2000, p. A30.

In fact, the Times says

the database does not include every attack of this type over the last 50 years.

The reference from the editorial is to this passage, about a different dataset:

Yet there is a strong impression that they have become more common. In an effort to confirm the trend, The Times analyzed F.B.I. reports of all homicides since 1976. Each year there were 15,000 to 22,000 homicides, but very few involved three or more victims.

That universe shrank even more, to just a few dozen, when The Times weeded out those involving robbery or gang violence, and those in which the primary victim was a family member.

What is left is the closest thing there is to a census of rampage killings — about one-tenth of one percent of all killings.

And it shows that in the 1990’s, they increased.

Their number remained fairly consistent from 1976 to 1989, averaging about 23 a year, only once going above 30. But between 1990 and 1997, the last year for which data was available, the number averaged over 34, dipping below 30 only once, in 1994.

So, yes, they do say that such killings increased, from 23 a year to 34 a year. They don’t say that they increased nine-fold as Lott claimed. And they base their claim on FBI data of all such killings, not on a database of just 100 cases.

4) “Why did you use the CBS and Voter News Service surveys for gun ownership in your book More Guns, Less Crime but use the General Social Survey in your book The Bias Against Guns?”

The CBS and Voter News Service surveys have the advantage in that they are very large surveys (e.g., the VNS survey interviewed over 30,000 people). That makes it possible to get a fairly accurate measure of gun ownership rates in individual states. The problem with these surveys is that they cover only two years, 1988 and 1996. By contrast, the GSS has a very small sample in any given year, but the survey covers most states every other year. Which survey you use depends upon the questions that you want to ask. In the current book, The Bias Against Guns, states have adopted safe storage gun laws over many different years from 1989 to 1998 during the period that I studied. The question that I wanted to apply the survey data to was how gun ownership rates changed in the different states that adopted these laws in different years (see pp. 177 to 179 in the book). For the general question addressed in More Guns, Less Crime on whether the places with the biggest relative increases in gun ownership had the biggest relative drops in violent crime (pp. 113-14), I wanted to use the largest surveys available to get as accurate a measure as possible of the differences in gun ownership rates across states. However, in the chapter on gun storage laws in The Bias Against Guns, it was desirable to see how gun ownership rates changed immediately before and after the adoption of the law and the only way that I could do that was with the GSS data.

The GSS sample size is much too small to give a meaningful estimate of gun ownership rates in a given state. About the only way it could be used for this would be to pool many years of data, but then you get no indication of “how gun ownership rates changed immediately before and after the adoption of the law”.

Lott’s discussion of the CBS and VNS surveys is also misleading. While the CBS survey had a very large sample, the VNS survey, with a sample of 3,818 isn’t much larger than the GSS, and when you are considering the accuracy of differences between the two surveys it is the sample size of the smaller one that matters most.

Neither of Lott’s reasons seems like a good one, and he he still hasn’t addressed the fact that the surveys give opposite results—the GSS shows gun ownership declining, while the CBS+VNS polls show gun ownership increasing.

Brian Linse observes that while Eugene Volokh has criticized a study that found a link between gun ownership and homicide, he hasn’t said anything about Lott. Linse writes:

Bitching about “bogus” gun studies would impress me more if these same folks didn’t support Lott in a thesis that promotes gun tragedies involving children and other innocents. It’s shameful, and it erodes the credibility of otherwise thoughtful gun rights activists.

The study Volokh is criticizing found that people who lived in a house where a gun was kept were more likely to end up as homicide victims. This suggests that keeping a gun in the home causes you to be more likely to get killed. Volokh argues that there is an alternative explanation for the link—criminals are more likely to be murdered and more likely to own guns.

Now, this is a legitimate criticism, but Volokh overstates his case, claiming that the study is “badly flawed” and

says nothing about whether gun ownership really “increases the odds” that a law-abiding citizen will be killed

Any correlational result like this could be caused by some other factor, and it is never possible to control for everything. Results from such studies are never certain, but it is not true that they “tell us nothing”.

It is possible that the link seen came from gun ownership increasing the chance of being killed, or because of criminals being more likely to own guns and be murdered or some combination.

To completely dismiss this result because of the “criminal background” confounding factor it would be necessary to show that criminal’s are more likely to be murdered (Volokh has some good evidence here), and that they are more likely to own guns (Volokh has no evidence here) and that these factors were sufficient to explain the correlation.

The study provides some evidence that having a gun in your house make you more to be murdered, but the confounding factor that Volokh has identified weakens that evidence.

Lott has an editorial arguing that the US army would be better off if it didn’t disarm Iraqi civilians. Kathy Kinsley agrees. What is notable about his piece is what he doesn’t cite. In arguing that American soldiers would be better off if more Iraqi civilians had guns he doesn’t cite his own research on concealed carry. This is quite possibly because while he won’t admit to making the coding errors, he knows that when they are corrected his results go away.

Instead he cites Mustard’s paper that found a correlation between concealed carry laws and reduced police deaths. Unfortunately for Lott, the model Mustard used is similar to Lott’s and suffers from the the same flaw of lumping all the states together. Most likely if Mustard’s model is disaggregated or extended to include the latest crime figures the results will go away, just as they did with Lott.

Lott also claims:

The states that polls show as having the biggest increases in gun ownership are also the ones that have experienced the biggest relative drops in violent crime.

This is not correct—his analysis used data from polls that were totally unsuited for his purpose and contradicted by all other polls including those he used in subsequent research. More details are here.

In the July 14 issue of National Review Michael Potemra has a review of The Bias Against Guns. He writes:

Each of us has a favorite part of the Bill of Rights; for me—as for many others—it’s the First Amendment. But a good rule of thumb is to consider that particular freedom most important which, at a particular time, is most under attack. And that’s why John R. Lott Jr. of the American Enterprise Institute deserves the status of Hero of the Constitution in our time: He stands up for the embattled Second Amendment, the section of the Bill of Rights most hated by today’s smart set.

Lott does not stand up for the Second Amendment. He hardly even mentions it in his book. Lott’s actions have damaged the cause of gun rights. Instead of an argument about what rights the Second Amendment protects, he has made the argument about whether gun controls increase or decrease crime and then lost that argument by using cooked statistics.

Try the following thought experiment. Imagine a fellow who goes on TV and says, “Muslims tend to be violent and creepy,” and another who says, “Gays tend to be violent and creepy.” In both cases, there would be a justifiable explosion of outrage at the proclamation of such unfair and bigoted stereotypes. But now try to imagine a third fellow, who declares that “gun advocates tend to be violent and creepy.” His outburst would probably occasion, at most, a press release from the National Rifle Association; the mainstream media and the public at large would likely see nothing exceptionable in his statement.

Rather than guess at how people might react to such a declaration, I thought I’d see how they did in practice. However, when I searched Google and Factiva, I couldn’t find anyone who’d ever said that or anything similar. The closest examples I could find (via a Google search on “gun creepy”) were a review by Michael Brown, who wrote:

“A good anti-gun propagandist must be ruthless, cold and calculating, like those creepy folks at the Violence Policy Center.”

and a page that described gun control advocates as “creepy-crawly enemies of liberty”. No-one on Potemra’s side of the argument objected at all to this.

Potemra continues:

In his new book, The Bias Against Guns: Why Almost Everything You’ve Heard About Gun Control Is Wrong (Regnery, 349 pp., $27.95), John Lott explains how the defenders of gun ownership have been saddled with this undeserved reputation—and provides the statistical truths that the anti-gun activists don’t want you to know.

Actually, Lott makes statistical claims that are not supported by his data, but pro-gun folks tend to accept these claims uncritically because they suit their agenda.

The picture he paints is quite striking. Gun ownership is an important factor in reducing the crime rate; it makes ours a less, not more, violent society. For example, states with concealed-carry laws have seen large decreases in the number of multiple-victim public shootings; which only makes sense, because a violent criminal intent on a murder spree is more likely to shoot at targets he can confidently assume to be unarmed. This is part of the more general benefit of allowing citizens to engage in defensive gun use. One study found that in the ten states that adopted concealed-carry laws between 1977 and 1992, overall murder rates fell after the laws were passed. Lott’s book is full of information of this kind—which is highly inconvenient for media outlets that want to traffic in gun scaremongering.

Lott’s multiple-victim public shooting study has been contradicted by Duwe et al. Lott does not mention Duwe’s study at all in his book. And his claims about murder rates falling have been contradicted by Ayres and Donohue. Lott misrepresents Ayres and Donohue’s findings in his book.

In response to my comments about Potemra’s review of The Bias Against Guns, Paul Blackman points out that Lott actually mentions the Second Amendment twice in his book. I’ve corrected my earlier posting to say “barely even mentions” instead of “never mentions”.

The first mention is when Lott quotes Benjamin Civiletti:

“The nation can no longer afford to let the gun lobby’s distortion of the Constitution cripple every reasonable attempt to implement an effective national policy towards guns and crime.”

Lott does not dispute Civiletti’s interpretation of the Constitution—he just uses the quote to show that Civiletti supports gun control

The second mention is a paraphrase of Italian defence minister Antonio Martino, who:

“suggested that Italy model its laws after the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment, which protects the right of citizens to bear arms.”

Lott only mentions the Second Amendment in passing and only when he is quoting or paraphrasing someone else.

In footnote 40 of his article The Impact of Concealed-Carry Laws (in Evaluating Gun Policy), John Donohue comments on Lott’s claims about multiple-victim public shootings:

In the wake of a recent school shooting in Germany that killed 14, Lott summarized his finding from the Lott and Landes study:  “multiple-victim public shootings fell on average by 78 percent in states that passed [right-to-carry] laws.”  John Lott, “Gun Control Misfires in Europe,” Wall Street Journal, April 30, 2002, A16.  Although the results may at first seem persuasive, there is a major problem with the Lott and Landes data.  The FBI Supplemental Homicide Report (SHR) reveals over 800 such multiple-victim deaths per year while Lott and Landes use a Lexis search that generates only about 20.  While it may be that not all 800 should be included (e.g., Lott and Landes would eliminate some of the murders in the FBI data because they are not committed in public places), the true number of cases is vastly greater than the number that Lott and Landes employ.  Indeed, Lott and Landes have now found that when they use the SHR data, their results “were rarely statistically significant.”  Consequently, if their story doesn’t emerge when they use the best data, why should we believe their results using much less accurate data? 

Whenever a major public shooting occurs, Lott writes an op-ed claiming that concealed-carry laws would largely eliminate them. He never mentions the problems with his data or the contrary research. No doubt he is working on one now in response to the Lockheed shootings. This one occured in a concealed-carry state, but I imagine he’ll be able to come up with something.

Lott has an article in the National Review Online criticizing the UN’s efforts to combat the illicit trade in small arms, which, according to the UN, are involved in 300,000 deaths in armed conflicts each year. That seems like a lot to me, but here’s Lott’s take:

“Political scientist Rudy Rummel estimates that the 15 worst regimes during the 20th century killed 151 million of their own citizens. Even assuming that the 300,000-gun-deaths-per-year-in-armed-conflicts figure is accurate, the annual rate of government-sanctioned killing is five times higher.”

So Hitler and Stalin killed more. That hardly makes the 300,000 dead each year insignificant.

Lott goes on to claim:

“In the U.S., the states with the highest gun-ownership rates have by far the lowest violent-crime rates.”

He offers no evidence in support of this claim. Of course, in an op-ed like this there isn’t always enough space to provide supporting cites. Trouble is, he makes exactly the same claim on page 76 of The Bias Against Guns and doesn’t offer any cites or evidence to support his claim there either. Nor does he mention all the studies that have found that states with higher gun-ownership tend to have more homicides.

Lott then claims

“And similarly, over time, states with the largest increases in gun ownership have experienced the biggest drops in violent crime.”

This is not correct—his analysis used data from polls that were totally unsuited for his purpose and were contradicted by all other polls including those he used in subsequent research. More details are here.

Lott continues:

“Research by Jeff Miron at Boston University, examining homicide rates across 44 countries, found that countries with the strictest gun-control laws also tended to have the highest homicide rates.”

Lott does not mention that none of Miron’s correlations between gun-control laws and homicide were statistically significant. (In his book it’s worse—Lott falsely claims that half of the correlations are significant.) Nor does he mention that Miron’s measure of gun laws was badly flawed. Their measure was a simple three point scale with 0 being no laws, 1 being some controls, and 2 a complete ban. On this scale the US and the UK have the same gun laws, and France and Germany have less restrictive laws than the US.

And Lott unaccountably fails to mention all of the studies that have examined the relationship between gun ownership and homicide with international data. The most sophisticated of these, with a vastly better measure of gun ownership and more statistical controls than Miron is by Anthony Hoskin in Justice Quarterly 18:3 pp. 569-592 (2001). Hoskin found:

“Two-stage least squares regression, which controls for homicide’s effect on firearm availability in addition to a number of other confounding factors, reveals a statistically significant positive effect of firearm availability on national homicide rates. The magnitude of the association is considerable. The observed relationship is found to be insensitive to sample composition. Results also indicate that homicide rates do not influence levels of firearm availability.”

That’s more guns, more crime. Don’t expect Lott to admit that this study exists any time soon.

Lott tries to make it look as if a gun ban in Britain caused a crime increase:

“News reports in Britain showed how crimes with guns have risen 40 percent in the four years after handguns were banned in 1997.”

Lott, of course, does not mention that violent crime in Britain has declined significantly since the 1997 law. Now, it is not likely that the 1997 law caused either the increase in gun crimes or the decrease in violent crime, but Lott is cherry picking which facts to present to try to make it look like the law caused crime to increase.

Lott continues:

Passive behavior is much more likely to result in serious injury or death than using a gun to defend oneself.

As I explained earlier, Lott is misrepresenting the results of Kleck’s study, which found that passive behaviour is not more likely to result in serious injury than using a gun, and did not say anything about death.

A reader reminds me of another problem with Lott’s attack on UN gun control efforts that I discussed yesterday. Lott argues that the UN’s regulations would prevent people from obtaining small arms to resist totalitarian regimes. This is rather undercut by the Iraqi experience. Tim Noah observes that Iraqis seemed to have been well armed without ever overthrowing a repressive dictatorship. Also of interest are follow-up postings by Tim Noah and Jim Henley and the ensuing blogspace discussion ably covered by Henley here.

A 1998 Lott op-ed called “The Cold, Hard Facts About Guns” has been getting some blogspace attention, with links from Margi Lowry, Joshua Claybourn and pecksnif. pecksnif, apparently unaware of Mary Rosh, even asserts:

unlike Michael A. Bellesiles, who also wrote about guns, Lott is not a known liar and fabricator of facts, nor was he forced to resign his position at the University of Chicago.

Unfortunately, many of Lott’s claims in his op-ed are inaccurate. Since his piece was written in 1998 when debunking his claims I won’t use anything from after 1998. He writes:

Myth No. 1: When one is attacked, passive behavior is the safest approach.

The Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey reports that the probability of serious injury from an attack is 2.5 times greater for women offering no resistance than for women resisting with a gun. Men also benefit from using a gun, but the benefits are smaller: offering no resistance is 1.4 times more likely to result in serious injury than resisting with a gun.

As I detailed earlier none of the differences he presents are statistically significant and he has no business making such a claim from the NCVS data.

Lott also says:

Myth No. 3: The United States has such a high murder rate because Americans own so many guns.

There is no international evidence backing this up. The Swiss, New Zealanders and Finns all own guns as frequently as Americans, yet in 1995 Switzerland had a murder rate 40 percent lower than Germany’s, and New Zealand had one lower than Australia’s. Finland and Sweden have very different gun ownership rates, but very similar murder rates. Israel, with a higher gun ownership rate than the U.S., has a murder rate 40 percent below Canada’s. When one studies all countries rather than just a select few as is usually done, there is absolutely no relationship between gun ownership and murder.

In fact, a 1993 study by Killias did find such a relationship. (You see an on-line summary of the study here.) Here is the data on homicide and gun ownership from that study:

	homicide	gun ownership
USA	7.6	48
Switzerland	1.2	27
Finland	3.0	23
New Zealand	2.0	22
Australia	1.9	19
Sweden	1.3	15
W.Germany	1.2	9

We see that contrary to Lott’s claims, the Swiss, New Zealanders and Finns all own guns much less frequently then Americans, Switzerland and Germany have the same homicide rate, and New Zealand had the same rate as Australia. Finland has more gun ownership than Sweden and also a higher homicide rate.¹

Lott got pretty well every single fact wrong in his passage.

Lott also writes:

Myth No. 5: The family gun is more likely to kill you or someone you know than to kill in self-defense.

The studies yielding such numbers never actually inquired as to whose gun was used in the killing. Instead, if a household owned a gun and if a person in that household or someone they knew was shot to death while in the home, the gun in the household was blamed. In fact, virtually all the killings in these studies were committed by guns brought in by an intruder. No more than four percent of the gun deaths can be attributed to the homeowner’s gun. The very fact that most people were killed by intruders also surely raises questions about why they owned guns in the first place and whether they had sufficient protection.

This is wrong from beginning to end. It is not true that “virtually all the killings … were committed by guns brought in by an intruder”. If you look at the data (available from the ICPSR, study 6898), you will find that less than 10% of the killings were of this type. And it is not true that “No more than four percent of the gun deaths can be attributed to the homeowner’s gun” In fact, the majority of them can be.

¹ Lott is apparently talking about homicide rates in 1995, while Killias’ data is 1983–86, but the picture does not change if you use homicide rates from 1995. It is possible the discrepency is caused by the use of different data sources, but while Killias tells us where his data comes from (ICVS and WHO), Lott does not

Lott has an op-ed in the Kansas City Star which is recycled from a previous op-ed in the Columbus Dispatch that I commented on here. He has made an interesting change—in earlier versions he wrote:

Other research, by David Olson at Loyola University and Michael Maltz at the University of Illinois, found that when law-abiding citizens carried concealed handguns, criminals were much less likely to carry guns. In fact, they found gun murders fell by 20 percent.

This prompted a rebuke from Michael Maltz, who wrote:

In an effort to promote laws permitting the carrying of concealed weapons, in the April 24th Dispatch John Lott supports his own position by citing research I did with David Olson, purporting to show that these laws reduce homicide. In doing so, Lott bends the truth so much that he breaks its back. Specifically, Lott is well aware of a paper Joseph Targonski and I published in September of last year that points out that the data that we used in that study was problematic and should not be relied upon. The conclusion of our more recent paper is that Lott’s data (and ours) were so error-laden that they cannot be used with any degree of reliability.

So how did Lott change his op-ed in response to this? Does he withdraw the claim? No, he replaces the passage with:

Several studies find that as law-abiding citizens are allowed to defend themselves, criminals are much less likely to carry guns.

This seems to be Lott’s standard practice. After Ayres and Donohue showed that his data contained significant coding errors, Lott did not admit to the errors or correct them, but he did switch to citing Olson and Maltz’s research in his pieces. Now that Maltz has rebuked him for his misrepresentation of Maltz’s work, Lott does not admit to do anything wrong but modifies his claim so that it is so vague that it is difficult to refute.

Last week I commented on Lott’s LA Times editorial where he claimed that

Examining all the multiple-victim public shootings in the United States from 1977 to 1999 shows that on average, states that adopt right-to-carry laws experience a 60% drop in the rates at which the attacks occur, and a 78% drop in the rates at which people are killed or injured from such attacks.

I pointed out that he once again failed to mention the results in Duwe, Kovandzic and Moody. Homicide Studies 2002 6:4. Here is the abstract:

Right-to-carry (RTC) laws mandate that concealed weapon permits be granted to qualified applicants. Such laws could reduce the number of mass public shootings as prospective shooters consider the possibility of encountering armed civilians. However, these laws might increase the number of shootings by making it easier for prospective shooters to acquire guns. We evaluate 25 RTC laws using state panel data for 1977 through 1999. We estimate numerous Poisson and negative binomial models and find virtually no support for the hypothesis that the laws increase or reduce the number of mass public shootings.

They did find some evidence that carry laws increase the number of people killed and wounded in mass public shootings, but this was in only one of the models.

Well, in his reply to comments on the LA Times article, Lott finally mentions the Duwe article. He writes:

for a recent paper that gets the same results I do when this more narrow definition is used see Duwe, Kovandzic and Moody, “The Impact of Right-to-Carry Concealed Firearm Laws on Mass Public Shootings,” Homicide Studies, November 2002

That’s right, Lott is claiming that Duwe got “the same results” as Lott. Most people would, I think, reckon that with Lott saying “78% drop” and Duwe saying “virtually no support” for an increase or a decrease, that their results were not the same.

So, what tortured reasoning does Lott use to claim that Duwe got “the same results”? Here is what Lott says:

Whether one looks at two or more people killed or injured as well as three or more people killed, the drops are huge and quite statistically significant. Only when you examine multiple victim public shootings involving four or more people killed is the number of deaths so small that the drops are no longer statistically significant (for a recent paper that gets the same results I do when this more narrow definition is used see Duwe, Kovandzic and Moody, “The Impact of Right-to-Carry Concealed Firearm Laws on Mass Public Shootings,” Homicide Studies, November 2002, for a similar result when examining the few cases where four or more people are killed).

This misrepresents both Lott’s findings and Duwe’s paper to make it look like Duwe’s work supports Lott. First, in the Lott and Landes paper, they write that when they examined shootings with four or more people killed:

The results are similar to our earlier ones. We find that right-to-carry laws reduce the number of deaths, and that these deaths were increasing before passage of the law and falling thereafter.

Duwe et al could not reproduce this result. When they used a Poisson model as Lott did here, they found statistically significant increases. Buried in an endnote on page 302 of The Bias Against Guns Lott admits that the results are not significant if he uses a negative binomial model (instead of Poisson) but insists that the results still show decreases. And while Duwe et al also found that the results were not significant, in some specifications there were increases and some decreases.

Lott’s description of the differences between looking at shootings with two injuries and those with four killed is also misleading. He makes it seem that the only difference is that the sample size is smaller, causing the “huge” drops to stop being statistically significant, but if there were huge drops with the smaller sample, then they would still have been statistically significant. In fact, the drops are smaller and are actually increases in some specifications. Duwe et al also point out that the smaller sample has a big advantage—it is possible to collect ever single such shooting, while the larger sample could be biased by the omission of some cases.

Lott’s description of Duwe as getting “the same results” is reminiscent of the way he has described Ayres and Donohue’s work. Most observers would say that their results contradict his, but Lott insisted that:

Their own county level data that did the year by year breakdown actually showed that Lott and Mustard were correct, but they weren’t smart enough to know it.

Vladimir Kushnir describes how Symantec’s censorware blocks access to many pro-gun websites such as nra.org, under the category ‘Weapons’. I checked, and he has accurately described which sites are blocked. (Though the Lott site that is blocked is actually a collection of Lott’s articles—Lott’s own site is not blocked.) I agree with Kushnir that most people would not expect ‘Weapons’ (blocked by default) would block access to sites like gunscholar.com.

Kushnir also found that many more pro-gun sites were blocked than pro-control sites. I found that 13 of 48 sites in Google Directory’s Pro-Gun Rights category were blocked by the ‘Weapons’ category, while only 5 of the 78 sites in Google’s so called Anti-Gun Rights category were blocked. There certainly seems to be some bias against pro-gun sites here. Kushnir believes that this

could only be achieved as a result of a conscious effort to block conservative websites, dedicated to the protection of the Constitution, while not blocking the liberal ones.

I don’t think this is correct. They do block some pro-control sites and the pattern observed could be the result of unconscious bias on the part of the employees selecting sites, or that pro-gun sites are more likely to be submitted for blocking.

In any event, I don’t think any of the sites should be blocked (and perhaps the NRA and VPC can agree on something here—they are both blocked). But then, I think the whole idea of censorware is a bad idea.

Update: Guncite (one of the blocked sites) has more information. Symantec’s explanation for the blocking was:

Basically the logic behind gun filtering lists came about after the Columbine school shootings. It was decided that I-Gear would start filtering gun sites that promote gun use so schools can monitor their students in hopes of preventing future school shootings. This is the reasoning behind filtering sites that promote gun “use” vs. guns in general.

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.

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.

Glenn Reynolds links to this Dave Kopel article and says that it shows that the New York Times reporting on guns was “riddled with amateurish errors and apparent deception”. Speaking of which, here is Kopel:

What if a gun owner does something very unwicked—such as saving dozens of people from a mass killer? Don’t expect to read about it in the New York Times. When a failing law student went on a murder rampage at Appalachian School of Law, Times reporter Francis X. Clines explained that the killing ended when the killer “was tackled by fellow students” (Jan 17, 2002). “Mr. Odighizuwa was subdued by three law students who were experienced police officers, the authorities said,” Cline wrote. What Clines and the Times omitted was that two of the law students who “subdued” and “tackled” the killer had retrieved their own handguns from their cars, and had used those handguns to “subdue” the murderer.

and this is what Clines wrote in the New York Times story (emphasis added):

Mr. Odighizuwa was subdued by three law students who were experienced police officers, the authorities said.

“We’re trained to run into the situation instead away from it,” said one of the three, Mikael Gross, 34, of Charlotte, N.C., who ran to his car for his bulletproof vest and service pistol before tackling the suspect.

That’s right, it was in the very next sentence and Kopel somehow failed to notice it.

None of this is new—Kopel admitted that the error was indefensible and posted a correction on The Corner some three months ago. Trouble is, the NRO hasn’t bothered to add a correction to the article. Is this an amateurish error or an apparent deception?

Update: Glenn Reynolds has an update where he notes that failure to correct errors in articles is a common problem at NRO. He also writes:

Notably, however, Lambert doesn’t try to defend Fox Butterfield.

I didn’t write anything about Fox Butterfield because I don’t know whether the charges are true or false. At the moment I have neither the time nor the inclination to investigate the matter. Given Kopel’s egregious error about another matter in his article, I am not going to take his word for it.

Further update: Tom Maguire examines the first thing Kopel writes about Butterfield and finds it wanting.

The Federalist Society is sending Lott on a speaking tour.  They asked Saul Cornell to debate Lott. This is what he sent them:  

Lott has been accused of research fraud and has lied on a host of other topics related to his research, including his participation in Internet discussions under a false female identity (cyber-cross dressing—very un-Federalist Society if you ask me—can you imagine Publius in drag?) I would gladly debate with any serious academic on this or other topics, but I have a general rule about not sharing the stage with frauds. In fact no serious scholar would even bother with Lott at this moment. He is only being kept afloat because he has never passed a serious tenure review and has jumped around on a series of ideologically funded fellowships. If he were in a regular academic job, he would certainly be the subject of an independent investigation. I would urge you to reconsider the invitation. I could easily suggest a host of more congenial and interesting persons to defend either the individual rights view or concealed carry laws. If Lott comes to town you are apt to make the issue seem silly—just imagine all of the Mary Rosh (Lott’s twisted cyber-sister) street antics you would encourage. Do you really want to make the cause of gun rights look just silly? I certainly would not want to encourage this. The decision is up to you, but I think you are making a mistake.

Alex Tabarrok has some more on the question of whether Iraqis were well armed while Saddam was in power. (My earlier comments are here.)

He points to a New York Times article that states: “Mr. Hussein, never one to tolerate competition, forbade private citizens to carry weapons, effectively outlawing the security industry.”, and suggests that contradicts an earlier New York Times article that reported that guns were easy and legal to obtain in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Tabarrok concludes:

Clearly, the New York Times is wrong. But where does the truth lie?

However, it is possible that Iraqi civilians might have been allowed to own guns and keep them in their homes, but not to carry them in public, so there isn’t necessarily a contradiction between the two reports.