Deltoid

Glenn Reynolds has an update with comments from Dan Polsby who writes:

Numerous of Lott’s opponents (John Donohue, Ian Ayres, Phil Cook, Jens Ludwig, and many others) use the Lott-Mustard numbers, subsequently updated by Lott, in their work because they have to

However, because of Lott’s dishonesty, it will now be necessary to check all of Lott’s data for accuracy.

Patti Thorn investigates how many other fake reviews there are at Amazon.com.

Lott makes it into the Sunday comics. (Thanks to Julian Sanchez for the link.)

Samuel Browning has some thoughtful comments .

David Mustard has made a statement giving his recollections about when Lott told him about the survey:

I do not remember the first time John Lott and I talked about the survey. At the time there was nothing exceptional about the survey for me to associate with it and help me remember when I first learned about it.

I believe it likely that John informed me of the completed survey in 1997. I think it highly probable that John told me he had completed the survey at the time of my talk at the Academics for the Second Amendment conference in Washington, DC in November 1998.

I know beyond a reasonable doubt that John and I talked about the completed survey before I testified to the Maryland House of Delegates Judiciary Committee on 20 October 1999 about Maryland House Bill 736 to allow citizens to carry concealed weapons. I also know beyond a reasonable doubt that we had talked about the survey multiple times before then, because in our conversation in Oct. 1999 I clearly remember having knowledge about the survey.

The only date that Mustard is sure of is that he was told before October 1999. This is consistent with the other dates when Lott told people about the survey—the May 13 letter and May 21 phone call to Duncan, the May 25 letter to the Wall Street Journal, and the June 23 email to me. It seems likely that Lott told Mustard about the survey around the same time and this is why Mustard recalls that he had already heard about it in October 1999.

Ari Armstrong comments:

I think the burden of proof lies with Lott to demonstrate he in fact conducted it. Certainly the changes in Lott’s text, as well as a host of other strange circumstances described at the link above, call into question the existence of the survey.

Lott’s new book has been published. This means that I can disclose the results of his 2002 survey. In that survey, 7 people said that they had used a gun for self defence. Of those 7 people, only one reported firing the gun (in fact, that person reported wounding the attacker). This means that a 95% confidence interval for the percentage firing is 3%–50% (calculated using Wilson’s method). This confirms what I suggested earlier—the number of defensive gun users in Lott’s 2002 survey is far too small for this survey to give any useful information about the percentage of defenders who fire their weapons. This is what Lott wrote about his new survey:

“let me note the most important bottom line: the survey that was done last fall produced very similar results. The earlier results were replicated.”

Given the size of the sample of defensive gun users, this is an extremely misleading statement. Either Lott does not understand the basic concept of statistical significance, or he knowingly made a false statement about replicating the earlier results. It is extremely misleading for Lott to say that this new survey “replicates” the survey Lott claims to have conducted in 1997.

I estimated the firing percentage above using the unweighted sample. Weighting the sample by demographics, household size and/or frequency of defensive gun use would make the effective sample size smaller and the confidence interval even larger. For example, of the 7 defensive gun users, one reported three uses, and four reported two uses. If these frequencies are used to weight the results, then the effective sample size is reduced to 6.3 and the 95% confidence interval for the percentage firing is 1%–46%. I haven’t worked out the confidence interval if demographic weighting is used, but it should be similar. It isn’t possible to weight by household size, since Lott failed to collect that information.

ArchPundit has a post and another post on Lott’s new survey. He argues that Lott has replicated his previous survey—by replicating a worthless survey with another worthless survey.

Laura Billings has a article in the St Paul Pioneer Press where she argues that Lott has “been largely discredited as a reliable source of information on gun policy”. In the Albuquerque Alibi Steven Robert Allen lambasts both Lott and Bellesiles as frauds.

The Washington Post has printed a letter from Lott responding to two Washington Post articles, one about his survey, and one about Mary Rosh. Lott makes several false claims in his letter:

1. that the Post did not print a letter from “an academic who wanted to correct a statement attributed to him that was the opposite of what he had written.” You can check the two articles and see for yourself that the only statements attributed to an academic were those attributed to Lott, and he has not disputed those ones.
2. “Academics have confirmed … discussions that I had back in 1996 and 1997 regarding the survey”. If you examine Mustard’s statement you will find that Mustard is only sure that he heard about the survey in 1999, after Duncan raised questions about the origin of the 98% statistic.
3. Lott changes his story about his reason for using Mary Rosh:

   “I originally used my own name but switched after receiving threatening and obnoxious telephone calls from other Internet posters.”

   Unfortunately for Lott, Google groups has saved his John Lott postings. I checked, and every followup to his postings was polite. It is not in the slightest bit credible that someone who violently disagreed with one of his postings would phone instead of posting themselves or emailing. Note further that Lott also posted under his own name while operating the Mary Rosh pseudonym. Nor does it make sense that Lott would only mention this now, months after Mary Rosh was first unmasked.

Guy Cabot comments on how Lott keeps trying to make it look like the question was whether he had a disk crash or not. Jo Fish isn’t impressed either. Tom Spencer suggests that the American Enterprise Institute is looking for a way to let Lott go. skippy thinks Lott should “stop lying”.

Postwatch also comments on Lott’s letter. He doesn’t “understand why the Post wouldn’t allow someone to correct a blatant error”. The explanation is simple—Lott invented the “blatant error”.

US Newswire has a story about Lott’s problems.

Mac Diva comments on Lott’s claims in his Washington Post letter. Mac doesn’t believe Lott’s story about the threatening phone calls that forced Lott into the Mary Rosh deception.

This story in the Zanesville Times Recorder highlights the problems that Lott’s behaviour has caused for advocates of concealed carry laws. They are now having to say things like:

“Lott’s research has little bearing on the state’s need for responsible and fair concealed weapons legislation.”

Meanwhile, Lott said:

“But this debate shouldn’t be just about me. I suppose it’s flattering. But there have been lots of papers published on this issue. All have them have shown a range from small benefits to large benefits.”

Lott is well aware of Ayres and Donahue, whose Stanford Law Review paper reports

“Those who were swayed by the statistical evidence previously offered by Lott and Mustard to believe the more guns, less crime hypothesis should now be more strongly inclined to accept the even stronger statistical evidence suggesting the crime-inducing effect of shall issue laws.”

It is astonishing that he pretends that this paper does not exist.

I’ve done some more investigation in Lott’s latest explanation for his Mary Rosh postings:

I originally used my own name but switched after receiving threatening and obnoxious telephone calls from other Internet posters.

The first group of Lott postings were made between 3 June 1998 and 14 July 1998. All the responses were polite. In one of his postings Lott 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.

I asked David Friedman, who introduced Lott to Usenet, if Lott had ever mentioned something as highly unusual as getting threatening phone calls as a result. David could not recall Lott ever mentioning such a thing.

After 1998, there was the Mary Rosh review of More Guns, Less Crime in 1999. The next Mary Rosh posting was this one, on 2 June 2000 in freerepublic.com:

If you want to read the research paper upon which this research is based, go to:

http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?ABSTRACT_ID=228534

The papers that get downloaded the most get noticed the most by other academics. It is very important that people download this paper has frequently as possible.

Mary Rosh joined freerepublic.com that same day. It seems that Lott was reading freerepublic.com and came across a posting of one his articles and decided to try to boost his download numbers at SSRN. Obviously he was in no danger of getting threatening phone calls from freerepublic members. The reason that he posted under a pseudonym is that trying to rig the download counters as Lott did is against the rules at SSRN and Lott did not want to be caught doing it. Mary Rosh posted several more times to freerepublic, usually trying to get people to download papers from SSRN.

In July 2001, Mary Rosh made similar postings to Usenet, once again suggesting people download Lott’s papers from SSRN. However, unlike freerepublic.com, on Usenet there are posters who disagree with Lott, so her postings drew comments that were critical of Lott, Mary leapt to Lott’s defence, and Mary’s Usenet career was launched.

Far from being concerned about threatening phone calls, Lott also posted to Usenet under his own name while Mary was posting. He also posted a few days after Rosh was unmasked, and even posted yesterday.

Meanwhile, CNSNews.com seems to be blissfully unaware of the Lott affair, with this story reporting:

“Surveys Lott conducted in January 1997 indicated that guns are used more than two million times a year in self-defense, either by threatening to use a gun, brandishing it, firing a warning shot or actually shooting a criminal.”

Mitch Berg defends Lott against Laura Billing’s criticism:

For instance, critics of his have long wondered where he came across a “national survey” cited in his book claiming that “98 percent of the time people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack.”

That’s easy. It’s a conclusion reached by Gary Kleck in his seminal “Point Blank”, the biggest and most thorough survey of firearms use in the United States.

While the 98% figure does appear in “Point Blank”, it includes warning shots and misses. Lott specifically denies getting the number from Kleck.

One feature of Lott’s behaviour in this affair is his refusal to admit that he attributed the 98% figure to “national surveys” and to Gary Kleck. Instead, he told Slate

“A lot of those discussions could have been written more clearly.”

However, in on-line publications by the Independence Institute and the Heartland Institute he wrote:

“Kleck’s study of defensive gun uses found that ninety-eight percent of the time simply brandishing the weapon is sufficient to stop an attack.”

This isn’t the sightest bit unclear. He is attributing the 98% to Kleck. How can he pretend that he is not attributing the 98% to Kleck?

Well, guess what. Lott has figured out a way to pretend that he didn’t attribute it Kleck. If you check the Independence Institute article here you will find that the page has been deleted. (This is not because of a reorganization or something—if you look at their page containing all of their opeds from 2000, you’ll find that only one missing is Lott’s.) If you check the Heartland Institute article here, you will find that the sentence attributing the 98% to Kleck has been deleted. Unfortunately for Lott, it is still possible to see the original versions in Google’s cache here and here.

In today’s letters page in the Washington Post, Saul Cornell catches Lott misquoting Mustard. In a response to this review of Evaluating Gun Policy, Lott claims that Mustard wrote that the data showed “sharp decreases in murder, rape and robbery.” Cornell replies:

Scholars have a duty to check their sources before they go into print. The quotation that Lott attributes to Mustard does not appear anywhere in the book I reviewed, Evaluating Gun Policy. What Mustard actually argues there is that the more restrictive nature of concealed-carry laws passed in the 1990s might account for economist John J. Donohue’s discovery that states passing such laws witnessed an increase in crime. This argument implicitly concedes Donohue’s point, but seeks to explain away its significance by arguing that the second wave of concealed carry laws passed in the 1990s imposed too great a cost on those seeking permits.

Readers can check this for themselves by downloading the chapter in which Mustard’s contribution appears and searching for “sharp decreases”.

John R. Lott, Jr.
Resident Scholar
American Enterprise Institute

[Critical Commentry by Tim Lambert

This is a copy of the original document by Lott, downloaded from Lott’s web site here on March 21, 2003. My comments appear in italics like this.]

Guns make it easier for bad things to happen, but they also make it easier for people to stop crime and prevent bad things from happening. The important question that ultimately concerns everyone is the net effect, whether on net guns save lives or cost lives and whether they increase or decrease violent crime that threaten so many people.

(more…)

Julian Sanchez has some thoughtful comments on the Heartland and Independence Institutes’ deletion of Lott’s attribution of the 98% to Kleck. One more piece of information I can add is on the timing of the changes. On March 5, I noticed that the Independence Institute page had vanished, so I changed the link in my list of 98% claims to point to the Heartland version, so the Independence Institute version was deleted some time before then (but not much before or I would have noticed), and the Heartland version modified after that date.

I got some responses from Heartland and Independence. Someone from Heartland wrote:

The article you read on our Web site was originally issued by another organization; we reprinted it, with that group’s permission. The author’s article, John Lott, did not attribute the 98 percent figure to Kleck’s work; that was apparently done inadvertently by an editor at the original organization. When we heard of the problem, we removed the offending sentence.

Dave Kopel, Research Director at the Independence Institute wrote:

The attribution of the 98% figure to Kleck was an Independence Institute editing error, and Heartland merely reprinted the Independence Institute copy.

A version of this same Lott article (without Independence Institute editing) was published in the Rocky Mountain News, and that version does not contain any reference to Kleck.

There is no basis for claiming that Lott has ever attributed the 98% figure to Kleck.

I removed the Lott article from the Independence Institute website after deciding that the 98% figure–while based on research which Lott really conducted–had too wide a margin of error for the Independence Institute to continue to disseminate the figure.

The Independence Institute version was:

“Guns clearly deter criminals, with Americans using guns defensively over 2 million times each year — five times more frequently than the 430,000 times guns were used to commit crimes in 1997, according to research by Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck. Kleck’s study of defensive gun uses found that ninety-eight percent of the time simply brandishing the weapon is sufficient to stop an attack.”

The Rocky Mountain News version is:

“Guns clearly deter criminals, with Americans using guns defensively more than 2 million times each year — five times more frequently than the 430,000 times guns were used to commit crimes in 1997. Some 98 percent of the time, simply brandishing a weapon is sufficient to stop the attack.”

What kind of editing error is it that adds not one but two false attributions to Kleck? Given Lott’s previous behaviour in blaming the New York Post’s editors for an error he made, I am concerned that Lott has insisted that he never made the attribution to Kleck and that Dave Kopel has taken Lott’s word for it. We need a statement from whoever made the editing error, admitting responsibility and explaining how the error happened.

Another problem is that the attribution was made in Feb 2000. Lott did not correct it then. The Kleck attribution was noted in Lindgren’s report back in December. Lott has made several replies to Lindgren’s report without ever disputing the Kleck attribution. Slate specifically asked him about the Kleck attribution and Lott’s reply was only “A lot of those discussions could have been written more clearly.” Lott’s continually shifting stories subtract from his credibility.

Furthermore, on at least four occasions before May 1999 Lott made claims like this one:

“Americans also use guns defensively about 2.5 million times a year, and 98% of the time merely brandishing the weapon is sufficient to stop an attack.”

As Lott himself says “The 2.5 million estimate obviously comes from Kleck.”, so, even if the direct attribution is found to be the Independence Institute’s fault, Lott has indirectly attributed the 98% statistic to Kleck