Deltoid

There has been flurry of bloggers posting their results on the Political Compass Test. This test attempts to measure your political leanings on a two-dimensional scale, with a left/right axis and a libertarian/authoritarian axis. Lawrence Solum has collected some of the results here. This has inspired me to reorganize the results into a table so you can see at a glance where everyone is, add links to all the blogs, and add a form so others can easily add themselves.

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Lott is at it again. In a Tech Central Station column he claims:

Over 90 percent of the time simply brandishing the weapon stops an attack.

I suppose we should be glad that rather than his 98% estimate based on a fictional survey, or his 95% estimate based on a survey that gives a different number, Lott is now advancing a number that actually comes from a survey that was really carried out. Unfortunately, his 90% number is based on a sample size of just seven gun users. This sample size is too small to produce any meaningful estimate, and it is dishonest for Lott to keep presenting this number over and over again as if it meant something.

I appreciate that some people might find that the controversy about Lott’s cooking of his “More Guns, Less Crime” results too complicated to follow, but this example leaves no wriggle room for Lott apologists.

1. Lott’s 2002 survey had just seven defensive gun users. Anyone can check this by downloading the survey data from johnlott.org
2. A sample size of seven is far too small. Anyone who doesn’t know this already can check this by consulting a statistics text or someone who has studied basic statistics.

How can anyone with a scrap of integrity excuse this?

Lott also deliberately omits any mention of the research that found that safe storage laws were associated with a reduction in juvenile accidental gun deaths. I suppose that is better than what he did in his book and blog which was to misrepresent the methodology of that research.

Lots of folks have reported their results on the Political Compass. Now Chris Lightfoot has come up with a better political survey. I think it is much better than the Political Compass survey because: There aren’t as many horribly ambiguous questions. The methodology is open so we can see how your answers get converted to a score. Rather than start with preconceived left/right authoritarian/libertarian axes, he has used principal component analysis to find a two-dimensional political space. The first dimension seems to correspond to the conventional left/right axis. The second dimension is less well defined. Lightfoot calls it pragmatic/idealistic, but you should not get too hung up on the name—the important thing is that someone is the same location in the 2D space as you will tend to answer all the questions the same way. You get a results page that lets you show anyone exactly how you answered the questions.

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In a June 26 op-ed Lott claimed that gun ownership was making Iraqis safer:

“Yet, despite Iraqis owning machine guns and the country still not under control, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pointed out that Baghdad is experiencing fewer murders than Washington, D.C., where handguns are banned. ”

Lott was taken to task by Wyeth who pointed that Rumsfeld had no evidence for his claim and that in fact Baghdad suffered 20 times as many gunshot murders as Washington in July. Previous discussion is here.

An October 12 Newsday story reports:

Perhaps the most hopeful change appeared several days ago in the office of Dr. Faiq Amin Bakr, director of the Institute of Judicial Medicine, Baghdad’s main morgue. Mulling a new sheet of statistics, he declared that Baghdad’s exploding homicide rate fell last month, the first monthly decline since the Americans arrived.

The morgue counted 667 homicide victims in September, down from 800 in August and 702 in July. But even the September rate is 42 times the rough average recorded last year. And the bloodshed - from crime, revenge killings, shootings of civilians by U.S. troops or guerrilla fighters - is some degree higher than what the morgue measures, because an unknown number of homicide victims are buried without being brought to the morgue.

The Coalition decided they had better do something about the horrendous homicide rate. On October 19 PR Newswire reported:

In Baghdad, official control over the news is getting tighter. Journalists used to walk freely into the city’s hospitals and the morgue to keep count of the day’s dead and wounded. Now the hospitals have been declared off-limits and morgue officials turn away reporters who aren’t accompanied by a Coalition escort. Iraqi police refer reporters’ questions to American forces; the Americans refer them back to the Iraqis.

THE OTHER STORY IN BAGHDAD Reported crime in the Iraqi capital this year.   July Aug. Sept. Oct. Murder 92 75 54 24 Kidnapping 29 28 27 11 Aggravated Assault 135 118 90 40

The new Coalition policy appears to have worked. On Nov 10, The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) reported the latest (presumably official) crime statistics, which show that in October the number of homicides in Baghdad fell to just 24 (see table to left).

However, it is clear that the official figures only include a tiny fraction of all homicides. In September the official figures show just 54 homicides, but 667 homicide victims showed up at the morgue. Note also that there were supposedly just 78 aggravated assaults, which seems most implausible. For comparison, metro Washington, with about the same population as Baghdad, has about 30 homicides and 1,000 aggravated assaults each month.

I think any reasonable person would conclude that the official crime figures for Baghdad are not accurate. Not John Lott, however. On his blog (link under “Blogs” in sidebar, scroll to 11/10/03) he trumpets “Rumsfeld vindicated” and asserts that the new crime figures prove that the homicide rate in Baghdad is relatively low. Although he is well aware of it from previous discussion, he completely ignores the contradictory statistics from the Baghdad morgue. Unfortunately, this behaviour is typical of the way Lott approaches research—he just reports results favourable to his thesis and ignores the unfavourable ones.

My thanks to Seb for providing me with a copy of the WSJ article.

Update: The New York Times reports the following figures on the Baghdad murder rate:

	April	June	August	October
Annualized Murder Rate in Baghdad per 100,000	100	135	185	140

This is many times greater than metro Washington’s rate of 7.9 per 100,000 population.

I was reading the normally sensible Steve Bainbridge when I came across this post that seems to have come from the planet Zebulon in the galaxy Warblogger. Bainbridge offers his interpretation of an intelligence memo in parallel with Kevin Drum’s. I was struck by the complete disconnect between Bainbridge’s interpretation and the actual words of the memo.

I emailed Bainbridge to see if I could get an explanation. With his permission, I post our correspondence:

TL:

Your interpretation of:

“Pull the majority along as far as we can on issues that may lead to major new disclosures regarding improper or questionable conduct by administration officials.”

is

“Learning something that might contribute to national security isn’t even on the rader screen.”

The only way I make sense of your interpretation is if you somehow believe that national security requires that improper conduct by the administration be covered up. Is that what you believe?

SB:

My point was that nothing in the memo is addressed to actually learning anything about national security. It’s all about partisan advantage.

TL:

In a war on terrorism, intelligence is the primary weapon. It is not true that intelligence has nothing to do with national security.

SB:

Yeah, but they don’t want to learn about intelligence failures, they just want to spin.

TL:

Forgive me, but you seem to be just making stuff up here. Where in the memo do they say that they don’t want to learn about intelligence failures?

SB:

Look, the point I was trying to make was that the memo is all about partisan spin. The whole tone of the memo is: How do we maximize our ability to castigate the majority? Do you really think that the democrat staffers are selflessly concerned solely with promoting national security?

TL:

I don’t think that is their sole concern. But your claim was that they did not care at all about promoting national security. Uncovering improper conduct by the administration will both embarass the administration and promote national security.

SB:

So your point, I take it, is that I spun it too hard to the “Democrats are evil, give them no credit” side. Fair enough. I don’t admit it, of course, but I’ll concede it is a plausible argument. If so, however, should you not also acknowledge that Kevin Drum spun it just as hard to the “Democrats are patriots who care nothing for partisan advantage” side? You could then make some apt (albeit commonplace) comments about the the red state/blue state divide in American politics, perhaps pointing out with sympathy that I am a misplaced red stater who not lives in a blue state, but also a red county thereof.

TL:

No, my point is not that you spun it too hard. “Spinning” implies that you are offering your interpretation of the facts. Instead, you seem to be making up your own set of facts. You have failed to provide any evidence for your claim that they did not care at all about promoting national security. This claim appears to be your invention and not to be based on the content of the memo. If you can point to the spot where they said or implied that they did care, please do so.

Furthermore, you have misrepresented Kevin Drum’s position. He did not claim that “Democrats are patriots who care nothing for partisan advantage”, but rather:

Obviously, both sides are interested in using this for political advantage, but it strikes me that if there’s a party to accuse of not being interested in truly investigating the full scope of our intelligence failures, it’s the Republicans.

Next, you try to claim some sort of moral equivalence between your interpretation and Drum’s. There is none. Drum’s position is that the Democrats are interested in investigating the full scope of the intelligence failures. This is supported by the actual words of the memo. Your position is that they don’t care. This is contradicted by the actual words of the memo.

Finally, I don’t understand why where you live is relevant to the discussion.

SB:

At this point there is nothing left but to let our readers decide. Which is fine by me.

BTW: I don’t think I’m “making things up.” I think I’m drawing inferences on the basis of the text of the memo. Whether or not they are plausible inferences, I leave to my readers to decide.

TL:

It’s only an inference if there is some basis in the text for it. I’ve tried quite hard to get you provide such a basis but you have failed to do so. You dismiss the actual words of the memo that contradict your interpretation apparently because you believe that “Democrats are evil” and don’t say what they really mean. This lets you invent an interpretation unconstrained by the actual language of the memo or any notion of fairness. “Making things up” is perhaps too mild a term to describe what you did.

Update: The next round is here.

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

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

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

After our earlier discussion Steve Bainbridge has a post where he concedes:

I was pretty confident that many, if not most, of my readers would disagree with Lambert and conclude that the inferences I drew from the memo were correct. After all, much of the blogosphere attention my post drew was quite favorable—e.g., Pejman Yousefzadeh, Michael Van Winkle, John Cole, and Robert Prather. The post even got me an Instalanche. On further reflection, however, I concluded that the exchange of emails up on Lambert’s site did not show me to my best advantage. … Well, okay, I stunk the place up.

Dear Professor Bainbridge,
I think an important lesson to be learned here is that the favourable attention you got from those bloggers was not because your post was well-argued, but because they agreed with your conclusion. They displayed poor judgement and it would be a mistake to place any great weight on their opinions on similar matters in the future.

In your new post, you appeared to have changed what you are arguing for. Originally you claimed that the memo meant

All we really care about is embarrassing the administration….Learning something that might contribute to national security isn’t even on the rader screen.

Now you have changed from saying that memo showed that the Democrats didn’t care at all about national security to saying that:

The basic point of my original post was that the memo was concerned more with partisanship than national security.

Anyway, let’s examine your arguments for your new position. You wrote:

1. The line in the memo that first caught my eye was this statement: “Assiduously prepare Democratic ‘additional views’ to attach to any interim or final reports the committee may release.” That statement is followed a couple of sentences later by this statement: “Our additional views will also, among other things, castigate the majority for seeking to limit the scope of the inquiry.” Notice that the memo does not state that additional views will be added to “any reports that pull a coverup.” No, it says “any report” without qualification. Notice also that the memo assumes the inquiry will be limited in scope even though the inquiry is not yet finished. I think it is reasonable to infer intent to obtain partisan advantage from these statements.

Unlike your earlier claims, here it is at least possible that the Democrats are out for partisan advantage. However, it is not reasonable to conclude that they are. It also possible that they are concerned that the majority will cover things up and they want to be prepared for that eventuality. The link you provided to the Republican Committee Chairman shows that they are, in fact, limiting the scope:

Democrats have been calling for an expansion of the committee’s review to include the “use” of intelligence by Bush administration policymakers.

Your next point is:

2. The memo contains a number of references to timing, most notably this one:”We can pull the trigger on an independent investigation at any time—but we can only do so once. The best time to do so will probably be next year ….” If you had good ideas on improving national security, wouldn’t you want to advance those ideas ASAP? If you were concerned with mazimizing partisan advantage, however, you might want to time your actions so as to ensure they get “more coverage.”

Or you might think that the committee is making progress at the moment but expect the majority to start stonewalling next year. That is, “when it becomes clear we have exhausted the opportunity to usefully collaborate with the majority”, as the memo stated in the previous sentence.

You also approvingly quote Hugh Hewitt:

Hugh Hewitt thinks so:

The memo is the “smoking gun” on Democratic partisanship, demonstrating conclusively that Democrats are more interested in their own political advantage than in the national security.

So I followed the link to Hugh Hewitt, and in big letters at the top of the page I find:

Potestas Democraticorum delenda est

My Latin is a little rusty, but I believe that means “The Democratic party must be utterly destroyed”. Hewitt doesn’t say “Al-Qaeda delenda est”, or “Saddam delenda est”, but “Potestas Democraticorum delenda est”. Exactly who is putting partisan advantage over national security here? And sure enough, on Hewitt’s page we find details of how the Republicans are planning to exploit the memo for partisan advantage during the election campaign.

Even though you have significantly weakened the position you were arguing for, you still do not have sufficient grounds to draw the conclusion that you want to make.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lott also writes:

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

In fact, Lott repeated the number over and over again in op-eds, in speeches, on radio and on TV. Often it was one of only two or three numbers presented. He did do another survey but that survey did not get “very similar results”—the results of that survey are different from what Lott claims. And doing another survey hardly proves that he did the original survey.

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

Lott’s favourite example of the “Bias Against Guns” is the story of the shootings at the Appalachian School of Law. Lott performed a superficial analysis of the news stories about the shootings and found that very few of the stories mentioned the fact that two of the students involved in apprehending the killer were armed. Lott concluded that reporters deliberately left out this fact because they were biased, but my more careful analysis finds that the first stories published did not mention the guns because the reporters did not know about them, while the later stories were about different aspects of that matter.

Bernard Goldberg has a new book Arrogance where he makes the same argument and repeats Lott’s superficial analysis. He was interviewed on CNBC by Tim Russert on Nov 15:

Mr. GOLDBERG: That’s—that story, Tim—you know, I told you I don’t believe in conspiracies, but this one makes me wonder. Early last year a student at the Appalachian Law School in Grundy, Virginia, went on a shooting spree. He killed a bunch of people. He killed three people, including the dean and a professor and a—a student and shot and wounded three other students. It’s a blue-collar law school, so a lot of the students there have jobs. And two of them had jobs in law enforcement. When they heard the shooting—and the campus was running all over the place. People were ducking for cover and everything. This guy was just shooting up the place. They went to their cars and got their guns—and—and I did a lot of reporting on this, and tracked down one of the major figures involved, and they walked up to the guy with their guns from two different directions, these two students, and they said, ‘Put down your gun,’ and—and then they wrestled him to the ground.

In fact, only one student, Tracy Bridges said that he pointed his gun at the killer. Goldberg neglects to mention that Bridges’ account is disputed by Ted Besen, who says that the killer put his gun down before Bridges arrived and that there are no witnesses who saw Bridges pointing the gun.

I got a call from a criminologist, a scholar—a scholar, who said that he had done a search on the computer and found 204 stories on this, and only four mentioned that the students who subdued the gunman, who tackled the gunman as—as all the papers and networks put it, also had guns. I didn’t believe that. That could not be true; four out of 200. So I did a little research on my own, and I found some guy at the University of Iowa who ran two separate studies, and he came up with pretty much the same numbers, pretty much. I didn’t believe it. I did my own study. I went to Nexis and found the 100 biggest news organizations in America, which included the networks and the—and all the big papers, that covered the story, and I found six. Four of them in the area, making it a local story for them—six that reported that the two gunmen—that the two students also had guns to subdue him. They didn’t simply tackle him. They didn’t simply subdue the guy. They used guns.

Of course, the scholar he refers to is John Lott.

And I was—I was saying to myself, ‘Why would you leave out such a crucial piece of info—that is crucial. All I could come up with is that, since many reporters are liberal—most—almost all are liberal—and since many liberals don’t just not like guns, but they’re anti-gun, to—to do a story that says guns sometimes—sometimes are used to prevent more violence, sometimes guns are used defensively for good, that just didn’t fit the preconceived notions. And by the way, that’s what the book is about, the preconceived notions that reporters come to the story with. And on guns, the preconceived notion is simply guns are bad.

Or if he had taken a little care in his analysis, he might have noticed that, for example, reporter Rex Bowman did not mention the guns in his Jan 17 story but did mention them in his Jan 18 story and figured out that Bowman didn’t mention them on Jan 17 because he didn’t know about them. But then Goldberg would not have had this example for his book.

By the way, I think America is broken up into two groups about guns, so I’m going to give you my own bias. I’m not a gun person. I don’t like guns. But I’m not anti-gun. I wish everybody on my street, where I live in Miami, has a gun. You know, I think it would be a safer place if everybody had a gun. But that—that goes beyond, you know, just group think. That almost goes to group lying.

RUSSERT: But now when you raise this issue—I’m immediately curious, did the students actually fire their guns?

Mr. GOLDBERG: No.

RUSSERT: Were their guns in their cars?

Mr. GOLDBERG: Yes.

RUSSERT: Were they bringing their guns to school?

Mr. GOLDBERG: Yeah.

RUSSERT: Were they licensed guns? I mean, it’s a whole sidebar story.

Mr. GOLDBERG: That’s right. By the way, the—there’s a sidebar I did not put in this book, but I’ll tell you—and I should have. I didn’t learn about it till later. When—when somebody involved in looking into this called the Associated Press and spoke to a major, major editor there, and said, `Your guy didn’t'—talking about the Associated Press, ‘Your guy didn’t put this in his story,’ the editor was shocked, but not shocked because his reporter left it out of the story, shocked that these other students had guns that they brought to campus with them, and then put—took them out of their car, and God knows what might have happened if these two guys started shooting. That’s what he was shocked about.

Now this comes from a story (registration required) by Rick Montgomery in the Kansas City Star on the controversy about the media coverage of the shootings. Unlike Goldberg, Montgomery presents both sides of the debate, so Goldberg must be well aware that Besen contradicts Bridges’ account and that reporters did not mention the gun because they did not know about it. If Goldberg had bothered to tell his readers about these facts it would have undercut his message about media bias, so he just left them out. Montgomery’s story presents both sides of the question, while Goldberg’s is deliberately one-sided. Goldberg complains about media bias when the bias is his own.

You know, Tim, I said there are slivers of sunshine, but when I even hear myself telling stories like this, I say these guys are so arrogant. They better wise up. They better wise up because if they don’t change, they’re going to become the journalistic equivalent of the leisure suit; harmless enough but hopelessly out of date.

Goldberg needs to wise up. He can no longer get away with deliberately distorted accounts in his books because some blogger will check the facts and expose him.

RUSSERT: It is so important when you have an issue like guns, now matter how you feel, the fact is, the National Rifle Association does represent a sizable number of Americans…

Mr. GOLDBERG: Oh, yeah.

RUSSERT: …state their opinion accurately, and Americans for Gun Control have their view. Put both views out there and let people make their own decision as to how—where they come down.

Mr. GOLDBERG: But people get angry. There was one guy who went on a Web site and he really started putting stuff out that the gunman had already put his gun down before the students went up with their guns. That’s not totally true. The students came up with their guns. They said, ‘Put your gun down.’ The st—the guy had run out of bullets, was in the process of putting his gun down. He may have been going to the car to get more bullets. The fact that they had guns, these other students, no journalist could argue that that’s not relevant. Yet only six news organizations out of the top 100 reported that the subduers, the tacklers—tacklers—had guns.

“One guy who went on a Web site”? That would be me. (If you google for “Appalachian School of Law”, my blog shows up in the first page of results.) Notice how he just says “putting stuff out” rather than saying that I was reporting the eyewitness account of Ted Besen. And if Goldberg had bothered to read all the stories about the shootings he would have known that the killer did not have more ammunition in his car.

In another interview, Goldberg repeats the story and adds this detail:

And then I found one of the guys, Tracy Bridges, one of the students and had a long talk with him. And he told me—he said, ‘I spoke with about a hundred reporters. I told every one of them what happened.’

This is interesting. Last year Bridges said he spoke to over 50 reporters. Now the number has grown to a hundred. If Bridges embellished his account of the number of reporters how do we know he didn’t embellish his account of his gun use? After all, the first time he told it, he didn’t saying anything about pointing his gun at the killer.

The incomparable Bob Somerby takes Goldberg apart for more outragously misleading writing in Arrogance here, here and here.

Nick Confessore has an interesting article in which he reveals that webzine Tech Central Station is actually published by DCI, an organization that specializes in astroturfing. An extract:

TCS’s articles have also complemented work being done by DCI. During 2000, Microsoft contracted with DCI to perform various services, among them generating “grassroots” letters opposing a breakup of Microsoft and launching Americans for Technology Leadership, an anti-breakup group funded in part by Microsoft and run out of DCI’s office. Meanwhile, down the hall, Tech Central Station went on the offensive, inaugurating an “anti-trust” section that over the coming months would publish little except defenses of Microsoft and attacks on the software maker’s corporate and governmental antagonists, with occasional detours into the subject of lawsuit reform. (Microsoft smartly plugged some of the articles on its own Web site.)

(More on the fake letters here; another bit of Microsoft astroturf here.)

With TCS pushing Microsoft’s agenda in one area, what do they publish about Open Source software, another strategic concern for Microsoft? To find out, I collected all the articles published in TCS on Open Source software and listed them in the table below. They exhibit a heavy bias against OSS. Only once have they ever published a positive article (the one by Julian Sanchez), and even then they felt the need to publish a negative one in the same issue for balance. They equate it with communism, pronounce it unworkable, warn that it might contain stolen intellectual property, and say that it causes cancer. (OK, I made the last one up, but you get the idea.)

Date	Author	Title	Extract
24-Jun-2002	Arnold Kling	The Programming Soviet	“End-users have absolutely no influence over Unix or Open Source software”
16-Aug-2002	Jessica Davis	Closing the Door on Choices	“mandating the use of open source just isn’t necessary and sets a dangerous precedent”
26-Aug-2002	Joel Bucher	California Scheming	“software copyrights to open source advocates are a violation of free speech”
16-Sep-2002	David Henderson	The Free Software Lunch	“The General Public License amounts to an insidious attack on a hybrid system of public and private enterprise for developing software that has served us well”
03-Oct-2002	Sonia Arrison	Source Socialism	“For many, Microsoft’s problem is that it makes successful products”
10-Dec-2002	James DeLong	Open Agnosticism	“it is hard to see the cooperative effort working over a period of years in an environment in which hardware changes continually and software must be modified in response”
10-Dec-2002	Julian Sanchez	Open Source and Its Enemies	“Both liberal principles of neutrality and public choice considerations weigh strongly in favor of adopting OSS when that’s feasible.”
20-May-2003	Sonia Arrison	Is the Penguin Contaminated?	“we can expect defiance, not cooperation, on serious issues like intellectual property from the open-source community”
6-Oct-2003	Megan McArdle	Why Open Source May Be Doomed	“the object of this lawsuit is not to stop Linux from using the code; it’s to stop Linux from eating SCO Unix’s lunch. And it seems to me that it’s very likely to succeed.”

Now, just because TCS is biased against Open Source, it doesn’t follow that it told the authors of those articles what to write. (Megan McArdle specifically denies this.) More likely the editor selects those that are favourable to the interests of the companies paying the bills. Henry Farrell explains further.

Oh, and while the articles at TCS might be biased against Open Source, guess what operating system TCS runs on? Yes, that’s right, Linux. Apparently, they were running Windows, but switched.

Update: Julian Sanchez writes:

I actually was motivated to write that piece for them precisely because, after disagreeing pretty strongly with a few articles there, I did a search for OS & saw a (then smaller) list of purely negative pieces. It was pretty clear what was going on, and I was partly just curious to see whether they’d say “sorry, not in line with our agenda” or whether they’d actually run it.

They were happy to run his piece, but also ran a reply from James DeLong in the same issue for “balance”. Whenever they ran an anti-OSS piece they did not balance it with an article presenting the other side of the question.

markus has the best summary of all the blogspace discussion of TCS.

In my previous entry on the Baghdad murder rate I noted that pretty well every paper that had reported the Baghdad murder rate had given a vastly higher figure than Lott’s number and the only paper out of step was the Wall Street Journal. So, in Lott’s 11/19/03 entry on his blog he draws the obvious conclusion: every other newspaper got it wrong, and in amazing display of chutzpah, he demands that the New York Times correct its “error”:

A recent article in the New York Times got some of it’s facts completely wrong about murder rates in Iraq. The mistakes were up to around a factor of 12 fold. In fact, the piece couldn’t even accurately report another New York Times piece that it relied upon for its data. I point this out in a letter to the editor. Not surprisingly, the NYT has apparently decided not to correct this mistake.

And here is the letter that the NYT wisely decided not to print:

The Op-ed chart on “How are things really going in Iraq?” by Ms. Adriana de Albuquerque and Mr. Michael O’Hanlon contained grossly incorrect numbers (November 14). They claimed that the annualize murder rate in Baghdad from April to October this year ranged from an incredible 100 to 185 per 100,000 people. The number was contrasted to the District of Columbia’s murder rate in 2002 of 45.8 per 100,000 people. While the Baghdad “murder” rate came from another Times article by Neil MacFarquhar (9/16), the authors ignore that MacFarquhar clearly stated that these deaths included “automobile accidents” and cases where people “were shot dead by American soldiers,” not just murders.

More importantly, other figures do not paint such a dreary picture. For example, the U.S. Army 1st Division in Baghdad reports that the annualized murder rate in Baghdad in August was 15.9, not the 185 reported in the article.

If you glance at the op-ed chart you will see that it includes the murder rate for October. It is impossible for this to come from an article published in September. As for the claim that the numbers in the MacFarquhar article were not relevant to the murder rate because MacFarquhar stated that they included automobile accidents, MacFarquhar also states that 70% died from gunshot wounds, which you generally don’t get in automobile accidents. Lott also discounts the numbers because MacFarquhar “clearly stated” that they included “cases where people ‘were shot dead by American soldiers’”. Let us provide a little more context:

Several families from Abu Ghraib, just west of Baghdad, are there to gather some of the four victims, including an 8-year-old girl, they said were shot to death by American soldiers who opened fire in the market after a grenade was thrown at their armored personnel carrier. The U.S. military spokesman’s office in Baghdad confirmed that one soldier was wounded in a grenade attack, but denied the soldiers from the 1st Armored Division fired back.

MacFarquhar doesn’t “clearly state” that they included shootings by American soldiers. He “clearly states” that that is in dispute. Because he wants to discount the huge number of violent deaths in Baghdad, Lott is actually arguing that US soldiers gunned down an eight year-old girl and the military lied about it. Now clearly the American Enterprise Institute has no objection to Lott’s lying and fabricated research, but this is something that might get him into trouble.

This whole episode gives us more insight into Lott’s pathology. In the survey affair, all he had to do was admit to making a mistake in citing the wrong brandishing number, but rather than admit to the error he invented a survey; and then had to actually conduct a survey to try to bolster his story and then had to fabricate the results of the real survey to make them agree with the invented survey. Here, rather than admit to making a mistake about the Baghdad murder rate (if you you’ve forgotten what this was originally about, Lott claimed that all the guns the Iraqis had were making them safer), Lott has now effectively accused the US armey of gunning down an eight year-old Iraqi girl. He’s pathological.

Glenn Reynolds points to a page that purports to show the effect on crime of Kennesaw’s ordinance that made gun ownership mandatory. Unfortunately the numbers given there are misleading—they just give the crime rates for the year before the ordinance (54 burglaries) and the year the ordinance was passed (35 burglaries) and for 1998 (36 burglaries). This makes it look like there was a decrease, but if you look at burglary rates over a ten year period (see the graph to the left [1]) there is a lot of fluctuation. A statistical test shows that there was a statistically insignificant increase [1].

It’s not surprising that the ordinance had no effect. It was purely symbolic and was never enforced so is unlikely to have had any effect on gun ownership in Kennesaw.

There was also a large increase in the population of Kennesaw, which meant that by 1998, although the number of burglaries had not changed, the burglary rate per 100,000 population had decreased greatly. It is hard to attribute this to the ordinance since the large increase meant that the people living in Kennesaw in 1998 were almost completely different from those living there in 1981.

[1] David McDowall, Brian Wiersema and Colin Loftin. “Did Mandatory firearm ownership in Kennesaw really prevent burglaries?” Sociology and Social Research 74:48-51 (1989).

Update: Glenn Reynolds responds in an update:

I don’t think that burglars check resumes, and I don’t see why duration of residency should make any difference at all here. And if the number of burglaries stays the same, while the population grows, that means that burglary is getting less common. Doesn’t it?

The burglary rate decreased gradually as the population increased. It doesn’t make sense to attribute a gradual decrease to a one time event like the ordinance. If it had an effect, you would expect an abrupt decrease when it was passed, but there was no such decrease.

Bob Somerby nails Bernard Goldberg’s repetition of Lott’s false claim that the media deliberately concealed defensive gun use in the shootings at the Appalachian School of Law.

In April 2000, Lott published an article in Economic Inquiry entitled “Does a Helping Hand Put Others at Risk?: Affirmative Action, Police Departments, and Crime” (subscription required). This is what he had to say about women police and their need to shoot:

“If criminals believe that they have a greater chance of resisting arrest when officers are weaker, more assaults may be committed by criminals against women officers. In compensating for their weaker strength, women may substitute into other ways of controlling criminals —the most obvious method being guns. Although guns are a “great equalizer,” they may not completely offset differences in strength. Being less able to fall back on their physical strength to protect themselves when faced with a possible attack, women may have to determine whether they will fire their gun before the possible attacker gets into physical contact with them. If true, shorter reaction times risk resulting in more accidental shootings” (p. 241).

“Criminals are more likely to attack if they believe that an attack will successfully allow them to escape. Consistent with the hypothesis, mentioned in the introduction, that female officers have a shorter time to react to perceived threats because they must make a decision before they come into physical contact with the criminal, there is some preliminary evidence that male officers are more likely to avoid shooting civilians” (p. 260).

So, according to Lott, civilians just have to brandish their guns 98% of the time, but female police officers have to shoot much more often. I guess that must be because criminals are less intimidated by police guns than civilian guns. Or something.