Deltoid

You might recall how Mary Rosh posted a glowing review of More Guns, Less Crime to Amazon.com. (Lott claims, rather unconvincingly, that his son and wife wrote the review.) Well, Lott has posted an Amazon.com customer review of Joyce Lee Malcolm’s Guns and Violence: The English Experience :

A sweeping history of the English crime rate, a must read, September 16, 2002
Reviewer: A reader from Swarthmore, PA USA
Joyce Lee Malcolm has put together an excellent, very readable study that should cause many to rethink the claims that Britain has a lower homicide rate because they have so many gun control regulations. What Malcolm shows is that British murder rates were declining for centuries before gun control was started and had reached very low rates by the turn of the last century. It is only once gun control was implemented that the crime rate began to slowly rise. Malcolm’s findings should be a warning to those who rely on simple cross-sectional comparisons, without taking into account that crime rates can vary for many different reasons. Any one interested in history generally or in the gun debate in particular will find this very interesting reading.
John R. Lott, Jr.

OK, nothing wrong with that, and no surprise that Lott likes Malcolm’s book, but here’s the thing: The attribution of the review is “A reader from Swarthmore, PA USA”. On the form you use to write an online review Lott must have selected “Keep me anonymous” and entered “Swarthmore, PA USA” as answer to the question “Where in the world are you?”. Amazon saves these settings, so unless he explicitly changed them, any other book reviews that Lott made from his Amazon account will have exactly the same attribution. I found five such reviews written in the last three years on Amazon.com. They were all on books that were of interest to Lott. They were all highly negative, giving only one or two stars. They were all anonymous. I’ve listed them all below, first the review and then my comments. Bear in mind that it is possible, though very unlikely, that one or more of these reviews might have been written by some other anonymous person who lives in Swarthmore and entered their location in exactly the same way and happened to have the same interests as Lott and a similar writing style to Lott.

Nine Crazy Ideas in Science: A Few Might Even Be True.

by Robert Ehrlich

Very low level of sophistication, October 23, 2002
Reviewer: A reader from Swarthmore, PA USA
The level of data analysis in this book is somewhat above op-ed writing, but not very much. Crime rates are analyzed without any other factors being accounted for. The analysis on energy is no more sophisticated. The guy should stick to his areas of expertise, but this is really poorly done.

This is the only one-star review of this book on Amazon. All the other reviwers gave it at least three stars. Why such a negative review? Well, one of the nine crazy ideas is Lott’s “More guns, Less crime” and Ehrlich doesn’t think much of that idea. (You can read an on-line debate between Ehrlich and Lott here.) It seems a little underhanded for Lott to anonymously trash Ehrlich’s book.

Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists Criminals & Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores

by Michelle Malkin

Not very carefully researched, filled with ascertions, May 6, 2003
Reviewer: A reader from Swarthmore, PA USA
As a conservative and someone concerned about immigration, this was a real disappointment. Some horror stories are sprinkled through the book, but there is no real solid analysis. No notion of the trade-offs or attempts to meassure the returns to expending money on different measures. Just a lot of ascertions.

Now why would a conservative give Malkin’s book such a negative review? It couldn’t possibly be payback for this column, written three months earlier, could it?

The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century

by Robert J. Shiller

Overall not very convincing, July 12, 2003
Reviewer: A reader from Swarthmore, PA USA
Whether it is home value insurance or other improvements that Shiller offers to fix the market, the one question that Shiller never deals with is why those policies don’t already exist. He simply assumes that he is smarter than the market and that others have made mistakes in not offering these options. Might there be moral hazard problems in home value insurance? No discussion is offered. This approach of simply asserting an “optimal” arrangement without really asking why it doesn’t exist if it is so “optimal” is something that infects a lot of economics, but you would think that if a service is so valuable the first question would be “why doesn’t the market already provide this?” Instead Shiller’s presumption that he is so smart.

Hmmm, I wonder what Shiller did to annoy Lott? John Quiggin has written a rather more positive review of Shiller’s book.

Bubbleology: The New Science of Stock Market Winners and Losers

by Kevin Hassett

A “how to book” that is not very clear, August 3, 2002
Reviewer: A reader from Swarthmore, PA USA
Despite Mr. Hassett’s track record with his previous book “Dow 36,000,” I saw him appear on CNBC during the early morning show and thought that he did well enough that I should buy the book. He promised that you could use his book to figure out what stocks were overvalued and which ones weren’t. A pretty important topic given the current market environment. However, after reading this short book I have no idea of how to actually rank stocks on the 1 to 6 scale that he uses. He doesn’t actually provide concrete examples, only that he says that he put together this ranking and it worked really well. My other problem is that if this approach works so well how come he didn’t use it when his “Dow 36,000″ book came out when the stock market was at its peak. Some explanation would have been useful for why Hassett, who is marketing this book as a full proof approach to spotting bubbles, wasn’t able to use this approach himself over just the last couple of years to warn people and predict which stocks were going to crash, a period when he was supposedly writing this book. Claiming that you use a not clearly stated formula to identify overvalued stocks after they have already crashed seems like a scam to me. —This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title

I agree with this review—you’d have to be barking mad to take stock market advice from someone who has proven as wildly incorrect as Hasset, but why would Lott anonymously attack a fellow AEI scholar? It’s intriguing. Perhaps there was a fight over a parking space? Or maybe there is some internal AEI politics going on here?

Gun Violence : The Real Costs

by Philip J. Cook, Jens Ludwig

Very disappointing research, September 21, 2001
Reviewer: A reader from Swarthmore, PA USA
This book is obviously strongly on our side, but unfortunately it is not going to provide us with serious evidence. Suppose someone challenges me on how they got their $100 billion estimate of the costs of guns. Will I be taken seriously if I tell them that the book relies on one public survey question in one survey? If I do use this number, where does that leave me in arguing with gun nuts that cite these wacky surveys showing that guns are used defensively 2.5 million times a year? So they have 16 surveys. I don’t believe any of them, but what do I say when they say I only use a survey to measure the costs, why not also the benefits? What if the gun nut morons point out that the estimates of benefits from the surveys are greater than our estimated costs? The one paragraph that Cook and Ludwig have on defensive gun uses being silly could just as well be used against their reliance on a survey. I want to use the figures here, but could one of the people on our side write a review saying how I could respond to these concerns. Absent that this book risks making us look rather silly and hypocritical.

Now, some would argue that Lott is being dishonest here in pretending to be a supporter of gun control who is looking for good evidence to use against those “gun nut morons”, but I would like to suggest an alternative explanation: John Lott really is on the side of gun control and he really thinks that the pro-gun folks are “gun nut morons”. The whole “More Guns, Less Crime” thing with the fake survey and the cherry-picked models has been an elaborate plot to discredit the pro-gun side of the debate. So far it is working.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells has a most interesting article in the Washington Monthly about the intellectual decline of AEI. His first example is the case of John Lott. He writes:

Had Lott been in academia, he would almost certainly have lost his job—as did Michael Bellesiles, the Bancroft Prize-winning liberal historian from Emory University, who resigned after a panel found he had faked data purporting to show that fewer Americans had actually possessed guns in the 19th century than historians had previously thought. But AEI is not a university. It is a conservative think tank, operating in a world where penalties for bad scholarship hardly exist. AEI did not fire Lott, or reprimand him, or even investigate him. The institute’s president, Christopher DeMuth, repeatedly refused to even answer reporters’ questions about the incident. Indeed, several AEI fellows had warned DeMuth of their suspicions on Lott’s lack of scholarly honesty back when AEI was recruiting him in 2000. DeMuth hired Lott anyway. In an email to The Washington Monthly, DeMuth defended Lott and questioned critiques of his work, adding, “We welcome and encourage challenges to our research rather than regarding them as cause for empaneling boards of investigation.”

So there’s the answer from the AEI to all the calls for them to investigate Lott’s conduct: “Nope, we don’t care”.

A Matt Bai article published in Newsweek in 2001 has some more relevant information about Lott’s recruitment at the AEI:

Look at John Lott’s 31-page resume, and you’ll see that he got his Ph.D. from UCLA by the time he was 26. At 31, he was chief economist for the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Not bad. But then you’ll see that he’s been shown the door at some of the nation’s finest schools.

There were brief stints at Texas A&M, Rice, UCLA. Four years at Wharton, four harsh winters at U. of Chicago. Most recently, Lott managed to catch on at Yale Law, doing research from a basement office that even the receptionist can’t find. He’s applied for literally hundreds of tenure-track jobs and received just one offer—in Australia.

Bai speculates that the reason why Lott couldn’t find a job in academia was because his work is so controversial, but Wallace-Wells’ article suggests another reason—the “suspicions on Lott’s lack of scholarly honesty” that were known back in 2000.

Note: Wallace-Wells gets the sequence of the events in the Lott saga a little wrong in his article. Mary Rosh was before Ayres and Donohue published their paper, and the NAS panel was set up even earlier (and it’s examining firearms research in general, not just Lott’s work).

PS: Yes, I’m real glad he didn’t take up the job offer here in Australia.

Mark Kleiman has some apposite words from Master K’ung for Lott, while Chris Mooney calls me a “super sleuth“. I’m just in it for the scooby snacks.

Congratulations to John Lott for making number 16 on Jesse Taylor’s list of the Twenty Most Annoying Conservatives of 2003. Well done!

These are extracts from stories about homicides in England found by searching Factiva for “self-defence and (burglar or robber)”. (more…)

Mary Rosh cut her posting teeth hawking Lott’s research on Freerepublic.com in 2000, but she stopped posting there in 2001 and switched to Usenet. Fortunately, a poster called Washingtonian picked up the torch that Mary had dropped. From then on, Mary and Washingtonian lived parallel lives, Mary on Usenet and Washingtonian on Freerepublic.

	Mary Rosh	Washingtonian
Interests	John Lott John Lott John Lott Guns John Lott	John Lott John Lott John Lott Guns John Lott
Amazon review of More Guns, Less Crime	SAVE YOUR LIFE, READ THIS BOOK - GREAT BUY!!!! If you want to learn about what can stop crime or if you want to learn about many of the myths involving crime that endanger people?s lives, this is the book to get. It was very interesting reading and Lott writes very well. He explains things in an understandable commonsense way. I have loaned out my copy a dozen times and while it may have taken some effort to get people started on the book, once they read it no one was disappointed.If you want an emotional book, this is not the book for you. If you want a book with the facts, a book that tells you the benefits and risks from protecting yourself and your family from crime, a book that will explain the facts in a straightforward and clear way, this is the book to get.This is by far the largest most comprehensive study on crime, let alone on gun control. Professor Lott examines crime rates as well as accidental gun deaths and suicides for all 3,056 counties in the United States by year for 18 years. By comparison, the previous largest study on gun control examined 170 cities within one single year 1980. Lott examined 54,000 observations and the previous largest study looked at 170 observations. Lott used all the FBI data that was available from the first year that they released the county level data to the last year that they had put it out when he wrote his book. Unlike other studies, Lott used all the data that was available. He did not pick certain cities to include and others to exclude. No previous study had accounted for even a small fraction of the variables that he accounted for.	Important accurate info that Opponents constantly distort This is by far the most comprehensive study ever done on guns. It provides extensive evidence on waiting periods, the Brady Act, one-gun-a-month rules, concealed handgun laws. For some gun laws this is the only study available and it is important to note how many academics have tired to challenge his work on concealed handgun laws and failed and that no one has even bothered to try and challenge his work on one-gun-a-month laws and other gun control laws. I am constantly amused the lengths to which reviewers here will go to distort Lott’s research. Take the one by the Australian who claims that Lott doesn’t explain why he uses the polling data that he does on gun ownership rates. If he was honest, he would note that Lott talks about these being the largest surveys on gun ownership rates available and that it is necessary to have such a large survey to get detailed information at the state level. A survey of 1,000 or even 1,500 people nationally is not enough to allow you to make comparisons across individual states. These guys will do anything to keep people from reading Lott’s work.
Posts from:	Philadelphia	Swarthmore, PA USA (Swarthmore is a suburb of Philadelphia and is home to John Lott)
Also posts from:	aei.org	Washington, DC (the AEI is located in Washington, DC and is the workplace of John Lott)
Opinion of John Lott:	“he was the best professor that I ever had”	Five minutes after someone asked “Who are the best conservative academics?”, Washingtonian answered “John Lott at Yale University”
Opinion of Ayres and Donohue’s paper:	The Ayres and Donohue piece is a joke. I saw it a while ago. 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. A friend at the Harvard Law School said that Donohue gave the paper there and he was demolished on this and other points. I haven’t checked their paper again, but do they still have the county level breakdown by year or did they remove it because it was the most general test and it went the wrong way from their perspective?	This paper is garbage. Look at the most generally results that break down the impact of the law on a year-by-year basis. Graph out the coefficients and you clearly see that violent crime is falling immediately after the law. This is the most general specification, much more general than the “hybrid” model. It is also pretty clear what is happening with the intercept shift and straight line in the hybrid model. The data is nonlinear. Crime rates are falling at an increasing rate after the law is in effect. Fitting a straight line to that with an intercept shift overpredicts the crime rate in the early years. So much for their claim about a small initial increase. If you doubt me, draw a verticle line and then a quarter of a circle that starts at that line. Now fit a straight line through the middle of that curved line and you will see that it is above the curve line in the beginning. This is the same thing that is happening here.
Lott article on arming pilots	Posted at 11:29 am on 11 Oct 2001	Posted at 11:47 am on 11 Oct 2001
Lott article claiming bias against guns	Posted at 5:43 pm on 7 Feb 2002	Posted at 4:43 pm on 7 Feb 2002
Lott article on gun laws in Europe	Posted at 1:49 pm on 30 Apr 2002	Posted at 5:48 pm on 30 Apr 2002
On the mysterious survey:	“what about the fact that Lott’s 2002 survey apparently produces the same results?”	“Lott’s survey was repeated in 2002 and obtained similar results.” *

Mary Rosh would regale us with tales of wearing high heels and her days as Lott’s adoring student, but Washingtonian has been less forthcoming about his (or her?) personal life. We do find out from a review of Mac OS X 10.3 that:

We installed OS X 10.3 with a family pack on five computers that we have at home.

By an odd coincidence, Lott’s defence in the case of The File from the Future was that he’s innocent because he uses a Mac.

As well as More Guns, Less Crime, Washingtonian also reviewed Punishment and Democracy: 3 Strikes and You’re Out in California by Zimring, Hawkins and Kamin:

Disappointing This is an important topic, but the empirical work in this book is at the level of the average newspaper. The work doesn’t even take into account that all counties in California didn’t follow the rules. What about simultaneously trying to account for arrest rate and conviction rates or changes in any other factors that affect crime?

Oddly enough, Zimring and Hawkins wrote an article dismissing Lott’s “More Guns, Less Crime” thesis.

Mary Rosh’s career was cut tragically short in January when Julian Sanchez unmasked her as Lott’s sock puppet. Lott told the Washington Post:

“I should not have done it, there is no doubt.”

Fortunately, Washingtonian has soldiered on since Lott said that his use of a sock puppet was wrong, defending Lott, promoting Lott’s books, and posting Lott’s articles.

It would have been really cool if Mary Rosh and Washingtonian had met somewhere on the Internet and had a conversation, but I couldn’t find any examples of them meeting, so readers will have to imagine what topic they would discuss and what they would say about him.

PS: More, much more, tomorrow.

Links from Chris Mooney, Atrios and Buzzflash. Ted Barlow wonders what John Lott has to do to get fired from the AEI. “Sadly, No!” helpfully suggests that with two more personalities Lott can start a boy band. John Quiggin asks “why so few individual conservatives and libertarians have dumped Lott”. Kevin Drum says that Lott was stupid for continuing with the sock puppetry after he got caught once.

In fact, Lott didn’t even pause. On Jan 22 he confessed to using the Mary Rosh sock and wrote “I shouldn’t have used it”. On Jan 23 his other sock was back posting again.

And naturally in the comment threads of the posts above there are lots of fake postings from Mary Rosh, Washingtonian and Glenn Reynolds. Weirdly enough, those three have something else in common—they have all posted five-star reviews of More Guns, Less Crime to Amazon.com.

And thanks to all the folks that linked, I got about 9,000 visits yesterday.

I looked at some of Lott’s anonymous reviews of other people’s books on Amazon.com in this posting. Yesterday I found that Washingtonian had made a five-star review of More guns, Less Crime, just like Mary Rosh did. Today we are going to see just how many other five-star review.Lott gave his book.

To understand what follows you need to know three things:

1. Lott obsessively checks the reviews of his books.
2. Lott just has to reply to any criticism. Whenever anyone posted something critical on Usenet, Mary Rosh would leap to Lott’s defence. For pretty well every paper critical of Lott’s work, Lott has written a reply. Back in January when the Lott affair burst into blogspace, Lott (and Mary) would email bloggers who criticized him.
3. Amazon includes a few recent customer reviews on the page about each book. The most recent review is listed first. So if there is a critical review in first postion and someone posts a favourable review, it pushes the critical review to a less prominent position. A few more reviews and the critical review gets pushed off the front page and few people will be likely to see it.

Given that, if he saw a powerful negative review of his book you have to ask youself, WWLD? (What Would Lott Do?) Let’s roll the tape:

On October 29, 2001, I posted my review of the 2nd edition of More Guns, Less Crime:

Lott has not fixed the problems with the first edition
Reviewer: Tim Lambert (see more about me) from Maroubra, NSW Australia
The only significant difference between this edition and the first edition is the addition of chapter 9, where Lott updates some of his results and responds to the extensive criticism of the first edition.

I’ve already posted a review of the first edition, and mentioned two serious flaws, so to get a feel for how Lott does in his new chapter, we can look at how he addresses these two criticisms.

First, that Lott used two exit polls to estimate gun ownership even though dozens of other polls and guns sales statistics contradicted his results. Lott responds in section 9.9, but fails to give any reason why his polls should be regarded as better than all the other ones.

Second, Kleck’s critique that the change in the number of people carrying was too small to have produced the result Lott observed. Lott respond to this one twice, in section 9.7 and again in section 9.14 (misattributing the Kleck quote to me in that section). Even with two goes at it, Lott does not have a good response. In 9.7 he offers an “explanation” of Kleck’s position that completely misses the point. Things get worse in section 9.14. Lott asserts that the survey results (given in Kleck’s “Point Blank”) on gun carrying include mere transportation and not just carrying for protection. Lott’s assertion can easily be seen to be false by anyone who looks at Kleck’s book. Then Lott makes the bizarre assertion that it is misleading to look at current permit rates because more people might get permits in the future. However, Lott believes that the current low permit rate caused relatively large decreases in crime, so the future rates, whatever they might be are not relevant.

In summary, Lott has not fixed the problems with the first edition, so my rating has not changed.

A few days later, Washingtonian posted a review replying to mine and accusing me of dishonesty:

Important accurate info that Opponents constantly distort, November 8, 2001
Reviewer: washingtonian2 (see more about me) from Swarthmore, PA USA

This is by far the most comprehensive study ever done on guns. It provides extensive evidence on waiting periods, the Brady Act, one-gun-a-month rules, concealed handgun laws. For some gun laws this is the only study available and it is important to note how many academics have tired to challenge his work on concealed handgun laws and failed and that no one has even bothered to try and challenge his work on one-gun-a-month laws and other gun control laws.

I am constantly amused the lengths to which reviewers here will go to distort Lott’s research. Take the one by the Australian who claims that Lott doesn’t explain why he uses the polling data that he does on gun ownership rates. If he was honest, he would note that Lott talks about these being the largest surveys on gun ownership rates available and that it is necessary to have such a large survey to get detailed information at the state level. A survey of 1,000 or even 1,500 people nationally is not enough to allow you to make comparisons across individual states.

These guys will do anything to keep people from reading Lott’s work.

All right, we knew about that one already, but now we know the pattern.

Our next exhibit is this critical review:

Poor Research Cannot Be A Basis For Policy Changes, October 9, 2000
Reviewer: Mark Wylie (see more about me) from Spokane, WA United States
John Lott’s provocatively titled “More Guns: Less Crime” has attracted enormous media attention and has become a powerful rhetorical weapon in the hands of gun control opponents. However, his work is marred by poor statistical analysis and sloppy reasoning, and should not be a basis for public policy.

Lott argues that if most adult Americans were able to get a permit to carry a concealed weapon in public, violent crime would fall. His reasoning is that criminals are calculating people who sit down and work out the benefits and costs of a potential criminal act; therefore, if they know that potential victims are likely to be carrying guns, they will be deterred from committing crimes against persons, and will switch to committing property crimes where they are less likely to encounter an armed victim. Lott then presents some extensive statistical analysis purporting to show that when jurisdictions around the US pass “shall issue” laws that enable most adults to carry concealed weapons in public, violent crime falls in those jurisdictions.

There are errors both in Lott’s reasoning and in his statistical analysis. Even those lacking the technical training to evaluate the latter can see the error in the former. Lott looks at criminals from the perspective of the neoclassical economist, viewing people as always rational–they always act in their own self-interest, carefully weighing the costs and benefits of any possible action. But anyone familiar with violent crime knows that much of it is extremely impulsive. For example, nearly half of all murders take place as a result of arguments or brawls, situations where people are hardly taking rational account of costs and benefits of their actions.

Turning to Lott’s evidence, you see that he tries to calculate the effect of passing “shall-issue” type laws on crime by using data from every county in the US to conduct what is called a multivariate regression analysis–a technique used by social scientists to analyze complex sets of data. It is this regression analysis that is the basis for the “more guns, less crime” conclusion. Such conclusions, however, are valid only if the analysis they are based on is valid, and there are several problems with Lott’s analysis, three of which I want to outline.

1. The Robbery Problem. Lott is studying the effects of “shall-issue” laws, which affect the ability of people to carry guns in public, not to have them in their homes. Logically, the greatest impact of these laws should be on robbery, which of the four main categories of violent crimes (the others are murder, rape and assault) is the most likely to occur away from the home in a public place, and which is also the most likely to occur as a result of advance planning. In fact, Lott finds that the impact of shall-issue laws on robbery rates is far smaller than on other violent crimes. This result is inconsistent with the deterrence theory he is proposing and suggests that there is something seriously wrong with his statistical analysis.

2. The Adult/Juvenile Homicide Problem. Lott’s analysis makes no distinction between murders of adults and juveniles. His logic, however, suggests that the effect of shall-issue laws should be greater on adult homicides than on juvenile homicides. Since the laws allow adults only to carry concealed weapons, from the criminal’s viewpoint, any adult is potentially defended, but juveniles are protected only when in the company of adults. However, when Professor Jens Ludwig redid Lott’s analysis looking at adult and juvenile homicides separately, he found that shall-issue laws lead to an increase in adult homicides.

3. The Stranger Homicide Problem. A similar problem exists when homicides are broken down by the relation of offender and victim. Lott’s logic suggests that “shall issue” laws should have a greater effect on “stranger” homicides, than on homicides where offender and victim are related, because someone intending to kill a family member will likely know whether their victim is armed, while someone killing a perfect stranger will not. But Albert Alschuler has found that this is not the case; once again, the data contradict Lott’s logic.

It is true, as Lott’s defenders will protest, that he attempts to respond in his book to some of these criticisms as well as others that I did not have space to review. However, like his analysis, his counterarguments are unconvincing. For example, on the adult/juvenile issue, he merely argues that juveniles are protected by the presence of adults in public, ignoring the fact that, as I noted, juveniles are protected only when in the company of a (potentially armed) adult, while adults are protected all the time.

Readers may ask why, if Lott’s work is so badly flawed, have so many people accepted it. Part of the reason seems to me to be the psychological effect it has on gun control opponents. The strongest argument in favor of gun control is, clearly, that it would save countless lives. Lott’s book allows opponents of gun control to pose as the true “life-savers,” enabling them to feel better about themselves. This attitude can be detected in many of the favorable reviews of Lott’s book posted here.

Sure enough, a few days later a review replying to Mark Wylie’s appeared:

Second edition is even more powerful than the first edition, October 26, 2000
Reviewer: maximcl from Philadelphia
As an academic I can honestly say that I have never seen so much data assembled to study a topic. There is no doubt that Lott has done by far the most comprehensive study on crime ever conducted. Not only is it the largest number of counties and cities studied over the longest period of time, but he accounts for more factors than anyone else has even come close to accounting for. It is an impressive accomplishment, but just as amazingly Lott provides this information in a readable and interesting manner. Most academics are unable to explain what they have done in common sense easily understandable terms. Not Lott. He eliminates the useless jargon that fills academic discussions and discusses what he has done in readily accessible terms. If you understand percentages, you will understand this work.

I also have to comment on some of the critical comments made by other readers here. I can only conclude that they have not read the book. As someone who has seen and been involved in academic debates, this is a particularly strange discussion. People repeat claims that they must have heard others make, but they are not correct. Take the review below by Mark Wylie.

1) The Robbery Problem. “In fact, Lott finds that the impact of shall-issue laws on robbery rates is far smaller than on other violent crimes.” This is false. Here is just a fraction of the pages that argue that the effect on robbery is very large (indeed, the largest single effect): 78, 133, 137, 173, and 215-217.

2) The Adult/Juvenile Homicide Problem. Wyle writes: “Lott’s analysis makes no distinction between murders of adults and juveniles.” Again, this is completely false. Lott not only discusses this possibility early on but he goes through a discussion to explain how the results for these different age groups all fit together. See for example Lott’s discussion on pages 98 and 147-148.

3) The Stranger Homicide Problem. Lott explains that gun ownership can also stop attacks when the attacker knows the victim. For example, see his discussion on pages 148-150.

Possibly, these attacks will work as long as they keep people from reading this book, but once people read it they will be amazed about how much that they have heard is so completely false. It is amazing that those like Wylie, who make claims such as Lott “makes no distinction” about the impacts of the law by age, make attacks that are so easily disproved once someone reads the book. Either he did or did not make this distinction. Any reader will clearly see that he spends substantial time on this point.

This one is from Philadelphia, just like Mary Rosh’s review. Did you notice the name of the reviewer? maximcl would be Maxim C. Lott, John Lott’s son, the “Ma” in MaRy RoSh. The same son who Lott tried to blame for the Mary Rosh review. Now it is obvious from the writing style that John and not fourteen-year-old Maxim wrote it, but anyone who wants to argue that Maxim did write it has to face the fact that it begins “As an academic” and fourteen is too young to be an academic.

I also reviewed the first edition of More Guns, Less Crime:

Kleck’s book is better, June 10, 2000
Reviewer: Tim Lambert (see more about me) from Maroubra, NSW Australia
This book is a greatly expanded version of a paper published by Lott and Mustard in 1997. In that paper they claimed that laws allowing the concealed carry of handguns caused significant decreases in violent crime. The paper was Lott’s first publication on firearms policy and unfortunately Lott’s inexperience with this subject shows.

Contrast the treatment of the topic of gun ownership in Lott’s book with that in another book by a pro-gun scholar, Gary Kleck’s “Targeting Guns”. Lott looks at the results of two exit polls, conducted in 1988 and 1996 and concludes that the percentage of the population that owned guns increased by 50% in just eight years. Kleck looks at 86 different surveys, going back to 1959, as well as half a century of gun sales data, which show that the gun ownership percentage has not changed since 1959. Kleck’s conclusion is obviously the better supported one.

Lott does a better job in his statistical analysis which found the the introduction of concealed carry laws was associated with declines in violent crime rates. That is because this analysis is in his area of expertise, econometrics. Unfortunately, his unfamiliarity with firearms research betrays him when he interprets this result to mean that the laws caused the decrease in crime. Kleck’s book contains details of surveys of gun carrying that show that the number of people that get permits for concealed carry is much less than the number of people who carry illegally, that is, the laws did not make a significant difference to a criminal’s chance of encountering an armed victim. Kleck concludes that the crime decreases were probably caused by some factor other than the carry laws.

There are many more errors of fact and interpretation in Lott’s book, too many to list here.

So why does the pro-gun book by Kleck have a sales rank of 72,000 while the pro-gun book by Lott have a rank of 1264? I think the reason is that Lott goes well beyond what the data supports to claim that more guns cause less crime. Kleck sticks with a position that is supportable by the data - that the bad and good uses of guns mostly cancel out, leaving little net effect on crime. Pro-gun readers would rather hear Lott’s message, even if it’s wrong.

Readers looking for a pro-gun book should buy Kleck’s book, rather than Lott’s. Lott’s book is only useful for those readers who are interested in the details of Lott’s multivariate statistical analysis. –This text refers to the Hardcover edition

Just two days later this other review appeared, pushing my review down the page:

Well-written, important, powerful book, June 12, 2000
Reviewer: A reader from Philadelphia, PA
Here are just a few of the academics who have expressed admiration for Lott’s pathbreaking book. Few people have both the real world law enforcement experience and extenstive research background to take on this explosive issue of guns and crime. This is what the experts in the field think of Lott’s book. (The quotes are from the paperback version of the book.)

“John Lott has done the most extensive, thorough, and sophisticated study we have on the effects of loosening gun control laws.” — Gary Kleck, Professor, Florida State University

[Other quotes omitted]

The book has gotten similar positive comments from those working in law enforcement. This is a great book.

This isn’t as obvious a reply to my negative review as the other two, but the quote from Kleck is meant to rebut the mention of Kleck in my review. Lott used the same tactic in Usenet discussion when Kleck’s conclusions were brought up. This one is from Philadelphia, just like the one from maximcl. The writing style of the previous two is obviously Lott’s, but since this one is mainly quotes there isn’t enough text to judge. However, it is Lott’s style to post a review containing the blurbs, since that is what he did for the first edition. Here is the very first review of all:

Comments from the book’s reviewers:, March 10, 1998
Reviewer: john_lott@law.uchicago.edu from Madison, Wisconsin
“This sophisticated analysis yields a well established conclusion that supports the wisdom of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution rather than of those who would limit the right of law-abiding citizens to own and carry guns. The general reader may find of most interest chapter 7 which documents how far ‘politically correct’ vested interests are willing to go denigrate anyone who dares disagree with them. John Lott has done us all a service by his thorough, thoughtful scholarly approach to a highly controversial issue.”-Milton Friedman

[Other quotes omitted]

Note that for this review Lott did the right thing—he signed his own name to it and told Amazon that it was from the author and hence it does not include a star rating. Would that he had done that for all the others.

I am highly confident that all three of the five-star reviews above are by Lott since there is at least three pieces of evidence pointing towards him for each review—the style, the timing and the location of the reviewer. I found three more reviews that I think are likely also from Lott, though I am not sure. Judge these ones yourself. All three are written in Lott’s style and make the same points that Lott likes to make. The first is from Madison, Wisconsin, the same location as the very first Lott review above. The next two have the tell tale phrase “as an academic” that was used in the maximcl review:

Required reading for those interested in what causes crime!, August 8, 1998
Reviewer: A reader from Madison, Wisconsin
More Guns, Less Crime is a very readable and thorough examination of the relationship between gun ownership and its deterrent effect on criminal activity. Professor Lott explodes myths about crime that go unquestioned in the press everyday. Should people behave passively when confronted by a criminal? Are people that we know a threat to us? What are the real risks in having a gun in the home? Do guns save more lives than they endanger? This book answers these questions and many, many more. I will never listen to the news media reports on crime the same way again. –This text refers to the Hardcover edition

A MUST BUY! DEMOLISHES GUN CONTROL MYTHS THAT ENDANGER LIVES, July 30, 1999
Reviewer: A reader
Great book. As an academic, with all the garabage research that gets covered by the press, I can’t believe that this book hasn’t gotten more news coverage. If everyone actually read this book, we would have a lot fewer deaths. It is extremely well written and explains to people where the different claims that they hear come from. I have never seen such a careful indepth study of any issue. This guy really sets the standard for research! Despite what might be good intentions (though after reading chapter 7 I have real doubts about their intentions) gun control advocates are endangering people’s lives. The press really needs to think twice about the impact that their newscoverage has on people’s safety. I can understand why bad events get so much news coverage relative to good events, but this lopsided coverage creates some real misimpressions. –This text refers to the Hardcover edition

If you are interested in the facts, read this book, July 10, 2000
Reviewer: A reader from Miami, Florida

A couple of friends of mine have been nagging me to read this book for a couple of years. When the second edition came out I finally gave in and got it (for $9.60 I couldn’t argue that the price was too high). Anyway, I am only sorry that I didn’t read this book earlier. As an academic and a person who has been somewhat anti-gun, I had two reactions to the book.

1) I was amazed by how much research went into this book. I have never seen so many different data sets been used so comprehensively. State level, county level, and city level data is used, and not just from a few jurisdictions but for the entire country. Just the work that he has done on the impact of police on crime is amazing by itself.

2) The attacks on Lott disgust me. I confess that I have seen some of these claims in the press (about things like whether he accounts for certain factors or not), but one thing is obvious — the point of these attacks is to keep people from even reading the book. It is a high risk strategy because anyone who spends a half hour with this book will realize that those attacking Lott are lying constantly. How amazingly false these attacks surely made me wonder about other things that the media tries to push.

Finally, let me just say this is a book that shows you how research should be done. It is also written in a way that I wish other research was written. It is very clearly written and accessible to a very wide range of readers. To much of what academics write these days is filled with jargon. This book has changed my views when I didn’t think that they could be changed.

Summary: I believe that Lott reviewed his own book at least four times (Mary Rosh, Washingtonian, maximcl, and “a reader from Philadelphia”). It is probable that he reviewed it seven times. Each review gave it five stars.

There will be more tomorrow. If you can’t wait, I’ve given you the secret of finding Lott’s reviews. Think: What Would Lott Do?

Links from Sadly, No!, Kevin Drum and Mark Gisleson. Roger Ailes reads some of Washingtonians’s posts. Matthew Yglesias chastises the NRO for running an article by Lott on the Florida election. Brad DeLong comments on Lott’s anonymous trashing of Hassett’s book, writing:

But shouldn’t you at least criticize a guy’s book to his face, when the guy works in your office?

Some commentators have not been persuaded that the reviews by “A reader from Swarthmore, PA USA” were really by Lott. Fine. I rummaged around in Google’s cache and found older versions of the reviews of the books by Kevin Hassett, Robert Ehrlich and Cook and Ludwig. In those versions the location of the reviewer is not Swarthmore (Lott’s home), but Washington, DC (Lott’s workplace). Why did it change?

I experimented by reviewing the nearest book to my computer (Game Programming Gems 2) and changing my location from Maroubra to Sydney. Not only was my location given as Sydney in the new review, but it was changed to Sydney in previous reviews as well. Amazon must store the location not for each review that is made, but for each reviewer. Lott had given his location as Washington, DC but he posted a new review (probably the one of MacOS X 10.3) and changed his location to Swarthmore. this meant that all his previous reviews changed to being from Swarthmore as well. This feature of Amazon has proven to be Lott’s downfall. You see, I wouldn’t have found a review posted from DC to be suspicious, but when I saw one from an unusual place like Swarthmore, I pulled on the deerstalker hat and started looking for more such reviews. I turned up lots and lots as well as discovering Lott’s other sock puppet, Washingtonian.

Now if you look at the Google cache of the book by Zimring et al reviewed by Washingtonian you will find that Washingtonian’s location also changed from Washington DC to Swarthmore. I think we can conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that the reviews of Hassett’s book, Ehrlich’s book and Cook and Ludwig’s book were posted from Washingtonian’s Amazon account.

Yesterday I showed how Lott would respond to unfavourable reviews of More Guns, Less Crime with his own, anonymous, five-star reviews. Today we are going to look at his other books. I hope you are not one of those people who like surprise endings—this story is very predictable.

The very first review published of The Bias Against Guns was a very negative one:

Lies, damn lies, and statistics, March 15, 2003
Reviewer: A reader from Maryland
I can’t believe John Lott has a doctorate and gets away with such flawed research. He “randomnly” called a little over 1000 people and made a conclusion for the entire nation. Can’t do it with such a small sample. … Lott uses statistics to confuse the naive and ignorant. Plus, he attempts to explain how the Taliban gained control of Afghanistan by confiscating firearms, yet never mentions the nation was and still is awash in guns. …
Lott uses “lies, damn lies, and statistics” to support his bias towards gun control laws and movements. Don’t waste your time with this trash. …

I agree with the one star rating, but not with the review, which gets basic statistics wrong. A random sample of 1,000 is perfectly adequate for making a conclusion about the entire nation.

Anyway, to figure out what happened next, just ask yourself: “What Would Lott Do?”.

Sure enough, the very next day this review showed up:

The Blurbs Say It All, March 16, 2003
Reviewer: A reader from Philadelphia, PA United States

Even for a cynic such as myself, Lott’s documentation of how the media and the government distort our perceptions of guns is amazing. The research that went into this book is impressive. He documents not only the imbalance in newscoverage but also how the media actually makes news to discredit guns. He shows how government studies systematically measure only the bad things that happen with guns and never discuss the benefits.

“If you want the truth the anti-gunners don’t want you to know… you need a copy of The Bias Against Guns.” —Sean Hannity, of Fox News Channel’s Hannity & Colmes

[Other quotes omitted]

Most impressively he also provides all his data to people who what to recheck the work that he has done on the benefits of keeping guns in the home as well as his work on gun shows, concealed handgun laws, one-gun-a-month rules, and “assault weapons” bans. The web site is noted in the book as (…).

Note that this is “from Philadelphia, PA United States” which is where Lott lives. Lott also posted the blurbs from the first and second editions of More Guns, Less Crime as two separate reviews of that book.

Of course, with this five-star review and the one-star one, the average rating for the book was a mere three stars. What Would Lott Do?

You guessed it. A few days later this was posted:

Endorsements from Three Nobel Prize Winners and a Rock Star!, March 21, 2003
Reviewer: A reader from Swarthmore, PA USA
This book deserves the endorsements that it has from three Nobel Prize winners. The discussion of media and government bias is great, but it could be even longer than the two chapters currently devoted to the topic. I liked the stories that he had about the New York Times and the Washington Post, but the facts on how the media systematically only reports bad events goes beyond annecdotal stories and really nails the argument. The discussion of government funded research was also very interesting as Lott shows how easy it would be to look at both the costs and benefits of guns but that the government is only interested in measuring the costs. This book is a very important book.

Lott’s writing style and exactly the same attribution as the one on Washingtonian’s reviews. I read this review when it first appeared and I’m pretty sure that I would have noticed if it had said that the reviewer was from Swarthmore. It is most likely that this review was posted anonymously from Washingtonian’s account and the location only changed to Swarthmore quite recently as explained here.

And remember these were posted after he got into trouble for Mary Rosh’s five-star review. Lott is incorrigible.

But, wait! There’s more. Lott has published three books. The third one is Are Predatory Commitments Credible? Do you think he would review that book, too?

Look at this review:

Must Reading for the Microsoft and American Airlines Cases, July 29, 1999
Reviewer: A reader
If you want to understand the government’s charges against American Airlines or Microsoft, this book lets you know where they are coming from and why their cases make so little sense. I saw Lott recently on CSPAN discussing this book and it lived up to its billing. As the Chicago Professor says in a dust cover blurb, Lott demolishes any evidence that predatory pricing is an important phenomenon. This book is worthwhile reading even if you only want to learn how to set up and present empirical evidence in a clear convincing manner. I was particularly impressed by how he took the time to clearly describe the arguments on both sides of the debate.

It’s Lott’s writing style, and where have I seen the attribution “A reader” before?

It was in this review, which I decided was likely written by Lott:

A MUST BUY! DEMOLISHES GUN CONTROL MYTHS THAT ENDANGER LIVES, July 30, 1999
Reviewer: A reader
Great book. As an academic, with all the garabage research that gets covered by the press, I can’t believe that this book hasn’t gotten more news coverage. If everyone actually read this book, we would have a lot fewer deaths. It is extremely well written and explains to people where the different claims that they hear come from. I have never seen such a careful indepth study of any issue. This guy really sets the standard for research! Despite what might be good intentions (though after reading chapter 7 I have real doubts about their intentions) gun control advocates are endangering people’s lives. The press really needs to think twice about the impact that their newscoverage has on people’s safety. I can understand why bad events get so much news coverage relative to good events, but this lopsided coverage creates some real misimpressions. –This text refers to the Hardcover edition

Note that these two reviews, one of each of Lott’s published books at the time, were written one day apart with similar styles. I think it is clear that the same person wrote them, so I’ll count them as likely written by Lott.

In total, there are six certain and four probable self-reviews of Lott’s books. All of these reviews give him five stars.

And yes, there is still more to come tomorrow.

Fellow Lott-sockpuppet exposer Julian Sanchez links to the story of Washingtonian.

Fellow Blosxom bloggers Brutal Hugs link to my exposure of Lott’s anonymous Amazon reviews and write:

The Brutal Hugs team is pretty varied in its views of guns, but thanks to Deltoid, even the NRA-defender among us thinks Lott should just pack it in.

Incidently, Brutal Hugs provides a very handy page so that anyone can manually add trackbacks to blogs they link to.

As well as giving his own books perhaps as many as ten five-star reviews, Lott has given one and two-star reviews to books by people who have annoyed him in some way. One author has been singled out by Lott to be the target of a campaign of negative reviews. And his target is not someone on the other side, but pro-gun scholar Gary Kleck who even wrote an endorsement of More Guns, Less Crime that appears on the back cover of the book.

I feel that some pro-gun people have been reluctant to criticize Lott because they think that he is on their side. Well, Lott isn’t on the pro-gun side—he’s on his own side. For Lott it’s not about whether you support gun rights, it’s whether you support Lott’s ego. Read on.

I am highly confident that the three reviews below of Kleck’s work were written by Lott. In each case there are four independent pieces of evidence that point to Lott as the author:

1. The writing style is Lott’s
2. The subject matter: although they are supposed to reviews of Kleck, he writes more about Lott’s work
3. The location of the reviewer is somewhere where Lott was living or working and also where he had posted other reviews from
4. The timing of the review was right after Lott was criticized or posted another review

On June 10, 2000 I posted my review of More Guns, Less Crime to Amazon.

Kleck’s book is better, June 10, 2000
Reviewer: Tim Lambert (see more about me) from Maroubra, NSW Australia
This book is a greatly expanded version of a paper published by Lott and Mustard in 1997. In that paper they claimed that laws allowing the concealed carry of handguns caused significant decreases in violent crime. The paper was Lott’s first publication on firearms policy and unfortunately Lott’s inexperience with this subject shows.

Contrast the treatment of the topic of gun ownership in Lott’s book with that in another book by a pro-gun scholar, Gary Kleck’s “Targeting Guns”. Lott looks at the results of two exit polls, conducted in 1988 and 1996 and concludes that the percentage of the population that owned guns increased by 50% in just eight years. Kleck looks at 86 different surveys, going back to 1959, as well as half a century of gun sales data, which show that the gun ownership percentage has not changed since 1959. Kleck’s conclusion is obviously the better supported one.

Lott does a better job in his statistical analysis which found the the introduction of concealed carry laws was associated with declines in violent crime rates. That is because this analysis is in his area of expertise, econometrics. Unfortunately, his unfamiliarity with firearms research betrays him when he interprets this result to mean that the laws caused the decrease in crime. Kleck’s book contains details of surveys of gun carrying that show that the number of people that get permits for concealed carry is much less than the number of people who carry illegally, that is, the laws did not make a significant difference to a criminal’s chance of encountering an armed victim. Kleck concludes that the crime decreases were probably caused by some factor other than the carry laws.

There are many more errors of fact and interpretation in Lott’s book, too many to list here.

So why does the pro-gun book by Kleck have a sales rank of 72,000 while the pro-gun book by Lott have a rank of 1264? I think the reason is that Lott goes well beyond what the data supports to claim that more guns cause less crime. Kleck sticks with a position that is supportable by the data—that the bad and good uses of guns mostly cancel out, leaving little net effect on crime. Pro-gun readers would rather hear Lott’s message, even if it’s wrong.

Readers looking for a pro-gun book should buy Kleck’s book, rather than Lott’s. Lott’s book is only useful for those readers who are interested in the details of Lott’s multivariate statistical analysis.

As I showed earlier just two days later Lott, posting as “A reader from Philadelphia, PA”, responded with a five star review of More Guns, Less Crime that included a favourable quote from Kleck:

“John Lott has done the most extensive, thorough, and sophisticated study we have on the effects of loosening gun control laws.”—Gary Kleck, Professor, Florida State University

But that wasn’t all, because the next day there was another response to my review—this review of Targeting Guns also by “A reader from Philadelphia, PA” appeared:

NOT ANYWHERE AS GOOD AS LOTT, June 13, 2000
Reviewer: A reader from Philadelphia, PA

This update of Kleck’s “Point Blank” is useful, though I have a few serious problems with it and ultimately I came away from the book disappointed. Before stating my problems, however, I will give Kleck this much, he is frequently unfairly attacked by gun control advocates. In some sense, Kleck’s work really should not bother them too much because he is really saying that guns don’t matter. If they want to get rid of guns and it makes them feel better, let them do it because nothing will change.

I will also say that the book provides a useful source for the literature on guns.

Here are my most basic problems with the book:

How does one get from his survey data to his conclusion that guns on net produce no benefit?

Kleck oversells the quality of his empirical work. If one wants to see the best empirical work on crime, read Lott’s More Guns, Less Crime (the second edition is even much better than the first). The difference in the amount of time that these authors put into doing their studies isn’t even comparable. The inability to even account for other factors like arrest or conviction rates or the death penalty or prison sentences or illegal drug prices or almost anything else is disturbing. As to the previous review that Kleck somehow alone in understooding that higher crime rates can cause increased gun ownership, my advice is that he actually read Lott and see how one is supposed to take this into account correctly. By the way, once one does this and takes into account the other factors that influence crime, Lott is correct: More Guns mean Less Crime.

Personally, I also don’t understand Kleck’s criticizisms of Lott’s work. In a sentence he guesses that something else might exist which could explain away why concealed handgun laws reduce crime, but then he fails to even hazard what else should be accounted for.

Is this a review of Kleck’s book or of Lott’s?

And this was the second negative review of Kleck’s book that Lott posted. Look at this review:

Pretty disappointing, May 13, 1999
Reviewer: A reader from Madison, Wisconsin

I thought that Gary Kleck’s “Point Blank” was OK, but this book is basically a reprint of that one with a few updated numbers and a new title. I must confess that I felt cheated.

What bothers me the most about this book is that Kleck continually argues that guns produce no net benefit or harm, but I could not find any evidence that directly proves this contention. If someone could point to the page that he provides direct evidence on this, I would appreciate it because I completely missed it.

I thought John Lott’s book (More Guns, Less Crime) was vastly superior. When he makes a claim the evidence he marshalls is directly on point, and I thought that his book was much more clearly written. The two books aren’t even close in quality.

Finally, I was also bothered with some of Kleck’s discussion of other research. Kleck gets upset when others attack him by saying that something might explain away his results, but they refuse to say what those unexplained factors are. Kleck is correct to be upset this with. But he unfortunately does the same things to others.

What does Lott mean in his last sentence when he writes: “But he unfortunately does the same things to others”? Well, like the previous one, this review appears to be a response to a critical review of Lott’s work. You see, a couple of days before it was posted I sent Lott a copy of my critical review of Lott’s “More Guns, Less Crime”. In a prominent part of that criticism I noted that in Targeting Guns, Kleck had rejected Lott’s conclusion, writing :

More likely, the declines in crime coinciding with relaxation of carry laws were largely attributable to other factors not controlled in the Lott and Mustard analysis.

Kleck said that “other factors” likely caused the crime reductions and this is what Lott is complaining about in his last sentence.

I got an email from Lott a couple of days later (May 17) mentioning that he had read my critique and he specifically responded to this passage in the second edition of his book. Also note that Lott posted an author’s review of More Guns, Less Crime” and gave his location as Madison, Wisconsin, the same as the author of this review.

On the very same day (May 13, 1999) that Lott anonymously slammed Kleck he wrote a letter to Otis Dudley Duncan praising Kleck:

“I am a great admirer of Gary Kleck’s work, and I think that he has done a great deal to advance the study of crime. Few academics have his integrity and courage.”

Is Lott two-faced or what?

Now, most of Lott’s reviews really have not made much difference. There are lots of five-star reviews of his books, so the six to ten that he wrote don’t matter much. And one and two-star reviews of books on politically charged subjects tend to be discounted because readers of the reviews think that they are written by someone on the other side of the question. Amazon lets readers rate reviews by voting on whether the review was helpful or not, and Lott’s anonymous negative reviews did not garner many “helpful” votes. Except for his reviews of Targeting Guns. Readers rated Lott’s two reviews as the two most helpful reviews. Amazon gives such reviews greater prominence as “Spotlight Reviews”, putting them first on the page. I believe that the reason these two reviews rated so well is that they were obviously from a pro-gun person, so pro-gun readers (the main market for Kleck’s book) would take them seriously instead of dismissing them as the product of some anti-gunner. Whatever the reason, I think it likely that Lott’s reviews have hurt the sales of Kleck’s book by persuading people to buy Lott’s book instead.

Lott also seems to have reviewed Armed: New Perspectives on Gun Control by Kleck and Kates:

How many times can you write a book repeating the same point, December 31, 2001
Reviewer: A reader from Washington, DC

I have read Targeting Guns and Point Blank. Point Blank was a classic. Target Guns, despite the different title, was simply an update of that book. I have also read the previous book by Kates and Kleck entitled The Great American Gun Debate. My biggest problem is that the same arguments keep on getting repeated over and over again. What is the deal with this?

My second problem is why does Kleck seem to always feel so strongly that guns do not on net decrease crime. This book again talks about defensive gun use and implies that it is much more prevelant than the bad things that happen with guns used in crime, but never, ever explains why he thinks that the net effect is a wash. Can someone please explain this to me?

My third problem is Kleck appears to really dislike Lott. He can’t even accurately discuss what research Lott has done on concealed handguns. To Kleck the only thing that Lott has done is examine the before and after crime rates with respect to concealed handgun laws. Give me a break!

I confess that I couldn’t bring myself to finish reading this book. By the time I got 3/4’s of the way through I realized that the odds that “Armed” would bring up a new argument were extremely small. If it wasn’t for my respect for Kleck’s work in Point Blank, I would have given this book only one star.

What evidence is there in this book that “Kleck appears to really dislike Lott”? Kleck hardly mentions Lott at all. In 360 pages, this is all he says about him:

Economists John Lott and David Mustard found that crime rates declined in states with right-to-carry laws after the laws went into effect, to a greater extent than in states without the laws, and attributed these decreases in a greater perception of risk from victims among prospective offenders. Deterrence was necessarily very indirectly inferred, and crime decreases that might have been attributed to other factors were attributed to unmeasured changes in criminal perceptions of risk.

I think Lott was sore because Kleck did not give Lott’s research the prominence that Lott thinks it deserves so, Lott let him have it with another anonymous two-star review.

This review is “from Washington, DC”, the location of Lott’s workplace, the AEI, and the location of other reviews by Lott discussed here.

A few days earlier this review of The Seven Myths of Gun Control also from Washington, DC appeared. It is obviously written by the same person as the review above.

Well done popularized version of earlier work, December 26, 2001
Reviewer: A reader from Washington, DC
This book is a fast read, and it serves a useful niche taking the research done by others and presenting the work in such a way that it is easily understood by a wide audience. While the book addresses second amendment issues, the biggest emphasis is on how gun control increases crime. It is on this last point that the book relies very, very heavily on John Lott’s More Guns, Less Crime and his op-ed pieces. Even though I had read Lott’s book, I hadn’t read some of his op-ed pieces, so I still got something out of even this discussion. I also think that Poe does a good job of simplifying some of Lott’s discussions. My bottom line: is that Poe’s book is still a valuable addition to Lott’s book.

I almost think I should count this as another five-star self-review of More Guns, Less Crime, since it mentions Lott twice as often as the author of the book that is ostensibly being reviewed.

This concludes my series of posts on Lott’s anonymous Amazon reviews. The six to ten five-star reviews of his own books, and the one and two-star reviews of other books were bad enough, but I think that his conduct in publicly praising Kleck while secretly stabbing him in the back again and again is absolutely outrageous, even by the standards set by Lott’s previous misconduct. What does it take for pro-gun folks to cut him loose?

Eagle-eyed reader Michael has spotted another one of those five-star reviews of Lott’s books. This time it’s at Barnes and Noble:

A reviewer, from Madison, Wisconsin, April 19, 1999,
Clearly written and a truly thought provoking book
It is too bad that there isn’t more of this clear headed and factual discussion of important issues that directly impact people’s lives. This book may not have completely changed my mind on the issue of gun control, but I have certainly gone from automatically supporting controls to a much more agnostic position. Probably the most important thing that I learned from this book is that sometimes what may seem like the most obvious, simplest solutions to problems can have unintended consequences. I guess that I have become more concerned that we must be careful that gun control policies do not the primarily disarm law-abiding ‘good’ citizens, who are most likely to obey any new laws. I guess that I have also come to believe that guns not only have obvious bad effects, but also beneficial ones for people’s safety and that we must ask what is the net effect of new rules. Lott’s powerful evidence that it is poor minorities who live in high crime areas who benefit the most from being able to defend themselves hit me hard. The evidence on accidental gun deaths was also very surprising. With all the national news coverage of accidental gun deaths involving young children, I would never have guessed until I read Lott’s book how infrequent these events are. Again what is most powerful about the book is not that Lott denies the problems, but that he asks how do the benefits compare with the costs: Do guns on net save childrens’ and adults’ lives? Just as getting rid of pools would prevent drownings but simultaneously eliminate important benefits, Lott shows that more lives are saved than lost from gun ownership. I was also deeply bothered by the outrageous attacks that gun control organizations like Handgun Control launched against Lott.

Let’s see:

1. The writing style is Lott’s.
2. It hits all of Lott’s favourite points he likes to make about his book.
3. It is posted from Madison, Wisconsin within a few weeks of another anonymous review by Lott also posted from Madison.
4. It pretends (not very convincingly) to come from a supporter of gun control, just like Lott’s anonymous review of Cook and Ludwig.

I conclude that this review was written by Lott, bring the the totals to seven certain and four probable self reviews of Lott’s books.

Kevin Drum links to the latest installments in my exposure of Lott’s sock puppetry and generously nominates me for Best Single Issue Blog in the Koufax awards. In a clarification of the rules, John Lott’s blog was ruled ineligible for “Best Group Blog” because “A group blog requires more than one actual person.”

Howard Nemerov has a post defending Lott and responding to Chris Mooney’s Mother Jones article. Unfortunately, he gets his facts wrong, leaves out inconvenient facts and indulges in fallacious arguments. I’ll go through his post and correct these, but first some general comments.

1. Even though his article is a response to Chris Mooney’s article Nemerov does not link to Mooney’s piece. If he did, his reader’s might have been able to discover how badly Nemerov misrepresents the article.
2. Nemerov tries to pretend that the dispute is just about politics. He doesn’t mention any critic by name, instead Lott is being attacked by a single entity he calls “the left”. Nemerov does not mention any of the criticism of Lott from pro-gun and right-wing folks.
3. Nemerov repeatedly hurls insults at “the left”: “hypocrisy, smut, and innuendo” … “Let’s give the left it’s [sic] 15 minutes of whine” … “what we have here is liberals who are not intelligent and educated enough to understand statistical analysis” … “the left is too stupid to keep its lies consistent”. Such insults only subtract from Nemerov’s argument—they do nothing to persuade me that he is correct and suggest that he does not have any better arguments. And “smut”??? Where does Nemerov think the “smut” is in Mooney’s piece?

Nemerov starts off on the wrong foot by managing to completely miss what Mooney’s piece was about:

An article from Mother Jones magazine’s website attempts to discredit the work of John Lott, author of “More Guns, Less Crime.” The brouhaha seems to center around one alleged lost survey, in which he found that “98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack.” This survey was documented as lost in a computer crash.

Mooney briefly discussed the mysterious survey, but his article was about the coding errors Lott made in his “More Guns, Less Crime” data and Lott’s behaviour when his errors were discovered. Nemerov does not mention the coding errors in any way, shape or form. Nor is true that the survey “was documented as lost”. There is no documentation showing that it was lost. In fact there is no documentation showing that it existed in the first place. And notice that Nemerov found the article on the Mother Jones website. He has no excuse for not linking to it.

So let’s suspend critical thinking for a moment and other authoritative surveys about defensive gun use reached similar conclusions.

Other surveys did not reach similar conclusions. Lott said his survey found 2% firing. The lowest number any other survey found was ten times higher:

Survey	Percent firing	Source
Kleck	24	Kleck 1995
NSPOF	27	Duncan 2000
NCVS 1987-1990	28	Duncan 2000
NCVS 1987-1992	38	Rand 1994
NCVS 1992-2001	21	NCVS online analysis system
Field	34	Kleck 1995
Cambridge Reports	67	Kleck 1995
DMIa	40	Kleck 1995
Ohio	40	Kleck 1995

After summarizing Bellesiles’ misconduct Nemerov writes:

John Lott is accused of not coming up with a single piece of data, which was not the heart of his book.

Lott is, like Bellesiles, being accused of fabricating research results. It’s not just about not coming up with the data, (which is serious enough by itself) but whether he did the research at all.

Secondly, until the very end liberals staunchly defended Bellesiles, and some continue to bemoan that his fate is merely the doing of the vast right wing/gun lobby conspiracy.

Gee, just like Nemerov staunchly defending Lott to the end while complaining about how “the left” is attacking him.

Nemerov than accuses “the left” of using a double standard because:

Al Franken receives a Harvard “fellowship” and uses Harvard students to write a book published under his name, and is rewarded by a place on the New York Times best seller list. John Lott uses a pseudonym in an Internet chat room—a common practice—and is guilty of fraud.

Dear readers, here’s where I have to appeal for help. If you can figure out what the parallel between Franken getting a fellowship and Lott using a pseudonym is supposed to be, leave a message in the comments. As far as I can tell, Nemerov just took a rocketship to Planet Non Sequiter. Oh, and the fraud part of Mary Rosh was not the mere use of a pseudonym, but the dishonest use of it with the five-star reviews of More Guns, Less Crime and claiming that Lott was “the best professor I ever had” and so on.

Another supposed sin is John Lott’s tendency to use complex explanations of his work. “They tend to be mind-bogglingly complicated, involving things like ordinary least squares and Poisson distributions.” I only took one statistics class in college, but it seems to me that if he did not include this technical discussion, they would be beating on him for not being scientific enough to be credible.

Well, no. Chris Mooney actually provided a link to Goertzel’s Sceptical Inquirer article so Nemerov could have found out what it was arguing, but it looks like Nemerov either didn’t read it or didn’t understand it. Goertzel is arguing that the dueling statistical arguments are unpersuasive.

It sounds like what we have here is liberals who are not intelligent and educated enough to understand statistical analysis, and rather than acknowledge their own educational shortfalls for handling the topic, they prefer to insult someone who is their intellectual superior. But this is the socialist way: if one climbs too high, bring him back down into the mediocre morass with the rest of us. After all, the desire to excel is selfish arrogance, and traumatizes and victimizes those without the drive to succeed. Education is not necessary, because we are entitled to happiness and income derived from suing McDonald’s for spilling hot coffee on ourselves and eating ourselves into obesity.

There isn’t any actual argument in this paragraph to respond to, I just thought it was funny the way he worked the McDonald’s coffee thing into his rant.

These attacks are followed by more standard liberal hypocrisy: ‘’The Stanford Law Review critique, authored by Yale’s Ayres and Stanford’s Donohue, analyzed more recent crime statistics, extending Lott’s original 1977-1992 crime dataset to include data through the late 1990s. As it turned out, after 1992, partly due to the end of the 1980s’ crack cocaine-related crime wave, crime rates dropped dramatically in states with large urban centers, many of which had not passed right to carry laws.”

Thanks for highlighting the fact that the left is too stupid to keep its lies consistent. If the violence issue is controlled by drugs and not guns, then why all the whining about the need for more gun control?

It’s unwise to call others “stupid” when there is a chance that you might have missed the point as Nemerov has here. Just because drugs affect crime, it does not follow that other things do not.

I agree with the article on one issue: we do not need to discuss least squares, regressions, and distributions. The heart of ‘’More Guns, Less Crime'’ resides in FBI crime data, collected from all counties in the U.S. over many years. It is available to any who want to check Lott’s conclusions, so regular folks like us can see for ourselves that crime rates drop when law-abiding citizens exercise their Second Amendment rights.

The issue where he says he agrees with the article is the issue that prompted his rant where he accused liberals of not being intelligent enough to understand statistics. Now he is agreeing with the article on this? Consistency is not Nemerov’s strong suit. Anyway, in case the thought was at the back of your mind, this shows that Nemerov is not another one of Lott’s sock puppets. Lott would never say that we don’t need regressions.

For example, you can clearly see that for the 2001-2002 time period, Michigan, with a new CCW law, saw a 5% drop in total crime per 100,000 residents, and a 2.6% drop in violent crime, while murder rates stayed the same. Neighboring Ohio, without a CCW law, saw less than a 1.7% drop in total crime, and less than two tenths of a percent drop in violent crime, while murder was up 15%!

I don’t think that Nemerov is Lott, but he sure can cherry-pick like him. Michigan has two neighbouring states without a CCW law. The other one is Wisconsin. How did Wisconsin do compared with Michigan 2001-2002? Wisconsin saw a 2.7% drop in violent crime, a slightly greater decrease than Michigan, while murder went down 22%! Why didn’t Nemerov tell us about this?

These comparisons involving just two states and two years are useless—you can always find a comparison that says whatever you want.

Nemerov then writes “would you care more or less about a bunch of intellectual ivory tower types splitting statistical hairs?” I wish he would make up his mind. Do those darn liberals believe that “Education is not necessary”, or are they “intellectual ivory tower types”? Hmm?

Ken Miles links to my posts on Lott’s anonymous reviews and writes:

Tim Lambert has destroyed any possible remnants of John Lott’s credibility.

Last time I commented on Lott’s claims about the Baghdad murder rate, I noted his pathological refusal to admit that he was wrong about the rate. Even though dozens of newspapers have reported that there are hundreds of murders each month in Baghdad (see the table with some of the stories at the end of this post), Lott insisted that the one single report he found that claimed that there were only 24 murders in October must be right and all the others must be wrong. He has now published on op-ed repeating his claim and complaining that the New York Times refused to print a “correction”.

Lott’s arguments about why all the other reports are wrong have to be seen to be believed:

I contacted the authors of both pieces. Albuquerque and O’Hanlon, who wrote the Times piece, provided two sources for their murder rate numbers: An article by Neil MacFarquhar in the New York Times (Sept. 16, 2003) and a piece by Lara Marlowe in the Irish Times (Oct. 11, 2003). Yet, both references clearly stated that much more than murder was included in the reports that they used from the Baghdad morgue. MacFarquhar notes that these deaths also included “automobile accidents” and cases where people “were shot dead by American soldiers,” cases that clearly did not involve murders. The Irish Times piece mentions that “up to a quarter of fatal shootings [in the morgue] are caused by U.S. troops.”

All right, suppose we want to exclude shootings by US troops from the total. If “up to a quarter” are by US troops, then, at least three quarters are not by US troops. The Irish Times article reports that 518 people were shot dead in August. Three-quarters of 518 is 388. That is a very conservative estimate for the number of murders since it doesn’t count those murdered by other means, or those victims whose bodies did not make it to the morgue and that it was “up to a quarter”, so the true number could well be higher.

Lott doesn’t mention it, but MacFarquhar’s piece also reported that 70% of the deaths were from gunfire, so you can do a similar calculation with his data to also see that there were hundreds of murders a month.

Anyway, that’s the logical way to correct the figures, but look at the way Lott “corrects” them:

For some perspective, in D.C., murders account for fewer than 5 percent of all deaths. Even counting only the types of deaths explicitly mentioned in the stories citing the Baghdad morgue (accidental deaths, murders, suicides) and assuming that soldiers were engaged in the same type of fighting in D.C. as they are in Iraq, murders in D.C. would account for just a third of deaths. (The respective numbers for the U.S. as a whole are even lower: a half of one percent and 11 percent.) Obviously, counting these other deaths as “murders” in D.C. would imply that murders were three to 20 times more common than they actually were.

The first thing to note is that Lott is trying to pretend that the body count at the morgue is for all deaths, even though the articles say that it is violent deaths. And if there are only 800 deaths a month of all kinds in a city of five million people then that translates to a life expectancy of about 400 years. But never mind that. I want you to admire the circularity of his argument. He assumes that murders in Baghdad would be about 5% of all deaths, just like in DC. But that will only be true if the murder rate in Baghdad is similar to that in DC. In other words, if you assume that the murder rate in Baghdad is similar to that in DC, you can show that the murder rate in Baghdad is similar to that in DC. If, instead of assuming what you want to show, you use the facts given in the articles, it is clear that the murder rate in Baghdad is much greater than than that in DC.

Lott continues:

The Wall Street Journal Europe instead relied on the U.S. Army 1st Division stationed in Baghdad. A public affairs officer with that division, Jason Beck, confirmed for me that a large part of the Iraqi legal system is being overseen by the U.S. JAG officers, and they are using the same standards for murder rates as used in the U.S. and separating out murders from other deaths.

And pretty clearly, they have only been able to record a small fraction of the murders that have occured.

Lott finishes up by demanding that the New York Times print a “correction”:

When a publication of record such as the New York Times gets Baghdad’s October murder rates wrong by up to a factor of 28 to 1 and no correction is issued, the consequences are significant.

You have to admire Lott’s chutzpah, but he should think bigger than this—he should demand that all the other newspapers listed below also issue “corrections”.

Blogger Michael Williams is fooled by Lott, while spc67 is little more skeptical.

Update: More bloggers fooled by Lott: Del Simmons,