Deltoid

Will Baude has asked Julian Sanchez 20 questions, including a couple about Lott. When asked if Lott is a liar or not, he wrote:

That depends on whether you count as a liar someone who’s convinced himself that he’s telling the truth: I think he may have. I guess there’s no rock solid proof that he’s lied, just some highly suspicious circumstantial evidence… let’s just say that at this point, if I read him claiming that there are 60 seconds in a minute, I’d want to double-check it.

Glenn Reynolds links approvingly to a post by Thomas Lifson on the results of a BBC phone-in and email poll that allowed people to propose a new law that they would like to see passed. The winning proposal was a law that would allow home-owners to use any means to defend their home from intruders. Stephen Pound, the MP who agreed to put forward the proposal, said that it was “unworkable”. Lifson’s comment on all this was:

MP Pound’s disdain for popular opinion is typical of not only British, but Western European elites, who consider themselves, and the nations whose public policies they control, to be vastly superior to the uncivilized Yanks, who carry guns and execute vicious criminals. Public opinion polls show that a majority of Britons favor capital punishment, but there is virtually no chance it will be re-introduced to Britain anytime soon.

Segments of the British public have been outraged over the jailing of Norfolk farmer Tony Martin, who shot a burglar who had broken into his house. In all probability, this outraged fuelled the votes which selected resulted in victory for the self-defense (or ‘vigilante’) law which won the BBC poll.

However, results of phone-in polls are meaningless since the sample is self-selected. It may be that popular opinion supports a law that allows home-owners to kill burglars even if it isn’t in self-defence, but the poll does not tell us that. It just tells us that some people feel strongly enough to phone in (possibly multiple times).

Lifson omits some details about the Tony Martin case to make it seem outrageous. Martin shot an unarmed, fleeing, 16-year-old burglar in the back, while the burglar was begging for mercy, and left him to die. The jury decided that the shooting was not self-defence.

Update: Michael Peckham, Kieran Healy and Kevin Baker also comment.

Thomas Lifson responds in an update, writing:

My post was about the BBC’s poll, and its (and the MP’s)arrogant rejection of the results, when they were surprised and displeased by them.

However, the BBC did not reject the results. Pound will advance the proposal just as he said he would, even though he personally thinks that it is unworkable.

Two additional points. The jury who convicted Martin has a vastly better claim of being representative of the community than the self-selected group who want to change the law. The jury decided that Martin had not acted in self-defence. The folks who want to change the law, don’t like the decision of the community as represented by the jury, so they want to stop juries from making decisions on the matter altogether. Who’s being elitist here?

Martin hated Gypsies. He “talked of putting Gypsies in the middle of a field, surrounding it with barbed wire and machine gunning them.” He believed that “Hitler was right” in his policies towards Gypsies. Now, maybe this was all just talk. But if it wasn’t and the proposed law was passed, Martin could implement his own mini-Final Solution for Gypsies, killing with impunity any who broke into his house.

Update 2: There’s been all kinds of discussion of this on the web: Hit and Run, Harry’s Place, Misha, and Mark Steyn. Steyn claims

The fact that most homeowners are believed to be armed reduces crime, in my neighbourhood, to statistically insignificant levels.

However, actual crime figures from the US contradict his claim. In The Effects of Gun Prevalence on Burglary: Deterrence vs Inducement Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig find:

The proposition that widespread gun ownership serves as a deterrent to residential burglary is widely touted by advocates, but the evidence is weak, consisting of anecdotes, interviews with burglars, casual comparisons with other countries, and the like. A more systematic exploration requires data on local rates of gun ownership and of residential burglary, and such data have only recently become available. In this paper we exploit a new well-validated proxy for local gun-ownership prevalence—the proportion of suicides that involve firearms—together with newly available geo-coded data from the National Crime Victimization Survey, to produce the first systematic estimates of the net effects of gun prevalence on residential burglary patterns. The importance of such empirical work stems in part from the fact that theoretical considerations do not provide much guidance in predicting the net effects of widespread gun ownership. Guns in the home may pose a threat to burglars, but also serve as an inducement, since guns are particularly valuable loot. Other things equal, a gun-rich community provides more lucrative burglary opportunities than one where guns are more sparse. The new empirical results reported here provide no support for a net deterrent effect from widespread gun ownership. Rather, our analysis concludes that residential burglary rates tend to increase with community gun prevalence.

Last month I detailed how Lott posted at least six and probably ten five-star reviews of his books to Amazon.com. Well, it may be that Lott isn’t the only conservative author who does this. Someone posting as “A reader from New York, NY” (which is where Coulter lives), has posted many five-star reviews of Ann Coulter’s books at Amazon.com. Each of these reviews is actually a detailed response to points raised in negative reviews. The writing style is similar to Coulter’s and the reviewer seems to have an uncanny insight into Coulter’s thought processes. The Nameless Blogger has the story.

Now, it is possible that Coulter has a fan in NY who has copied her style and has made a hobby of anonymously defending her in the Amazon.com and that fan knows how Coulter thinks, but I suspect that the “reader from New York, NY” is actually Coulter.

Update: The “reader from New York, NY” is denying everything:

I wrote that review (I am an Amazon customer dating back to 1999) and I am not Ann Coulter. The behind the scenes techies at Amazon can verify this (if they’re so inclined). And, except as a reader of her books, I have no connection to Coulter whatsoever. Try getting the facts, instead of inventing them off the top of your head, before shooting off your mouth.

I tried to see how many reviews of Coulter’s books the “reader from New York, NY” had posted and counted 36 five-star reviews before I got too bored to continue.

Site Meter says that I have now had 100,000 visits to this blog in just under a year. My thanks to everyone who has dropped by. It’s gratifying to see such interest in my writings.

I’m one of the nominations for best single issue blog over at Wampum’s Koufax weblog awards. Google tells me that Koufax is left-arm pitcher, so translating it to cricket that’s the equivalent of a Wasim Akram award. (Sorry, I was at the SCG yesterday to farewell Steve Waugh and have cricket on the brain at the moment.) Anyway, it is an honour to be on the same list as so many excellent blogs.

Update: I also got nominated for best series. With 346 posts on Lott in 2003, I’d have a lock on most obsessive if that was a category.

Brad DeLong quotes the Economist on “rabidly anti-gun” Steve Levitt:

If you browse through the working papers circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research (at www.nber.org) you will find that in 2003 alone Mr Levitt wrote or co-wrote seven. His topics included the effect of school choice on educational results; the causes and consequences of distinctively black names; the effect of legalised abortion on crime; how to test theories of discrimination using evidence from the television programme, “The Weakest Link”; the gap in test results between blacks and whites in the first two years of schooling; gambling and the National Football League; and teachers who cheat in appraisals of their students’ performance. Among the work he has published in prestigious peer-reviewed journals are a series of papers on crime and punishment, drug-gang finance, penalty kicks in soccer, money and elections, drunken driving, and the effect of ideology as opposed to voter preferences on the policies supported by politicians. In 2002 the impeccably sober American Economic Review published a paper co-written by Mr Levitt on corruption and sumo wrestling. You get the idea….

On top of all those he has a 2003 paper not in the NBER archive entitled: Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s: Four Factors that Explain the Decline and Seven That Do Not. He argues that neither carry laws nor gun control laws were responsible for any part of the crime decrease in the US in the nineties. (The four that did were: more imprisonment, more police, the decline of crack, and legalized abortion.)

And yet Glenn Reynolds claimed that Levitt was an especially ardent supporter of gun control. Odd.

In a post on his blog Keith Burgess-Jackson wrote:

First, studies by law professor John Lott and others show that private gun-ownership reduces crime rates. This may be counterintuitive, but it’s true. There would be more crime than there is if guns were banned.

In an attempt to set him straight, I emailed him and pointed out that Lott’s studies had been refuted by better and more extensive work by Ayres and Donohue and gave him a link to my comments on Lott. Instead of responding to any of the points I made, he replied:

You sound like a gun-hater.

I wrote back: “You are mistaken. Do you care whether your claims are true or not?” Burgess-Jackson replied:

I have more faith in John Lott than I do in you, that’s for sure.

In an article called “More Statistics, Less Persuasion: A Cultural Theory of Gun Risk Perceptions”, published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Dan Kahan and Donald Braman argue that the whole debate between Lott and his critics is a waste of time because most people behave like Burgess-Jackson towards empirical evidence on gun issues. Kahan and Braman write:

individuals can be expected to credit or dismiss empirical evidence on gun control risks depending on whether it coheres or conflicts with their cultural values.

The same issue also has five commentaries on their paper and a response from the authors. In those commentaries, Lott and two of his critics (Cook and Ludwig) actually agree on something: that Kahan and Braman are wrong

Anyway, my take on all this: Kahan and Braman are wrong, but so is Lott. For details, read on.

The empirical evidence for Kahan and Braman’s claim is an analysis of GSS data where they find that cultural values (for example, whether a person values individualism more or less) have a statistically significant correlation with whether that person supports gun control. They conclude that all the statistical analysis by Lott and his critics is a waste of time:

Rather than focusing on quantifying the impact of gun control laws on crime, then, academics and others who want to contribute to resolving the gun debate should dedicate themselves to constructing a new expressive idiom that will allow citizens to debate the cultural issues that divide them in an open and constructive way.

I believe that their conclusion is in error—just because cultural values affect attitudes towards gun control it does not follow at all that information about the costs and benefits of gun control would not also affect attitudes. There is also something curiously self-defeating about using statistics to persuade you that statistics can’t persuade you. If you are persuaded by their statistics then that proves them wrong. (Of course, they come back with: “You weren’t persuaded by our statistics. That proves us right!”)

The first commentary, by Cook and Ludwig, pretty much says what I think—that showing that cultural values matter doesn’t show that other things don’t matter as well.

The next one, by Fremling and Lott argues that Kahan and Braman’s results really show that cultural values don’t matter. They observe that adding variables for cultural values in the model increases r² (What is r²?) by only 1.6 percentage points, and argue:

Thus, Kahan and Braman prove the opposite of what they intended. Instead of demonstrating that people’s views of social order explain a lot of the variation in positions on gun control, they show that these views matter very little. …

It is very interesting that Kahan and Braman find that attitudes on guns are so little explained by attitudes in other areas. …

We think Kahan and Braman should revise their conclusion and take credit for this interesting finding.

I think that Fremling and Lott’s argument makes a fetish out of r², but let’s accept it and see where it takes us. How much does including the variable for carry laws increase r² in Lott’s “More Guns, Less Crime” models? In his famous Table 3a Lott reports r² values for three different models involving carry laws, but he doesn’t tell us what the r² values are if you don’t include any variable for carry laws. If the amount of increase in r² is as important as he claims above, it is rather odd that he did not report this interesting statistic. No matter, I have the numbers here. The carry law makes no noticable change to r² for almost all models—in a few instances it increases r² by a tiny 0.01. In any case, the increase is much less than what Kahan and Braman got in their models. So when can we expect to see the following from Fremling and Lott?

Thus, Lott proves the opposite of what he intended. Instead of demonstrating that carry laws make an important difference to crime rates he shows that these laws matter very little. …

It is very interesting that Lott finds that changes in crime rates are so little explained by carry laws.

We think Lott should revise his conclusion and take credit for this interesting finding.

Update: Dan Kahan responds:

We didn’t mean to imply that the empirical debate is a “waste of time,” just that it isn’t suited to promoting a stable resolution of the gun debate through democratic politics. But since enough people misunderstood us on this point (we must not have been careful enough), we wrote the “Cultural Cognition” follow up, which clarifies that issue and which also addresses the Cook/Ludwig/Lambert claim that culture and empirics can both matter at the same time. Instead of drafting a new response to your blog, I would rather refer people to the “Cultural Cognition” paper, subject to the proviso that it is a draft (the simulations are being made more complicated and interesting, although we are pretty happy with our narrative account of the social and psychological mechanisms that constrain individuals’ acceptance of factual beliefs that disappoint their cultural commitments).

(more…)

Michael Peckham has an interesting post looking at Bellesiles and Lott and how they relate to other research frauds. He thinks that they might serve as examples that deter others from research fraud.

Lott has a post (scroll to 1/10/04 entry on his blog) on the meaningless poll that discussed earlier. Lott’s headline is:

A BBC Poll Shows that Most British Want a Law authorizing homeowners to use any means to defend their home from intruders

Of course, as I explained earlier phone-in polls are not at all representative of the population. Nor in any case was there majority support for the shoot a burglar law, which received 37% of the votes.

Lott links to a post by Eric Rasmussen, who also seems to think that the poll is representative of public opinion in Britain. Sigh.

I’ve been nominated for another blog award. This one is for Best NSW Blog. I don’t you should take such awards too seriously, but they do provide a way to find interesting blogs to read, so check them out.

The Journalist’s Guide to Gun Policy Scholars and Second Amendment Scholars is a site that provides journalists with a list of “credible, articulate scholars” to consult about gun policy questions. It used to contain a listing for John R. Lott Jr, who was available to give his special insight into “Women and Gun Issues” as well as other gun issues. The site’s maintainer, Eugene Volokh, invites visitors to tell him “how this guide can be made more useful”. I don’t think anyone should be recommending Lott to journalists, so I wrote to Volokh suggesting that the guide could be improved by removing Lott’s name from it. And he has.

Yet another columnist has demonstrated profound ignorance of opinion polling. Scott Norvell writes about the meaningless BBC phone-in poll (discussed earlier here and here):

Britain’s chattering classes sure can get their knickers in a knot with the will of the people offends their liberal sensibilities.

A phone-in poll does not represent the will of the people in any way, shape or form. Norvell compounds his error by leaving out important details about the shooting by Martin, like the fact that the burglar was shot in the back while fleeing and left to die. Norvell also seems to have based his description of Pound’s reaction on third-hand reports, mischaracterizing it as “apoplectic”. You can actually listen to Pound’s comments and find out that his tone was not “apoplectic”. Too bad Norvell didn’t bother.

What is worse is that Norvell isn’t just some random blogger or columnist, but London Bureau Chief for Fox News. Why can’t these people understand opinion polls?

Update: Eugene Volokh understands that such polls are meaningless. Here he writes about another meaningless poll on gay marriage. Unlike the BBC, the people who ran that poll (the American Family Association) reneged on their promise to put forward the results to lawmakers.

Glenn Reynolds, however, either does not understand or does not care. He posts for the second time on it, misrepresenting the result as “The will of the people”. I sent him a copy of this post and he added this update:

Tim Lambert emails (as I expected him to) that the poll is unscientific. Maybe so—but that’s an argument against the BBC using it—not an argument for discounting it after it produced a result the BBC didn’t like.

1. I sent him this post and the link to it, but he does not link to this post, preventing his readers from seeing my arguments.
2. The fact that the result is meaningless is, in fact, an argument for discounting it, regardless of what the result was.
3. Stephen Pound did not like the result, but he is neither the BBC nor an employee of the BBC. And he did not discount the result but accepted that he would have to put forward to other lawmakers a proposal that he personally considered most unwise.

Glenn Reynolds approvingly links to another poll that he claims provides

More evidence that the British public is taking a tougher line on crime than the British government.

Of course, Reynolds yet again fails to take notice of the fact that it is yet another meaningless on-line poll which tells nothing useful about what the British public thinks.

Also, Michael Peckham has some more comments on the infamous BBC phone-in poll.

Kevin Drum is dismayed that the Economist has printed a letter from Lott:

Contrary to your claims of the Americanisation of armed robbery in Britain, one could only hope that robbery in England and Wales was truly becoming Americanised (”You’re history“, January 3rd). The International Crime Victimisation Survey shows that for 2000, the latest year available, the robbery rate in England and Wales was twice America’s rate.

Equally tellingly, your figure shows that armed robberies stopped falling in England and Wales in 1997 and started rising dramatically almost immediately afterwards. Was not the 1997 handgun ban in Britain supposed to reduce armed robberies? By contrast, American robbery rates have fallen during the 1990s just as more and more Americans have been able to carry concealed handguns for protection.

Lott is up to his usual tricks in his letter. First, although the article was about armed robbery, he compares the English and American robbery rates, instead of the firearm robbery rates. That makes an enormous difference. In the US, 40% of robberies involve firearms, while in England the figure is 4% (see section 3.20). I don’t think that we should hope that the 4% figure turns into 40%.

Second, he tries to blame the increase in firearms robberies after 1997 on the handgun ban and misstates the purpose of the ban. The ban was a response to the shootings at Dunblane and was intended to prevent something like that happening again. Nor is their a plausible mechanism for it to have increased firearms robberies.

Third, while robbery rates have fallen in the 90s in the US, Lott does not mention that they fell the most in the states that did not make it easier for people to carry concealed guns.

The address for letters to the Economist is letters@economist.com.

Lott has on op-ed on gun carrying by professional athletes. As usual, he gets his facts about guns and crime wrong. Lott claims that NCVS data shows that guns are the safest means of self-protection:

Take robbery or assault. The Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey has shown for decades that providing no self-protection is by far the most likely to result in injury. Even actions other than carrying a weapon, such as screaming or trying to attract attention, are safer than passive behavior.

Let’s look at what the National Crime Victimization Survey really shows. The table below shows the injury rates for the self-protection measures Lott mentions. (Extracted from Table 7.1 of Armed by Kleck and Kates.)

Percent Injured NCVS 92-98
	Robbery	Assault
Any SP with gun	13%	28%
Cooperated with O	13%	38%
Tried to attract attention	45%	70%
Screamed from pain, fear	70%	94%
All SP measures	34%	58%
No SP measures at all	24%	55%

Doing nothing is not “by far the most likely to result in injury”. In fact, for both robbery and assault folks who do nothing are less likely to be injured than if they take some self protection action and much less likely to be injured than those who screamed.

And did you notice something else badly wrong with Lott’s argument? He assumes that the injury is the result of the self-protection action. In other words, the injury was caused because the victim screamed in pain. But it is much more likely that the injury came first and caused the victim to scream in pain. The table does not tell us whether the self-protection came first or the injury came first, so we can’t say that the self-protection action caused (or prevented) injury. Fortunately for us (but not for Lott’s argument) the clever people running the NCVS thought of this and also asked if the injury was received after the the self-protection action. Here are the results:

Percent Injured after SP action
	Robbery	Assault
Any SP with gun	8%	4%
Cooperated with O	7%	15%
Tried to attract attention	14%	7%
Screamed from pain, fear	22%	13%
All SP measures	7%	8%
No SP measures at all	—	—

This shows that using a gun isn’t significantly safer than other means for self-protection. Kleck puts it like this:

Consequently, while defensive gun use is generally safe, it does not appear to be as uniquely safe among self-protection methods as data from earlier NCVS data suggested.

Notice that after arguing for years that guns were the safest means of self-protection, when disconfirming data showed up, Kleck changed his opinion. How unlike Lott.

Now Lott is well aware of the table and Kleck’s analysis of it. We know he read Armed, because he posted an anonymous negative review of it. He also cites Armed in The Bias Against Guns claiming it says the opposite of what it actually says. And he also read my entry pointing out that Kleck said the opposite of what Lott claimed. Far from correcting his false statements, Lott repeats them and adds new ones. His article gives dangerously misleading advice about which self-protective actions are best during a robbery or assault.

Most of Lott’s article is stories about incidents of crime. There are only two more statistics offered. They turn out to be unsupported/wrong as well:

Well over 50 percent of NFL players are estimated to own guns. By contrast, about 45 percent of Americans generally own guns.

Notice the “are estimated”. Lott does not give a source for this estimate, but it is likely that the 50 percent number is just someone’s wild guess. And his claim that 45 percent of Americans own guns is wrong also. Even though I’ve corrected him before, he has once more confused a figure for houseold ownership with a figure for personal ownership.