Deltoid

Glenn Reynolds writes:

Here’s another in a steady stream of reports along these lines:

76 million people own a gun in this country. And now more than ever, the number of women who are buying and learning to fire guns is increasing.

It is indeed one of a steady stream of reports. A steady stream of bogus reports that gun ownership by women is increasing.

Tom Smith and Robert Smith thoroughly debunked this notion in a paper published in The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (86:1 1995). They examined such claims and the evidence and concluded:

Through the circulation of statistics of dubious reliability and accuracy, pro-gun groups have successfully created the impressions that gun ownership by women has increased appreciably and has reached unprecedented levels. Most of the media have accepted the claims of increasing ownershipd and have sometimes even mangled and exaggerated these claims.

The facts of gun ownership by women are dramatically different from that described by pro-gun groups and the media. According to the best available data, the ownership of firearms among women is not increasing, the gender gap is not closing, and the level of ownership is much lower than commonly stated, with about 11 to 12% of women owning a gun and 4.5 to 8% owning a handgun. Nor is the typical female gun owner an unmarried woman living in a large city or a past or fearful victim of violent crime. Gun ownership is higher among married women living outside large cities, and it is associated more with hunting than with either fear of crime or past victimization.

Of course, that was ten years ago. These days, anyone with a web browser can analyse the GSS data themselves using the excellent SDA system. I plotted the results in the graph on the left (the output from SDA is here). The error bars show 95% confidence intervals. Smith and Smith’s results are still true: the percentage of women owning guns is not increasing. (The trend was a slight decrease, but this was not statisitically signficant.)

Finally, I should add that I don’t think that the pro-gunners promoting the erroneous claims that female gun ownership was increasing were being deliberately deceptive. More likely it was a case of wishful thinking. They wanted to believe those claims were true, so they were willing to accept inadequate evidence for them.

Say Uncle suggests that I am “anti-gun” and implies that I “favor more gun control in the US”. I am not “anti-gun”. Here is a picture of me (on left) with a gun. Unless you think that Lott is some sort of gun, criticizing him is not being “anti-gun”. Nor do I favour more gun control in the US. I have never written anything saying what I think the laws in the US should be—I don’t think that is any of my business. As for Australia, I felt that the laws before 1996 were about right and I do not think that the 1996 laws were a good idea. (Not that there is the slightest scrap of merit to the claims by American pro-gunners that the 1996 laws caused increases in crime.)

Andrew Wakefield published a study linking immunization injections with autism. The Lancet now says that it should never have been published because of a “fatal conflict of interest”. At the time Wakefield was being paid to collect evidence to support possible compensation claims. Ten of his coauthors have issued a retraction, though Wakefield has refused. I think it was unethical for Wakefield to conceal his conflict of interest.

George Ricaurte published a study alleging that MDMA (Ecstasy) causes brain damage. It turns out that he actually used a different drug in his experiments. Mark Kleiman has the details. I agree with Kleiman—Ricaurte is guilty of outrageous misconduct.

A while ago, I wrote about Steve Milloy’s junkscience.com and observed

Unsuspecting visitors might think that Milloy’s site is devoted to criticizing shoddy science, but they would be wrong. If you look at what he “debunks” you will find that the real criterion for deciding what is “junk science” is not the quality of the work, but the political agenda that it might support. Studies that support a right-wing agenda are endorsed, while studies that don’t are harshly criticized.

Junkscience.com only covered one of the cases above. Can you guess which one? The one about the study that would help lawyers sue a drug company, or the one about the study that supported drug laws?

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Last month I wrote about how junkscience.com and The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition were fronts set up by tobacco companies to oppose regulatioon of smoking. Chris Mooney published a very interesting article in the Washington Post on the use of the phrase “sound science” by other industry funded groups to oppose government regulation.

Iain Murray then attacked Mooney, accusing him of misrepresentation, distortion and double-speak. Mooney has replied here, in my opinion thoroughly destroying Murray’s arguments.

I’ve been reluctant to write anything about the climate change debate because there is a daunting amount of material on the matter, and I don’t feel that I’ve read enough of it to make any kind of useful comment. However, the heart of Murray’s piece is the claim that Mooney misrepresented what the NAS report on climate change found. To see whether that claim is true you don’t have to read the entire literature, just the mercifully brief NAS report.

To support his claim that Mooney misrepresented the report, Murray quotes Richard Lindzen, one of authors of the report (and a global warming skeptic, though Murray does not mention this). The complete article that this quote comes from is here. Lindzen writes:

[I]t is quite wrong to say that our NAS study endorsed the credibility of the IPCC assessment report. We were asked to evaluate the IPCC “Summary for Policymakers” (SPM), the only part of the IPCC reports that is ever read or quoted by the media and politicians.

In fact, right in the very first paragraph of the report you find:

In particular, the written request (Appendix A) asked for the National Academies’ “assistance in identifying the areas in the science of climate change where there are the greatest certainties and uncertainties,” and “views on whether there are any substantive differences between the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] Reports and the IPCC summaries.”

The panel was asked to look at the reports and the summary and give their views on whether their were differences. Section 7 of their report is devoted to this. Lindzen was one of the panel members. How could he possibly be unaware of what the panel was supposed to do?

Lindzen continues:

The SPM, which is seen as endorsing Kyoto, is commonly presented as the consensus of thousands of the world’s foremost climate scientists. In fact, it is no such thing. Largely for that reason, the NAS panel concluded that the SPM does not provide suitable guidance for the U.S. government…

This is pretty well the opposite of what the panel concluded. In section 7 they actually report:

After analysis, the committee finds that the conclusions presented in the SPM and the Technical Summary (TS) are consistent with the main body of the report.

Again, Lindzen is one of the authors of the report. How can he say that the report says the opposite of what it actually says?

Lindzen continues:

The full IPCC report, most of which is written by scientists about specific scientific topics in their areas of expertise, is an admirable description of research activities in climate science. It is not, however, directed at policy. The SPM is, of course, but it is also a very different document. It represents a consensus of government representatives, rather than of scientists. As a consequence, the SPM has a strong tendency to disguise uncertainty, and conjures up some scary scenarios for which there is no evidence.

I suppose it is possible that this is true, but it is not what the NAS report says. The panel checked with the scientists and found “that no changes were made [to the SPM] without the consent of the convening lead authors”.

Lindzen continues:

Similarly, in the case of our NAS report, far too much attention was paid to the hastily prepared summary rather than to the body of the report. The summary claimed that greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise. Yet, the full text noted that 20 years was too short a period for estimating long term trends, a crucial point that the summary neglected to mention.

What? There are only 20 years of data for surface air temperatures? That doesn’t sound right. Let’s see what the full text really says:

Although warming at Earth’s surface has been quite pronounced during the past few decades, satellite measurements beginning in 1979 indicate relatively little warming of air temperature in the troposphere. The committee concurs with the findings of a recent National Research Council report, which concluded that the observed difference between surface and tropospheric temperature trends during the past 20 years is probably real, as well as its cautionary statement to the effect that temperature trends based on such short periods of record, with arbitrary start and end points, are not necessarily indicative of the long-term behavior of the climate system.

Wow. Global warming skeptics have been pointing at the satellite data and arguing that it shows that there is no warming going on. The NAS panel points out that 20 years of satellite data is probably not enough to judge long term trends, so it should be treated with caution. Lindzen then pretends that the caution about the satellite data was meant to apply to the panel’s statement that greenhouse gases were causing global warming. It clearly was not meant to apply to that statement and it doesn’t even make sense if you try to apply it to that statement, since surface temperature data goes back at least one hundred years. Again, Lindzen is one of the authors of the report. I can’t think of any excuse for what he wrote here, can you?

Lindzen goes on to claim:

Our primary conclusion was that despite some knowledge and agreement, the science is by no means settled.

Well, no. Their primary conclusion is expressed at the beginning of their summary:

Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise. Temperatures are, in fact, rising. The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability. Human-induced warming and associated sea level rises are expected to continue through the 21st century.

It is possible that their conclusion is wrong, but they certainly didn’t throw up their hands and say that the science wasn’t settled as Lindzen claims.

I find Lindzen’s systematic misrepresentation of the report that he helped author completely inexcusable. As for Murray, after endorsing Lindzen’s remarks, he very commendably offered a link to the report so that his readers could check for themselves, so I don’t know what to make of what he has done. Didn’t he read the report himself? To compound the problem he has used the same Lindzen quote to attack a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists. Murray wittily calls a group containing twenty Nobel Prize winners the “Union of Crackpot Scientists”.

Seems that bloggers have a strong urge to post their scores for Bryan Caplan’s Libertarian Purity Test. So here’s a spot where you can post your score and find blogs with similar (or different) scores.

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Via Randy Barnett we learn that Lott’s Bias Against Guns has been nominated for a Spooner award for the best book on liberty published in 2003. On the voting page they state:

only one vote per email address will be accepted

I predict that Lott’s book will get a Lott of votes.

Dan from Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics has a problem:

I’m working in a fairly esoteric field in which there are very few existing academic papers (because it’s a highly politically charged topic, I’ve decided not to discuss it here until I have at least have all the data before me). One of the papers was co-authored by John Lott. I’m seriously queasy about citing Lott, given his spectacularly unprofessional behavior in the past surrounding “More Guns, Less Crime” and the Mary Rosh fiasco. So, the question is: do I cite Lott, cite Lott with a footnote indicating that the man is all but entirely discredited, or just ignore the paper?

Usually it is best to provide all relevant information to your readers, so you can’t ignore his paper or his misconduct. So you cite the paper and add a footnote warning your readers that he is not a reliable source of information.

I have posted some of my emails to the firearmsreg mailing list from September and October 2002. This shows some of the initial discussion of Lott’s mysterious survey. Read them here.

Via David Bernstein I learn that the finalists for the Lysander Spooner award are:

James Bovard, Terrorism and Tyranny;
John Lott, Bias Against Guns;
Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment; and
[his] own, You Can’t Say That!

My congratulations to all the finalists. To get into the final four just required emailed votes and it wasn’t even against the rules to vote more than once by using multiple email accounts. Winning the award will be more difficult for Lott, since it will be decided by a jury of members of the Center for Independent Thought’s board of directors and other prominent libertarians and scholars. I hope that the scholars on the jury will check some of the references in the Bias Against Guns. Like this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this.

Update: Ralph Luker wonders how many times Mary Rosh voted for Lott.

When I was looking in the Philip Morris Documents Archive for information on their astroturf operations, I noticed some familiar names: The American Enterprise Institute, The Heartland Institute and the Cato Institute. All have been involved in employing and/or promoting John Lott.

For example, here is a quote from Philip Morris’ 1999 communications plan:

Our communications plan will include enlisting allies and other potential third parties to help provide an “echo chamber” of opinion in local, regional and national media, consistent with our messages.

Some of the “allies” listed were:

• CATO Institute
• Heritage Foundation
• American Enterprise Institute
• Competitive Enterprise Institute

Now, just because Cato allied itself with Philip Morris it doesn’t mean that their is something untoward going on. Cato say that part of its mission mission is to promote limited government, so both Cato and Philip Morris would oppose government regulation of cigarettes, Philip Morris because it would reduce their profits and Cato because of a general opposition to government regulations. But in this document on the Republican agenda and Tort reform, Cato, the AEI and Heritage are all enthusiastic about pushing Philip Morris’ agenda on tort reform:

During the week I spoke with the leadership of the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation to insure that as they submit policy initiatives to the Republican leadership (which all three groups have requested to do on an expedited basis) that they focus on tort reform as a priority and that they include us in the process. All are enthusiastic about the process.

Perhaps I’m missing something here, but the issue in this case is not supporting smaller government, but changing the law to help Philip Morris make more money.

One of the reasons that Cato et al were so eager to do Philip Morris’ bidding might have something to do with the payments listed in Philip Morris’ 1997 Budget:

American Enterprise Institute	$100,000
Cato	$175,000
Competitive Enterprise Institute	$200,000
Heartland	$50,000
Heritage	$53,000
TASSC	$200,000

On their “about cato” page, Cato states:

In order to maintain an independent posture, the Cato Institute accepts no government funding or endowments.

Apparently Cato feels that accepting money from the government would compromise its independence. It would seem that money from Philip Morris has had a similar effect.

Update: Julian Sanchez emails:

While I don’t know what sort of “assurances” the gentleman from Philip Morris feels he got from Cato, I do know that at an event I attended when I worked there, their legal scholar Bob Levy opposed (on federalism grounds) national legislation that would have immunized gunmakers against state suits. He makes essentially the same case in this article. Bob Levy had also been Cato’s point-man on tobacco issues, and while I can’t say for certain, I would be very surprised if he didn’t hold the identical position vis a vis private tobacco suits. Bob was certainly critical of some of the state lawsuits but I think his argument there is fully consistent with the general mission and principles of Cato, whether one agrees with those or not. Also, it’s hard to square some of his writing with the idea that he’s shilling for Phillip Morris. Here’s Bob’s chapter from a recent Cato Handbook for Congress:

The Master Settlement Agreement, signed in November 1998 by the major tobacco companies and 46 state attorneys general, transforms a competitive industry into a cartel, then guards against destabilization of the cartel by erecting barriers to entry that preserve the dominant market share of the tobacco giants. Far from being victims, the big four tobacco companies are at the very center of the plot. They managed to carve out a protected market for themselves, at the expense of smokers and tobacco companies that did not sign the agreement.

Phillip Morris is criticized by name in the same chapter

In another email he adds:

I assume what was going on in the meeting is that the Cato folk at the very least were opposing some of the state actions, and maybe some weird legal maneuvers the states themselves had undertaken. Florida, for instance, temporarily repealed the “assumption of risk” defense (barring the tobacco companies from arguing in court that they weren’t liable if smokers knowingly took a risk by choosing to smoke).

However, while Bob Levy criticises Philip Morris for helping to set up a cartel via the settlement, the actual policy recommendations proposed by Levy and Cato are:

Congress should

• deny funding for the Justice Department’s suit against cigarette makers,
• enact, under the Commerce Clause, legislation that abrogates the multistate tobacco settlement, and
• deregulate the growing of tobacco and the manufacture and advertising of tobacco products.

Each of these proposals would greatly benefit Philip Morris. And while Levy opposes federal inteference in gun laws he thinks it is appropriate in the case of the tobbaco settlement.

So I did some more searching and found a document detailing the tort reform changes Philip Morris wanted Cato to support. They included:

• uniform product liability law for state and federal cases
• limiting punitive damages
• requiring victims to show by “clear and convincing evidence” that the harm they suffered was the direct result of malicious conduct

However, in Cato’s policy recommendations they oppose reforms similar to the Philip Morris ones on federalism grounds. So we do have a case where Cato has behaved independently from Philip Morris even though the Philip Morris guy said they had Cato’s “enthusiastic” support. Perhaps the Phillip Morris guy was trying to justify his salary by pretending Cato was much more supportive than it really was.

Lott has an opinion piece on page 15 of today’s Australian. Lott writes:

Americans may feel safe when an academic addresses a conference using a laser pointer. In the hands of an Australian, however, there is understandable fear that these devices could do untold harm. An Australian academic with a laser pointer would cause real panic.

Well, I’m an Australian academic and I use a laser pointer in my lectures and guess what? There was no panic. They don’t even cower in their seats in terror. Weird.

As far as I can tell, the fact that the sale of high-powered laser pointers is not allowed has gone into Lott’s head, bounced around inside for a while and mutated into a “fact” that people are terrified of the low power ones used in lectures.

Lott then decides that Victoria’s ban on swords also applies to steak knives:

A licensing process will be set up so that a select few will be granted an exemption and pay a $135 fee, but they will have to lock their weapons in sturdy safes and put in burglar alarms. If properly enforced, the law could produce other benefits, such as ensuring that dishes are promptly washed after dinner so that any offending steak knives can be placed back in their safe. On the downside, the knives would still be available during dinner when many family arguments might get out of hand.

I don’t agree with Victoria’s new restrictions on swords. There is hardly any problem with sword violence and there are far more productive uses of police manpower. So I’m actually on the same side as Lott on the sword ban. But he gets an op-ed to argue against it and instead of of making sensible arguments he writes silly stuff about steak knives and laser pointers.

Now I’m used to seeing articles in foreign newspapers that get fundamental things wrong about life here. My favourite example is this article in the Dallas Morning News on “How to speak Australian”. Follow the advice in the article and you’ll have any Aussie you speak to rolling around in laughter. But Lott’s article appears in the Australian. You’d think that if the editors lived here and read the article they would have noticed that something was wrong

Lott also repeats bogus claims he made earlier about crime increases in Australia following the 1996 gun laws. I dealt with these here.

The Australian published a letter to the editor the day after Lott’s piece on laser pointers:

John Lott (Opinion, 24/3) claims an Australian academic with a laser pointer would cause panic. I’m an Australian academic and when I use a laser pointer it does not cause a panic. Lott has confused high-powered lasers, which are resricted because they can cause eye damage, with the low power laser pointers we use in lectures. He also thinks that the Victorian ban on swords applies to steak knives. It’s funny when a foreign newspaper has a story about kangaroos hopping down George St. It’s not so funny when an Australian newspaper does the same thing.
Tim Lambert
Maroubra, NSW

A couple of people commented that Lott was just being sarcastic. I know he was trying to be sarcastic, but his starting premise that laser pointers were banned was wrong. Anyway, wbb demonstrates how sarcasm is done.

Lott’s continued ability to get published in newspapers caused John Quiggin to wonder if bloggers can make a difference. He writes:

Clearly bloggers have a lot more work to do.

No problem. Stay tuned, folks.

Ken Parish criticizes Lott’s claim that the 1996 gun laws were a failure because:

Violent crime rates have gone up dramatically in Australia since the 1996 Port Arthur gun control measures. And violent crime rates averaged 20 per cent higher in the six years after the law was passed (from 1997 to 2002) than they did in 1996, 32 per cent higher than the violent crime rates in 1995. The same comparisons for armed robbery rates showed increases of 67 per cent and 74 per cent, respectively; for aggravated assault, 20 per cent and 32 per cent; for rape, 11 per cent and 12 per cent; murder, attempted murder and manslaughter rose by 5 per cent in both cases.

Parish correctly notes that this is a strawman argument. It is unreasonable to expect the law to reduce non-gun crimes. Parish points to statistics that show a substantial reduction in gun deaths which may have been caused by the gun laws.

Lott’s numbers also contain several significant errors. A table containing all the crime figures is here. (I also have them in a spreadsheet.) Lott’s first error is that he doesn’t know what the crime categories are. He calls the figure for sexual assaults, “rape”, and that for assaults, “aggravated assaults”, making the crimes seem more serious than they actually are. Next, he compares the rate in 1996 with the average rate in the years following the law. Because rates fluctuate from year to year this is likely to lead to misleading results. In the last column of my table I instead compare the average for 1993–1996 with the average for 1997–2002. Another thing that is clear from the table is that gun crimes are only about 1% of violent crimes. The most important crime where guns are involved a significant fraction of the time is murder. The with-gun murder rate declined from 0.37 to 0.3, while the overall murder rate fell by a similar amount, from 1.7 to 1.65. So how did Lott manage to avoid telling his readers about the decline in murder rates? Look again at the figure he reports—it’s for the total of murders, attempted murders and manslaughters. This total increased because the number of attempts went up by more than the number of murders went down. Murder attempts became less lethal, but by carefully selecting the statistics to report, Lott tried to make it look like the law had not produced any crime decreases. If you look in the table you will see some other decreases as well, but naturally the only figures that Lott reports are increases.

I should note that the decrease in murders isn’t statistically significant. More data will be needed if we to find out if the decrease was caused by chance.

The Panda’s Thumb is an excellent new blog devoted to defending the integrity of science against attacks from creationists. I put it straight into my blog roll. Mark Perakh has a post where he tells a story that should be very familiar to those who know about Lott’s antics at Amazon.com.

My book Unintelligent Design became available from Amazon in the middle of December 2003. On December 22 those curious observers who watch the sometimes funny exchange of opinions regarding books offered by Amazon, already could read a review of my book signed “A reader from Waco, Tx.” The opinion of that anonymous and very prompt reviewer was that my book was bad because it was published by a bad publisher — Prometheus Books. The anonymous reviewer recommended instead a forthcoming book by William Dembski titled The Design Revolution (which presumably must be good because of being published by a good publisher — InterVarsity Press). The reviewer from Waco promised that Dembski’s book would answer all my concerns. Of course, the fact that Dembski holds a non-teaching position at Baylor university which is located in Waco, Tx, was supposed to be a mere coincidence.

Some other reader responded to the reviewer from Waco referring to the latter’s review as that from “reader from Waco.” Suddenly, a few days later, the review from Waco reappeared on Amazon, word for word, but now signed “A reader from Riesel, Tx,” thus making a reference to “a reader from Waco” in another reviewer’s reply incomprehensible. Of course, the fact that Dembski happens to live in Riesel, Tx, was supposed to be just another of those coincidences whose probabilities Dembski is so fond of calculating. Indeed, Dembski would not, of course, advertise his own book anonymously, would he? It would be against his rigorous standards of decent behavior. Then something unthinkable happened. There was a glitch on the Canadian Amazon website wherein all real authors of anonymous reviews were revealed for a whole week. Who turned out to be the reader from Waco a.k.a. reader from Riesel? Surprise, surprise! It was our old acquaintance, mathematician, philosopher, theologian and the Isaac Newton of information theory, William Dembski.

The reason why the location of the reviewer changed to Riesel would be that Dembski posted a review under his own name on January 20, 2004 and gave his location as Riesel. Amazon reports the same location for all reviews by the same reviewer so Dembski’s anonymous review was also changed to Riesel.

This is not the only bit of underhanded behaviour that “Intelligent Design” proponents have been guilty of recently. Brian Leiter posted a blistering critique of a pro-Intelligent-Design book review by one Lawrence VanDyke. Chris Mooney explains what happened next:

perhaps because Leiter’s critique was so (justifiably) scathing, conservative attack dogs pounced. The National Review Online ran a piece by one Hunter Baker, a “freelance writer in Texas,” accusing Leiter of abusing his position as a distinguished scholar to try to ruin a young student’s career. Yet as Leiter notes here, Baker isn’t exactly a disinterested party. In fact, he’s the teaching assistant of pro-ID scholar Francis Beckwith, whose book was reviewed by VanDyke! Does National Review have any shame?

That would be the same National Review that published David Kopel and Glenn Reynold’s smear of Steve Levitt using as source a “scholar” whose identity they deliberately concealed. And even though Levitt immediately denied the charge, to this day the NRO has not seen fit to correct the article.

I wrote earlier about the Tony Martin case. Martin shot a fleeing burglar in the back and left him to die. He was convicted of murder (reduced to manslaughter on appeal). Pro-gunners such as John Lott, Glenn Reynolds and John Derbyshire have written about the Martin case, apparently unaware of the facts that showed that the killing was not in self defence, and proceeded to make bogus claims that self defence was against the law in Britain. Claims which they have never bothered to correct.

Last week this story appeared in the Scotsman:

A man who stabbed to death an armed intruder at his home was jailed for eight years today. Carl Lindsay, 25, answered a knock at his door in Salford, Greater Manchester, to find four men armed with a gun. When the gang tried to rob him he grabbed a samurai sword and stabbed one of them, 37-year-old Stephen Swindells, four times.

Now, there are two possible explanations for Lindsay’s conviction:

1. The jury knew more facts that those which appeared in the brief story and these showed that the killing was not in self defence.
2. Self defence is illegal in the UK.

The reaction from bloggers was swift and extensive. At the time of writing, Technorati reports 61 blogs linking to the story, all going for explanation 2, none even considering the possibility that the killing was not self defence.

John Derbyshire called it the “Outrage of the week”. Glenn Reynolds expressed disappointment “at this barbaric infringement of human rights”. John Lott reckoned that it showed that there wasn’t a right to self defence in Scotland (apparently he thinks that Manchester is in Scotland). James Taranto said that Lindsay should have instead been “hailed as a hero”. Jerry Scharf claimed “Self defence outlawed because it deprives criminals of their livelyhood”. Michael Demmon called it a “moronic sentence”. Dean Esmay called the Brits “bloody well insane”. Dozens more bloggers expressed similar sentiments.

However, when more details emerged, it became likely that explanation 1 was the right one and the killing was not defensive. Lindsay was actually a drug dealer, and more importantly, Swindells had been stabbed four times in the back while fleeing. The reaction to this was mixed. Commendably, some updated their original posts and corrected their mistaken conclusions. Esmay and Demmon fall into this category. Some just ignored the new information. Derbyshire, Lott and Scharf fall into this category. Taranto adds an update that mentions the drug dealer part but doesn’t mentin the more important fact that Lindsay literally backstabbed Swindell. Reynolds updates and mentions the new information, but instead of correcting his original opinion insists that it doesn’t really make a difference—just like in the Martin case, he is sure that the UK does not allow self-defence and all evidence to the contrary is ignored or discounted.

I guess we’ll see if these bloggers have learned from this and are less quick to jump to incorrect conclusions the next time a similar case comes along.

Update: Glenn Reynolds has added another update where he writes:

Matt Rustler notes that while the English shooting may have been good or not, it’s not clearly a bad call based on the additional available evidence.

True, but the additional evidence does not contradict the original story in any way. That is, it wasn’t clearly a bad call based on the original story either.