Deltoid

Lehrer and Lott have recycled their previous cherrypicking exercise into an article in the Investor’s Business Daily falsely claiming that gun control in Britain, Canada and Australia have lead to “historic increases in crime”. Mostly they repeat their previous claims, so I’ll just comment on the new ones. They claim that “overall violent crime” in England increased by 118%. The first graph at left (from Chapter 5 of Crime in England and Wales 2002/2003) shows how utterly false their claim is. Since 1997, violent crime has declined significantly. Where did their 118% increase come from? Well, the second graph shows the number of violent crimes recorded by the police. To get the increase that Lott and Lehrer claim, all you have to do is use the police numbers and ignore the footnote on the graph, which says (my emphasis):

“There is a discontinuity in the police recorded trend for violence in 1998 when new offence categories were added to police recorded violence, notably common assault, and new crime counting rules were introduced. The numbers of recorded violent crimes before and after this change should not be compared, as they are not on the same basis.”

Lott and Lehrer claim:

the exploding crime rates (including gun crime) in countries that have banned all guns shows that we can add gun control to the list of government planning efforts that do not live up to their billing.

Their article only mentions gun crime in England. That’s because gun crime in Australia and Canada, far from exploding, has decreased (see Australian and Canadian figures). This is not a problem for cherry pickers like Lott and Lehrer—they just deceive their readers by only reporting the increases in crime and not the decreases. And often when there have been decreases, like violent crime in England and homicide in Canada, they report them as increases.

Lehrer does some solo cherry picking at NRO, writing:

Since American crime rates peaked in the early 1990s, crime has fallen in 48 American states and over 80 percent of America’s major cities. Meanwhile, it has risen in six of Canada’s ten major providences [sic] and seven of its ten largest cities.

The crime rate in Canada has fallen significantly since the early 90s. I don’t have the crime figures for each province, so i don’t know whether Lehrer’s claim is more cherry picking or just wrong.

Lehrer also wrongly compares the overall crime rate in Canada with that in the US. The crime rate is defined differently in the two places, so cannot be compared. He also repeats the cherry picked claims from his work with Lott: “Both the United Kingdom and Australia have seen crime soar”. Lehrer seems well suited to collaborate with Lott.

Update: The earliest crime figures by city I could find at StatsCan were for 1995. Between 1995 and 2002 the crime rate has decreased in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa, Hamilton and Quebec. The only large cities where it has increased are Winnipeg, Edmontonand Calgary. Now Lehrer’s claim was about changes since the early nineties, but the overall crime rate in Canada was even higher then, so his claim about increases in most cities is likely false.

Well, I now have 500 posts here, and only 399 are about Lott. The first post I made to this blog was on Jan 12, 2003, but to confuse things I just put up my first ever Usenet post to make it look as if my blog is older than the web.

Sadly No gives Lott’s latest op-ed the short shrift it deserves.

Update: Hunt Stilwell also writes about the stupidity of Lott’s argument.

Tom Giovenetti, the president of the Institute for Policy Innovation has responded to my story on the Microsoft-funded think tanks attack on open source. It’s rather an odd response—he’s angry that I dared to suggest that they were funded by Microsoft, but he’s not going to deny it. Anyway, here it is, with my comments:

* Your journalism is as lousy as your software.

My software works fine, thank you.

First, you accuse IPI of taking money from Microsoft, but you have no facts or proof. True, you’d LIKE us to do your homework for you, but in absence of proof, a decent journalist never makes an accusation.

Actually I didn’t accuse IPI of taking money from Microsoft. I presented the evidence that suggests that they have and allowed my readers to form their own conclusions.

The best you can do is say that a former member of IPI’s board of directors went to work for Miscosoft like 8-9 years after leaving IPI’s board? Pretty tenuous connection, don’t you think? By the way, he doesn’t work at Microsoft any longer, if that means anything. But of course, it doesn’t.

He was their chief of external affairs at Microsoft at a time when they gave money to many think tanks (including $380,000 to Citizens for a Sound Economy). If he was spreading the money around so extensively, why wouldn’t he think of his old think tank?

Second, regarding whether we take money from Microsoft, IPI has an absolute policy of protecting our donors’ privacy. I’m sure if you donated money to IPI, you would appreciate that policy. When people are publically identified as donors to an organization, they are beseiged by new requests for money. So we absolutely protect their privacy.

You’re not going to admit that they funded you because otherwise Microsoft will be beseiged by requests for money? Err, everyone already knows they give lots of money to think tanks ($380,000 to CSE, for example). And if they didn’t fund you, saying so would not damage their privacy.

And, finally, we have 2 more studies on open source coming out later this summer, so keep your inkwell full.

Let me guess, your studies will conclude that Open Source is lousy?

More criticism of the IPI attack on Open Source is here. Notice that Dan Geer states that IPI is funded by Microsoft.

Giovanetti’s views on intellectual property are interesting:

I have always believed that there is absolutely no difference between “real” and “intellectual” property. I agree that Jim Henson’s descendents should control and own the rights to his creations, in perpetuity, unless they sell those rights to someone else, who THEN should control them in perpetuity. All the arguments about the benefits to society of something moving into the public domain are unsupportable. In fact, it is generally recognized that the minute something moves into the public domain, it disappears, because there is no longer any incentive for anyone to do anything further with it.

Shakespeare, Darwin, Mozart, Dickens, The Bible, all disappeared! Who knew?

And what happens if a think tank isn’t on Microsoft’s side?:

[Microsoft] stopped donating to the respected conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, even though the AEI has no official position on the case and most of its antitrust and technology experts are pro-Microsoft. But the institute happens to be home to Robert H. Bork, the legal scholar and former appellate judge. Bork, known for his minimalist views on antitrust enforcement, shocked the company when he took the other side. Microsoft has also funded a newspaper ad campaign of conservative academics under the auspices of the Independent Institute and underwrote the cost of publishing the sympathetic book Winners, Losers & Microsoft.

Update: Tom Giovanetti replied to this post. He does not want his reply posted so I will summarize it:

1. There is no legal requirement for IPI to disclose its funding sources, so no-one can know for sure if they are funded by Microsoft or not.
2. Open source software is lame.
3. Open sourcers spend their time writing viruses and worms, hacking websites, and asserting things without proof.
4. In any case, if IPI is funded by Microsoft (not that Giovenetti is admitting this), criticizing IPI will just make them seem more heroic and ensure continued funding.

After reviving my first ever online post. I’ve dug up my first ever post on guns. Phil Ronzone posted this to soc.culture.australian:

Of even more interest is the TREMENDOUSLY larger per capita rape numbers in the “non-violent peace loving” European counties. The Unites States at 26.30 is below such countries as Australia (90.82), West Germany (77.49), New Zealand (65.73), Netherlands (56.00), Scotland (44.69), Denmark (41.06), Sweden (40.52), Austria (30.42).

Gee, it must be the USA system of mandatory penis registration & control that accounts for our per capita rate of rape being about 25% of that of Australia.

On Nov 4, 1991, I replied:

Phil, comparing crime rates between different countries is notoriously difficult, because of differences in the definition of crimes, reporting rates, police recording procedures, and so on.

I looked up some crime statistics in “The Size of the Crime Problem in Australia” by Mukherjee and Dagger, published by the Australian Institute of Criminology and found the following:

[figures for sexual assault] cannot therefore by compared between states with any validity at all.

So, comparing countries is even less valid.

Anyway, the rate for sexual assault in 1988 was 55 (per 100,000 population). I’d by interested in hearing in hearing where on earth you got your 90 figure. Sexual assualt includes rape, attempted rape, assualt with intent to rape, and indecent exposure. The only numbers I could find for the rape were for 1976—6.6. I could make some crack about the rate being 25% of that in the USA, but I hope I’ve convinced you how stupid that would be.

I’m afraid that people are still making the same mistake as Ronzone. Howard “Worst defence of Lott ever” Nemerov has an article purporting to show that the 1996 gun ban in Australia caused a dramatic rise in violent crime. Nemerov writes:

Following are selected comparisons for violent crime rates per 100,000 people in 2001. While homicide is lower and robbery is similar, assault and rape occur more than twice as often in Australia, proving that when the physically weaker are barred from possessing the best tool for self-defense, they are rendered helpless. As with England, women pay the price when politicians use tragedy as an excuse to eliminate armed threat to their power.

Homicide:	AUS - 1.8	US - 5.6
Assault:	AUS - 779	US - 319
Rape:	AUS - 86	US - 32
Robbery:	AUS - 136	US - 146

However, the rate he gives for rape in Australia is not for rape but for sexual assault. And the rate he gives for assault in the US is not for assault, but for aggravated assault. The rates in Australia are lower for both of the comparable crime categories. And Nemerov used rates from 2001, even though rates from 2002 are available. Most rates didn’t change, except that the robbery rate in Australia dropped to 106. Nemerov blames any increase in crime rates in Australia on the gun laws, will he credit the gun laws with causing this decrease?

Mann, Bradley and Hughes have published some corrections to the supplementary information for the famous hockey stick graph showing the temperature record of the last 1000 years. They say that the errors do not affect their published results. This could explain why McKitrick and McIntyre could not reproduce their results, but McKitrick is continuing to insist that Mann’s graph is wrong.

McKitrick has also published some errata. Unlike Mann’s error McKitrick’s error affects his results:

Figure 3 in the Cooler Heads Briefing on TBS contains an error. Tim Lambert of Australia has pointed out that missing data were handled differently between Figures 2 and 3, and when this is fixed the example no longer illustrates the intended point. The point (that the trend can change if the averaging rule is changed) is shown in this Revised Spreadsheet. Our thanks to Tim Lambert for pointing out the error.

(The post where I pointed out the error is here.)

I looked at his revised spreadsheet. This time he has dealt with missing values consistently and it does indeed show a warming trend when the usual arithmetic mean is used and a cooling trend when their unusual root-mean square is used. So how did he manage this? After all, as I showed in my earlier post, the root-mean square in Kelvins gives almost he same answer as the regular average. Well, McKitrick invented his own temperature scale. McKitrick modestly did not give it a name, but I am dubbing it the McKitrick scale in honour of its creator. To help you gain familiarity with this new scale, the form below lets you convert between degrees McKitrick and the old-fashioned degrees Celsius and degrees Fahrenheit. Just type a number into any of the boxes and press “Enter”.

°M     °F     °C

Anyway, in his revised spreadsheet McKitrick takes the root-mean-square average of temperatures measured in degrees McKitrick. This way of averaging temperatures gives some rather odd results. For example, the RMS average of -10°M and -10°M is not -10°M as you might expect, but +10°M. Needless to say no-one actually uses RMS averages of temperatures in the McKitrick or any other scale, and no-one in their right mind would use them.

So revising their original example to use degrees McKitrick means the trend is different for different averaging methods? Well, no. If you take their original example and use the root-mean-square-in-degrees-McKitrick average, you still get the same trend. In the revised spreadsheet McKitrick has also changed the set of weather stations used. Even then it makes little difference to the size of trend—it changes an insignificant warming trend to an insignificant cooling trend.

To summarize: even if you use a weird root-mean-square-in-degrees-McKitrick average it makes little difference to the size of any warming or cooling trend you might see.

The cover story in the Spectrum section of the Sydney Morning Herald is Paul “Magic Water” Sheehan’s review of Fahrenheit 9/11. Fahrenheit 9/11 isn’t opening in Australia until July 29, and Sheehan appears not to have seen it. So how does he write the review? Easy—he cuts and pastes from reviews by other people. Here is Sheehan:

Perhaps the most egregious factual error is the bald and absurd claim that Iraq under Saddam had never attacked, killed or even threatened any American.

And here is Christopher Hitchen’s review (he calls this an “astonishing falsification”):

Moore asserts that Iraq under Saddam had never attacked or killed or even threatened (his words) any American.

Could it be a coincidence that Sheehan and Hitchens used the same words? No, because Moore never made that assertion and they are not “his words”. The incomparable Bob Somerby quotes Moore’s actual words:

MOORE: On March 19, 2003, George W. Bush and the United States military invaded the sovereign nation of Iraq. A nation that had never attacked the United States. A nation that had never threatened to attack the United States. A nation that had never murdered a single American citizen.

The “astonishing falsification” here belongs to Hitchens, who turns a true statement (Iraq never threatened to attack the US) into a false one (Iraq never even threatened any American). Somerby points out:

Who knows—maybe Hitch even believed his characterization when he penned it for Slate two weeks back. By this week, of course, he’d had time to check, and we saw him make this same claim Monday night.

For his part Sheehan just copied from Hitchens without bothering with the usual convention of quotation marks. That’s plagiarism.

Update: Professor Bunyip often writes about plagiarism in Australian papers. For example, here he suggests that Philip Adams is guilty of plagiarism. Bunyip’s verdict on Sheehan? Not guilty! And Bunyip isn’t dismissing the charge because Sheehan is a fellow RWDB, no sir. Apparently Sheehan was drummed out of the RWDB brigade because he opposed the war on Iraq and even a 3000 word rant attacking Michael Moore isn’t enough for readmission. No, to be let back in, Sheehan’s going to have to support the invasion of Iran which is apparently scheduled to occur after the election. (Where are the armies for this coming from? I guess the plan is to turn in the three horseman cards the coalition holds.)

Now lifting one sentence is pretty minor and my students would get off with a warning for doing such thing. What makes this more serious is that the sentence Sheehan lifted was a fabrication—Moore didn’t say what Hitchens claimed. And by stealing it, Sheehan took ownership of the fabrication.

Update 2: If you want to read a review of Fahrenheit 9/11 from someone who has actually seen it, I recommend Bob Somerby.

I’ve been having a discussion with Kevin Baker about his claim that self-defence in the UK is practically illegal. The discussion started when Carl Lindsay was convicted of manslaughter after killing an intruder who was trying to rob him. I wrote:

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.

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.

In his latest response, Baker objects:

Note that Tim doesn’t wonder why 61 out of 61 blogs choose option 2 - to him it’s obvious that we’re all just “gullible gunners” and there is no prior evidence that would lead us to believe that “self defence is illegal in the UK,” this story being only the latest example.

Actually, I specifically stated that the “prior evidence” as put forward by Lott, Reynolds and Derbyshire was bogus. Tony Martin did not act in self-defence. The person who has done the most to misinform pro-gunners about British law on self-defence is Joyce Lee Malcolm. In a book and several articles she has mislead her readers, falsely claiming that Tony Martin was convicted after defending himself and writing about British law on self-defence:

That willingness was further undermined by a broad revision of criminal law in 1967 that altered the legal standard for self-defense. Now everything turns on what seems to be “reasonable” force against an assailant, considered after the fact. As Glanville Williams notes in his Textbook of Criminal Law, that requirement is “now stated in such mitigated terms as to cast doubt on whether it [self-defense] still forms part of the law.”

Malcolm has doctored the quote from Glanville Williams to reverse its meaning. The word “it” does not refer to self-defence as Malcolm’s addition to the quote indicates, but to the requirement that the defender’s belief that his actions were necessary had to be a reasonable belief. If this requirement is no longer part of the law it makes it easier to plead self-defence.

Here is the entire paragraph that Malcolm pulled her quote from. It is is clear that “it” refers to “The requirement of reasonableness” and not to “self-defence”:

The requirement of reasonableness is unhappy. Enough has been said in criticism of it, and the CLRC has recommended that it should be expunged from the law. In practice, as we have seen, the requirement may be construed indulgently to the defendant, for, as Holmes J memorably said in the United States Supreme Court, “detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.” As we shall see in the next section, the requirement is now stated in such mitigated terms as to cast doubt on whether it still forms part of the law.

You can see this paragraph in context here. Here is more from Williams (my emphasis) that shows how extraordinarily selective Malcolm had to be with her quotes to make it look like self-defence was no longer part of the law:

All putative self-defence, it seems, falls into the category of “necessary self-defence.” In this part of the judgment, the idea that the defendant’s belief is merely evidence of reasonableness has suddenly vanished; indeed, the very word “reasonable” is dropped. It seems, therefore, that the decision makes a radical change in the law. At least where the defender fears death or serious injury, there is no proportionality rule any longer; and a good thing too—in view of the jury’s verdict in Shannon. German law, it seems, gets on without a proportionality rule, and so could we, where the facts are similar to those in Shannon. The reasoning in the decision is fudged, but that is the price one pays for a beneficial change in the law.

Back to Kevin Baker’s post. He conceded that British law allows self-defence, but argued that prosecution of self-defenders means that it is not legal in practice. I challenged him on this, pointing out that he didn’t have a single case where this had occurred. In his latest post Baker tries to find “just one example of the government prosecuting someone for an obvious case of self defense”. I’ve organized the cases he mentions into a table and added several more that I was able to find. I’ve only included the ones where someone was killed because the information on the other cases is less complete, making it difficult to determine what really happened. For some of the cases I’ve given two versions of what happened. The first version only tells part of what happened and makes it look like the case was self-defence. The second version adds the details that suggest that the killing was not self-defence.

Killer	Version 1	Version 2	Outcome
Tony Martin	Shot a burglar who broke into his house.	Burglar was shot in the back while fleeing. Martin’s story about what happened was contradicted by the forensic evidence.	Convicted of murder, reduced to manslaughter on appeal because Martin suffered from a paranoid personality disorder.
Satpal Ram	Defended himself against a racist who attacked him with a broken glass.	Stabbed victim in back 2-3 times with a flick knife as well as inflicting multiple other wounds. Did not even plead that it was self-defence.	Convicted of murder.
Carl Lindsay	Stabbed one of four armed robbers with a sword.	Chased robber out of his home and stabbed him the back.	Convicted of manslaughter.
Thomas O’Connor	Stabbed in the chest an intruder who broke down his front door.		Not prosecuted
Barry-Lee Hastings	Stabbed a burglar who he thought was armed with a machete	Stabbed him in the back 12 times, outside the house and while the burglar was lying face down.	Convicted of manslaughter.
Steven Parkin	Stabbed a burglar	Stabbed from behind while the burglar was fleeing	Judge directed a not guilty verdict
John Lambert	Stabbed a burglar in the chest		Not prosecuted
Brett Osborn	Stabbed an cocaine-addled intruder	Intruder was unarmed and stabbed five times in the back	Pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
Nick Baungartner	Tackled a burglar who suffered a severe neck injury		Not prosecuted.
John Campbell	Stabbed a burglar who attacked him with a baseball bat		Not prosecuted
Dean Davis	Stabbed a burglar		Not prosecuted
Richard Watkins	Stabbed an armed robber in the chest		Not prosecuted
Shannon	Stabbed an assailant with scissors		Convicted of manslaughter, conviction quashed on appeal because judge did not describe the law on self-defence correctly

There is a pattern here. In the obvious cases of self-defence, the ones where the fatal wound was inflicted in the front, the killer was not prosecuted. This alone disproves Baker’s assertion that self-defence in England is practically illegal. The cases involving back-stabbing or back-shooting were prosecuted. These cases are not obviously self-defence, though it is possible they might have been. Kevin Baker argues (writing about the Hastings case):

Yes, the burglar was stabbed in the back. So? If you’re grappling with an attacker with a knife in your hand, where is the blade going to go?

The trouble with this is that we have less information than the jury. If Hastings had been grappling with the burglar when he stabbed him in the back then his lawyer would have made sure that the jury knew this. If you want to argue that jury decided the case wrongly it is not sufficient to speculate that there were some additional facts that would prove it was self-defence—you have to find and present those facts. As it happens, when Hastings was stabbing the burglar in the back again and again, the burglar was not grappling with him but lying face down outside the house.

In most of the cases we have similar difficulties. We have less information than the jury and are in no position to argue that they made the wrong decision. In the case of Satpal Ram we fortunately have more information. Baker points to a Guardian article that claims that Ram was convicted of murder for defending himself from a racist attack, but the author of the Guardian article (and Kevin Baker) just took Ram’s word for what happened without checking to see whether he was being truthful. Alexander Baron has a web site arguing that Ram is guilty of murder and has posted the judgment of the appeal that shows how Ram lied to the reporter. The evidence presented in the judgment shows Ram’s claims are contradicted by eye witness testimony and the coroner’s report.

Satpal Ram’s story	The truth
Satpal responded by drawing a short-bladed penknife.	Satpal used a flick knife with a five-inch blade.
Prior to his trial Satpal had only one 40-minute consultation with his barrister, the late Douglas Draycott QC, who informed him that because of the number of stab wounds Pearce had sustained a plea of self-defence - which is an absolute defence - was destined to fail. This was based upon a misreading of a pathologist’s report. It did list six wounds, but said that only two of them were the result of the blade. The rest were superficial and caused when Pearce fell on to broken glass.	Pearce received the wounds before he fell down, so all of them were inflicted by Ram.
At the trial, a whole series of Asian witnesses, who could have supported Satpal’s version of events, were never called. The evidence of the one who did take the stand was dismissed because his broken English could not readily be understood. No translator was employed.	There were no such witnesses. The witness who spoke in broken English was a witness for the prosecution who was actually able to give a statement in fluent English to the police.
At one point the judge told the jury he would translate, even though he did not speak Bengali.	Does this sound even faintly plausible?

In the whole list there is only case where it is clear that someone was convicted after defending himself. That is the case of Shannon whose conviction was reversed on appeal. But that was back in 1980 and the appeal set a precedent so that it would not happen again.

Finally we turn to Brett Osborn. Baker claims that this is a case of the government prosecuting someone for an obvious case of self defence. Like all the killers who were convicted he stabbed the victim in the back. This doesn’t sound he was defending himself, but there were others present so he could have been defending them; we just don’t know for sure. In any event, it certainly isn’t an obvious case of self-defence. In this case we don’t know what the jury thought of the evidence because Osborn chose to plead guilty to manslaughter. Why?

Osborn decided that he could not face the risk of life imprisonment. “You see it in the paper,” Osborn has said, “that bloke Tony Martin who shot the kid who was burgling his house. He went to prison for years.

Osborn mistakenly believed that Martin had been convicted despite acting in self-defence. And the reason why he believed that was because of the activities of the “Tony Martin is innocent brigade”. If Osborn was really acting in self-defence then the jury would have acquitted him but Osborn was unsure of this because of people like Baker who argue that self-defence is legally risky in England. As a result Osborn is now in jail.

The law and the results of the cases seem clear. Self-defence in Britain is lawful. There may be some chilling effect on people because of fear of being convicted for self-defence, but the people responsible for that are on Baker’s side of the question.

[Note: This is a copy of a document found at this link on John Lott’s website on April 25, 2005. I have added critical commentary, written in italics like this. Tim Lambert ] (more…)

After a comment spambot left spam on over a hundred of my posts, I’ve decided to close comments on posts older than 60 days. I had to write a small plugin to do this. Blosxom users can get it here. You’ll also need Jason Clark’s storystate plugin.

Matthew Yglesias and Mark Kleiman have both written about the Assault Weapons Ban. I agree with Yglesias that the ban doesn’t make sense since it bans weapons by name rather than by some characteristic that makes them dangerous. I’ve criticized the ban in Australia on semi-automatic long guns, but at least that was based on the type of the weapons rather than it’s name. And while the ban in Australia may have caused a small reduction in the homicide rate, this reduction is too small to justify the cost of the ban.

Kleiman also states:

The evidence that crime can be prevented by restricting weapons availability to those without prior criminal histories simply isn’t there.

I don’t agree with this. I think a relaxation of Australia’s gun laws to the level of those in the US would likely result in a significant increase in homicides here.

If you look at the numbers you will find that Australia and the US have roughly similar violent crime rates—some rates are higher in the US and some in Australia. The big difference is that in Australia guns are much less likely to be used in crime and the homicide rate is much lower. This isn’t a coincidence. Several studies have found that crimes committed with guns tend to be significantly more likely to result in the death of the victim. For example, Kleck and McElrath (Social Forces 69:669-92 1991) did a multivariate analysis on NCS and SHR data. The analysis implied that when the attacker was armed with a gun it increased the chance of a dead victim by five times as when the attacker had a knife. (I write “the analysis implied” rather than “they found” because Kleck misinterpreted his results as meaning that guns made almost no difference to lethality.)

Nor is the cost in the US of criminal gun use cancelled out by the benefit of defensive gun use. All surveys that have examined both offensive and defensive gun use have found that offensive gun use is much more common. The best data we have on this, from the NCVS, indicates that offensive use are about ten times as frequent as defensive uses. Lott claims that defensive uses are five times as common by comparing the lowest available estimate for gun crimes (430,000 from the FBI’s UCR) and a high estimate for defensive gun uses (An average of the estimates computed by Kleck *). While that produces a ratio favourable to Lott’s position, it is impossible for both estimates to be correct. According to the respondents in Kleck’s survey (which is the basis for the DGU estimates Lott uses) one fifth of his estimated 2.5 million defensive gun uses were against gun crimes, implying that every single time a criminal committed a gun crime, they encountered an armed victim. This is clearly impossible.

Some would argue that restrictions on guns to law-abiding folks would have no effect on criminals, but gun ownership by the law abiding creates both a supply (from stolen guns) and a demand (to defend against armed victims) for guns by criminals. Please note that I’m not arguing that if the US adopted Australian style gun laws it would greatly reduce gun use by criminals. Criminals in the US already tend to use guns and would want to continue to use them to defend against other criminals even if law-abiding people disarmed.

Kellermann’s studies on guns frequently get criticized by people who do not seem to have read them. The latest to do so is Michael Krauss, who writes

Notwithstanding all this data, the press gave extraordinary publicity to a 1993 article by one Arthur Kellerman in the New England Journal of Medicine. Kellerman’s “study” concluded that the presence of a gun in one’s home dramatically increased one’s chances of being killed by gunfire. As has since been widely noted, though, the study had stupendous methodological flaws that would surely have precluded its publication, were the NEJM not blinded by its fear and loathing of guns.

As we shall see below, Krauss doesn’t seem to have actually read Kellermann’s study.

The study consisted of going to homes where a homicide occurred, and asking whether there was a gun in the house. Such a study by design and definition excluded successful uses of the gun (i.e., where the attacker is scared off and no one is killed).

Not so. Krauss is apparently unaware that the study was a case-control study. That means that as well as visiting the houses where there was a homicide (the cases), they also found similar homes where there wasn’t a homicide (the controls). Successful uses of guns that prevent homicides show up in the controls.

Even if the homicide victim was someone who did not live in the house, and who was stabbed to death, the answer “yes” to the question, “Was there a gun in the house?”, would increase the correlation between guns and homicide.

Krauss does not seem to have even bothered to look at the abstract of the study. It states: “we identified homicides occurring in the homes of victims”.

Moreover, the fear of being killed by a stalker or a gang might well contribute to one’s decision to purchase a firearm. If the fear is well-founded, then we would expect gun purchasers to be more likely victims of murder than others. But that does not establish that the firearm ownership caused the crime. Analogously to Kellerman’s dishonest methodology, I could “prove” that visiting a hospital correlates with dying. This does not show that the hospital visit caused the fatal illness.

Krauss seems to be unaware that Kellermann’s study controlled for many factors such as age, sex, neighbourhood, drug use and criminal history. To take the hospital example, if we compare people with the same disease and the same severity of disease and find that the ones who go to hospital are more likely to die than the ones that don’t then you have evidence that the hospital is making things worse. Furthermore, Kellermann’s study found that gun ownership was not associated with a higher risk of being murdered by other means, just with a higher risk of being murdered with a gun. Are we supposed to believe that people only get a gun to defend against potential killers that are going to use guns and not against people who might attack them with a knife?

I would have hoped that before making serious charges of dishonesty against Kellermann, Krauss would have looked at Kellermann’s study, but he does not seem to have done so. And Krauss is a law professor.

Some weeks ago Lott wrote this article, where he dismissed concerns about fraudulent electronic voting as “conspiracy theories”. As far as I can tell Lott has no expert knowledge about computers, and rather than do any research into the electronic voting machines, he has just invented his own version of the way these machines work. For example, he wrote:

After the election, most electronic voting machines transfer the election results to a compact disk or some other “read only” format. These CDs are then taken to a central location where they are read into a computer.

However, as Avi Rubin, who is a computer science professor at John Hopkins, states about Diebold machines:

All of the tallies are kept on PCMCIA cards.

PCMCIA cards are not “read only”—stick them into a laptop and you can change any of the information stored on one.

In this thread at The High Road, pro-gun activist Jim March explained how he emailed Lott, writing:

Dr. Lott,

You may remember me. I’m the gun rights activist out in California who has been tracking racism and misconduct in concealed weapons permits; I have an autographed copy of “More Guns, Less Crime” and I am otherwise a huge fan of yours.

Which is why I was saddened by the factual errors in “Voting machine conspiracy theories“

March went on to correct the numerous errors in Lott’s article, in particular:

Problem: one, all three of the biggest and most suspect vendors (Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia) do NOT use read-only CDs. They use PCMCIA read/write memory cards. Security problems with the data on these memory cards has been noted before. One of the Diebold internal memos that has been leaked discussed that very issue, in a report of a conversation with a California SecState staffer name of Lou Dieder:

March finished his email with:

Calling myself, Bev Harris, Professor Rebecca Mercuri, Dr. David Dill, Professor Doug Jones and others “conspiracy theorists” doesn’t address the underlying disaster here, and I am deeply disappointed in your column.

Professor Lott, you did important scholarship on the CCW issue in ‘97 with Prof. Mustard. That, you researched. If state governments always acted sanely, the CCW laws in California, New York and elsewhere would have been reformed shortly afterwards. You of all people know how screwed up things can get in the public sector.

Re-think your position here. You’re being used as a stooge of some very corrupt and unethical people. You’re better than that.

Pay attention to us geeks on this one, sir.

I will await your reply before making this document public.

Lott’s reply:

I appreciate your comments, and I appreciate your interest in my work on guns. I don’t have time to respond in depth, but I will assure you that I am not a “stooge” for anyone, nor did anyone ask me to write this piece. I have done a lot of work on voting machines, having been for example the statistical expert for the minority report from the USCCR on the 2000 election and having been the statistical expert for the state of Ohio in evaluating the different voting machines. I also worked with USA Today as one of their statistical experts. I do appreciate your information and I will look at it, though I should tell you that I have talked to computer programming experts as well as those who designed these machines (as well as their competitors). Attached is also a paper that I have done that is very critical of electronic voting machines with respect to another issue. Again, no one asked me to write this.

March replied to Lott, giving details of the problems with Diebold and providing links where all of his information could be confirmed. They exchanged a couple more emails. So what did Lott do next? He publishes another op-ed in the Washington Times repeating his false claims including:

Most electronic voting machines transfer the election results to a compact disk or some other “read only” format. These CDs are then taken to a central location where they are read into a computer.

It would have only taken Lott a few minutes in the first placeto find out how electronic voting machines transfer their results. But he didn’t. After March corrected him, it was even easier for him to find out for sure that he was wrong. But he didn’t. This is the same behaviour that got Lott into trouble over the survey. If he had done his research properly in the first place he would never have made the 98% claim. And if he had been willing to admit to making a mistake he would never have told the story about conducting a survey in 1997 that has caused him so much trouble.

The latest installement in the story is here. John Fund in the Wall Street Journalquotes Lott’s saying that concerns raised by March and others sound

“a lot like an effort to anger some people into voting while providing the basis for lots of election litigation if the results are close.”

Fund then asserts that March has lost credibility because he stands to profit if a lawsuit he is help to bring against Diebold is successful. I never thought that the Wall Street Journal would come down against the profit motive.

The Akron Beacon Journal reports that a trial on whether punch card ballots were constitutional has been delayed. Why? Read on:

ACLU lawyers complained Wednesday that the state’s last-minute filing hadn’t given them enough time to study the evidence—a report comparing punch cards with other voting methods. …

The ACLU had wanted the judge to declare punch cards unconstitutional.It argues that the ballots—the bane of the 2000 presidential election—aren’t uniform and don’t alert voters to a mistake, as electronic machines do. The ACLU also contends that the state’s “unequal” balloting system violates the rights of blacks, who live in predominantly punch-card counties.

And who wrote this last minute report?

The report in question Wednesday generally supports the use of punch cards. It was written by John Lott Jr., a resident scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

Lott revised the report earlier this year and submitted a new version to the state weeks ago. However, the ACLU didn’t get the new version until last week.

A spokeswoman for the Ohio Attorney General’s Office couldn’t say why the revised report was filed only Friday.

But she said that’s irrelevant.

“We believe that the conclusions in both reports are identical,” Kim Norris said for her office, which represents the Ohio Secretary of State’s Office in court.

ACLU attorney Dan Tokaji said Lott’s revised report has 11 additional pages. The original version, he said, contained “serious flaws.”

“The report contradicts what the secretary of state has been saying for months, that punch cards need to be replaced,” he said. “… The state is talking out of both sides of its mouth.”

Most experts seem to think that punch cards are a lousy system, but they obviously don’t have Lott’s way with statistics. Lott’s report is here. Even Lott is forced to concede that punch cards have a higher undervote rate in the presidential race. However, Lott argues that this is cancelled out by a lower undervote in the state races. I can’t say that I’m impressed with this argument. The state races aren’t as important, so undervotes there aren’t equivalent to undervotes in the presidential election. Also, the undervote rate is much higher in the state races, so that most of the undervotes must be intentional—Lott is comparing intentional undervotes with unintentional ones.

Lott also includes 36 demographic variables for age, sex and race in his analysis. He included these in his “More Guns, Less Crime” analysis as well. As Ayres and Donohue have pointed out, these variables are strongly correlated with each other. (This is called multicollinearity.) This can cause spurious results. Ayres and Donohue found that Lott’s MGLC results,

are incredibly sensitive to the inclusion of various seemingly unimportant demographic controls.

and

Apparently, then, Lott and Mustard’s thirty-six demographic variables mimic time trends in crime that we can control for directly with our controls for state trends.

Lott’s results on punch card ballots must similarly be regarded as suspect. Lott, of course, has read Ayres and Donohue and is well aware of the multicollinearity problem, but chose to repeat his previous mistake.

Incidently, Dan Tokaji has a blog where he writes about voting technology.