Deltoid

In chapter 3 of More Guns, Less Crime Lott presents an analysis based on two exit polls of gun ownership (conducted in 1988 and 1996) that purports to show that a 1% increase in a state’s gun ownership causes a 4.1% decrease in the violent crime rate and a 3.2% decrease in auto theft.

Lott’s two polls indicate that gun ownership increased by a remarkable 50% in just eight years, from 26% to 39%. However, this is contradicted by all other surveys on gun ownership. The best of these are the GSS surveys which actually show a modest decline over that period.

Even Lott found a 50% increase so unlikely that in this Usenet exchange he called it a “strawman”:

Doug Weil:

Two surveys ask questions in very different ways. The organization that collected the data says — the surveys are not comparable. You compare the data anyway, and produce a result so far afield from anything any regularly administered survey has produced (specifically a 50% increase in gun ownership in the general population over an 8 year period all other surveys show no increase in gun ownership) and claim that, well — you must be right because you controlled for differences in the survey questions.

John Lott:

The survey implies at 35% change in gun ownership. Why do I have a feeling that you are trying to exaggerate the poll data so that you can can set up a strawman?

In chapter 9 of the 2nd edition of More Guns, Less Crime Lott defends his use of these exit polls.

Now, in his analysis of safe storage laws in chapter 7 of The Bias Against Guns Lott does not use these exit polls. Instead, despite his suspicion that the GSS surveys are cooked, he uses the GSS surveys to measure how gun ownership changes as a result of a state passing a safe storage law. Using these polls he finds that gun ownership declined by one percentage point per year in the states with the laws and argue that the laws caused increases in crime rates.

Lott does not explain why, after stoutly defending his use of the exit polls to measure changes in gun ownership at the state level he abandoned them for his later paper. One possible explanation is that the exit polls say the opposite thing to the GSS surveys. The exit polls show substantial increases in gun ownership in the states that passed safe storage laws. I computed a regression relating the change in gun ownership as measured by the exit polls to the number of years that a safe storage law had been in place and found that the laws were associated with a 0.06 percentage point per year increase in gun ownership rates. This increase is not statistically significant, but it is the opposite sign to Lott’s result using the GSS surveys.

Since the exit polls show increases in gun ownership while the GSS surveys show decreases, it is plausible that if Lott had conducted his analysis in chapter 3 of More Guns, Less Crime using the GSS surveys he would have found that more guns were associated with more crime.

Lott has a new entry on his blog. First, he approvingly links to an NRO opinion piece by John Derbyshire, who writes about the case of Tony Martin, who was convicted of murdering a 16-year old burglar. Derbyshire feels that Martin’s imprisonment is “preposterous”. Glenn Reynolds, in a rather overwrought column goes further, declaring Martin to be a “political prisoner” and wants Amnesty International to weigh in. Unfortunately, Reynolds and Derbyshire have uncritically accepted the Martin’s defense lawyers version of the events, apparently without checking to see if it was accurate. If you look at an account that presents the prosecution’s side of the story as well, you will find that Martin was accused of lying in wait for the burglars and shooting them without warning. The jury, who presumably were more familiar with the facts in the case than Derbyshire decided that the prosecution had proved their case.

Lott goes on to claim that “the British 1997 Act … literally made it a crime to use a gun defensively.” He offers no support for this remarkable claim and the fact that Martin was not charged for a crime of using a gun defensively rather undercuts Lott’s claim.

Next Lott reprints a passage from The Bias Against Guns where he asserts that there were dramatic crime increases in Britain and Australia following tighter gun laws. Mary Rosh made similar claims about Britain, which I corrected here. And Ken Parish already demolished Lott’s claims about crime in Australia. Lott also falsely claims that the new laws in Australia made “it a crime to use a gun defensively.”

Lott’s comments about Australia that I discussed yesterday follow a similar pattern to those of many American pro-gunners. First, they greatly exaggerate the restrictions introduced in 1996, claiming that Australia “banned guns” or, in Lott’s case claiming that Australia banned “most guns and [made] it a crime to use a gun defensively.” In fact, semi-automatic long guns were banned and there was no change in the law on self-defence. Next, the pro-gunners will assert or imply that Australians were made defenceless. In fact, the new laws made very little difference there. Finally, they present some cherry-picked crime statistics in an attempt to show that crime went up because of the new laws. The trouble here is that there are lots of different categories and crime goes up and down, so you can usually find one category where crime has increased.

One example of this sort of thing was debunked on the Urban Legends Reference Pages. Another example was an NRA video that was criticized by many people.

Lott’s most dramatic statistic is:

In Sydney, handgun crime rose by an incredible 440 percent from 1995 to 2001.

The source Lott gives for his claim is this article in Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph. They seem to have originally got it from this report., which found that the number of handgun shootings in NSW increased from 9 in 1995 to 42 in 2000. The increase seems much more dramatic when expressed as a percentage, and such small numbers tend to fluctuate greatly. Naturally Lott does not report the dramatic decline that followed in 2002.

Lott has an article which purports to show that Rush Limbaugh was right when he claimed that Donovan McNabb was overrated because the media wanted to see a black quarterback do well.

Lott looked at whether media coverage was more favourable to black quarterbacks than to white quarterbacks and found that stories about black quarterbacks were slightly more likely to be positive (67% to 61%). He then did a multivariate analysis controlling for factors like the whether the quarterback’s team won and finds that after doing this, black quarterbacks are 27 percentage points more likely to get favourable coverage.

My reaction to his analysis underlines the damage that Lott has done to himself with his conduct. Even if all the data is correct and his regressions have been correctly calculated his analysis is not in the slightest bit persuasive. The reason is that his behaviour in the coding errors case suggests that he just keeps trying different models and just cherry picks the one that gives the result he wants. Would Lott want to get a result that supports Limbaugh? Well, check out this Mary Rosh posting:

You have got to download this paper. Lott has done an amazing piece here. Fits in perfectly with Rush Limbaugh’s program today.

On his show Limbaugh apparently claimed that giving women the vote was a bad idea and the same day Mary Rosh was on freerepublic.com promoting a Lott paper supporting him. It seems that John Lott is a Rush Limbaugh fan.

Seb from “Sadly, No!” has examined Lott’s data and analysis and sure enough has found evidence suggesting that Lott is up to his cherry-picking tricks again. First of all, Lott only gets his initial 67% to 61% advantage to black quarterbacks because he only considers a subset of the stories. When you look at all the data, the result was reversed, with black quarterbacks getting 53% favourable stories and white ones 57% favourable. The difference seems too small to be meaningful, but it is the opposite of what Lott reported.

Second, Seb noticed that Lott included some variables in his regression for the extent of media coverage that made no sense. Why would having more stories make those stories be more or less likely to be positive? Seb reran the regression without those variables and found that Lott’s result went away—the quarterback’s race no longer had a significant effect. Now this dosn’t prove that Lott cherry-picked his model since we don’t know if he tried doing it Seb’s way, but given Lott’s past conduct it seems quite possible.

In any event, the data Lott collected indicates that there is no clear bias in the media either in favour of or against black quarterbacks.

Lott has a new article at Fox News where he claims that gun control is unravelling:

Crime did not fall in England after handguns were banned in January 1997. Quite the contrary, crime rose sharply. Yet, serious violent crime rates from 1997 to 2002 averaged 29 percent higher than 1996; robbery was 24 percent higher; murders 27 percent higher. Before the law, armed robberies had fallen by 50 percent from 1993 to 1997, but as soon as handguns were banned, the robbery rate shot back up, almost back to their 1993 levels.

Australia has also seen its violent crime rates soar after its Port Arthur gun control measures (search) in late 1996. Violent crime rates averaged 32 per cent higher in the six years after the law was passed (from 1997 to 2002) than they did the year before the law in 1996. The same comparisons for armed robbery rates showed increases of 45 percent.

The 2000 International Crime Victimization Survey, the most recent survey done, shows that the violent crime rate in England and Australia was twice the rate in the US.

Lott as usual, has cherry picked his statistics. There are lots of different crime statistics to choose from and some show increases while other show decreases. Lott just tells his readers about the ones that show increases. Violent crime in England has actually decreased significantly since the gun ban. See the graph here. It looks like Lott chose to use the figures for police recorded crimes rather than the more accurate ones from the British Crime Survey. The police figures have gone up because of changes in recording practices and increases in the reporting rate, not because the actual number of violent crimes have increased. Of course he uses figures from the International Crime Victimization Survey in the last paragraph when it suits his purpose. These also show a violent crime decrease in England.

In any case, the advocates of the gun laws did not claim that they would reduce crimes committed without guns. Lott somehow forgot to mention what happened to the with-gun robbery rate. (The “armed robbery” rates he quotes include robberies committed with other weapons.) Here is a table containing the crime figures for Australia. (I also have them in a spreadsheet.) In the last column of my table I compare the average for 1993–1996 with the average for 1997–2002. The with-gun robbery rate has declined by 10%. Don’t expect Lott to ever admit this. Now, it is true that some rates have increased—for example the assault-with-firearm rate has increased, but the total gun crime rate has decreased. Certainly, Lott’s claim that gun control is “unravelling” is not supportable.

Hunt Stilwell asks:

since the gun lobby’s statistical claims have been debunked so thoroughly and so often, why do they continue to use them, and why do people continue to buy them?

Brian Linse thinks there has been some progress, since not many progun bloggers linked to Lott’s piece, whereas

I remember the days when Instantman would have linked it within seconds of it being posted.

John Ray boasts that he quoted Lott in an attempt to bait me. He also offers an explanation for his earlier conduct in refusing to link to my post that he was responding to. Apparently it was “too intemperate” and “rage-filled”. Ray conveniently forgets to link or quote from this “rage-filled” posting so his readers aren’t able to see if his characterization is accurate: judge for yourself. Ray then attempts to side step the whole cherry-picking issue by asserting “almost any use of statistics has to be selective”. Well, yes, but if you do as Lott does and just select the statistics favourable to your position, then that’s cherry picking.

Lott has teamed up with Eli Lehrer for another cherry picking exercise. In an op-ed published in National Post they get straight to it with an outrageous cherry pick in just the second sentence:

Gun control has not worked in Canada. Since the new gun registration program started in 1998, the U.S. homicide rate has fallen, but the Canadian rate has increased.

On the left you can see a graph of Canadian homicide rates for the last ten years (data from Statistics Canada). Since 1998 the homicide rate has pretty obviously gone down. So how were Lott and Lehrer able to come up with an increase? Simple. In 1998 the rate was 1.84, while in 2002 the rate was 1.85 (details). They picked the year after the law with the highest homicide rate (2002). Then they picked the year before the law with the lowest homicide rate (1998). Even then they got numbers with the smallest possible difference in rates. But they didn’t tell you that, trying to make it seem that the increase was significant.

Lott then goes on to cut and paste his previous cherry picked statistics purporting to show that crime in England and Australia has increased. I dealt with these in a previous post.

Lott and Lehrer continue with:

violent crime has fallen even faster in right-to-carry states than for the nation as a whole.

This is not true. The most comprehensive study on this (Ayers and Donohue’s Stanford Law Review paper) finds that crime has tended to fall faster in the states without carry laws.

The states with the fastest growth in gun ownership have also experienced the biggest drops in violent crime rates.

This is from an analysis (page 114 of More Guns, Less Crime) based on two surveys of gun ownership (conducted in 1988 and 1996) that purported to show that a 1% increase in a state’s gun ownership causes a 4.1% decrease in the violent crime rate and a 3.2% decrease in auto theft.

Lott’s two polls indicate that gun ownership increased by 50% in just eight years, from 26% to 39%. This is contradicted by everything else we know about gun ownership:

Since 1959, there have been at least 86 different surveys on gun ownership *. There doesn’t seem to have been in any increase over that period, let alone over 1988-1996. The percentage of the population that declared they were gun owners varied between 25% and 35%, but there was no clear trend. It seems that the changes in the numbers are caused by sampling error, differently worded questions, and changes in the willingness of people to admit to gun ownership. Lott’s apparent increase is an artifact of his having looked at just two polls instead of many.

My thanks to Carl Jarret for first pointing out Lott’s cherry picking of the Canadian statistics.

The National Post has printed a letter from Gary Mauser commenting on the Lott/Lehrer oped I discussed earlier. Here is the whole thing:

It should not surprise many people that Canada’s gun laws have not worked (More Gun Control Isn’t The Answer, John R. Lott Jr., June 15). Anyone living in a big Canadian city has witnessed the horrifying increase in violent crime over the past decade.

Canada’s violent crime rate is now higher than in the United States. Our burglary and assault rates are particularly frightening, and illegal handguns are increasingly misused in our largest cities.

This is the result of the Liberal government’s failure to punish violent criminals and instead to criminalize hunters and target shooters if they fail to get a licence and to register their shotguns and rifles.

Nor do gun laws work any better in Great Britain or Australia. In a recent study for the Fraser Institute, I showed that gun laws in those countries have failed to stop increases in violent crime and homicides.

In contrast, violent crime and homicide rates are plummeting in the United States. Violent crime is dropping even faster in those states that allow citizens to carry concealed handguns.

When is Ottawa going to get serious about stoping violent criminals?

There are several problems with Mauser’s letter.

On the left is a graph of the “horrifying increase in violent crime over the past decade” in Canada. If you compare the violent crime rate now with that of ten years ago, you’ll see that it has actually gone down. There has been no increase, let alone a “horrifying” one. And guess where this graph comes from? His own Fraser Institute Study.. He even refers to it in his letter.

And look at the graph in Mauser’s paper immediately before the one showing violent crime rates. In his letter Mauser writes “in contrast violent crime and homicide rates are plummeting in the United States”. But his own graph shows that homicide rates are dropping in Canada in parallel with those in the US.

Mauser also claims that “Canada’s violent crime rate is now higher than in the United States”. What he fails to mention that the “violent crime rate” in the Canadian statistics includes simple assaults but in the US statistics it only includes aggravated assaults. The graph on the left (from here) shows that the robbery and aggravated assault rates are actually lower in Canada. Moreover, Mauser is well aware of this since in his study he refers to this very graph (it’s from Gannon (2001)) when he writes:

“The comparison here shows the official statistics from both countries. Gannon (2001) constructs indices of violent crime that are more directly comparable. In her analysis, the trends in violent crime in the two countries resemble each other more closely, but her data also show that violent crime in Canada is increasing while it is decreasing in the United States.”

The graph clearly shows that robberies are decreasing in Canada. Mauser seems to consistently call decreases increases when it suits his argument.

His references to violent crime and homicide increases in Great Britain and Australia are also incorrect. Violent crime in England has decreased significantly since their gun ban. The number of violent crimes recorded by police has increased because of increased reporting and changes in recording practices. Mauser reports the police figures to try to make it look as if violent crime has increased even though the more accurate British Crime Survey figures show that it decreased. And he his well aware of what the BCS shows a decrease since he mentions it but buries it in an endnote and does not admit its significance. As for Australia, his own graph shows that homicide has decreased, but as usual he calls it an increase.

In his study he also claims:

Professor [sic] John Lott has shown how violent crime has fallen faster in those states that have introduced concealed carry laws than in the rest of the United States.

Of course, my readers will be well aware that Ayres and Donohue’s more comprehensive study has shown that crime has actually tended to fall faster in the states without carry laws, and that Lott’s results go away when his coding errors are corrected. Mauser is well aware of Ayres and Donohue’s work—we discussed it at great length in 2002 and 2003 on the firearmsregprof list, a mail list that Mauser is on, and yet he does not mention their work at all. In fact he doesn’t cite any critics of Lott at all.

Oh, and guess who is a Senior Fellow of the Fraser Institute, the think tank that published Mauser’s study: Our old friend Ross McKitrick.

In reponse to criticism that Lott used cherry picked numbers to claim that homicides had increased following gun registration in Canada, “Maxim” posted on Usenet:

The law started in December 1998. Guns did not have to be registered until 2001. Violent crime was falling until very shortly after the law started doing anything, and the crime rates start rising consistently after that, with the biggest increase in 2002. It is falling before the law and for one year after and then rising consistently afterward.

Hmm, it was posted under the name of Lott’s son, but the writing style belongs to John Lott. Note that Lott has posted a five-star review of More Guns, Less Crime under Maxim’s name. I suppose it’s possible that John helped Maxim with the post.

John Lott posted on his blog:

Canadian long gun and shot gun registration was started in December 1998 and the guns were supposed to be registered by January 2001, though there was an extension until July 2001. Crime rates continued falling during the first full year of the program but rose consistent [sic] every year thereafter and in the lastest [sic] numbers for 2002 ended up higher than the last year prior to the law (1998).

Maxim, at least, seems to be better at proof reading his posts.

Anyway, on to the substance of their defence. The “consistent” increase is barely noticeable on the graph since it is an increase from 1.76 to 1.77 to 1.78. Given the normal random variation in crime rates, no person knowledgable in statistics would read anything into such an increase.

Furthermore, when you look at the official Canadian statistics you’ll see that there is a footnote on the 2002 homicide rates:

Part of the increase in 2002 is a result of 15 homicides that occurred in Port Coquitlam in previous years and that were reported by police in 2002. Homicide counts reflect the year in which police file the report.

If you adjust the the statistics to count those murders when they happened, the rates for 2001 and 2002 end up exactly the same at 1.80 each, and even Lott’s cherrypicked increase goes away.

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.

Crime statistics for the last 12 months in NSW have been released. Most crime categories have decreased significantly.

Indecent assault, act of indecency and other sexual offences	Down by 11.9%
Robbery with a weapon not a firearm	Down by 19.7%
Break and enter - dwelling	Down by 9.4%
Break and enter - non-dwelling	Down by 17.6%
Motor vehicle theft	Down by 8.7%
Steal from motor vehicle	Down by 13.7%
Steal from retail store	Down by 17.4%
Steal from dwelling	Down by 5.1%
Steal from person	Down by 17.8%
Fraud	Down by 12.3%
Murder	No significant trend
Assault	No significant trend
Sexual assault	No significant trend
Robbery without a weapon	No significant trend
Robbery with a firearm	No significant trend
Malicious damage to property	No significant trend

Now if, hypothetically, you were out to show that crime had increased here because of the 1996 gun laws you would be faced with a problem. Normally with sixteen crime categories you can find one that increased and you can then run with that. But there weren’t any significant increases this time. What to do, what to do?

Fortunately the crime statistics are broken down into region and subregion. If you scroll down in the report you find a table giving the crime categories for each part of Sydney. Fourteen rows and sixteen columns means that there are 224 cells in the table. The table is a sea of negative numbers. Crime is down everywhere and in every category. But wait! There is one, just one, positive number in the whole table: Robbery with a firearm increased by 34% in inner Sydney, from 123 to 165. So what do we find on Lott’s blog?

With a reported 34 percent increase in armed robberies in Sydney during just the last 12 months, some have been driven to try and stop the attacks. (I don’t have the numbers handy at the moment, but armed robberies have been going up dramatically for the last six or so years in Australia.)

Actually it was firearm robberies in inner Sydney that went up 34%. Armed robberies in Sydney declined by 16%. And armed robberies in Australia have also been going down. To be fair, we must give the Sun-Herald an assist on this cherry pick since they pulled out the 34% figure:

Latest Bureau of Crime Statistics figures show all major crime rates as stable or in decline except for armed robbery, which has undergone a 34 per cent spike in inner Sydney in the past 12 months.

But leaving out the part about all major crime rates being stable or declining was all Lott’s work. As was the false claim that armed robberies were increasing nationwide.

Lott has an article in the National Review Online where he claims that the Washingtonian DC handgun ban caused crime increases:

Crime rose significantly after the gun ban went into effect. In the five years before Washington’s ban in 1976, the murder rate fell from 37 to 27 per 100,000. In the five years after it went into effect, the murder rate rose back up to 35. During this same time, robberies fell from 1,514 to 1,003 per 100,000 and then rose by over 63 percent, up to 1,635.

I’ve graphed the homicide and robbery rates for the ten years on either side of the law so you can see how Lott cherry picked his numbers as usual. (Data is from here.) Notice how the crime rates fluctuate from year to year. If you choose one year at random to represent the situation after the law was passed their is a good chance that it will be unrepresentative. Of course, Lott didn’t just choose one year at random. He chose 1981, which just happens to be the year that had the highest homicide and robbery rates of the ten following years.

The law was also in effect for only part of 1976, so that year is not a good choice to represent the situation before the law.

If you look at the graphs you will see that homicides tended to be lower after the law and robberies were about the same. Of course, just looking at the graphs only gives a rough idea of the possible effects of the law. This has been studied by several researchers. Loftin at al (NEJM 325:1615-1620) found significant decreases in firearms homicides and no significant change in non-firearms homicides. Kleck et al (Law & Society Review 30(2):361-380) disputed their findings, arguing that the law had no effect. Whoever is correct, there is no published support for Lott’s claim that the law caused crime increases.

Over on his blog, Lott presents a graph showing crime rates. And it looks good for his case—it’s V shaped, with the bottom of the V right when the law was passed. Except that he graphed the overall crime rate. The majority of crimes are non-violent ones like larceny, where handguns are not a factor, even offensively or defensively. His graph isn’t even remotely relevant but if he graphed something relevant like homicide it wouldn’t support his case.

Over the past few years crime rates in Australia, Canada and England have fallen dramatically. For example, in NSW crime plunged to the lowest level in 20 years, in Canada, the 2003 homicide rate was the lowest in 36 years, while in England the crime rate was the lowest since the BCS started in 1981. While crime has been plummeting, John Lott has been publishing a steady stream of op-eds blaming gun control for increasing crime in those places. His secret? Cherry-picking.

Lott’s latest column is a little unusual amongst his cherry picking efforts in that he provides links to his sources. He writes:

And with Canada’s murder rate rising 12 percent last year

The trouble with this approach is that readers can click through and read the parts of the report that he chose not to mention. Here are the section headings, leaving nothing out.

Violent crime down but homicide rate up … Robberies with a firearm continue to decline … Property crime resumes downward trend … Drug incidents resume upward trend …Youth crime down

And look at how the increase in homicide was reported:

Canada’s homicide rate rose 12% in 2004 after hitting a 36-year low the year before.

Lott conveniently left out the second part of the sentence. He also says:

With Canada’s reported violent-crime rate of 963 per 100,000 in 2003, a rate about twice the U.S.’s (which is 475), Canada’s politicians are understandably nervous.

Lott does not tell his readers that the “violent crime rate” in the Canadian statistics includes simple assaults but in the US statistics it only includes aggravated assaults. If you compare the same crime categories, violent crime rates are lower in Canada.

Lott also cherry picks some English crime statistics:

The 2000 International Crime Victimization Survey, the last survey completed, shows the violent-crime rate in England and Wales was twice the rate of that in the U.S. When the new survey for 2004 comes out later this year, that gap will undoubtedly have widened even further as crimes reported to British police have since soared by 35 percent, while those in the U.S. have declined 6 percent.

Lott does not mention that the crime victimization rate in England has decreased significantly—the increase in crimes reported has occurred because the police have improved their record keeping, not because there has been any increase in crime.

And he cherry picks Australian ones:

Australia has also seen its violent-crime rates soar immediately after its 1996 Port Arthur gun-control measures. Violent crime rates averaged 32-percent higher in the six years after the law was passed (from 1997 to 2002) than they did in 1995. The same comparisons for armed-robbery rates showed increases of 74 percent.

I’ve put the Australian statistics in a spreadsheet so you can see for yourself that he has selected the crime rate and the basis for comparison to conjure up some crime increases. There was a temporary increase in the armed robbery rate after the 1996 laws, but since then the armed robbery has fallen below what it was when the law was passed. More importantly (and you will never hear this from Lott), the firearms murder rate has halved, falling from 0.32 per 100k in 1995 to 0.16 in 2004. The non-firearms murder rate did not change significantly.

I’ve long been opposed to the 1996 laws because I didn’t think they would have a significant effect on crime, but the latest Australian crime figures are making me waver because it’s likely that laws were responsible for at least some part of the reduction.

Lott has published yet another cherry-picked article where he pretends that crime in Australia is increasing despite plummeting crime rates here. Jonathan Dursi takes it apart.

In his latest op-ed Lott continues his misrepresentations about crime in Australia and England:

The British government banned handguns in January 1997 but recently reported that gun crime in England and Wales nearly doubled in the seven years from 1996 to 2003. Since ‘96, the rate of serious violent crime has soared by 88 percent: armed robberies by 101 percent, rapes by 105 percent and homicide by 24 percent.

Before the law, armed robberies had fallen by 50 percent from 1993 to 1997 — but as soon as handguns were banned, the robbery rate shot back up, almost back to 1993 levels. The crooks still had guns, but not their victims.

Australia’s 1996 gun-control regulations banned many types of guns and the immediate aftermath was similar. Crime rates averaged 32 percent higher in the six years after the law was passed (from 1997 to 2002) than in 1995. The same comparisons for armed robbery rates showed an increase of 74 percent, reversing a previous decline.

Lott, of course, has cherry picked his numbers. He carefully picks his numbers to avoid mentioning the dramatic decline in violent crime in England since 1996. As for Australia, note the use of the word “immediate” so he can avoid mentioning the recent large reductions in armed robbery which is now below what it was when the law was passed. And he’ll never admit that the firearms murder rate has halved since the law was passed.

Letting more law-abiding citizens own guns may actually save police lives. Many countries, from Britain to Brazil, have learned this the hard way. There are also a large number of peer-reviewed academic studies showing that letting private citizens own guns reduces violent crime, and some work finds that gun crime falls even faster than overall violent crime.

Well, a large number of studies by Lott at any rate. A National Academy of Sciences panel reviewed all those studies and concluded:

There is no credible evidence that “right-to-carry” laws, which allow qualified adults to carry concealed handguns, either decrease or increase violent crime.

In Lott’s latest column he cuts and pastes his previous cherry picking on England, so I’ll just repeat my correction: He carefully picks his numbers to avoid mentioning the dramatic decline in violent crime in England since 1996. As for Australia, he finds yet another way to avoid mentioning how violent crime has been falling here:

Australia’s 1996 gun-control regulations banned many types of guns and the immediate aftermath was similar. While murder rates remained unchanged, armed robbery rates averaged 59% higher in the eight years after the law was passed (from 1997 to 2004) than in 1995.

He averaged the armed robbery rate over eight years to hide the fact that it is now lower than when the law was passed. Furthermore, if you compare the murder rates the way that he compared the armed robbery rates, they were not “unchanged” but declined by 12%.

But his column isn’t pure recycled stuff—he has a new example where he implies that criminals took advantage of the disarmed Irish:

The Republic of Ireland banned and confiscated all handguns and all center fire rifles in 1972, but murder rates rose fivefold by 1974 and in the 20 years after the ban has averaged 114% higher than the pre-ban rate (never falling below at least 31% higher).

So do you think that Lott is completely ignorant about the recent history of Ireland or did he deliberately conceal it from his readers? In 1972 the Republic of Ireland did ban handguns and large calibre rifles. And the number of murders did increase from 10 in 1971 to 51 in 1974 (numbers from here). What Lott failed to mention is the reason for the gun ban in Ireland was not to reduce homicides there (they only had 10 murders a year in a country of three million people for heaven’s sake!), but to cut off the supply of guns to Northern Ireland. Lott also failed to mention is that the reason for the big increase in murder in 1974 was the terrorist bombings in Dublin and Monaghan which killed 33 people. It’s as if he blamed the enormous increase in the homicide rate in New York City in 2001 on gun control there.

There are more posts on Lott’s cherry picking at the new site.