Deltoid

In chapter 7 of The Bias Against Guns, where Lott argues that “safe storage” laws cause increases in violent crime, he quotes from an op-ed:

Jessica Lynne Carpenter is 14 years old. She knows how to shoot … Under the new “safe storage” laws being enacted in California and elsewhere, parents can be held criminally liable unless they lock up their guns when their children are home alone … so that’s just what law-abiding parents John and Tephanie Carpenter had done…. [The killer], who was armed with a pitchfork … had apparently cut the phone lines. So when he forced his way into the house and began stabbing the younger children in their beds, Jessica’s attempts to dial 9-1-1 didn’t do much good. Next, the sensible girl ran for where the family guns were stored. But they were locked up tight…. The children’s great-uncle, the Rev. John Hilton, told reporters: “If only (Jessica) had a gun available to her, she could have stopped the whole thing. If she had been properly armed, she could have stopped him in his tracks.” Maybe John William and Ashley would still be alive, Jessica’s uncle said.

David Friedman summarizes Lott’s account of this story given in one of his talks: (You can hear the story at 32:50 in this Real Audio recording of another Lott talk.)

But the most interesting thing in the talk was information, not about firearms but about reporting bias. There was a news story a few months back from (I think) Merced California, about someone who broke into a house containing five children, killed two (with a pitchfork) and wounded two others. Apparently the original news story from the local paper, carried by the wire service, included the fact that while he was breaking in the eldest child, a fourteen year old girl with experience in target shooting, went to her parents’ bedroom, got out their handgun–and was unable to use it because of the trigger lock that her father had put on in obedience to a recent state law.

The interesting point was that, according to John, that part of the story was cut out by every newspaper in the state, aside from the Fresno Bee (I think) which is where the original appeared.”

Later, however, Friedman discovered that Lott’s story was not true and corrected it in this Usenet posting:

It’s a good story, but as far as I have been able to determine it isn’t true. After I heard it , I tried to locate the news stories. As far as I can tell, the account my source had given (in a public lecture) and had gotten from someone else confused two different news stories.

The original story on the shooting had nothing about the girl trying to get at her parents’ handgun, and it sounded from the sequence of events as though that would have been impractical. A later story, based on an interview with a relative, put some of the blame on gun control laws, I think specifically safe storage laws. So the other newspapers were not cutting out information from the original story–merely repeating what the original story said without adding anything from the later story. And what was in the later story was a lot less damning than in the account I heard.

Now, when Lott first presented the false story a couple of years ago, he might have just been very careless with his facts and honestly believed it to be true, but he must know by now that it is untrue. Why did he present it again in The Bias Against Guns?

I found a copy of the Fresno Bee story that Lott claimed

“included the fact that while he was breaking in the eldest child, a fourteen year old girl with experience in target shooting, went to her parents’ bedroom, got out their handgun—and was unable to use it because of the trigger lock that her father had put on in obedience to a recent state law.”

Of course it doesn’t include that “fact”, which would appear to be a fabrication.

Lott has started a blog and responded to the questions I raised about his claims about the Merced pitchfork murders:

Fox News interviewed the father of the dead children and reported the following:

“Lott cited a Merced, Calif. family whose guns were put away because of the state’s safe storage law. John Carpenter, who lost two children in an attack in 2000, said a gun would have stopped the man who broke into his home with a pitchfork. ‘If a gun had been here, today I’d have at least a daughter alive,’ Carpenter said.”

It doesn’t appear that Fox News interviewed the father at all, but rather that they interviewed Lott and Lott claimed that the father said that. This quote also appears to be a fabrication. None of the newspaper reports written at the time of the murders has this quote and it doesn’t make sense—three of his daughters survived, while the quote makes it sound like all his daughters were murdered. [Update: Lott has posted a Fox transcript that shows the quote is genuine.] [Further update: Kevin P interpreted the above as an accusation that Lott fabricated that quote. That was not my intent. I was suggesting that he was repeating another fabrication, not that he was the source. I apologize for my careless wording.]

It is also rather odd for Lott to cite himself to support one of his claims. Anyway, Lott goes on to write:

On top of this I appeared on a radio show with Rev. John Hilton, children’s great-uncle, who repeated what he said in the quote used by Suprynowicz. In addition, there were two articles that were published in a local California newspaper that discussed this case.

In the newspaper article that Lott refers to, Hilton does argue that if Jessica had had a gun she could have stopped the murderer:

Their father, John Carpenter, kept a gun in the home. His children had learned how to fire it. But he kept it locked away and hidden from his children.

“He’s more afraid of the law than of somebody coming in for his family,” Hilton said. “He’s scared to death of leaving the gun where the kids could get it because he’s afraid of the law. He’s scared to teach his children to defend themselves.”

However, this is just another example of the sort of tactics that Lott has used to attempt to defend himself on the question of the missing survey—there, since he can’t provide evidence that he conducted a survey in 1997, he keeps providing evidence that he had a hard disk crash, even though that is not being questioned. Here, he tries to make it seem that the Hilton quote is being questioned when what is being questioned is Suprynowicz’s claim (quoted by Lott in The Bias Against Guns) that:

the sensible girl ran for where the family guns were stored. But they were locked up tight.

and Lott’s claim that the Fresno Bee story

“included the fact that while he was breaking in the eldest child, a fourteen year old girl with experience in target shooting, went to her parents’ bedroom, got out their handgun–and was unable to use it because of the trigger lock that her father had put on in obedience to a recent state law.”

and his claim that

that part of the story was cut out by every newspaper in the state

All these claims are false. The Fresno Bee story is quite clear—after she found that the phone in her bedroom was dead, Jessica climbed out of her bedroom window to go and get help—she didn’t go and get her parent’s locked handgun. Instead of admitting to his mistakes, Lott has once more tried misdirection.

Lott has a new entry on his blog where he posts a transcript from Fox News that apparently has the father of the murdered children saying:

“If a gun would have been here today, I’d have at least a daughter alive.”

I was mistaken when I suggested that the quote was a fabrication. The quote implies that all his daughters were murdered when they weren’t, but perhaps it didn’t imply this in its original context.

In any case Lott has not responded to the rest of my post, instead concentrating on one minor point. In two blog postings now Lott has neither supported nor admitted errors in the claims that

1. “the sensible girl ran for where the family guns were stored. But they were locked up tight.”,
2. that she was unable to use her parents gun because it had a trigger lock on it,
3. that every newspaper in the state suppressed this fact,
4. that the Cummings paper did not use fixed year effects

Unfortunately, this behaviour is not new. He still has not responded to the serious charges that on two occasions his data contained systematic coding errors that happened to support his thesis.

Lott has blogged for the third time about the Merced murders:

Taken together, the different articles in these various posts indicate that the gun was locked; it was placed in a way that was not accessible by the children; both the father and the great-uncle, the Rev. John Hilton, believed that if the gun had been accessible children’s lives would have been saved; and these moves were done because of fear of the California state law.

And for the third time he has neither supported nor admitted as false this claim from his new book:

“the sensible girl ran for where the family guns were stored. But they were locked up tight.”

This is not some minor quibble. Lott’s account makes it sound like the only thing stopping her from using her parents’ gun was that it was locked up. In fact, she locked herself in her bedroom and tried calling 911. The killer banged on her door. If, for the sake of argument, we assume that the gun was unlocked and she had come out the door and tried to get the gun, there would have been a fair chance that she would have been pitchforked to death instead of climbing out her window and getting help (which is what actually occured).

Lott’s false version of the story avoids this problem by having her get to where the guns are stored and being stymied by the gun lock.

In his book The Seven Myths of Gun Control, Richard Poe has an extensive account of the murders. He is much more careful with his facts than the other pro-gun writers who hang an attack on safe storage laws on the tragedy. He interviewed the mother of the victims and contradicts claims claims by Suprynowicz and Lott that

“the sensible girl ran for where the family guns were stored. But they were locked up tight.”

According to Poe, the gun was not locked, but stored unloaded on a high shelf. And she did not run to where the gun was stored. The killer was outside her bedroom door so she sensibly went out the window to get help.

Unfortunately, while presenting a more accurate account of the incident, Poe was misled by Lott about the media coverage, writing that Lott said that:

“all mention of guns and gun laws had been surgically removed from the story by the newswires. Lott says that an early account of the bloodbath distributed by one news service mentioned that there were guns in the house, that the children were trained and ready to use them, and that the guns had been put out of reach, in order to comply with the law. But subsequent accounts failed to include this information.”

The news story that mentioned the gun laws was not distributed and then suppressed by a newswire. It appeared in the Fresno Bee, not some wire service. Nor was it an “early account”. The murders occured on the 23rd. This story appeared on the 26th and was one of the last stories printed about the murders. I did a Factiva search on stories published in the week after the murders, and almost all appeared on the 24th and the 25th, with none at all after the 26th. Just like his claims about the shootings at the Appalachian School of Law, Lott’s claim that the media is deliberately suppressing facts is not supported by the evidence.

I left a comment on Poe’s blog, suggesting that he had been misled. In his response, Poe repeats the long debunked claim that my criticism of Lott is somehow meant as a payback for Bellesiles. He also insists that the “early account” reported by a news service is the August 26 Fresno Bee story, even though that did not appear in a wire service and appeared after all the wire service reports, and claims that there was a cover-up. As noted above, the evidence does not support his claims.