Lotts to Ponder

Great piece! This gets me really angry. I had no idea that this had happened on Friday.

People still give John Lott a forum to throw around statistics on gun ownership and crime? Are you kidding me?

People still give John Lott a forum to throw around statistics on gun ownership and crime? Are you kidding me?

Why not get to see the statistics, Joe? Lott does his analysis, and the anti's try to disprove. Anything wrong with people posting their results?

This blog let you post your opinion, and I can post my opinion. Is there anything wrong with that?

It is always best to read both sides of the analyses, one might learn something.

Joe, I am open to being educated on these questions, though previous attacks on Lott have not been convincing. Since you are so upset with the current piece, it would be useful if you could point out what is wrong with the piece that Don Boudreaux pointed to.

John Lott committed the ultimate sin of academia, fabricating data. Thus, nothing he ever says will ever have any credibility. Ever.

Lott is to gun rights what McCarthy was to anti-communism. His presence and assocation slimes and degrades an otherwise good cause.

Dear Bartman:

Fabricating data? Be serious. I have always given out my data to other academics and I have given out the data to others even before my papers have been published. A huge number of academics never share their data, including those who are critical of me. One time I had a computer harddisk crash (numerous co-authors who lost data for papers that we were working on together have attested to this), but David Mustard and I put the data back together again and gave out the new data to anyone who has asked for it. The data is available on my website www.johnlott.org, and hundreds of academics have used. By the way, it wouldn't have been necessary to replace the data on concealed carry if the critics who we had given the data to prior to the harddisk crash had simply given it back to us (yes, David Mustard and I had given it to our critics before the crash, but they wouldn't give it back so we had to reconstruct it). If you are interested in the discussion about the survey data, see here:

http://johnrlott.tripod.com/surveysupport.html

Well, in the current piece, Lott claims that his own paper that found that safe storage laws increase crime is the only academic research on the subject, even though he is well aware of other academic research that comes to a different conclusion.

Details here.

It is in fact the only academic research that looks at the impact of trigger locks on crime rates. The one paper that you referred to had no Tables or actual estimates (but just four words in the paper that is not connected to anything else in it), and when asked about it by USA Today the author of that piece said “that, unlike Lott, he didn't explore the possibility that gun-storage laws actually cause crime. ‘I guess I wouldn't have, because it seems like a very implausible connection,’ Cummings says. ‘But I guess anything's conceivable.‘“ (Martin Kasindorf, “ Study: Gun-lockup laws can be harmful,” USA Today, Thursday, May 11, 2000, p. 8A.) This was also cited in The Bias Against Guns, but apparently you were unable to remember to quote it in the typical selective quoting that you engage in. Your other information is equally inaccurate.

Oh please. Your paper was not on the impact of trigger locks (you have no data on them at all), but like Cummings it was on safe storage laws. You even used his data on the laws.

Cummings may have thought it unlikely that the laws would cause increases in crime, but his regressions would have shown an increase if they had.

I see you have no defence on the other stuff. Why did you claim that Cummings had not controlled for national trends when he did and other researchers had replicated his results?

John,

It seems Mr. Lambert wants to quible and assert that trigger locks are not part of a safe storage plan.

Mr. Lambert, what do you mean by safe storage?

How can you support as rational the obviously insane idea that having a weapon in a home, trigger locked and/or stored in a safe, is going to aid a homeowner in defending his home when someone breaks in and confronts the homeowner with loaded and cocked gun in hand, or with long sharp knife, baseball bat, any number of those "arms" we are guaranteed to be able to "bear" by the 2nd amendment of the constitution?

The homeowner is supposed to call for a time out while he opens his safe, unlocks the trigger lock, inserts clip, and then cocks the gun?

It is an entirely looney idea to assert that all those "safe storage" methods reduce crime; and, if you need statistics to tell you that, if your mind is that frayed, no matter what your training or workplace skills I wouldn't want you within a mile of any jobsite I was running.

"Common sense is very uncommon. Common sense is in spite of, not as a result of education. Common sense is instinct, and enough is genius. Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he need more of it than he already has. Common sense is the knack of seeing things as they are, and doing things as they ought to be done."

(Rudyard Kipling’s view on Common Sense)

Trigger locks are one type of lock mandated by safe storage laws, but my response was not meant to single out just trigger locks. My paper was on safe storage. The point of my post above was to respond to Lambert's claim that Cummings paper looked a crime rates. Lambert's response that "but his regressions would have shown an increase if they had" is hardly a defense of his claim that they did estimate the impact on crime rates. This directly contradicts Lambert's statement in his first post that "Lott claims that his own paper that found that safe storage laws increase crime is the only academic research on the subject, even though he is well aware of other academic research that comes to a different conclusion."

As to the point that Lambert raises in his second post here, I called up Cummings and tried to figure out what was going on. The discussion of fixed effects was drawn from the conversation that I had with him, and the investigation would have been a lot more productive if he had been willing to share his data when he was asked. The fact that he was willing to share it years later was not particularly useful when I was doing the analysis.

Just keep forging ahead, John. Your work is appreciated.

Continued presentation of reason, rationale, and fact on the national stage is vital to countering the idiocy of the Lamberts of the world. You have access to that stage. For all of us, keep forging ahead.

Thanks.

Lott writes:

The point of my post above was to respond to Lambert's claim that Cummings paper looked a crime rates. Lambert's response that "but his regressions would have shown an increase if they had" is hardly a defense of his claim that they did estimate the impact on crime rates. This directly contradicts Lambert's statement in his first post that "Lott claims that his own paper that found that safe storage laws increase crime is the only academic research on the subject, even though he is well aware of other academic research that comes to a different conclusion."

Cummings paper did look at crime rates. Contrary to Lott's claim the paper did contain estimates and there were certainly more than four words on it. In fact, the word "homicide" occurs ten times in the paper and Cummings give estimates for the effects of safe storage laws on gun and non-gun homicides. (An 11% reduction in with-gun homicides, for example.)

Cummings estimated incidence rate ratios using Poisson regression to compare the rates with the law with the rates without the law. A ratio greater than one would suggest that the law had increased homicide, but the ratio was less than one.

I called up Cummings and tried to figure out what was going on. The discussion of fixed effects was drawn from the conversation that I had with him, and the investigation would have been a lot more productive if he had been willing to share his data when he was asked.

Are you seriously trying to tell us that in conversation Cummings told you that he had not used fixed effects to control for national trends? Even though his paper clearly states that he did. (And it says so in more than one place.)