Why so many mass shootings?

I heard the comment that the Police didn't know the reason for yesterday's shooting at the West Palm Wendy's. Try he didn't like Mondays. To quote the song: "there can be no reason, because there is no reason."

The obvious one seems to never be mentioned: access to firearms in the United States is far too easy. I can buy a handgun simply by presenting a valid driver's licence here in Pennsylvania. That is a scary concept given that the crime of identity theft is pretty common. It doesn't take too much to come up with a clean driver's licence in someone's name. Or the other options the straw purchaser or the gun trafficker.

Of course, we hear about John Lott and Gary Kleck, but their work is obviously flawed. Lott doesn't take into account other factors which could explain the drop in crime, but uses the numbers to back up his hypothesis. Other statisticians have followed up on Lott's work and have found it flawed.

Lott's thesis is that populations with greater access to firearms are better able to deter crime. Some scholars have quarreled with Lott's interpretation, but this controversy is about underlying data. One of Michael Bellesiles' principal critics, a Northwestern law professor named James Lindgren among others want to know where Lott got the evidence to support the following sentence, which appears on Page 3 of Lott's book: "98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack."

Initially, Lott sourced the 98 percent figure to "national surveys." That's how the first edition of More Guns, Less Crime put it. In an August 1998 op-ed for the Chicago Tribune, Lott appeared to cite three specific surveys:

Polls by the Los Angeles Times, Gallup and Peter Hart Research Associates show that there are at least 760,000, and possibly as many as 3.6 million, defensive uses of guns per year. In 98 percent of the cases, such polls show, people simply brandish the weapon to stop an attack.

But polls by the Los Angeles Times, Gallup, and Peter Hart show no such thing.

Alternatively, Lott would sometimes attribute the 98 percent figure to Gary Kleck, a criminologist at Florida State University. In a February 2000 op-ed for Colorado's Independence Institute, Lott wrote: "Kleck's study of defensive gun uses found that ninety-eight percent of the time simply brandishing the weapon is sufficient to stop an attack." But Kleck's research shows no such thing.

Eventually, Lott settled on yet another source for the 98 percent figure: "a national survey that I conducted," as Lott put it in a second edition of More Guns, Less Crime. When asked about the survey, Lott now says it was done by telephone in 1997 and that the data was lost a few months later in a computer crash.

Lott's conflicting explanations naturally attracted suspicion, first from Otis Dudley Duncan, a retired sociologist at the University of California, San Diego, who wrote an article on the matter for the Criminologist, and eventually from Lindgren, the Bellesiles gumshoe, who has been posting his findings online. When Lott was asked about the serial attributions to "national surveys," to three specific polls, and to Kleck, Lott conceded, "A lot of those discussions could have been written more clearly."

Lott has said that he lost all his data for the book in a computer crash and had to reconstruct it, but that he couldn't reconstruct the survey. Lott has been able to produce witnesses who remember him talking about this obviously traumatic event soon after it occurred. But none of these people specifically remember him talking about losing data for a survey he'd conducted. Nor has Lott been able to produce the names of the college students he says conducted the phone surveys in Chicago, where Lott was teaching at the time.

As I like to say, if Lott had shown that guns produced more crime, he would have had a Michael Bellesisles style roasting. On the other hand, Lott's work is pure crap, yet it is still cited by the RKBA crowd.

I like how one commentator said that people who believe Lott and Kleck (another discredited researcher) are predisposed to want to believe that muck. No contrary evidence will change their minds. Which is pretty true, because the RKBA arguments don't survive scrutiny if you have an open mind.

That is the major problem in the gun debate is that there is too much taken in faith by the RKBA crowd, and like most believers, they don't have faith strong enough to research the data and sources they use. They prefer to use what buttresses their argument, even if that is incorrect, rather than test their faith.

On the other hand, the empirical data shows that more guns and easy access to firearms is what is behind the soaring toll of gun violence in the United States. Something must be done about it. Gun policy cannot be determined by flawed statistics when raw data shows the actual toll of gun violence in terms of money spent on treating the victims of gun crime and the cost of processing the perpetrators (if they live) through the criminal justice system.

Whether that is the Justices of the Supreme Court following stare decisis in District of Columbia v. Heller 07-290, or politicians saying that gun rights are illusory since the Second Amendment is only to protect us from standing armies.