More Guns, Less Crime???

I have been asking this question for quite some time: How can Michael Bellesiles be ripped to shreds for his book Arming America, yet we still see John Lott cited as authoritative about CCW reducing crime?

John Lott makes Bellesiles look honest as heck.

Tim Lambert catalogues Lott's unethical behaviour. In fact, Lambert basically rips apart everything John Lott says.

Anyway...

From Mother Jones:

One of Michael Bellesiles' most dogged critics, Northwestern University law professor James Lindgren, also prepared a report investigating Lott's survey claims. "I have serious doubts whether he ever did the study," says Lindgren, "and the only evidence that he's brought forward for having done the study is ambiguous" -- an NRA activist who claims to remember having been called and asked about defensive gun uses.

But many gun rights conservatives have taken a pass on the Lott issue. A glowing review of "The Bias Against Guns" in National Review -- which made much hash of the Bellesiles affair -- failed to mention Lott's recent difficulties in corroborating the existence of his survey. "It's so interesting that Michael Bellesiles gets hung from the highest tree, while Lott, if anything, he's been more prominent in the last couple of months," says Donohue.

The right has good reason to stick by Lott: "The entire ideology of the modern gun movement has basically been built around this guy," says Saul Cornell, an Ohio State University historian who has written widely on guns. Over the years the pro-gun intellectual agenda has had two prongs: Defending a revisionist legal understanding of the Second Amendment in constitutional law, and refuting social scientists and public-health researchers who argue that the widespread availability of guns in America plays a key role in the nation's staggering number of homicides and suicides. Without Lott's work, the latter argument becomes much harder to make.

More conservative soul searching may result from a forthcoming National Academy of Sciences report from an expert panel dedicated to "Improving Research Information and Data on Firearms." Scheduled for release in late fall, the panel's report will address Lott's work. Duke University economist Philip Cook, co-editor of the Brookings Institution book "Evaluating Gun Policy", draws a historical analogy: In the late 1970s, after economist Isaac Ehrlich published a complex analysis supposedly proving that every execution in America deters about eight murders, the NAS released a devastating expert report debunking Ehrlich's findings. The same thing could happen to Lott.

If it does, we can be reasonably sure of one thing: Lott will have a response ready. "Lott will never say, 'that's a good point.' Lott will offer you some rebuttal," says Georgetown gun policy expert Jens Ludwig. But if Lott won't fully address the errors that undermine his thesis, it may fall to someone else -- his conservative peers, the American Enterprise Institute, perhaps -- to step in and do it for him.

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.