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{{short description|American economist, political commentator, and gun rights advocate (born 1958)}} | |||
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'''John R. Lott Jr., Ph. D.''' (born ] ]) is currently a resident scholar at the ]. His research interests include ], ], ], ], ], ], and ]. | |||
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{{Infobox economist | |||
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| birth_name = John Richard Lott Jr. | |||
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'''John Richard Lott Jr.''' (born May 8, 1958) is an American economist, political commentator, and ] advocate. Lott was formerly employed at various academic institutions and at the ] ]. He is the former president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, a nonprofit he founded in 2013. He worked in the ] within the ] under the ] from October 2020 to January 2021. Lott holds a Ph.D. in ] from ]. | |||
He has written for both academic and popular publications. He has authored books such as '']'', '']'', and '']''. He is best known as a ]<ref name="Frum140114">{{cite news|url=http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/14/with-guns-the-threatened-quickly-become-the-threat.html|title=With Guns, the Threatened Can Quickly Become the Threat|last=Frum|first=David|date=January 14, 2014|access-date=January 16, 2014|website=Daily Beast}}</ref><ref name="Blake121216">{{cite news|url=https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/la-xpm-2012-dec-16-la-et-st-piers-morgan-newtown-shooting-gun-control-20121215-story.html|title=Piers Morgan on gun control: 'How many kids have to die?'|last=Blake|first=Meredith|date=December 16, 2012|newspaper=Los Angeles Times|access-date=January 16, 2014}}</ref><ref name="BovardOnMGLC">{{cite web|url=http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo6686900.html|title=Review quotes|last=Bovard|first=James|website=press.uchicago.edu|publisher=University of Chicago Press|access-date=January 16, 2014|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180919122545/https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo6686900.html|archive-date=September 19, 2018}}</ref> and has argued against restrictions on owning and carrying guns. '']'' and '']'' have said "no one has had greater influence"<ref>{{Cite web |last=Spies |first=Mike |date=2022-11-03 |title=The Right's Favorite Gun Researcher |url=https://www.thetrace.org/2022/11/john-lott-gun-crime-research-criticism/ |access-date=2023-01-24 |website=The Trace |language=en-us}}</ref> in the scientific debate over firearms while '']'' referred to Lott as "The Gun Crowd's Guru."<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.mywire.com/pubs/Newsweek/2001/03/12/314509?extID=10051 |first=Matt |last=Bai |title=The Gun Crowd's Guru: John Lott has a high profile—and a target on his back |work=Newsweek |date=March 12, 2001 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150502153845/http://www.mywire.com/pubs/Newsweek/2001/03/12/314509?extID=10051 |archive-date=May 2, 2015 }}</ref> | |||
==Academic career== | ==Academic career== | ||
Lott studied ] at ], receiving his ] in ], ] in ], and ] in ]. He spent several years as a visiting professor and as a fellow at the ]. | |||
John Lott studied economics at ], receiving his ] in 1980, ] in 1982, and ] in 1984. Lott has held positions in law and economics at several institutions, including the ], the ], UCLA, the ], ], and ]. Lott was the chief economist at the ]<ref name=":0">{{cite web|url=http://www.foxnews.com/archive/author/john-lott/index.html|title=Dr. John R. Lott Jr.|date=2016-07-27|publisher=Fox News|access-date=2016-07-27}}</ref> (1988–1989). He spent five years at the ], as a visiting professor from 1994 to 1995 and as a ] from 1995 to 1999. Lott was a resident scholar at the ] from 2001 to 2006. He left AEI for ].<ref></ref> From July 2007 to 2010, Lott was a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland Foundation at the ] and lectured on law and economics.<ref></ref><ref></ref> | |||
Lott went on to work at other institutions, including the ] School of Law, ], UCLA, the ], and ], and was the chief economist at the ] (]–]), before taking a position at the ], generally considered to be a ] ]. | |||
Lott has |
Lott has written op-eds for '']'', '']'', the '']'', '']'', and the '']''. Since 2008, he has been a columnist for ], initially weekly.<ref></ref><ref name=":0" /> | ||
== |
== Research on guns == | ||
===Concealed weapons and crime rate=== | |||
Although Lott has published in academic journals regarding the beneficial aspects of government deregulation of various areas, and has also published in the popular press on ] topics such as the validity of the ] results in ], or how low the murder rate in ] is after the US deposed ], he is primarily known outside of academic econometrics for his involvement in ], and his arguments regarding the beneficial results of allowing Americans to freely own and carry guns. | |||
In a 1997 article written with David B. Mustard<ref name="LottMust97">John R. Lott Jr. and David B. Mustard, "Crime, Deterrence and Right-To-Carry Concealed Handguns", 26 ''Journal of Legal Studies'' 1 (1997) {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100616105437/http://www.law.uchicago.edu/files/files/41.lott_.final_.pdf |date=2010-06-16 }}; {{subscription required}}.</ref> and Lott's subsequent books '']'' and '']'', Lott argued that allowing adults to carry ]s significantly reduces crime in America. In 2004, the ] (NAS) National Research Council (NRC) conducted a review of current research and data on firearms and violent crime, including Lott's work, and concluded "that with the current evidence it is not possible to determine that there is a causal link between the passage of ] laws and crime rates."<ref> Executive Summary, Major Conclusions, p. 2. Ch. 6 Right-to-Carry Laws, pp. 120–151, reviews research by Lott and others on this issue.</ref> The NAS report wrote of Lott's work, "The initial model specification, when extended to new data, does not show evidence that passage of right-to-carry laws reduces crime. The estimated effects are highly sensitive to seemingly minor changes in the model specification and control variables."<ref name=":3">{{Cite web |last1=Farley |first1=Robert |last2=Robertson |first2=Lori |last3=Kiely |first3=Eugene |date=2012-12-20 |title=Gun Rhetoric vs. Gun Facts |url=https://www.factcheck.org/2012/12/gun-rhetoric-vs-gun-facts/ |access-date=2021-01-02|website=FactCheck.org|language=en-US}}</ref> The criminologist ] was the only member on the 18-member NAS panel who dissented from this conclusion.<ref>{{cite book |url=http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10881&page=269 |title=Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review |pages=269–270 |isbn=0-309-09124-1 |year=2004 |chapter=Appendix A Dissent |first=James Q. |last=Wilson |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121016133952/http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10881&page=269 |archive-date=October 16, 2012 }}</ref><ref name=":3" /> For similar reasons as highlighted by the NAS, as well as "multiple serious problems with data and methodology", a 2020 comprehensive review of existing research on concealed-carry by the ] discounted Lott's studies.<ref>{{Cite web|title=Effects of Concealed-Carry Laws on Violent Crime |url=https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/concealed-carry/violent-crime.html|access-date=2021-01-02 |website=rand.org|language=en}}</ref> | |||
In his books '']'' and '']'', he presents statistical evidence for his claim that allowing adults to carry ]s has significantly reduced crime in America. He supports this position by an exhaustive tabulation of various social and economic ] from ] and other population ]s of individual United States counties in different years, which he fits into a very large multifactorial mathematical model of ]. His published results show a very strong reduction in violent crime associated with the adoption by states of laws allowing the general adult population to freely carry concealed weapons. This book and the research and academic papers associated with it are sometimes referred to as "statistical one-upmanship" by critics who claim that, | |||
:"<nowiki></nowiki> demands that anyone who wants to challenge his arguments become immersed in a very complex statistical debate, based on computations so difficult that they cannot be done with ordinary desktop computers. He challenges anyone who disagrees with him to download his data set and redo his calculations, but most ] do not think it worth their while to replicate studies using methods that have repeatedly failed. Two highly respected criminal justice researchers, Frank Zimring and Gordon Hawkins (1997) wrote an article explaining that: | |||
Other reviews said that there were problems with Lott's model. A replication by Dan A. Black and ] found that minor adjustments to Lott and Mustard's model led to the disappearance of the findings.<ref name="Black">{{Cite journal|last=Black|first=Dan A.|author2=Daniel S. Nagin|date=January 1998|title=Do Right-to-Carry Laws Deter Violent Crime?|journal=Journal of Legal Studies|volume=27|issue=1|page=214|doi=10.1086/468019|s2cid=154626760}}</ref><ref name=":4">, Volume 26, No 1, January/February 2002, pp. 19–23. Expanded as: </ref> In the '']'', ] argued that Lott failed to account for several key variables, including drug consumption.<ref name="Hemenway">{{Cite journal|last=Hemenway |first=David |date=December 31, 1998 |journal=The New England Journal of Medicine |title=More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding crime and gun-control laws / Making A Killing: The business of guns in America |volume=339 |issue=27 |pages=2029–2030 |doi=10.1056/NEJM199812313392719}}</ref> ] and ] said that the model used by Lott contained significant coding errors and ].<ref name="shootdown">{{Cite journal|last=Ayres |first=Ian |author2=John J. Donohue III |date=April 2003 |title=Shooting Down the 'More Guns, Less Crime' Hypothesis |journal=Stanford Law Review |volume=55 |issue=4 |page=1193 |doi= 10.2139/ssrn.343781|s2cid=55757925 |url=http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/1241 }}</ref> In the ''American Journal of Public Health'', ] et al. also raised concerns about flaws in the study, such as misclassification of laws and endogeneity of predictor variables, which they said rendered the study's conclusions "insupportable".<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Webster|first1=D W|last2=Vernick|first2=J S|last3=Ludwig|first3=J|last4=Lester|first4=K J|title=Flawed gun policy research could endanger public safety.|journal=American Journal of Public Health|date=June 1997|volume=87|issue=6|pages=918–921|doi=10.2105/AJPH.87.6.918|pmid=9224169|pmc=1380922}}</ref> Florida State University criminologist ] considered it unlikely that such a large decrease in violent crime could be explained by a relatively modest increase in ].<ref>{{Cite book| last=Kleck| first=Gary| title=Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control| location=New York| publisher=Aldine de Gruyter| year=1997}}</ref> A 1998 study by ] that said it "more effectively control for unobserved variables that may vary over time" than the Lott and Mustard study concluded that "shall-issue laws have resulted, if anything, in an increase in adult homicide rates."<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Ludwig|first1=Jens|title=Concealed-gun-carrying laws and violent crime: evidence from state panel data|journal=International Review of Law and Economics|date=September 1998|volume=18|issue=3|pages=239–254|doi=10.1016/S0144-8188(98)00012-X|url=http://student-www.uchicago.edu/~ludwigj/papers/IJLE-ConcealedGunLaws-1998.pdf |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20221009/http://student-www.uchicago.edu/~ludwigj/papers/IJLE-ConcealedGunLaws-1998.pdf |archive-date=2022-10-09 |url-status=live|citeseerx=10.1.1.487.5452}}</ref> A 2001 study in the '']'' by University of Chicago economist ] did robustness checks of Lott and Mustard's study and found that the findings of the Lott and Mustard study were inaccurate.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Duggan|first=Mark|date=2001-10-01|title=More Guns, More Crime|journal=Journal of Political Economy|volume=109|issue=5|pages=1086–1114|doi=10.1086/322833|s2cid=33899679|issn=0022-3808}}</ref> | |||
::just as Messrs. Lott and Mustard can, with one model of the determinants of homicide, produce statistical residuals suggesting that 'shall issue' laws reduce homicide, we expect that a determined econometrician can produce a treatment of the same historical periods with different models and opposite effects. Econometric modeling is a double-edged sword in its capacity to facilitate statistical findings to warm the hearts of true believers of any stripe. | |||
Other academics praised Lott's methodology, including ] economist ],<ref name="Benson">{{Cite journal|last=Benson|first=Bruce L.|date=September 1999|title=Review of ''More Guns, Less Crime''|journal=Public Choice|volume=100|issue=3–4|pages=309–313|doi=10.1023/A:1018689310638|s2cid=150500420}}</ref> ] professor ],<ref name="McGinnis">{{Cite journal|last=McGinnis|first=John O.|date=July 20, 1998|title=Trigger Happiness|journal=]|volume=50|issue=13|page=49}}</ref> ] professor ],<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Moody|first1=Carlisle E.|date=October 2001|title=Testing for the Effects of Concealed Weapons Laws: Specification Errors and Robustness|journal=The Journal of Law and Economics|volume=44|issue=s2|pages=799–813|doi=10.1086/323313|s2cid=154918586}}</ref> ] professor William F. Shughart,<ref name="Shughart">{{Cite journal|last1=Shughart|first1=William F.|last2=Lott|first2=John R.|date=April 1, 1999|title=More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws: Review|journal=Southern Economic Journal|volume=65|issue=4|pages=978–981|doi=10.2307/1061296|jstor=1061296}}</ref> and SUNY economist Florenz Plassmann and University of Adelaide economist John Whitley.<ref name="Plassmann and Whitley">"" Confirming More Guns, Less Crime, by Florenz Plassmann and John Whitley, 2003, p. 1361</ref> | |||
:Zimring and Hawkins were right. Within a year, two determined econometricians, Dan Black and Daniel Nagin (1998) published a study showing that if they changed the statistical model a little bit, or applied it to different segments of the data, Lott and Mustard's findings disappeared." (. | |||
Referring to the research done on the topic, '']'' wrote in 2003 that "Mr. Lott's research has convinced his peers of at least one point: No scholars now claim that legalizing concealed weapons causes a major increase in crime."<ref name="CHE">{{Cite journal|last=Glenn |first=David |date=May 9, 2003 |title='More Guns, Less Crime' Thesis Rests on a Flawed Statistical Design, Scholars Argue |journal=] |volume=49 |issue=35 |page=A18 |url= http://chronicle.com/weekly/v49/i35/35a01801.htm |access-date=2007-05-27}}</ref> As Lott critics Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue III pointed out, "Lott and Mustard have made an important scholarly contribution in establishing that these laws have not led to the massive bloodbath of death and injury that some of their opponents feared. On the other hand, we find that the statistical evidence that these laws have reduced crime is limited, sporadic, and extraordinarily fragile."<ref name="shootdown" /> A 2008 article in '']'' surveyed peer-reviewed empirical academic studies, and found that 10 supported the proposition that right-to-carry reduces crime, 8 supported no significant effect and none supported an increase.<ref>, ''Econ Journal Watch'' Vol. 5, Iss. 3 (2008).</ref> The article was rebutted by ] and ] in the same journal in 2009.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://econjwatch.org/articles/yet-another-refutation-of-the-more-guns-less-crime-hypothesis-with-some-help-from-moody-and-marvell|title=Yet Another Refutation of the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis—With Some Help From Moody and Marvell · Econ Journal Watch: Law and economics, criminal justice policy, guns and crime|website=econjwatch.org|language=en|access-date=2017-09-13}}</ref> | |||
== Media Bias Regarding Guns == | |||
Lott argues that in both '']'' and '']'' he was trying to explain why media coverage of defensive gun use is rare. In both books he noted that only shootings that end in fatalities are likely to result in news stories. Since Lott was arguing that there is media bias, Lott argues that using this data instead of data that showed lower brandishing rates was biased against his conclusions. He wrote: | |||
In 2013, Lott founded the nonprofit organization Crime Prevention Research Center to study the relationship between gun laws and crime. As of July 2015, he was also the organization's president.<ref>{{cite web | url=https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/john-lott-guns-crime-data | title=When the Gun Lobby Tries to Justify Firearms Everywhere, It Turns to This Guy | work=Mother Jones | date=28 July 2015 | access-date=6 February 2016 | author=Lurie, Julia}}</ref> The board of directors for the organization includes guitarist ], conservative talkshow host ] and former sheriff ].<ref name=":2" /> In 2020, Lott left the organization to take a position in the Trump administration.<ref name=":2" /> | |||
<blockquote>"While news stories sometimes chronicle the defensive uses of guns, such discussions are rare compared to those depicting violent crime committed with guns. Since in many defensive cases a handgun is simply brandished, and no one is harmed, many defensive uses are never even reported to the police. I believe that this underreporting of defensive gun use is large, and this belief has been confirmed by the many stories I received from people across the country after the publicity broke on my original study." (''More Guns, Less Crime'' p.2)</blockquote> | |||
===Defensive gun use=== | |||
<blockquote>"...Pizza deliverymen defend themselves against robbers, carjackings are thwarted, robberies at automatic teller machines are prevented, and numerous armed robberies on the streets and in the stores are foiled, though these do not receive the national coverage of other gun crimes. Yet the cases covered by the news media are hardly typical; most of the encounters reported involve a shooting that ends in a fatality." (''More Guns, Less Crime'' p.3)</blockquote> | |||
{{Main|Defensive gun use}} | |||
Lott argues in both ''More Guns, Less Crime'' and ''The Bias Against Guns'' that defensive gun use (DGU) is underreported, noting that in general, only shootings ending in fatalities are discussed in news stories. In ''More Guns, Less Crime'', Lott writes that "ince in many defensive cases a handgun is simply brandished, and no one is harmed, many defensive uses are never even reported to the police." In May 1998, Lott wrote that "national surveys" suggested that "98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack." Lott cited similar figures in op-eds in '']''<ref name="Lott98WSJ">{{cite news|first=John R. |last=Lott Jr. |title=Keep Guns out of Lawyers' Hands |newspaper=Wall Street Journal |page=1 |date=1998-06-23}}</ref> and the '']''.<ref name="Lott98LAT">{{cite news|first=John R. |last=Lott Jr. |title=Cities Target Gun Makers in Bogus Lawsuits |newspaper=] |page=7 |date=1998-12-01}}</ref> | |||
In 2002, he said that brandishing a weapon was sufficient to stop an attack 95% of the time. Other researchers criticized his methodology. A study in ''Public Opinion Quarterly'' said that his sample size of 1,015 respondents was too small for the study to be accurate and that the majority of similar studies suggest a value between 70 and 80 percent.<ref name="2002studycriticism">{{Cite journal|last=McDowall |first=David |date=Summer 2005 |journal=] |title=John R. Lott Jr.'s Defensive Gun Brandishing Estimates |volume=69 |issue=2 |pages=246–263 |doi=10.1093/poq/nfi015}}</ref> According to Lott, Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz's 1994 estimate rises to 92 percent when brandishing and warning shots are added together.<ref>{{cite web | url=http://crimeresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/General-Disc-9702-Surveys.pdf |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20221009/http://crimeresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/General-Disc-9702-Surveys.pdf |archive-date=2022-10-09 |url-status=live | title=What Surveys Can Help Us Understand About Guns? | access-date=22 June 2016 | author=Lott, John|page=8}}</ref> Lott said that the lower rates found by others was at least in part due to the different questions that were asked.<ref>Discussion of different surveys on defensive gun use </ref> | |||
Lott claims that selective reporting by U.S. media fails to report instances of people defending themselves (or others) via legal use of guns. In his most commonly cited example, a school shooting at the ] on ] ], Lott cites Tracy Bridges who says he pointed his gun at the killer, who then dropped his weapon and was subsequently tackled.{{ref|tackle}} However, Ted Besen contradicted this viewpoint on the ] ] edition of ''The Early Show'', saying that the killer put his (empty) gun down before Bridges intervened. The true sequence of events remains unresolved. | |||
=== Defamation suit === | |||
Twenty-eight different reporters wrote about the incident. Reporters who wrote on ] tended not to mention the defender's gun, while stories on ] ] tended to mention the gun. Of the ten stories published on ], six mentioned that the students were armed, one story was written regarding the murdered dean and mentions the apprehension only in passing, and one story was about the memorial service and mentioned Gross as a tackler only in passing. {{ref|goss}} Of the eight-five stories published on the ] (not counting duplicates) only four made mention of the defender's use of a gun. Of the twenty-five stories published on the ], none made mention of the defenders' use of a gun. Lott's critics argue that this pattern contradicts any claim of intentional media bias, and points instead to journalists mentioning the gun if they knew about it. {{ref|mention}} Of the reporters who did not mention Bridge's story, ] of the '']'' cited "space constraints" for not including it. (''The Bias Against Guns'', p.26). | |||
On April 10, 2006, John Lott filed suit<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://www.overlawyered.com/lott_complaint.pdf/Lott%20v%20Levitt.pdf |title=PDF of Lott's complaint v. Levitt |access-date=August 27, 2007 |archive-date=September 27, 2007 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070927213215/http://www.overlawyered.com/lott_complaint.pdf/Lott%20v%20Levitt.pdf }}</ref> for ] against ] and ] over the book '']'' and against Levitt over a series of emails to John McCall. In the book ''Freakonomics'', Levitt and coauthor ] claimed that the results of Lott's research in ''More Guns, Less Crime'' had not been replicated by other academics. In the emails to economist John McCall, who had pointed to a number of papers in different academic publications that had replicated Lott's work, Levitt wrote that the work by several authors supporting Lott in a special 2001 issue of the ''Journal of Law and Economics'' had not been peer-reviewed, Lott had paid the University of Chicago Press to publish the papers, and that papers with results opposite of Lott's had been blocked from publication in that issue.<ref>{{cite news|last=Higgins|first=Michael|date=2006-04-11|title=Best-seller leads scholar to file lawsuit; Defamation allegation targets U. of C. author|page=3|newspaper=Chicago Tribune}}</ref> A federal judge found that Levitt's replication claim in ''Freakonomics'' was not defamation but found merit in Lott's complaint over the email claims.<ref>"" on John Lott's website</ref> The dismissal was affirmed by a three-judge panel of The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on February 11, 2009.<ref>" {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090216142918/http://www.ca7.uscourts.gov/fdocs/docs.fwx?submit=rss_sho&shofile=07-3095_022.pdf|date=2009-02-16}}"</ref><ref>{{Cite web|last=Staff|first=Courthouse News|date=2009-02-13|title=Professor Wasn't Defamed by 'Freakonomics' Author|url=https://www.courthousenews.com/professor-wasnt-defamed-by-freakonomics-author/|access-date=2021-01-02|language=en-US}}</ref> | |||
A settlement was reached over the claims made by Levitt in the emails to McCall whereby Levitt did not have to issue a formal apology but rather send a letter of clarification to John McCall that the issue of the ''Journal of Law and Economics'' was peer-reviewed, and that Lott had not improperly influenced the editors.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Gajda|first=Amy|title=The Trials of Academe|year=2010|publisher=Harvard University Press|isbn=978-0-674-05386-1|location=Harvard University Press|pages=166–170|doi=10.2307/j.ctvjghvr3|s2cid=198001655 }}</ref><ref name="settlement">{{Cite journal|last=Glenn|first=David|date=2007-08-10|title=Dueling Economists Reach Settlement in Defamation Lawsuit|url=http://chronicle.com/article/Dueling-Economists-Reach/6720|journal=Chronicle of Higher Education|volume=53|issue=49|page=10}}</ref><ref>""</ref> The ''Chronicle of Higher Education'' characterized Levitt's letter as offering "a doozy of a concession."<ref></ref> | |||
==Criticism== | |||
Lott's work is criticized by ] groups as well as some ]s within the gun rights movement. He has been accused of identifying only those interpretations of his data which promote a pro-gun agenda, and ignoring alternative interpretations. He has been accused of fabricating a ] in support of his position, using ] in a manner which oversteps professional and ethical boundaries, and other unethical conduct. | |||
===Lott's major firearms-related analyses and conclusions=== | |||
Some aspects of his model of the causes of violent crime appear ] to critics. A review of his book, ''More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws'', in ] states: | |||
:''As a result, many of Lott's findings make no sense. He finds, for example, that both increasing the rate of unemployment and reducing income reduces the rate of violent crimes and that reducing the number of black women 40 years old or older (who are rarely either perpetrators or victims of murder) substantially reduces murder rates. Indeed, according to Lott's results, getting rid of older black women will lead to a more dramatic reduction in homicide rates than increasing arrest rates or enacting shall-issue laws'' | |||
:... | |||
:''Lott takes data on gun ownership from 1988 and 1996 voter exit polls and purports to show that higher levels of gun ownership mean less crime. According to the polling source, Voter News Service, these data cannot be used as Lott has used them -- either to determine state-level gun ownership or changes in gun ownership. For example, the data from the exit polls indicate that gun ownership rates in the United States increased an incredible 50 percent during those eight years, yet all other surveys show either no change or a decrease in the percentage of Americans who personally own firearms.'' | |||
===Disputed survey=== | |||
In particular, critics argue that by requiring that the arrest rate and conviction rate for criminals and the scale of the deterrent effect be identical for all counties, instead of being allowed to vary from place to place, Lott has merely averaged out a single anomalous very large drop in violent crime seen during the period after deregulation of concealed weapons carrying in Florida over other locations which individually showed only small changes in the crime rate, sometimes an increase and sometimes a decrease. As ] ] professors ] and ] describe in ''Lives Saved or Lives Lost: The Effect of Concealed Handgun Laws on Crime'' in ] in ]: | |||
In the course of a dispute with ] in 1999–2000,<ref name="DuncanNumbers"> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120525025619/http://www.asc41.com/Criminologist/2000/January-February%202000.htm|date=2012-05-25}}, '']'', Vol. 25, No. 1, Jan/Feb 2000, pp. 1, 3–7.</ref><ref name="reply"> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120525030504/http://www.asc41.com/Criminologist/2000/September-October%202000.htm |date=May 25, 2012 }}, ''The Criminologist'', Vol. 25, No. 5, Sep/Oct 2000, pp. 1, 6.</ref> Lott claimed to have undertaken a national survey of 2,424 respondents in 1997, the results of which were the source for claims he had made beginning in 1997.<ref name="reply" /> However, in 2000 Lott was unable to produce the data or any records showing that the survey had been undertaken. He said the 1997 hard drive crash that had affected several projects with co-authors had destroyed his survey data set,<ref>{{cite web|last=Sanchez|first=Julian|author-link=Julian Sanchez (writer)|date=February 13, 2003|title=Red Herrings|url=http://www.juliansanchez.com/2003/02/13/red-herrings/|access-date=July 28, 2016|work=Julian Sanchez – blog}} (Julian Sanchez noted that the 1997 hard drive crash is widely accepted as a fact; the dispute is over the lack of solid evidence that Lott lost a survey data set in that crash)</ref> the original tally sheets had been abandoned with other personal property in his move from Chicago to Yale, and he could not recall the names of any of the students who he said had worked on it. Critics questioned whether the survey had ever taken place,<ref name="reason">{{cite web|last=Sanchez|first=Julian|date=May 2003|title=The Mystery of Mary Rosh|url=http://www.reason.com/news/show/28771.html|access-date=2007-06-15|work=]}}</ref> but Lott defends the survey's existence and accuracy.<ref name="surveysupport">{{cite web|title=Evidence of Survey|url=http://johnrlott.tripod.com/surveysupport.html}}, {{cite web|title=2002 Survey|url=http://www.johnlott.org/files/GeneralDisc97_02Surveys.zip}}</ref> | |||
:''Lott's finding relies on the assumption that the effect of permissive handgun laws on crime is identical across all counties and independent of any county characteristics. This assumption is flatly contradicted by conventional wisdom. Such laws would not have the same effect in crime-ridden urban areas as they would in remote rural counties or affluent suburbs. Some of Lott's results also assume that the number of arrests made by police does not depend on the number of crimes committed! So rural counties with very few crimes may presumably have more police arrests than urban counties with very large crime rates.'' | |||
:''Moreover, Lott's central results are invalid because of errors in computing expected arrest rates: he obtains mostly negative numbers for arrests. For example, more than 19,000 of approximately 33,000 county-level auto theft arrests are "negative"; the number of negative arrest rates for aggravated assault and property crimes are, respectively, 9,900 and 13,500. What does a negative arrest rate mean? Obviously, the number of individuals arrested for crimes can only be zero or positive.'' | |||
:''Once we correct for these errors, the more-guns-less-crime claim disintegrates. In fact, we show not only that Lott's strong crime-reducing effect does not materialize, but also that concealed handguns lead to a higher robbery rate.'' {{ref|hashem}} | |||
=== Mary Rosh persona === | |||
Even pro-gun researcher ] finds that Lott's analysis and conclusion fail a "reality check", stating | |||
In response to the dispute surrounding the missing survey, Lott used a ] by the name of "Mary Rosh" to defend his own works on ] and elsewhere. After investigative work by ] blogger ], Lott admitted to using the Mary Rosh persona.<ref name="reason" /> | |||
:''The 1.3% of the population in places like Florida who obtained permits would represent at best only a slight increase in the share of potential crime victims who carry guns in public places. And if those who got permits were merely legitimating what they were already doing before the new laws, it would mean there was no increase at all in carrying or in actual risks to criminals...more likely, the declines in crime coinciding with relaxation of carry laws were largely attributable to other factors not controlled in the Lott and Mustard analysis.'' (Kleck G. ''Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control'' New York, NY: Aldine de Gruyter; 1997) | |||
Further accusations claimed that Lott praised himself while posing as one of his former students<ref name="mj">] in ]: ''.'' October 13, 2003</ref><ref name="wifeandson">{{cite news |url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2003/02/01/scholar-invents-fan-to-answer-his-critics/f3ae3f46-68d6-4eee-a65e-1775d45e2133/ |title=Scholar Invents Fan to Answer His Critics |first=Richard |last=Morin |newspaper=] |date=February 1, 2003 |page=C01}}</ref> and that "Rosh" was used to post a favorable review of ''More Guns, Less Crime'' on ]. Lott has claimed that the review was written by his son and wife.<ref name="wifeandson" /> "I probably shouldn't have done it—I know I shouldn't have done it—but it's hard to think of any big advantage I got except to be able to comment fictitiously," Lott told '']'' in 2003.<ref name="wifeandson" /> | |||
On the basis of these and other similar and often more quantitative and statistically sophisticated ''a posteriori'' analyses of Lott's research on the subject {{ref|brookings}}, his critics argue that Lott has merely shown one analysis of his data which is not directly inconsistent with 'More guns, less crime'; but this model is unacceptable, however, on the basis of its other predictions and assumptions. Therefore, they conclude, some other factors are probably at work, specific to Florida in the time period covered. | |||
===Safe storage gun laws=== | |||
===Debate over adequacy of data for definitive answer to the question of the relationship between guns and crime=== | |||
The ] conducted a review of current research and data on firearms and violent crime, including Lott's work, and found: {{ref|nas}} | |||
:''There is no credible evidence that "right-to-carry" laws, which allow qualified adults to carry concealed handguns, either decrease or increase violent crime.'' | |||
at least in part because data collection limitations obscure anything more than the largest effects, positive or negative, from being observable. The report calls for the development of a ''National Violent Death Reporting System'' and a ''National Incident-Based Reporting System'' in order to start collecting accurate and reliable information that describes basic facts about violent injuries and deaths. | |||
In a 2001 study, Lott and John E. Whitley reported that safe-storage gun laws not only did not reduce juvenile suicides or accidental gun deaths, but that they also increased rates of violent and property crime.<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Lott Jr.|first1=John R.|last2=Whitley|first2=John E.|title=Safe-Storage Gun Laws: Accidental Deaths, Suicides, and Crime|url=http://crimeresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Lott-Whitley-Safe-Storage-Laws.pdf |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20221009/http://crimeresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Lott-Whitley-Safe-Storage-Laws.pdf |archive-date=2022-10-09 |url-status=live|journal=]|date=October 2001|volume=44|issue=S2|pages=659–689|doi=10.1086/338346|citeseerx=10.1.1.180.3066|s2cid=154446568}}</ref> The study was criticized by Webster et al. in the '']'' for using ] despite the fact that the data used in the study on youth suicides was "highly skewed and ]", and because the vast majority of crimes that Lott and Whitley claimed increased due to safe-storage laws occurred outside the home.<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Webster|first1=Daniel W.|title=Association Between Youth-Focused Firearm Laws and Youth Suicides|journal=]|date=4 August 2004|volume=292|issue=5|pages=594–601|doi=10.1001/jama.292.5.594|pmid=15292085|doi-access=free}}</ref> Webster and Carroll also wrote in ''Guns in American Society: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, Culture, and the Law'' that the Lott and Whitley study's findings with respect to crime were inconsistent with prior research.<ref>{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=oD46JBOhMU0C | title=Guns in American Society | publisher=ABC-CLIO | author=Carter, Gregg Lee | year=2002 | page=151| isbn=978-0-313-38670-1 }}</ref> | |||
However, there is a dissent by ] {{ref|wilsom}} who states, regarding Lott's work: | |||
:''In view of the confirmation of the findings that shall-issue laws drive down the murder rate, it is hard for me to understand why these claims are called "fragile."'' | |||
but ends his dissent by noting that Lott's evidence only confirms the effect on the '''murder rate''', not on violent crime as a whole: | |||
:''In sum, I find that the evidence presented by Lott and his supporters suggests that RTC laws do in fact help drive down the murder rate, though their effect on other crimes is ].'' | |||
and the comittee's response to Wilson {{ref|nasresp}} states: | |||
:''Except for the effects of right-to-carry laws on homicide, the entire committee is in agreement on the material in Chapter 6 and the report overall. In particular, the committee, including Wilson, found that "it is impossible to draw strong conclusions from the existing literature on the causal impact" of right-to-carry laws on violent and property crime in general and rape, aggravated assault, auto theft, burglary, and larceny in particular.'' | |||
and goes on to describe in more detail why they differ with Wilson in also remaining skeptical about the probative value of Lott's findings regarding murder. | |||
==Other research and events== | |||
Despite this controversy over the positive effects of gun ownership on reducing crime, the body of work reviewed by the NAS indicates that deregulation of concealed carry does not lead to a large increase in violent crime. As Wilson wrote: | |||
In a study published in 2000, Lott concluded that most of the large recent increases in campaign spending for state and federal offices can be explained by higher government spending.<ref>{{cite journal |doi=10.2139/ssrn.245336 |url=https://ssrn.com/abstract=245336 |title=A Simple Explanation for Why Campaign Expenditures are Increasing: The Government is Getting Bigger |first=John R. Jr. |last=Lott |journal=Journal of Law and Economics |date=October 2000 | s2cid=153298336 }}</ref> Lott also supports the conclusion that higher quality judges, measured by their output once they are on the court (e.g., number of citations to their opinions or number of published opinions), take longer to get confirmed.<ref>{{Cite journal|url=http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1740-1461.2005.00056.x/full|doi = 10.1111/j.1740-1461.2005.00056.x|title = The Judicial Confirmation Process: The Difficulty with Being Smart|year = 2005|last1 = Lott|first1 = John R.|journal = Journal of Empirical Legal Studies|volume = 2|issue = 3|pages = 407–447}}</ref> | |||
:''In addition, with only a few exceptions, the studies cited in Chapter 6, including those by Lott’s critics, do not show that the passage of RTC laws drives the crime rates up (as might be the case if one supposed that newly armed people went about looking for someone to shoot). The direct evidence that such shooting sprees occur is nonexistent.'' | |||
As an article in ''The Chronicle of Higher Education'' sums up the research on the topic, | |||
:''In the years since Mr. Lott's first publication, at least six scholars have published studies that tend to confirm his findings, while at least four other studies have tended to cast doubt on his findings. Mr. Donohue noted in an interview that Mr. Lott's research has convinced his peers of at least one point: No scholars now claim that legalizing concealed weapons causes a major increase in crime. Even Mr. Donohue's analysis, which is highly critical of Mr. Lott's, finds only "modest pernicious effects," in his words.'' | |||
Lott's supporters assert that this in itself represents a significant contribution to our understanding of the causes of crime, and even the ''New England Journal of Medicine'''s negative review of his book cited above states: | |||
:''Overall, Lott deserves high marks for attempting to study an important and difficult issue and for assembling and sharing his data.'' | |||
Other detractors continue to maintain, however, that overall his data and his analysis are too biased to clarify what was already a cloudy picture. | |||
=== Lost Bush votes in the 2000 presidential election === | |||
===Lott's "2%" survey=== | |||
In 2000, Lott argued, using a regression analysis, that George W. Bush lost at least 10,000 votes in Florida after the media incorrectly called the state for Al Gore while voting was still ongoing in the more conservative parts of the state.<ref name=":1">{{Cite book|last1=Brady|first1=Henry E.|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=1VQK7EGohB4C|title=Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards|last2=Collier|first2=David|date=2004|publisher=Rowman & Littlefield|isbn=978-0-7425-1125-5|language=en}}</ref> Lott's argument is used in the influential social science methodology textbook ''Rethinking Social Inquiry'' (edited by Henry Brady and David Collier) as an example of poor methodology. Contrary to Lott's study, they show that the number of lost Bush votes ranged from 28 to 56.<ref name=":1" /> | |||
Lott's critics also doubt Lott's claims to have conducted a survey in ], from which he concluded that in only 2% of defensive gun uses was it necessary for the defender to fire the gun at all, either at the perpetrator or as a warning. Although this estimate is mentioned in only one sentence in his first book, Lott has cited the 2% figure in public and in print dozens {{ref|dozens}} of times even after the controversy over this survey had been made public, including in sworn testimony before legislative bodies.{{ref|nebraska}}{{ref|maryland}} | |||
In the first edition of '']'' (May 1998) Lott first referred to the 98%/2% saying ''"If national surveys are correct, 98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack"'', with no further explanation regarding said surveys. On occasions when asked which particular sources reached this conclusion, Lott attributed it to a variety of different surveys, but in fact the 2% figure contradicts all other published studies of the question, including all the ones cited by Lott at various times. The lowest figure from any of these is that more than 20% of the defensive gun users involve firing the gun; ten times larger than the figure Lott cited. | |||
=== Abortion and crime === | |||
Upon publication of the second edition of his book, "If national surveys are correct" had been replaced by "If a survey I conducted is correct", without any explanation. Lott was unable to provide any evidence for his survey, stating that the data, methodology, and intermediate work and results had all been lost in a computer crash. No other evidence, such as hardcopy of the data, employment records or names of student workers, reimbursements, tax records, Human Investigation Committee records, or the disk of US telephone numbers which had been sampled, was available. Further, Lott cannot reconstruct the methodology of the survey, either how he generated the random sample of telephone numbers or the methodology used on the raw data to calculate the final results. | |||
With John Whitley at the University of Adelaide, Lott published a study that argued that liberalization of abortion laws led to higher murder rates.<ref>John R. Lott Jr. and John E. Whitley, "Abortion and Crime: Unwanted Children and Out-of-Wedlock Births", (2001) working paper and published article.</ref> In a review of the literature on the relationship between abortion and crime, ], an economist at Baruch College and the National Bureau of Economic Research, praised Lott and Whitley for gathering additional data on abortion but criticized the methodology that they used.<ref>{{cite journal |last=Joyce |first=Theodore J. |date=June 2009 |title=Abortion and Crime: A Review |doi=10.3386/w15098|s2cid=74738947 |journal=] |series=Working Paper Series |url=http://www.nber.org/papers/w15098 |doi-access=free }}</ref> | |||
=== Illegal immigration and crime === | |||
One individual (David Gross, an attorney for Concealed Carry Reform Now, a pro-gun lobbying orgnization {{ref|grossact}} has come forward to report that he recalled being called for such a survey which Lott asserted only later was the survey in question. {{ref|sanchgross}} | |||
Lott has non-peer-reviewed research that purports to show that undocumented immigrants are more crime-prone than U.S. citizens. In doing so, Lott lumped together both legal and illegal immigrants in prison into a category for illegal immigrants, leading to an elevated crime rate for illegal immigrants.<ref name=":5">{{Cite web|last=Lind|first=Dara|date=2018-03-01|title=The right-wing effort to paint DREAMers as a nightmare|url=https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/1/17054546/immigration-crime-dreamers-daca-gangs|access-date=2021-01-04|website=Vox|language=en}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|date=2018-02-05|title=The Fatal Flaw in John R. Lott Jr.'s Study on Illegal Immigrant Crime in Arizona|url=https://www.cato.org/blog/fatal-flaw-john-r-lott-jrs-study-illegal-immigrant-crime-arizona|access-date=2021-01-04|website=Cato Institute|language=en}}</ref> ''The Washington Post'' fact-checker wrote that this was a "significant flaw in Lott's study that undercuts his conclusion. Lott says the overall thrust of his study still holds, but the issue muddles his research and invites guesswork as to the actual crime rate for the undocumented immigrant population in Arizona."<ref>{{Cite news|date=2018|title=Questions raised about study that links undocumented immigrants to higher crime|newspaper=The Washington Post|url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2018/03/21/questions-raised-about-a-study-that-links-undocumented-immigrants-to-higher-crime/?noredirect=on}}</ref> | |||
Lott's claims were heavily promoted by the Trump administration to justify its anti-immigration policies, in particular their attempts to end DACA.<ref name=":5" /><ref>{{Cite web|last=Exstrum|first=Olivia|title=The guy behind the bogus immigration report has a long history of terrible and misleading research|url=https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/02/the-guy-behind-the-bogus-immigration-report-has-a-long-history-of-terrible-and-misleading-research/|access-date=2021-01-04|website=Mother Jones|language=en-US}}</ref> | |||
Lott repeated his survey in ], this time meticulously documenting the survey's existence. The estimate found in this survey was 8% not 2%. Lott claimed that, after weighting the study to resemble the demographics of the general US population the estimate was reduced to 5%. Despite this result, however, Lott cited the older 2% figure on a televised publicity talk for the new book (''Book TV'', CSPAN-2, May 15, 2004) which contains the new survey. | |||
=== |
=== Women's suffrage and government growth === | ||
According to a study by Lott and Larry Kenny, "women's suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue and more liberal voting patterns for federal representatives, and these effects continued growing over time as more women took advantage of the franchise."<ref>{{cite journal |url=https://ssrn.com/abstract=160530 |title=How Dramatically Did Women's Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government? |first1=John R. Jr. |last1=Lott |first2=Larry |last2=Kenny |journal=Journal of Political Economy |year=1999|doi=10.2139/ssrn.160530 }}</ref> | |||
=== Affirmative action in police departments === | |||
In early ] Lott admitted that he had created and used "Mary Rosh" as a ] to defend his own works on ]. Lott as "Rosh" argued about his work with critics, at the same time arguing that those same critics are not worthy of Lott's attention. | |||
Lott published a study arguing that affirmative action in the hiring of police reduced the overall quality of all officers and increased crime. The most adverse effects of these hiring policies have occurred in the most heavily black-populated cities. There is no consistent evidence that crime rates rise when standards for hiring women are changed.<ref>{{cite journal |url=https://ssrn.com/abstract=231100 |title=Does a Helping Hand Put Others At Risk?: Affirmative Action, Police Departments, and Crime |first=John R. Jr. |last=Lott |journal=Economic Inquiry |date=April 2000 |volume=38 |issue=2 |pages=239–277 |doi=10.1093/ei/38.2.239 }}</ref> | |||
=== Environmental regulations === | |||
At one point, Rosh engaged in a lengthy discussion of errors of fact in a newspaper op-ed piece Lott had written {{ref|roshusenet}} (regarding the disarming of the shooter in the school shooting mentioned above), which when corrected would have reduced support for Lott's slogan of "More guns, less crime". After Rosh was finally forced to admit that the original piece did indeed omit some important facts, Lott then published a corrected version in a different newspaper, which Rosh then cited as evidence that the errors in the original piece must have been due to bad editing by the newspaper, rather than Lott's fault. To prove her case, Rosh suggested that her opponent telephone Lott to discuss it; he did so, and, despite Rosh having been discussing it online for over a week, Lott claimed no knowledge of the controversy, and even not to have seen how the original newspaper had edited his work {{ref|lottnewspaper}}, implying that it was indeed the editors' fault, and that he had not in fact made an error then subsequently corrected it. Two months later, however, Lott published another article on the same subject {{ref|lottpublish}}, again omitting the same crucial facts which would have disproved his position, clearly demonstrating that not only was it not bad editing that was the source of the errors in the first place, but that Lott was willing to knowingly repeat the error to add false support to his argument, using Rosh to give himself the appearance of a "plausible deniability". | |||
Together with John Karpoff and Eric Wehrly at the University of Washington, Lott has worked to show the importance of government regulations through both legal and regulatory penalties and the weaknesses of reputational penalties in reducing ].<ref>{{cite journal |url=https://ssrn.com/abstract=747824 |title=The Reputational Penalties for Environmental Violations: Empirical Evidence |first1=Jonathan M. |last1=Karpoff |first2=John R. Jr. |last2=Lott |first3=Eric |last3=Wehrly |journal=Journal of Law and Economics |date=August 16, 2005 |volume=48 |issue=2 |pages=653–675 |doi=10.1086/430806 |s2cid=154290101 }}</ref> Firms violating environmental laws suffer statistically significant losses in the market value of firm equity. The losses are of similar magnitudes to the legal penalties imposed; and in the cross section, the market value loss is related to the size of the legal penalty. | |||
=== Voter fraud claims === | |||
Rosh claimed to be one of Lott's former students, and had many good things to say about him; for instance his teaching style: | |||
:"I had him for a PhD level empirical methods class when he taught at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania back in the early 1990s, well before he gained national attention, and I have to say that he was the best professor that I ever had. You wouldn't know that he was a 'right-wing' ideologue from the class. He argued both sides of different issues. He tore apart empirical work whether you thought that it might be right-wing or left-wing. At least at Wharton for graduate school or Stanford for undergraduate, Lott taught me more about analysis than any other professor that I had and I was not alone. There were a group of us students who would try to take any class that he taught. Lott finally had to tell us that it was best for us to try and take classes from other professors more to be exposed to other ways of teaching graduate material." | |||
{{further|Attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election}} | |||
Similarly, the Rosh identity was also used to post several five star reviews of his books {{ref|lottreviews}} on ], in violation of Amazon.com's clear policy, and at ], as well as bad reviews of books by his rivals; Lott states that his son and wife wrote them. Rosh also urged people to download copies of Lott's papers: | |||
In October 2020, Lott was appointed as a senior adviser for research and statistics at the ] within the ] in the ].<ref name=":2">{{cite web | last1=Gerstein | first1=Josh | title=Controversial gun advocate hired by Justice Department last month | url=https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/24/controversial-gun-advocate-justice-department-440251 | date=November 24, 2020 | work=] | access-date=November 24, 2020}}</ref> Lott resigned from the DoJ on January 16, 2021.<ref>{{cite news |title=John Lott, Discredited Gun Researcher, Leaves DOJ |url=https://www.thetrace.org/2021/01/discredited-gun-researcher-out-at-justice-department/ |access-date=January 22, 2021 |work=The Trace |date=21 January 2021 |language=en-us}}</ref> Lott has claimed there was voter fraud in the ].<ref>{{Cite web|last=Gerstein|first=Josh|title=Controversial gun advocate hired by Justice Department last month|url=https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/24/controversial-gun-advocate-justice-department-440251|access-date=2021-01-02|website=Politico |date=November 24, 2020 |language=en}}</ref> He argued there was "irregularities" in the ] in ], and later wrote a paper claiming there was evidence of fraud in the absentee ballots in ] and ].<ref name=":6">{{Cite web|last=Hansen|first=Jordan|title=GOP-backed group claims 'irregularities' on Missoula County 2020 ballots|url=https://missoulian.com/news/local/gop-backed-group-claims-irregularities-on-missoula-county-2020-ballots/article_c43cc57c-ff31-54c3-9359-4a5d042cb799.html|access-date=2021-09-14|website=missoulian.com|date=March 30, 2021 |language=en}}</ref> A 2021 '']'' study by political scientists at Stanford University and the University of Chicago rebutted Lott's paper as being not even remotely convincing, writing that his analysis was "entirely dependent on the completely arbitrary order in which pairs of precincts in other counties are entered in the dataset" and that his conclusions about voter fraud were "utterly baseless."<ref name=":6" /><ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Eggers|first1=Andrew C.|last2=Garro|first2=Haritz|last3=Grimmer|first3=Justin|date=2021-11-09|title=No evidence for systematic voter fraud: A guide to statistical claims about the 2020 election|journal=Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences|language=en|volume=118|issue=45|doi=10.1073/pnas.2103619118|issn=0027-8424|pmid=34728563|pmc=8609310 |bibcode=2021PNAS..11803619E |doi-access=free }}</ref><ref>{{cite web |last1=Grimmer |first1=Justin |title=Comment On 'A Simple Test For The Extent Of Voter Fraud With Absentee Ballots In The 2020 Presidential Election' |url=https://www.hoover.org/research/comment-simple-test-extent-voterfraud-absentee-ballots-2020-presidentialelection |website=] |access-date=14 September 2021 |date=5 January 2021}}</ref> | |||
:"The papers that get downloaded the most get noticed the most by other academics. '''It is very important that people download this paper as frequently as possible'''." (Emphasis in the original) | |||
=== 2021 "graduation address" event === | |||
===Questions regarding the overall reliability of Lott's work=== | |||
On June 4, 2021, two parents of a child killed in the 2018 shooting at ] invited Lott and ] to deliver what they falsely said was a dress rehearsal for a 2021 graduation address for a fictitious school called "the James Madison Academy". The space for the audience contained 3,044 empty folding chairs. Lott first realized that the event was a staged attempt to call attention to school shootings, and not a genuine commencement address dress rehearsal, when news media asked him to comment on segments of video of the "dress rehearsal" that the organizers posted on the internet. They said that the empty chairs were intended to represent the victims of school shootings who would never graduate from high school. In a local ] news interview, Lott said that he is not opposed to all forms of background checks but simply believes that background checks broadly discriminate against persons of color, primarily black and Hispanic, among potential gun buyers.<ref name=Clark1>{{cite web |last1=Clark |first1=Lauren |title=Gun activists tricked into speaking at fake Las Vegas high school graduation |url=https://news3lv.com/amp/news/local/gun-activists-tricked-into-speaking-at-fake-las-vegas-high-school-graduation |website=3LV News |date=June 23, 2021 |access-date=8 September 2021}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/amberjamieson/nra-president-graduation-speech|title = A Parkland Victim's Dad Tricked a Former NRA President into Speaking at a Fake Graduation| website=] | date=June 23, 2021 }}</ref> | |||
Other questions regarding the credibility of Lott's work have been raised. | |||
*Some academic critiques of Lott's work have found his conclusions to rely on coding errors and other systematic sources of bias, although no suggestion of deliberate wrong-doing was made {{ref|shootdown}}. Lott's rebuttals to these were in turn found to similarly depend on systematic sources of bias {{ref|misfires}}. | |||
*Some of Lott's op-eds and other popular works have been found to contain assertions which were either false or debateable. Lott has sometimes blamed faulty editing on the part of the media, though identical errors were sometimes repeated in other Lott-authored papers. Lott has denied many of the errors, though at times he has replaced erroneous files with corrected ones {{ref|replaced}}. One of Lott's critics alleges that Lott has also backdated corrections {{ref|bacdate}}. Jeff Koch (Lott's webmaster) and Lott attribute this to error rather than malicious intent {{ref|error}}, Koch did not responded to requests from ] contributor ] to elaborate. | |||
==Bibliography== | ==Bibliography== | ||
*''Are Predatory Commitments Credible?'' (ISBN 0226493555) | |||
*''More Guns, Less Crime'' (ISBN 0226493644) | |||
*'']'' (ISBN 0895261146) | |||
* ''Uncertainty and Economic Evolution'' ({{ISBN|0-415-15166-X}}) | |||
== External links == | |||
* ''Are Predatory Commitments Credible?'' ({{ISBN|0-226-49355-5}}) | |||
* | |||
* '']'' ({{ISBN|0-226-49364-4}}) | |||
* | |||
* '']'' ({{ISBN|0-89526-114-6}}) | |||
* | |||
* ''Straight Shooting'' ({{ISBN|0-936783-47-8}}) | |||
* in ] | |||
* '']'' ({{ISBN|978-1-596-98506-3}}) | |||
* ''Debacle: Obama's War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do Now to Regain Our Future'' ({{ISBN|978-1118186176}}) | |||
* ''At the Brink: Will Obama Push Us Over the Edge?'' ({{ISBN|978-1621570516}}) | |||
* ''Dumbing Down the Courts: How Politics Keeps the Smartest Judges Off the Bench'' ({{ISBN|978-1626522497}}) | |||
* ''The War on Guns,'' ] 2016 ({{ISBN|978-1-62157-580-1}}) | |||
==See also== | |||
* ] | |||
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* ] | |||
==References== | |||
''Regarding Lott's research'': | |||
{{Reflist}} | |||
==External links== | |||
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==References== | |||
#{{note|tackle}} http://www.tsra.com/Lott48.htm retrieved January 10, 2006 | |||
#{{note|goss}} http://timlambert.org/2003/06/0618/ retrieved January 10, 2006 | |||
#{{note|mention}} http://timlambert.org/guns/appalachian/index.index retrieved January 10, 2006 | |||
#{{note|hashem}} http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_REPORT/erarchive/1999/September/erseptember.27/9_27_99dezhbakhsh.html retrieved January 10, 2006 | |||
#{{note|brookings}} http://www.brookings.edu/dybdocroot/press/books/chapter_1/evaluatinggunpolicy.pdf retrieved January 10, 2006 | |||
#{{note|nas}} http://www4.nationalacademies.org/news.nsf/isbn/0309091241?OpenDocument retrieved January 11, 2006 | |||
#{{note|wilson}} http://www.nap.edu/books/0309091241/html/269.html retrieved January 11, 2006 | |||
#{{note|nasresp}} http://www.nap.edu/books/0309091241/html/272.html | |||
#{{note|dozens}} | |||
#* Does Allowing Law-Abiding Citizens to Carry Concealed Handguns Save Lives? Valparaiso University Law Review, 31(2): 355-63, Spring, 1997. The same passage also appears in: John R. Lott Jr “Concealed Handgun Laws Can Save Lives” Agenda 3(4): 499-503, 1996 | |||
#*John R. Lott, Jr., Packing protection, Letters, Chicago Sun-Times, April 30, 1997, Pg. 52 | |||
#*John R. Lott Jr., Childproof Gun Locks: Bound to Misfire, Wall Street Journal, July 19, 1997 Wall St. J. A22 | |||
#*More Guns, Less Crime (University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 3. Date of publication, May, 1998. | |||
#*Will Suing Gun Manufacturers Save Lives? By John R. Lott, Jr. Investor’s Business Daily May 27, 1998 | |||
#*Interview with John Lott Jr., The Dallas Morning News May 31, 1998. | |||
#*Keep guns out of lawyers hands, Wall Street Journal, June 23, 1998. | |||
#*How to Stop Mass Shootings, The American Enterprise, July/August 1998. | |||
#*Gun-Lock Proposal Bound to Misfire, Chicago Tribune, August 6, 1998. | |||
#*John Lott, Commentary: Gun Locks That are Bound to Misfire, August 14, 1998, Washington Times (D.C.) A17. | |||
#*John R. Lott Jr., Letters, American Bar Association Journal, October, 1998 | |||
#*Gun Control Advocates Purvey Deadly Myths, Wall Street Journal Nov. 11, 1998. | |||
#*John Lott on Uncommon Knowledge “Farewell To Arms? Gun Control” Film Date: November 13, 1998 | |||
#*Will Suing Gun makers Endanger Lives? Chicago Tribune, Nov. 17, 1998. | |||
#*Cities Target Gun Makers in Bogus Lawsuits,. Los Angeles Times, Dec. 1, 1998. | |||
#*Will More Guns Mean Less Crime? Consumers’ Research Magazine, Dec 1998 v81 #12 p18 - this article consists of excerpts from More Guns, Less Crime | |||
#*National Review, Dec 21, 1998 p46(1) Gun Shy: Cities turn from regulation to litigation in their campaign against guns. (product liability suits in Chicago and New Orleans) John R. Lott Jr.. | |||
#*Interview with John Lott on NRA live, 25 December 1998. | |||
#*Talk by John Lott in Minnesota on January 27, 1999. Transcribed from an audio tape. | |||
#*“Lethal handgun fears” (review of Making a Killing by John R. Lott, Jr. Washington Times Feb 24 1999 | |||
#*Gun Laws Can Be Dangerous, Too, Wall Street Journal May 12, 1999. | |||
#*John R. Lott, Jr. Gun Regulations Can Cost Lives (Testimony before the House Judiciary Committee May 27, 1999) | |||
#*John R. Lott Jr “Q: Would new requirements for gun buyers save lives? No: New gun controls will pose greater dangers to persons threatened” Insight on the News June 21 1999 v15 i23 p24(4). | |||
#*John R. Lott Jr More Guns, Less Crime American Experiment Quarterly vol 2 no 2 Summer 1999 11-21 | |||
#*John Lott on NPR’s “Justice Talking” June 28, 1999 Quote is at time 55:25 in the audio | |||
#*“Should We Sue the Lawyers?” by John R. Lott Jr. Intellectual Capital August 5-12, 1999 Vol 4 Issue 31. | |||
#*Debunking gun myths By John R. Lott Jr. August 8, 1999 Journal Gazette, Fort Wayne, Indiana | |||
#*Oral statement, TV show, Hardball, CNBC, August 18, 1999. Video tape obtained from www.burrelles.com. | |||
#*“Do We Need the Second Amendment?” Eagle Council Forum XXVIII, September 24-26, 1999. Video tape obtained from ACTS, Inc. | |||
#*John Lott Gun Locks: Bound to Misfire Intellectual Ammunition, Mar 1, 2000. (The same article was also published on the Independence Institute’s Op-Ed page on Feb 9, 2000) | |||
#*John Lott February 13 2000 Rocky Mountain News | |||
#*Gun locks will cost, not save, lives in Maryland, Illinois Firearm Resource Feb. 25, 2000, Baltimore Sun. | |||
#*Gun Locks Bound to Misfire, New York Post, March 20, 2000. | |||
#*John Lott at a taping of a TV pilot hosted by John Stossel April 2000 | |||
#*Libertarian Party of New York’s convention on April 29 2000. | |||
#*Talk by John Lott to the Independent Women’s Forum, May 2000 | |||
#*More Guns, Less Crime, second edition (University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 3. Publication date, May, 2000 | |||
#*Gun locks may increase crime June 2, 2000. Detroit News By John R. Lott, Jr. | |||
#*“Dr. Stan with John Lott. More guns, less crime?” Radio Liberty, August 1, 2000, 4 PM. Cassette tape of broadcast obtained from www.radioliberty.com. | |||
#*John Lott, radio interview on “The Zoh Show” August 2000 | |||
#*One case for guns,Christian Science Monitor, August 21, 2000. | |||
#*John R. Lott, Jr’s Reply to Otis Duncan’s Recent article in The Criminologist, The Criminologist, vol. 25, no. 5, September/October 2000, page 6. | |||
#*John Lott. Talk at 2000 Gun Rights Policy Conference September 30, 2000 | |||
#*John Lott speech at Sioux Falls City Club, 25 Oct 2000 Broadcast on South Dakota Public Radio at time 26:30 in the speech | |||
#*What can be done to stop hate crimes? San Diego Union-Tribune, Feb. 23, 2001. | |||
#*John R. Lott Jr., Self-defense may be best crime deterrent, The Boston Herald, March 10, 2001. | |||
#*LA Times Friday, March 30, 2001 Others Fear Being Placed at the Mercy of Criminals by John Lott Jr. | |||
#*John R. Lott, Jr., Tell about when guns save lives, Dallas Morning News, April 10, 2001. | |||
#*Gun Lock Law Endangers Families, Independence Feature Syndicate Opinion-Editorial, Independence Institute, March 28, 2001. | |||
#*John R. Lott Jr., Why safe storage laws, gun locks likely will backfire. The San Diego Union-Tribune June 7, 2001. | |||
#*John R. Lott, Jr., Small Arms Save Lives, The Wall Street Journal Europe, July 30, 2001. | |||
#*Gun News You Never See, New York Post, August 6, 2001. | |||
#*Fighting fire with firepower, Chicago Sun-Times August 10, 2001 | |||
#*Israeli Homeland Security Tips New York Post, November 12, 2001. | |||
#*Yes:Armed citizens can make it more difficult for attackers, The Detroit News December 30, 2001 | |||
#*Mary Rosh, posting to soc.retirement on Jan 1, 2002 | |||
#*John Lott, The Bias Against Guns, p 259-260 Regnery, March 2003. | |||
#*John Lott, What Surveys Can Help Us Understand About Guns? March 2003. | |||
#*John Lott, on the KEZI Watercooler, April 8, 2003 | |||
#*John Lott, speaking on Radio Liberty on April 10, 2003. | |||
#*John Lott, speaking on the Glenn Mitchell show on KERA 90.1, April 15, 2003. | |||
#*John Lott, speaking at American Enterpise Institute panel discussion on The Bias Against Guns, May 19, 2003. | |||
#*John Lott, speaking on American Family Radio, June 10, 2003. | |||
#*John R. Lott, in an interview on the “Strike the Root” website, June 11 2003. | |||
#*John R. Lott Jr., Letting Teachers Pack Guns Will Make America’s Schools Safer Los Angeles Times, July 13 2003 | |||
#*John R. Lott Jr, Letter, The Columbus Dispatch, July 26 2003 | |||
#*John R. Lott Jr., Lottery Numbers Why don’t media cover the good-news stories about guns? Philadelphia Inquirer, Aug 01 2003 | |||
#*John R. Lott Jr., Letter, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Aug 13 2003 | |||
#*John R. Lott Jr., Guns, Crime, and Health, World and I, Oct 2003 v18 i10 p32 | |||
#*John R. Lott Jr., Bound to Misfire,Tech Central Station, Nov 7 2003 | |||
#*John Lott, speaking on the Jeff Rense Program on Nov 17, 2003. | |||
#*John Lott, Why People Fear Guns, Fox News Jan 02, 2004 | |||
#*John Lott, “What the Media Won’t Tell You About Guns”, American Rifleman, Mar 1, 2004 | |||
#*John Lott speaking on Book TV on The Bias Against Guns, recorded on April 15, 2004 | |||
#*John Lott speech delivered on May 25, 2004, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Seattle, Washington. | |||
#*John Lott debate with John Kessler, Ohio State University, October 26, 2004. | |||
#*John R. Lott Jr. & Jack Soltysik Suiting Down National Review Online, October 20, 2005 | |||
#{{note|nebraska}} Page 41, State of Nebraska, Committee on Judiciary LB465, February 6, 1997, statement of John Lott, Transcript prepared by the Clerk of the Legislature, Transcriber’s Office. | |||
#{{note|maryland}} Testimony of Professor John Lott in "opposition" to HB 280/2000 - Tax Credit for Gun Safety Devices on Wednesday, February 16, 2000, retrieved from http://www.mcdl.org/MD_Info/2000/Lott_HB280_2000.htm on January 10, 2006. | |||
#{{note|grossact}} http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/2003/08/20_zdechlikm_statefairguns/ accessed January 11, 2006 | |||
#{{note|sanchgross}} http://www.juliansanchez.com/notes/archives/2003/02/once_more_into.php accessed January 11, 2006 | |||
#{{note|roshusenet}} http://groups.google.com/groups?q=g:thl3450935520d&dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=u2b75u8tj7lqtubpq9v9psd371ij08vm51%404ax.com | |||
#{{note|lottnewspaper}} http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/guns/files/roshhuntress.html | |||
#{{note|lottpublish}} http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleID.17199/article_detail.asp | |||
#{{note|lottreviews}} http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/guns/files/maryrosh.html | |||
#{{note|shootdown}} | |||
#{{note|misfires}} | |||
#{{note|replaced}} http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2003/10/we_592_02.html accessed January 11, 2006 | |||
#{{note|bacdate}} http://timlambert.org/2003/09/0910/ | |||
#{{note|error}} http://johnrlott.tripod.com/other/J.html | |||
<!-- Metadata: see ] --> | |||
{{Persondata | |||
|NAME=Lott, John R. Jr. | |||
|ALTERNATIVE NAMES=Rosh, Mary | |||
|SHORT DESCRIPTION=American scholar, researcher | |||
|DATE OF BIRTH=] ] | |||
|PLACE OF BIRTH= | |||
|DATE OF DEATH= | |||
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Latest revision as of 23:14, 5 December 2024
American economist, political commentator, and gun rights advocate (born 1958) For other people named John Lott, see John Lott (disambiguation).
John Lott | |
---|---|
Born | John Richard Lott Jr. (1958-05-08) May 8, 1958 (age 66) |
Academic career | |
Field | Economics |
Institutions | University of Chicago Yale University The Wharton School University of Maryland, College Park American Enterprise Institute |
Alma mater | University of California, Los Angeles (BA, MA, PhD) |
John Richard Lott Jr. (born May 8, 1958) is an American economist, political commentator, and gun rights advocate. Lott was formerly employed at various academic institutions and at the American Enterprise Institute conservative think tank. He is the former president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, a nonprofit he founded in 2013. He worked in the Office of Justice Programs within the U.S. Department of Justice under the Donald Trump administration from October 2020 to January 2021. Lott holds a Ph.D. in economics from UCLA.
He has written for both academic and popular publications. He has authored books such as More Guns, Less Crime, The Bias Against Guns, and Freedomnomics. He is best known as a gun rights advocate and has argued against restrictions on owning and carrying guns. The New Yorker and The Trace have said "no one has had greater influence" in the scientific debate over firearms while Newsweek referred to Lott as "The Gun Crowd's Guru."
Academic career
John Lott studied economics at UCLA, receiving his B.A. in 1980, M.A. in 1982, and Ph.D. in 1984. Lott has held positions in law and economics at several institutions, including the Yale Law School, the Hoover Institution, UCLA, the Wharton Business School, Texas A&M University, and Rice University. Lott was the chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission (1988–1989). He spent five years at the University of Chicago, as a visiting professor from 1994 to 1995 and as a John M. Olin fellow from 1995 to 1999. Lott was a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute from 2001 to 2006. He left AEI for SUNY Binghamton. From July 2007 to 2010, Lott was a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland Foundation at the University of Maryland, College Park and lectured on law and economics.
Lott has written op-eds for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Chicago Tribune. Since 2008, he has been a columnist for Fox News, initially weekly.
Research on guns
Concealed weapons and crime rate
In a 1997 article written with David B. Mustard and Lott's subsequent books More Guns, Less Crime and The Bias Against Guns, Lott argued that allowing adults to carry concealed weapons significantly reduces crime in America. In 2004, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) National Research Council (NRC) conducted a review of current research and data on firearms and violent crime, including Lott's work, and concluded "that with the current evidence it is not possible to determine that there is a causal link between the passage of right-to-carry laws and crime rates." The NAS report wrote of Lott's work, "The initial model specification, when extended to new data, does not show evidence that passage of right-to-carry laws reduces crime. The estimated effects are highly sensitive to seemingly minor changes in the model specification and control variables." The criminologist James Q. Wilson was the only member on the 18-member NAS panel who dissented from this conclusion. For similar reasons as highlighted by the NAS, as well as "multiple serious problems with data and methodology", a 2020 comprehensive review of existing research on concealed-carry by the RAND Corporation discounted Lott's studies.
Other reviews said that there were problems with Lott's model. A replication by Dan A. Black and Daniel Nagin found that minor adjustments to Lott and Mustard's model led to the disappearance of the findings. In the New England Journal of Medicine, David Hemenway argued that Lott failed to account for several key variables, including drug consumption. Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue said that the model used by Lott contained significant coding errors and systemic bias. In the American Journal of Public Health, Daniel Webster et al. also raised concerns about flaws in the study, such as misclassification of laws and endogeneity of predictor variables, which they said rendered the study's conclusions "insupportable". Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck considered it unlikely that such a large decrease in violent crime could be explained by a relatively modest increase in concealed carry. A 1998 study by Jens Ludwig that said it "more effectively control for unobserved variables that may vary over time" than the Lott and Mustard study concluded that "shall-issue laws have resulted, if anything, in an increase in adult homicide rates." A 2001 study in the Journal of Political Economy by University of Chicago economist Mark Duggan did robustness checks of Lott and Mustard's study and found that the findings of the Lott and Mustard study were inaccurate.
Other academics praised Lott's methodology, including Florida State University economist Bruce Benson, Cardozo School of Law professor John O. McGinnis, College of William and Mary professor Carlisle Moody, University of Mississippi professor William F. Shughart, and SUNY economist Florenz Plassmann and University of Adelaide economist John Whitley.
Referring to the research done on the topic, The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote in 2003 that "Mr. Lott's research has convinced his peers of at least one point: No scholars now claim that legalizing concealed weapons causes a major increase in crime." As Lott critics Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue III pointed out, "Lott and Mustard have made an important scholarly contribution in establishing that these laws have not led to the massive bloodbath of death and injury that some of their opponents feared. On the other hand, we find that the statistical evidence that these laws have reduced crime is limited, sporadic, and extraordinarily fragile." A 2008 article in Econ Journal Watch surveyed peer-reviewed empirical academic studies, and found that 10 supported the proposition that right-to-carry reduces crime, 8 supported no significant effect and none supported an increase. The article was rebutted by Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue in the same journal in 2009.
In 2013, Lott founded the nonprofit organization Crime Prevention Research Center to study the relationship between gun laws and crime. As of July 2015, he was also the organization's president. The board of directors for the organization includes guitarist Ted Nugent, conservative talkshow host Lars Larson and former sheriff David Clarke. In 2020, Lott left the organization to take a position in the Trump administration.
Defensive gun use
Main article: Defensive gun useLott argues in both More Guns, Less Crime and The Bias Against Guns that defensive gun use (DGU) is underreported, noting that in general, only shootings ending in fatalities are discussed in news stories. In More Guns, Less Crime, Lott writes that "ince in many defensive cases a handgun is simply brandished, and no one is harmed, many defensive uses are never even reported to the police." In May 1998, Lott wrote that "national surveys" suggested that "98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack." Lott cited similar figures in op-eds in The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times.
In 2002, he said that brandishing a weapon was sufficient to stop an attack 95% of the time. Other researchers criticized his methodology. A study in Public Opinion Quarterly said that his sample size of 1,015 respondents was too small for the study to be accurate and that the majority of similar studies suggest a value between 70 and 80 percent. According to Lott, Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz's 1994 estimate rises to 92 percent when brandishing and warning shots are added together. Lott said that the lower rates found by others was at least in part due to the different questions that were asked.
Defamation suit
On April 10, 2006, John Lott filed suit for defamation against Steven Levitt and HarperCollins Publishers over the book Freakonomics and against Levitt over a series of emails to John McCall. In the book Freakonomics, Levitt and coauthor Stephen J. Dubner claimed that the results of Lott's research in More Guns, Less Crime had not been replicated by other academics. In the emails to economist John McCall, who had pointed to a number of papers in different academic publications that had replicated Lott's work, Levitt wrote that the work by several authors supporting Lott in a special 2001 issue of the Journal of Law and Economics had not been peer-reviewed, Lott had paid the University of Chicago Press to publish the papers, and that papers with results opposite of Lott's had been blocked from publication in that issue. A federal judge found that Levitt's replication claim in Freakonomics was not defamation but found merit in Lott's complaint over the email claims. The dismissal was affirmed by a three-judge panel of The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on February 11, 2009.
A settlement was reached over the claims made by Levitt in the emails to McCall whereby Levitt did not have to issue a formal apology but rather send a letter of clarification to John McCall that the issue of the Journal of Law and Economics was peer-reviewed, and that Lott had not improperly influenced the editors. The Chronicle of Higher Education characterized Levitt's letter as offering "a doozy of a concession."
Disputed survey
In the course of a dispute with Otis Dudley Duncan in 1999–2000, Lott claimed to have undertaken a national survey of 2,424 respondents in 1997, the results of which were the source for claims he had made beginning in 1997. However, in 2000 Lott was unable to produce the data or any records showing that the survey had been undertaken. He said the 1997 hard drive crash that had affected several projects with co-authors had destroyed his survey data set, the original tally sheets had been abandoned with other personal property in his move from Chicago to Yale, and he could not recall the names of any of the students who he said had worked on it. Critics questioned whether the survey had ever taken place, but Lott defends the survey's existence and accuracy.
Mary Rosh persona
In response to the dispute surrounding the missing survey, Lott used a sock puppet by the name of "Mary Rosh" to defend his own works on Usenet and elsewhere. After investigative work by libertarian blogger Julian Sanchez, Lott admitted to using the Mary Rosh persona.
Further accusations claimed that Lott praised himself while posing as one of his former students and that "Rosh" was used to post a favorable review of More Guns, Less Crime on Amazon.com. Lott has claimed that the review was written by his son and wife. "I probably shouldn't have done it—I know I shouldn't have done it—but it's hard to think of any big advantage I got except to be able to comment fictitiously," Lott told The Washington Post in 2003.
Safe storage gun laws
In a 2001 study, Lott and John E. Whitley reported that safe-storage gun laws not only did not reduce juvenile suicides or accidental gun deaths, but that they also increased rates of violent and property crime. The study was criticized by Webster et al. in the Journal of the American Medical Association for using Tobit regression despite the fact that the data used in the study on youth suicides was "highly skewed and heteroskedastic", and because the vast majority of crimes that Lott and Whitley claimed increased due to safe-storage laws occurred outside the home. Webster and Carroll also wrote in Guns in American Society: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, Culture, and the Law that the Lott and Whitley study's findings with respect to crime were inconsistent with prior research.
Other research and events
In a study published in 2000, Lott concluded that most of the large recent increases in campaign spending for state and federal offices can be explained by higher government spending. Lott also supports the conclusion that higher quality judges, measured by their output once they are on the court (e.g., number of citations to their opinions or number of published opinions), take longer to get confirmed.
Lost Bush votes in the 2000 presidential election
In 2000, Lott argued, using a regression analysis, that George W. Bush lost at least 10,000 votes in Florida after the media incorrectly called the state for Al Gore while voting was still ongoing in the more conservative parts of the state. Lott's argument is used in the influential social science methodology textbook Rethinking Social Inquiry (edited by Henry Brady and David Collier) as an example of poor methodology. Contrary to Lott's study, they show that the number of lost Bush votes ranged from 28 to 56.
Abortion and crime
With John Whitley at the University of Adelaide, Lott published a study that argued that liberalization of abortion laws led to higher murder rates. In a review of the literature on the relationship between abortion and crime, Theodore Joyce, an economist at Baruch College and the National Bureau of Economic Research, praised Lott and Whitley for gathering additional data on abortion but criticized the methodology that they used.
Illegal immigration and crime
Lott has non-peer-reviewed research that purports to show that undocumented immigrants are more crime-prone than U.S. citizens. In doing so, Lott lumped together both legal and illegal immigrants in prison into a category for illegal immigrants, leading to an elevated crime rate for illegal immigrants. The Washington Post fact-checker wrote that this was a "significant flaw in Lott's study that undercuts his conclusion. Lott says the overall thrust of his study still holds, but the issue muddles his research and invites guesswork as to the actual crime rate for the undocumented immigrant population in Arizona."
Lott's claims were heavily promoted by the Trump administration to justify its anti-immigration policies, in particular their attempts to end DACA.
Women's suffrage and government growth
According to a study by Lott and Larry Kenny, "women's suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue and more liberal voting patterns for federal representatives, and these effects continued growing over time as more women took advantage of the franchise."
Affirmative action in police departments
Lott published a study arguing that affirmative action in the hiring of police reduced the overall quality of all officers and increased crime. The most adverse effects of these hiring policies have occurred in the most heavily black-populated cities. There is no consistent evidence that crime rates rise when standards for hiring women are changed.
Environmental regulations
Together with John Karpoff and Eric Wehrly at the University of Washington, Lott has worked to show the importance of government regulations through both legal and regulatory penalties and the weaknesses of reputational penalties in reducing pollution. Firms violating environmental laws suffer statistically significant losses in the market value of firm equity. The losses are of similar magnitudes to the legal penalties imposed; and in the cross section, the market value loss is related to the size of the legal penalty.
Voter fraud claims
Further information: Attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential electionIn October 2020, Lott was appointed as a senior adviser for research and statistics at the Office of Justice Programs within the U.S. Department of Justice in the Donald Trump administration. Lott resigned from the DoJ on January 16, 2021. Lott has claimed there was voter fraud in the 2020 United States presidential election. He argued there was "irregularities" in the absentee ballots in Missoula County, and later wrote a paper claiming there was evidence of fraud in the absentee ballots in Georgia and Pennsylvania. A 2021 PNAS study by political scientists at Stanford University and the University of Chicago rebutted Lott's paper as being not even remotely convincing, writing that his analysis was "entirely dependent on the completely arbitrary order in which pairs of precincts in other counties are entered in the dataset" and that his conclusions about voter fraud were "utterly baseless."
2021 "graduation address" event
On June 4, 2021, two parents of a child killed in the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School invited Lott and David Keene to deliver what they falsely said was a dress rehearsal for a 2021 graduation address for a fictitious school called "the James Madison Academy". The space for the audience contained 3,044 empty folding chairs. Lott first realized that the event was a staged attempt to call attention to school shootings, and not a genuine commencement address dress rehearsal, when news media asked him to comment on segments of video of the "dress rehearsal" that the organizers posted on the internet. They said that the empty chairs were intended to represent the victims of school shootings who would never graduate from high school. In a local Las Vegas news interview, Lott said that he is not opposed to all forms of background checks but simply believes that background checks broadly discriminate against persons of color, primarily black and Hispanic, among potential gun buyers.
Bibliography
- Uncertainty and Economic Evolution (ISBN 0-415-15166-X)
- Are Predatory Commitments Credible? (ISBN 0-226-49355-5)
- More Guns, Less Crime (ISBN 0-226-49364-4)
- The Bias Against Guns (ISBN 0-89526-114-6)
- Straight Shooting (ISBN 0-936783-47-8)
- Freedomnomics (ISBN 978-1-596-98506-3)
- Debacle: Obama's War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do Now to Regain Our Future (ISBN 978-1118186176)
- At the Brink: Will Obama Push Us Over the Edge? (ISBN 978-1621570516)
- Dumbing Down the Courts: How Politics Keeps the Smartest Judges Off the Bench (ISBN 978-1626522497)
- The War on Guns, Regnery Publishing 2016 (ISBN 978-1-62157-580-1)
See also
- Gun violence in the United States
- Stephen Halbrook
- Gary Kleck
- List of American Enterprise Institute scholars and fellows
- Rudolph Rummel
References
- Frum, David (January 14, 2014). "With Guns, the Threatened Can Quickly Become the Threat". Daily Beast. Retrieved January 16, 2014.
- Blake, Meredith (December 16, 2012). "Piers Morgan on gun control: 'How many kids have to die?'". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved January 16, 2014.
- Bovard, James. "Review quotes". press.uchicago.edu. University of Chicago Press. Archived from the original on September 19, 2018. Retrieved January 16, 2014.
- Spies, Mike (November 3, 2022). "The Right's Favorite Gun Researcher". The Trace. Retrieved January 24, 2023.
- Bai, Matt (March 12, 2001). "The Gun Crowd's Guru: John Lott has a high profile—and a target on his back". Newsweek. Archived from the original on May 2, 2015.
- ^ "Dr. John R. Lott Jr". Fox News. July 27, 2016. Retrieved July 27, 2016.
- Curriculum Vitae of John R. Lott Jr., dated March 17, 2008.
- Social Science Research Network
- Blogspot.com
- Fox News
- John R. Lott Jr. and David B. Mustard, "Crime, Deterrence and Right-To-Carry Concealed Handguns", 26 Journal of Legal Studies 1 (1997) working paper PDF Archived 2010-06-16 at the Wayback Machine; journal article PDF (subscription required).
- NAS, Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review (2004) Executive Summary, Major Conclusions, p. 2. Ch. 6 Right-to-Carry Laws, pp. 120–151, reviews research by Lott and others on this issue.
- ^ Farley, Robert; Robertson, Lori; Kiely, Eugene (December 20, 2012). "Gun Rhetoric vs. Gun Facts". FactCheck.org. Retrieved January 2, 2021.
- Wilson, James Q. (2004). "Appendix A Dissent". Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review. pp. 269–270. ISBN 0-309-09124-1. Archived from the original on October 16, 2012.
- "Effects of Concealed-Carry Laws on Violent Crime". rand.org. Retrieved January 2, 2021.
- Black, Dan A.; Daniel S. Nagin (January 1998). "Do Right-to-Carry Laws Deter Violent Crime?". Journal of Legal Studies. 27 (1): 214. doi:10.1086/468019. S2CID 154626760.
- Ted Goertzel, "Myths of Murder and Multiple Regression", The Skeptical Inquirer, Volume 26, No 1, January/February 2002, pp. 19–23. Expanded as: Ted Goertzel, "Econometric Modeling as Junk Science"
- Hemenway, David (December 31, 1998). "More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding crime and gun-control laws / Making A Killing: The business of guns in America". The New England Journal of Medicine. 339 (27): 2029–2030. doi:10.1056/NEJM199812313392719.
- ^ Ayres, Ian; John J. Donohue III (April 2003). "Shooting Down the 'More Guns, Less Crime' Hypothesis". Stanford Law Review. 55 (4): 1193. doi:10.2139/ssrn.343781. S2CID 55757925.
- Webster, D W; Vernick, J S; Ludwig, J; Lester, K J (June 1997). "Flawed gun policy research could endanger public safety". American Journal of Public Health. 87 (6): 918–921. doi:10.2105/AJPH.87.6.918. PMC 1380922. PMID 9224169.
- Kleck, Gary (1997). Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
- Ludwig, Jens (September 1998). "Concealed-gun-carrying laws and violent crime: evidence from state panel data" (PDF). International Review of Law and Economics. 18 (3): 239–254. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.487.5452. doi:10.1016/S0144-8188(98)00012-X. Archived (PDF) from the original on October 9, 2022.
- Duggan, Mark (October 1, 2001). "More Guns, More Crime". Journal of Political Economy. 109 (5): 1086–1114. doi:10.1086/322833. ISSN 0022-3808. S2CID 33899679.
- Benson, Bruce L. (September 1999). "Review of More Guns, Less Crime". Public Choice. 100 (3–4): 309–313. doi:10.1023/A:1018689310638. S2CID 150500420.
- McGinnis, John O. (July 20, 1998). "Trigger Happiness". National Review. 50 (13): 49.
- Moody, Carlisle E. (October 2001). "Testing for the Effects of Concealed Weapons Laws: Specification Errors and Robustness". The Journal of Law and Economics. 44 (s2): 799–813. doi:10.1086/323313. S2CID 154918586.
- Shughart, William F.; Lott, John R. (April 1, 1999). "More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws: Review". Southern Economic Journal. 65 (4): 978–981. doi:10.2307/1061296. JSTOR 1061296.
- "Plassmann and Whitley Stanford Law Review (2003)" Confirming More Guns, Less Crime, by Florenz Plassmann and John Whitley, 2003, p. 1361
- Glenn, David (May 9, 2003). "'More Guns, Less Crime' Thesis Rests on a Flawed Statistical Design, Scholars Argue". The Chronicle of Higher Education. 49 (35): A18. Retrieved May 27, 2007.
- Carlisle E. Moody and Thomas B. Marvell, "The Debate on Shall-Issue Laws", Econ Journal Watch Vol. 5, Iss. 3 (2008).
- "Yet Another Refutation of the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis—With Some Help From Moody and Marvell · Econ Journal Watch: Law and economics, criminal justice policy, guns and crime". econjwatch.org. Retrieved September 13, 2017.
- Lurie, Julia (July 28, 2015). "When the Gun Lobby Tries to Justify Firearms Everywhere, It Turns to This Guy". Mother Jones. Retrieved February 6, 2016.
- ^ Gerstein, Josh (November 24, 2020). "Controversial gun advocate hired by Justice Department last month". Politico. Retrieved November 24, 2020.
- Lott Jr., John R. (June 23, 1998). "Keep Guns out of Lawyers' Hands". Wall Street Journal. p. 1.
- Lott Jr., John R. (December 1, 1998). "Cities Target Gun Makers in Bogus Lawsuits". Los Angeles Times. p. 7.
- McDowall, David (Summer 2005). "John R. Lott Jr.'s Defensive Gun Brandishing Estimates". Public Opinion Quarterly. 69 (2): 246–263. doi:10.1093/poq/nfi015.
- Lott, John. "What Surveys Can Help Us Understand About Guns?" (PDF). p. 8. Archived (PDF) from the original on October 9, 2022. Retrieved June 22, 2016.
- Discussion of different surveys on defensive gun use Johnlott.org
- "PDF of Lott's complaint v. Levitt" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on September 27, 2007. Retrieved August 27, 2007.
- Higgins, Michael (April 11, 2006). "Best-seller leads scholar to file lawsuit; Defamation allegation targets U. of C. author". Chicago Tribune. p. 3.
- "Judge Castillo issues decision on Lott v. Levitt" on John Lott's website
- "7th Circuit Affirmation of District Court Dismissal of Defamation Lawsuit Archived 2009-02-16 at the Wayback Machine"
- Staff, Courthouse News (February 13, 2009). "Professor Wasn't Defamed by 'Freakonomics' Author". Retrieved January 2, 2021.
- Gajda, Amy (2010). The Trials of Academe. Harvard University Press: Harvard University Press. pp. 166–170. doi:10.2307/j.ctvjghvr3. ISBN 978-0-674-05386-1. S2CID 198001655.
- Glenn, David (August 10, 2007). "Dueling Economists Reach Settlement in Defamation Lawsuit". Chronicle of Higher Education. 53 (49): 10.
- "Unusual Agreement Means Settlement May Be Near in 'Lott v. Levitt,' July 27, 2007"
- "Unusual Agreement Means Settlement May Be Near in 'Lott v. Levitt'," Chronicle of Higher Education, July 27, 2007
- Otis Dudley Duncan, "Gun Use Surveys: In Numbers We Trust?" Archived 2012-05-25 at the Wayback Machine, The Criminologist, Vol. 25, No. 1, Jan/Feb 2000, pp. 1, 3–7.
- ^ "John R. Lott Jr.'s Reply to Otis Dudley Duncan's Recent Article in The Criminologist" Archived May 25, 2012, at the Wayback Machine, The Criminologist, Vol. 25, No. 5, Sep/Oct 2000, pp. 1, 6.
- Sanchez, Julian (February 13, 2003). "Red Herrings". Julian Sanchez – blog. Retrieved July 28, 2016. (Julian Sanchez noted that the 1997 hard drive crash is widely accepted as a fact; the dispute is over the lack of solid evidence that Lott lost a survey data set in that crash)
- ^ Sanchez, Julian (May 2003). "The Mystery of Mary Rosh". Reason. Retrieved June 15, 2007.
- "Evidence of Survey"., "2002 Survey".
- Chris Mooney in Mother Jones: Double Barreled Double Standards. October 13, 2003
- ^ Morin, Richard (February 1, 2003). "Scholar Invents Fan to Answer His Critics". The Washington Post. p. C01.
- Lott Jr., John R.; Whitley, John E. (October 2001). "Safe-Storage Gun Laws: Accidental Deaths, Suicides, and Crime" (PDF). The Journal of Law and Economics. 44 (S2): 659–689. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.180.3066. doi:10.1086/338346. S2CID 154446568. Archived (PDF) from the original on October 9, 2022.
- Webster, Daniel W. (August 4, 2004). "Association Between Youth-Focused Firearm Laws and Youth Suicides". JAMA. 292 (5): 594–601. doi:10.1001/jama.292.5.594. PMID 15292085.
- Carter, Gregg Lee (2002). Guns in American Society. ABC-CLIO. p. 151. ISBN 978-0-313-38670-1.
- Lott, John R. Jr. (October 2000). "A Simple Explanation for Why Campaign Expenditures are Increasing: The Government is Getting Bigger". Journal of Law and Economics. doi:10.2139/ssrn.245336. S2CID 153298336.
- Lott, John R. (2005). "The Judicial Confirmation Process: The Difficulty with Being Smart". Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. 2 (3): 407–447. doi:10.1111/j.1740-1461.2005.00056.x.
- ^ Brady, Henry E.; Collier, David (2004). Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-0-7425-1125-5.
- John R. Lott Jr. and John E. Whitley, "Abortion and Crime: Unwanted Children and Out-of-Wedlock Births", (2001) SSRN Yale Law & Economics Research Paper No. 254 working paper and Economic Inquiry, Vol. 45, No. 2, pp. 304–324, April 2007 published article.
- Joyce, Theodore J. (June 2009). "Abortion and Crime: A Review". National Bureau of Economic Research. Working Paper Series. doi:10.3386/w15098. S2CID 74738947.
- ^ Lind, Dara (March 1, 2018). "The right-wing effort to paint DREAMers as a nightmare". Vox. Retrieved January 4, 2021.
- "The Fatal Flaw in John R. Lott Jr.'s Study on Illegal Immigrant Crime in Arizona". Cato Institute. February 5, 2018. Retrieved January 4, 2021.
- "Questions raised about study that links undocumented immigrants to higher crime". The Washington Post. 2018.
- Exstrum, Olivia. "The guy behind the bogus immigration report has a long history of terrible and misleading research". Mother Jones. Retrieved January 4, 2021.
- Lott, John R. Jr.; Kenny, Larry (1999). "How Dramatically Did Women's Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?". Journal of Political Economy. doi:10.2139/ssrn.160530.
- Lott, John R. Jr. (April 2000). "Does a Helping Hand Put Others At Risk?: Affirmative Action, Police Departments, and Crime". Economic Inquiry. 38 (2): 239–277. doi:10.1093/ei/38.2.239.
- Karpoff, Jonathan M.; Lott, John R. Jr.; Wehrly, Eric (August 16, 2005). "The Reputational Penalties for Environmental Violations: Empirical Evidence". Journal of Law and Economics. 48 (2): 653–675. doi:10.1086/430806. S2CID 154290101.
- "John Lott, Discredited Gun Researcher, Leaves DOJ". The Trace. January 21, 2021. Retrieved January 22, 2021.
- Gerstein, Josh (November 24, 2020). "Controversial gun advocate hired by Justice Department last month". Politico. Retrieved January 2, 2021.
- ^ Hansen, Jordan (March 30, 2021). "GOP-backed group claims 'irregularities' on Missoula County 2020 ballots". missoulian.com. Retrieved September 14, 2021.
- Eggers, Andrew C.; Garro, Haritz; Grimmer, Justin (November 9, 2021). "No evidence for systematic voter fraud: A guide to statistical claims about the 2020 election". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 118 (45). Bibcode:2021PNAS..11803619E. doi:10.1073/pnas.2103619118. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 8609310. PMID 34728563.
- Grimmer, Justin (January 5, 2021). "Comment On 'A Simple Test For The Extent Of Voter Fraud With Absentee Ballots In The 2020 Presidential Election'". Hoover Institution. Retrieved September 14, 2021.
- Clark, Lauren (June 23, 2021). "Gun activists tricked into speaking at fake Las Vegas high school graduation". 3LV News. Retrieved September 8, 2021.
- "A Parkland Victim's Dad Tricked a Former NRA President into Speaking at a Fake Graduation". BuzzFeed News. June 23, 2021.
External links
Lott's websites
- Crime Prevention Research Center website
- John Lott's blog
- John Lott's data, available for downloading Archived December 21, 2012, at the Wayback Machine
- Blog For John Lott's 2007 Book, Freedomnomics
- Lott's Fox News columns
Lott's research
- John Lott's Research Papers at the Social Science Research Network
- Opinion pieces by Lott in the general press
- NAS panel report on right-to-carry laws, National Academy of Science
- John Lott publications indexed by Google Scholar
- List of DOJ Publications
- 1958 births
- 20th-century American economists
- 21st-century American economists
- 21st-century American non-fiction writers
- Living people
- American bloggers
- American gun rights activists
- American male bloggers
- American male non-fiction writers
- American political writers
- Gun politics in the United States
- Gun violence researchers
- Rice University faculty
- First Trump administration personnel
- United States Department of Justice officials
- University of California, Los Angeles alumni
- John M. Olin Foundation