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John R. Lott Jr. (born May 8 1958) is currently a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His research interests include econometrics, law and economics, public choice theory, industrial organization, public finance, microeconomics, and environmental regulation.

Academic career

Lott studied economics at UCLA, receiving his B.A. in 1980, M.A. in 1982, and Ph.D. in 1984. He spent several years as a visiting professor and as a fellow at the University of Chicago.

Lott went on to work at other institutions, including the Yale University School of Law, Stanford, UCLA, the Wharton Business School, and Rice University, and was the chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission (1988–1989), before taking a position at the American Enterprise Institute, generally considered to be a right-wing think tank.

Lott has published over ninety articles in academic journals, as well as three books for the general public. Opinion pieces by Lott have appeared in such places as the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Chicago Tribune.

More guns, less crime

Although Lott has published in academic journals regarding education, voting behavior of politicians, industrial organization, labor markets, judicial confirmations, and crime, his research is hard to consistently tag as liberal or conservative. For example, some research argues for environmental penalties on firms. While other research on guns is viewed as quite conservative. He has also published in the popular press on topics such as the validity of the 2000 Presidential Election results in Florida, or how low the murder rate in Baghdad is after the US deposed Saddam Hussein, he is primarily known outside of academic econometrics for his involvement in arguments regarding the beneficial results of allowing Americans to freely own and carry guns.

In his books More Guns, Less Crime and The Bias Against Guns, he presents statistical evidence for his claim that allowing adults to carry concealed weapons has significantly reduced crime in America. He supports this position by an exhaustive tabulation of various social and economic data from census and other population surveys of individual United States counties in different years, which he fits into a very large multifactorial mathematical model of crime rate. His published results show a reduction in violent crime associated with the adoption by states of laws allowing the general adult population to freely carry concealed weapons. He also provides evidence that gun control laws such as the Brady Act, the Assault weapons ban, one-gun-a-month restrictions, and waiting periods have not reduced crime rates. He claims to be the first person to have studied the impact of the Brady Law. The National Academy of Sciences report on gun control comes to conclusions that seem similar to this research. He challenges anyone who disagrees with him to download his data set and redo his calculations. Many academics who have studied his data.

Media bias

Lott argues that in both More Guns, Less Crime and The Bias Against Guns 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:

"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. Such stories are not hard to find; 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)

"... Even though the survey I conducted during the fall 2002 indicates that simply brandishing a gun successfully stops crimes 95 percent of the time that guns are used defensively and other surveys have also found high rates, it is very rare to see such a story. No conspiracy explanation is really needed to explain why an editor finds a dead body on the ground very newsworthy (particularly if it is a sympathetic person like a victim). By contrast, take a story in where a woman brandishes a gun and a criminal flees, with no shots are fired, no crime is committed, and one isn’tno one is even sure what crime would have been committed had a weapon not been drawn. Nothing bad actually happened. It is not emotionally gripping enough to make the story “newsworthy.” (“Bias Against Guns”)

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 one example, a school shooting at the Appalachian School of Law on January 16 2002, Lott cites Tracy Bridges who says he pointed his gun at the killer, who then dropped his weapon and was subsequently tackled. . However, Ted Besen contradicted this viewpoint on the January 17 2002 edition of The Early Show, saying that the killer put his (empty) gun down before Bridges intervened. The true sequence of events remains unresolved.

218 different news stories about the incident. Only three actually mentioned that the guns were used by the students to stop the attack. Lott interviewed both the students who used their guns to stop the attack, including Mikael Gross. Of the reporters who did not mention Bridge's story, Maria Glod of the Washington Post cited "space constraints" for not including it. (The Bias Against Guns, p.26). Mikael Gross was one of the two students who claimed to have used a gun to stop the Appalachian Law School attack. After the preliminary hearing where the prosecutor put Gross on the stand and Odighizuwa had to made a public statement for his plea bargain a Washington Post news story noted: “Odighizuwa was subdued without incident by armed students”? Gross was also interviewed by Lott and provided a discussion of how he claimed the attack was stopped. He also explains why Ted Besen did not see what Bridges and Gross were doing.

Criticism

Lott's work is criticized by gun control groups as well as some skeptics 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 survey in support of his position and other unethical conduct. Some aspects of his model of the causes of violent crime appear counter-intuitive to some; for instance, his model shows a large dependency of the crime rate on the number of middle-aged African-American women, and very little dependency on the number of young African-American men, which goes against well-defined reliable statistics on both perpetrators and victims of violent crime. (Lott's book, More Guns, Less Crime, explains why this interpretation confuses who commits crimes with who are victims and other general characteristics of victims. He also makes several other responses.) Similarly, his model requires that the percentage of crimes in which the criminal is convicted remains constant, no matter what the crime rate, which is not actually the case. If this number is allowed to vary, then the deterrent effect of deregulated concealed carry of weapons does not disappear, but instead becomes unbelievably huge. Most tellingly, when the scale of the deterrent effect is allowed to vary from place to place instead of being a single overall factor, the model shows that deregulation of concealed weapons carrying in Florida was followed by a very large drop in violent crime, but in other locations was followed by only small changes in the crime rate, sometimes an increase and sometimes a decrease. (Lott's book looks at lots of differences across different types of places such as by county population density.) Therefore his critics argue that he has merely shown that the data can be interpreted as suggesting 'More guns, less crime', but that this is by no means the best interpretation, and that some other factors are probably at work specific to Florida in the time period covered.

The National Academy of Science conducted a review of current research and data on firearms and violent crime, including Lott's work, and found:

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.

However, there is a dissent by James Q. Wilson 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 ambiguous.

and the comittee's response to Wilson 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.

Despite this controversy over the positive effects of gun ownership on reducing crime, the body of work reviewed by the NAS demonstrates that deregulation of concealed carry does not lead to an increase in violent crime. As Wilson wrote:

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.

Lott supporters assert that this in itself represents a significant contribution by Lott to our understanding of the causes of crime, while his detractors allege that overall his data and his analysis are too biased to clarify what was already a cloudy picture.

One of his critics alleges that Lott has also backdated corrections. Lott’s webmaster attributes this to a one day error that was quickly fixed rather than malicious intent. An additional statement is also provided by someone who worked for Lott.

The 2% problem

Lott's critics have also focused on Lott's claims to have conducted a survey in which he found 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 finding represents only a minor side-issue from Lott's main work and gets only a single sentence in his first book, Lott has referred to this study result numerous times in print, in public, and even in sworn testimony before legislative bodies attempting to formulate optimal gun laws, even long after the controversy over this survey had been made public.

In the first edition of More Guns, Less Crime (May 1998) he wrote:

"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."

But in the second edition "If national surveys are correct" was replaced by "If a survey I conducted is correct", with no explanation. Lott originally referred to the 98%/2% breakdown as being the result of "national surveys", in person and in his book. When he was asked which particular surveys contained this result, rather than identify them there followed a period where he attributed it to a variety of different sources, until finally with the publication of the second edition of his book, 'national surveys' was changed to 'a national survey that I conducted', without any explanation, then or since. To add to the confusion, his initial references to the 2% figure were made before the date on which Lott says the survey was completed.

In fact, Lott's 98%/2% figure contradicts all other published studies of the question. 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, first as the results of other surveys, then as his. Furthermore, Lott's claimed size for the survey can be mathematically determined to be too small by a factor of at least ten to achieve this level of resolution; according to his recollections, there would have been approximately 25 defensive gun users found in his survey, so that 2% of them would mean that only one half of one person claimed to have fired a gun. Lott counters this by saying that the data was weighted by demographic factors, using a process the details of which unfortunately he cannot recollect; this could indeed result in such an inflation of a subsection of the original results but such a process would also inflate the margin of error (which obviously, cannot be less than one person in the raw data) by a similar factor, so that there is no way a statistically significant result of this magnitude could have been attained. (Lott continues to subdivide his results even further, claiming that only 1/4 of his 2% actually shot at the perpetrator; this would correspond to 1/8 of a person in his raw survey data.)

Lott was unable to provide any evidence for his survey. He stated that the data, methodology, and intermediate work and results were all lost in a computer crash; no paper records were kept, the work was done by volunteer students who were recruited personally and paid in cash out of his pocket, so no advertisements, pay records or cancelled checks exist. There are similarly no records of his having claimed any of this as a business expense or of the institutional Committee on Human Experimentation having reviewed the study, as required by law. Lott cannot reconstruct how he generated the sample of telephone numbers to be surveyed or the methodology used to calculate the final results from the raw data (which is particularly unfortunate, given the apparent mathematical impossibility of achieving these results from a sample of that size, as detailed above). Despite this matter being publicized in the national news media, nobody has come forward to report that they were either a student working on the survey or a subject contacted by the survey, other than one Second Amendment activist who recalls being surveyed about guns in that period of time and now believes it to have been the Lott survey.

Even if Lott actually did the survey, used a novel (or even mistaken) mathematical method to generate the results he quotes, and is the victim of the worst luck ever in losing all records of it, even his colleagues who oppose gun control consider it extremely unprofessional to continue to quote from memory a result for which the raw data are no longer available and the methodology is no longer remembered, particularly when that result is wildly at variance with every other study of the same subject, appears to be mathematically impossible from the design of the survey, and very well could be an error. Nevertheless, the 2% figure for the percentage of defensive gun uses which involve firing the gun has been adopted by the many firearms rights supporters and has become a fixture in their canon of argument, including continuing references by Lott himself.

Some of Lott's critics (and one former supporter) believe that the 2% figure is very likely the result of a trivial error in his memory of a study by Gary Kleck, to whom Lott attributed the figure at one point (Kleck's study actually found that 2% of the defensive gun uses involved shooting the attacker, not merely shooting the gun in general. In the past, others have misquoted the same study similarly). However Lott has denied several times that this is the origin of his 2% figure, continuing to maintain that it is his vanished survey. Despite its playing only a minor role in his work and being very possibly just a trivial error of memory, Lott refuses to acknowledge the possibility and goes to great lengths to bolster the evidence for his study. It has been noted by other firearms rights advocates that this particular figure never really mattered in the gun law debate until 'Lott has made it matter'. In addition to both editions of More Guns, Less Crime, searches of print and online media have found Lott himself to have referred to this 98%/2% result at least 25 times, citing various sources. (Does Allowing Law-Abiding Citizens to Carry Concealed Handguns Save Lives?, Valparaiso University Law Review, 31(2): 355-63, Spring, 1997; Gun-Lock Proposal Bound to Misfire, Chicago Tribune, August 6, 1998; Hardball, CNBC, August 18, 1999; Gun Locks: Bound to Misfire, online publication of the Independence Institute, Feb. 9, 2000; reply to Otis Duncan's article, The Criminologist, vol. 25, no. 5, September/October 2000, page 6; Others Fear Being Placed at the Mercy of Criminals Los Angeles Times, March 30, 2001)

In a footnote to the controversy, Lott resolved to settle the matter by repeating his survey in 2002 before the publication of his most recent book, this time meticulously documenting the survey's existence. True to his word, his new survey was of similar size, equally inadequate to have a resolution down to the level of 2% of the defensive gun uses he counted. The reported percentage of defensive gun uses who actually fired the weapon in his new survey was 8%, not the 2% he cites from his original survey. Lott claimed that after weighting the number was reduced to 5%; however, the weighting scheme he claims to have used actually increases the number to 9%. Despite this well documented result, however, Lott continued to cite the controversial 2% figure on televised publicity tours for his new book (Book TV, CSPAN-2, May 15, 2004).

Mary Rosh online persona

To add to Lott's troubles, in early 2003 he admitted that he had created and used "Mary Rosh" as a fake persona to defend his own works on Usenet. Lott's actions were discovered when weblogger Julian Sanchez noticed that the IP address Lott used to reply to an email was the same used by "Mary Rosh". Lott states that the name "Mary Rosh" derived from the first two letters of his four sons' first names.

After the discovery, Lott stated to the Washington Post:

"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."

While many, perhaps even most, Usenet posters do not use their own name for reasons of privacy, particularly individuals such as Lott who are public figures, academically it is considered somewhat unethical and unprofessional to use an anonymous identity to engage in substantive discussion of one's own work with critics, rather than defending one's work openly under one's own name. That could be viewed as a way to avoid the risk of damaging one's reputation; rather like hustling at a game like pool or chess or poker, or a professional fighter engaging in amateur bouts under an assumed name. Lott as "Rosh" argues about his work with critics, at the same time arguing (with some belligerence) that those same critics are not worthy of Lott's attention:

"Why should Lott bother responding to a nothing like Lambert who isn't in the area and who isn't particularly honest? I don't even know why he responded to him once. In any case, if Lambert really cared about the truth he would acknowledge that Lott has dealt extensively with this discussion in his book. All I have done here is parrot what Lott wrote."

In fact, while Lott was posting as Rosh, he would normally decline requests to engage in such Usenet discussions of his work under his own name, stating:

"I have not participated in the firearms discussion group nor in the apparent online newsgroup discussions"

on the grounds that he was attracting hostile reaction which upset his wife. Yet, despite this statement, the Usenet archives at Google show that Lott did continue to post occasionally under his own name from the various email addresses of the different institutions where he worked throughout the entire period when he was posting as "Mary Rosh", without apparent worry about attracting hostile attention, but avoiding the detailed professional discussions of his work that he left to Rosh. Furthermore, among the replies to these posts, there is no evidence of any hostility to Lott, at least publicly.

At one point, Rosh engaged in a lengthy discussion of errors of fact in a newspaper op-ed piece Lott had written (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, 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, 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".

Use of an anonymous posting identity can also be abused to make it appear that there is independent confirmation of one's views, or praise and approval from third parties. In fact, 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."

While this statement would be considered amusing ego-boost were it posted about oneself, posting it under an assumed name attempts to give it some credibility, while the revelation that it was posted about oneself anonymously makes it appear ludicrously self-serving. Similarly, the Rosh identity was also used to post several five star reviews of his books on Amazon.com, in violation of Amazon.com's clear policy, and at Barnes and Noble.com, 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:

"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)

Again, this would be amusing if one posted it about one's own work, but trying to push one's own work under an assumed name is considered academically unethical and unprofessional.

Lott's critics maintain that the whole 'Mary Rosh' incident, together with the questions about his unsupported survey, call into question Lott's trustworthiness, and therefore cast doubt on his entire body of work, even where no evidence of deception is found. His defenders reject such claims as ad hominem attacks, and point out that in Lott's main body of work, where all the data, reasoning, and mathematical analysis are quite properly completely presented, there is no apparent room for dissembling, as proved by the fact that others have indeed reworked the same data to come to different conclusions and identified where Lott had made errors (as described above).

Bibliography

• Are Predatory Commitments Credible? (ISBN 0226493555)
• More Guns, Less Crime (ISBN 0226493644)
• The Bias Against Guns (ISBN 0895261146)

External links

• Dr. Lott's Primarly Rebuttals to the NAS Review
• Dr. Lott's Rebuttal in the New York Post to the NAS Review
• NAS Review listing on the NAP

Regarding Lott's research:

• John Lott's weblog
• John Lott's data, available for downloading
• John Lott's Research Papers at the Social Science Research Network
• Opinion pieces by Lott in the general press

• Disinfopedia: Summary of John Lott's errors
• Tim Lambert: John Lott's unethical conduct (weblog)

• National Academy of Science: NAS panel report on right-to-carry laws
• Tim Lambert: Do more guns cause less crime?
• Ted Goertzel: Myths of Murder and Multiple Regression

• Otis Dudley Duncan: Gun Use Surveys: In Numbers We Trust?
  • Lott's response
    • Tim Lambert's comments on the Duncan-Lott exchange

• Michelle Malkin The other Lott controversy
  • John Lott Response to Malkin
    • Tim Lambert: Comments on Lott's response

Regarding the Mary Rosh identity:

• Washington Post story about Lott's fake identity
• Archive of Mary Rosh posts
• Who is Mary Rosh?, anti-Lott website that links to several articles

Studies that discuss, refute, replicate or duplicate Dr. Lott's research:

• Using Placebo Laws to Test “More Guns, Less Crime”
• Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns and Violent Crime: Crime Control Through Gun Decontrol?
• The Latest Misfires in Support of the “More Guns, Less Crime” Hypothesis
• Shooting Down the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis.
• Does the right to carry concealed handguns deter countable crimes?
• Testing for the effects of concealed weapons laws
• Olson/Maltz, Homicide in Large U.S. Cities
• The Effect of Concealed Weapons Laws: An Extreme Bound Analysis
• Privately Produced general deterence

• 1958 births
• Bloggers
• Gun politics