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{{POV}}
] where he is a resident scholar.]]
'''John R. Lott Jr., Ph. D.''' (born ] ]) is currently a resident scholar at the ]. His research interests include ], ], ], ], ], ], and ]. ] where he is a resident scholar.]]
'''John R. Lott Jr.''' (born ] ]) is currently a resident scholar at the ]. His research interests include ], ], ], ], ], ], and ].


==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 ]. Lott studied ] at ], receiving his ] in ], ] in ], and ] in ]. He spent several years as a visiting professor and as a fellow at the ].


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 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 ].


Lott has published over ninety articles in academic journals, as well as ]. Opinion pieces by Lott have appeared in such places as the '']'', '']'', the '']'', '']'', and the '']''. Lott has published over ninety articles in academic journals, as well as ]. Opinion pieces by Lott have appeared in such places as the '']'', '']'', the '']'', '']'', and the '']''.
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== More guns, less crime == == More guns, less crime ==


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. 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 ] results in ], or how low the murder rate in ] is after the US deposed ]; however, 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 '']'' 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, In his books '']'' and '']'', he presents statistical evidence indicating 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 strong 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 appears 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 have studied his data.
:"<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:


== Media bias ==
::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.
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:


<blockquote>"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)</blockquote>
: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." (.

== 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:


<blockquote>"... 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”)</blockquote>
<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>


<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>


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. Lott offers evidence 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 ] on ] ], 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 ] ] edition of ''The Early Show'', saying that the killer put his (empty) gun down before Bridges intervened. The true sequence of events remains unresolved.


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). Out of 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, ] of the '']'' 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== ==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 survey in support of his position and other unethical conduct. Some aspects of his model of the causes of violent crime appear ] to some; for instance, his model shows a large dependency of the crime rate on the number of middle-aged ]women, and very little dependency on the number of young African-American men, which goes against well-defined reliable statistics on both ]s and ]s of ]. (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.
Lott's work is criticized by ] groups as well as some ]s within the gun rights movement.
===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.''


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

Even pro-gun researcher ] finds that Lott's analysis and conclusion fail a "reality check", stating
:''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)

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.

===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.'' :''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. 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 ] {{ref|wilson}} who states, regarding Lott's work: 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."'' :''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: 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 ].'' :''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: 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.'' :''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. 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 indicates that deregulation of concealed carry does not lead to a large increase in violent crime. As Wilson wrote: 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.'' :''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.
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.


One of his critics alleges that Lott has also . Lott’s webmaster attributes this to a one day error that was quickly fixed rather than malicious intent.
===Lott's "2%" survey===
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.


===The 2% problem===
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.
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 part of a single sentence in his first book, Lott has referred to this study result other 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 '']'' (May 1998) he wrote:
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}}
:"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 the other two surveys over the last twenty years that estimated this rate. However, “Kleck and Gertz’s estimates rise to 92 percent when brandishing and warning shots are added together.”
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.


Besides statements by someone who took the survey and contemporaneous statements by others, 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. He has provided a copy of his tax records for the year that the survey took place to some academics, and it does show that he had large deductions for research assistants that year. 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.
=== Mary Rosh online persona ===


Some of Lott's critics (and ) believe that the 2% figure is very likely the result of a trivial error in his memory of a study by ]. Lott is accused of attributing 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, David Kopel, who ran the website upon which the claim was made, later admitted to doing this himself. Kopel wrote:
In early ] Lott admitted that he had created and used "Mary Rosh" as a ] to defend his own works on ].{{ref|wapo}} 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.{{ref|roshusenet}}


In addition to both editions of '']'', searches of print and online media have found Lott himself to have referred to this 98%/2% result at least 25 times (though many of these are the same publications being republished). (''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)
At one point, Rosh engaged in a lengthy discussion of errors of fact in a newspaper op-ed piece Lott had written {{ref|roshoped}}, 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,{{ref|fortworth}} 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 {{ref|roshblamenypost}} . Two months later, however, Lott published another article on the same subject {{ref|lottpublish}}, again omitting the same facts which would have disproved his position, demonstrating that it was not bad editing that was the source of the errors in the first place, but that Lott knowingly repeated the error to add false support to his argument, using the Rosh identity.


Before the controversy arose, Lott had repeated his survey for a book that he had written in ], 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).
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."{{ref|westwing}}


==Lott frequent victim of stalking and identity theft==
Similarly, the Rosh identity and other sock puppets were used to post several five star reviews of his books {{ref|lottreviews}} on ], in violation of Amazon.com's clear policy, and at ] {{ref|violatepolicy}}, as well as bad reviews of books by his rivals {{ref|lottbadreviews}}; Lott stated that his son and wife wrote the Rosh review. {{ref|wifeandson}} 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).{{ref|roshdownload}}


Tim Lambert, a computer scientist at the University of New South Wales in Australia, has been accused of stalking a number of people on the web, (see also ), and of engaging in the sockpuppetry that he accuses others of doing. Lambert has accused many other people of creating sock puppets from to . He has been accused of . In addition, and done the same thing to Others have also pretended to be Lott in and . In the past, Lott has also been by Senator Charles Schumer and others claiming that his work was paid for by gun makers.
===Questions regarding the credibility of Lott's work===


:
*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}}. A working paper published by John Donohue and Ian Ayres found that Lott's reply to this finding also depended on systematic sources of bias {{ref|misfires}}.


<blockquote>. . . "Ask John Lott: You can ask him any question you have about gun control or his books ," the paid advertisement claimed, followed by a graphic indicator showing high interest in the website. . . .
*When Lott was correcting the coding errors, he changed his calculations to remove a statistical correction for clustering while leaving a statement that clustering was corrected for in the associated tables{{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}}.
"The person or the group, whoever it is that's doing this, wants to use my name to advance causes with which I disagree, by directly saying that I support things I don't support" Lott said. "The person is also using it to try to discredit me in some way, by putting out into the public debate statements that will be attributed to me that were not made by me."</blockquote>

Another type of attack on Lott has been to accuse him of creating for use in various discussion groups. Even in the discussion on the Misplaced Pages page, this has occurred. For a partial listing of the claims, see this list:

: While Purtilo has been accused of being a sockpuppet for Lott over 20 times in different places, Jim Purtilo is actually a computer science professor at the University of Maryland.
: While Stotts has been accused of being a sockpuppet for Lott several times, he is a Professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
: While CBaus has been accused of being a sockpuppet for Lott at least four times in different places, Chad Baus lives in Ohio.
: While Gordinier has been accused of being a sockpuppet for Lott four times, Michael Gordinier teaches at the Washington University Business School in St. Louis, Missouri .
: While Henry1776 has been accused of being a sockpuppet for Lott, he is Henry Schaffer, at NC State.
: While Sniper1has been accused of being a sockpuppet for Lott four times, he is Mike Fleisher, a resident of suburban MD.
: Serinity was accused of being a sockpuppet for Lott four times before people stopped claiming that he was a sockpuppet in November, 2005.
:
:
: Even those posting from places where Lott is unlikely to be located are accused of being him.
:
: While 66.92.151.249 has been accused of being a sockpuppet for Lott several times, Jeff Koch lives in the same city as Lott, but he is not John Lott.
:
:
:

=== Other attacks ===

In early ] he admitted that he had created and used "maryrosh" as a ] to discuss gun issues and defend his own works on ]. Lott's actions were discovered when ]ger ] noticed that Lott made statements that were word for word identical to those from a poster named "maryrosh" and that both had the same beginning for their ]es from the Southeast Pennsylvania area for Comcast. When Lott was asked about the use of the pseudonym he immediate admitted to using it, and stated that he had done it because of all the personal attacks and threats that he had suffered. Lott states that the name "maryrosh" derived from the first two letters of his four sons' first names and it has served as the email address that the children had used.

After the discovery, Lott stated to the '']'':
:"I probably shouldn't have done it &ndash; I know I shouldn't have done it &ndash; but it's hard to think of any big advantage I got except to be able to comment fictitiously."

Some criticism from Lott supporters has pointed out that the media appear to have taken greater pleasure out of reporting this action than it has over reporting that other authors were posting glowing reviews of their own work at Amazon.com, apparently to boost book sales.

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.


==Bibliography== ==Bibliography==
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''Regarding Lott's research'': ''Other discussions regarding Lott's research, including non peer-reviewed research'':


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* National Academy of Science: * National Academy of Science:
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* Ted Goertzel:

* Otis Dudley Duncan:
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* Michelle Malkin * Michelle Malkin
** John Lott ** John Lott
*** Tim Lambert:


''Regarding the Mary Rosh identity'':

*
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* , anti-Lott website that links to several articles


''Studies that discuss, refute, replicate or duplicate Dr. Lott's research'':
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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|wapo}} "Scholar Invents Fan To Answer His Critics", Washington Post Saturday, February 1, 2003; Page C01
#{{note|roshusenet}} http://groups.google.com/group/alt.tv.the-west-wing/msg/597f6605916eab9d?q=g:thl3267562583d&dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&as_drrb=b&as_mind=29&as_minm=3&as_miny=1995&as_maxd=25&as_maxm=4&as_maxy=2002&rnum=23 accessed January 17, 2006
#{{note|roshoped}} http://groups.google.com/groups?q=g:thl3450935520d&dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=u2b75u8tj7lqtubpq9v9psd371ij08vm51%404ax.com
#{{note|fortworth}} "Armed response to shooting didn't really make the news" Fort-Worth Star-Telegram Sat, Feb. 02, 2002
#{{note|roshblamenypost}} http://groups.google.com/group/rec.crafts.metalworking/browse_frm/thread/65142548c58b3629/a66fd584b78ada61?lnk=st&q=%22Fort+Worth+Star-Telegram+%22+lott+rosh&rnum=2&hl=en#a66fd584b78ada61 accessed January 17, 2006
#{{note|lottpublish}} http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleID.17199/article_detail.asp
#{{note|westwing}} http://groups.google.com/group/alt.tv.the-west-wing/msg/bd20655b64200e42 accessed January 17, 2006
#{{note|lottreviews}} http://timlambert.org/2003/07/lottreviews/ accessed January 17, 2006
#{{note|violatepolicy}} http://www.jointogether.org/gv/news/summaries/reader/0,2061,556669,00.html accessed January 17, 2006
#{{note|lottbadreviews}} http://timlambert.org/2003/07/lottreviews/ accessed January 17, 2006
#{{note|wifeandson}} "Scholar Invents Fan To Answer His Critics", Washington Post Saturday, February 1, 2003; Page C01
#{{note|roshdownload}} http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3937bfab1a45.htm accessed January 17, 2006
#{{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 ] --> <!-- Metadata: see ] -->
{{Persondata {{Persondata
|NAME=Lott, John R. Jr. |NAME=Lott, John R. Jr.
|ALTERNATIVE NAMES=Rosh, Mary |ALTERNATIVE NAMES=
|SHORT DESCRIPTION=American scholar, researcher |SHORT DESCRIPTION=American scholar, researcher
|DATE OF BIRTH=] ] |DATE OF BIRTH=] ]

Revision as of 05:57, 25 January 2006

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File:John-lott.jpg
John R. Lott Jr. at the American Enterprise Institute where he is a resident scholar.

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 (19881989), before taking a position at the American Enterprise Institute.

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; however, 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 indicating 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 strong 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 appears 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 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 offers evidence 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.

Out of 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.

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 part of a single sentence in his first book, Lott has referred to this study result other 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 the other two surveys over the last twenty years that estimated this rate. However, “Kleck and Gertz’s estimates rise to 92 percent when brandishing and warning shots are added together.”

Besides statements by someone who took the survey and contemporaneous statements by others, 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. He has provided a copy of his tax records for the year that the survey took place to some academics, and it does show that he had large deductions for research assistants that year. 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.

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. Lott is accused of attributing 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, David Kopel, who ran the website upon which the claim was made, later admitted to doing this himself. Kopel wrote: “makes me believe that I added Kleck to the 98% sentence in the belief that the 98% figure came from him. The fact that I added Kleck is, of course, also supported by the Rocky Mountain News version of the Lott article (a version I did not edit) which contains no reference to Kleck.”

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 (though many of these are the same publications being republished). (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)

Before the controversy arose, Lott had repeated his survey for a book that he had written in 2002, 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).

Lott frequent victim of stalking and identity theft

Tim Lambert, a computer scientist at the University of New South Wales in Australia, has been accused of stalking a number of people on the web, including Lott (see also ), and of engaging in the sockpuppetry that he accuses others of doing. Lambert has accused many other people of creating sock puppets from Michael Fumento to Ann Coulter. He has been accused of doctoring and editing evidence. In addition, Lambert has set up a mirror of Michael Fumento's website and done the same thing to John Lott's website Others have also pretended to be Lott in various emails and postings on the web. In the past, Lott has also been the victim of attacks by Senator Charles Schumer and others claiming that his work was paid for by gun makers.

CNS news reported:

. . . "Ask John Lott: You can ask him any question you have about gun control or his books www.askjohnlott.org," the paid advertisement claimed, followed by a graphic indicator showing high interest in the website. . . . "The person or the group, whoever it is that's doing this, wants to use my name to advance causes with which I disagree, by directly saying that I support things I don't support" Lott said. "The person is also using it to try to discredit me in some way, by putting out into the public debate statements that will be attributed to me that were not made by me."

Another type of attack on Lott has been to accuse him of creating multiple pseudonyms for use in various discussion groups. Even in the discussion on the Misplaced Pages page, this has occurred. For a partial listing of the claims, see this list:

Purtilo While Purtilo has been accused of being a sockpuppet for Lott over 20 times in different places, Jim Purtilo is actually a computer science professor at the University of Maryland.
Stotts While Stotts has been accused of being a sockpuppet for Lott several times, he is a Professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Cbaus While CBaus has been accused of being a sockpuppet for Lott at least four times in different places, Chad Baus lives in Ohio.
Gordinier While Gordinier has been accused of being a sockpuppet for Lott four times, Michael Gordinier teaches at the Washington University Business School in St. Louis, Missouri .
Henry1776 While Henry1776 has been accused of being a sockpuppet for Lott, he is Henry Schaffer, at NC State.
Sniper1 While Sniper1has been accused of being a sockpuppet for Lott four times, he is Mike Fleisher, a resident of suburban MD.
Serinity Serinity was accused of being a sockpuppet for Lott four times before people stopped claiming that he was a sockpuppet in November, 2005.
Alt37
Timewarp
Even those posting from places where Lott is unlikely to be located are accused of being him.
137.216.209.23 (South Dakota)
66.92.151.249 (Washington, DC,, Speakeasy, Inc.) While 66.92.151.249 has been accused of being a sockpuppet for Lott several times, Jeff Koch lives in the same city as Lott, but he is not John Lott.
66.190.73.64 (Fort Worth, Texas)
128.8.128.182 (Hyattsville, MD)
128.239.177.196 (Williamsburg, Va.), 206.165.74.6 (Phoenix, AZ)


Other attacks

In early 2003 he admitted that he had created and used "maryrosh" as a fake persona to discuss gun issues and defend his own works on Usenet. Lott's actions were discovered when weblogger Julian Sanchez noticed that Lott made statements that were word for word identical to those from a poster named "maryrosh" and that both had the same beginning for their IP addresses from the Southeast Pennsylvania area for Comcast. When Lott was asked about the use of the pseudonym he immediate admitted to using it, and stated that he had done it because of all the personal attacks and threats that he had suffered. Lott states that the name "maryrosh" derived from the first two letters of his four sons' first names and it has served as the email address that the children had used.

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."

Some criticism from Lott supporters has pointed out that the media appear to have taken greater pleasure out of reporting this action than it has over reporting that other authors were posting glowing reviews of their own work at Amazon.com, apparently to boost book sales.

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.

Bibliography

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

External links

Peer-reviewd studies that discuss, replicate, duplicate or disagree with Dr. Lott's research:

Other discussions regarding Lott's research, including non peer-reviewed research:

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