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John Lott

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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 (1988–1989), before taking a position at the American Enterprise Institute, generally considered to be a center-right 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 the beneficial aspects of government deregulation of various areas, and has also published in the popular press on conservative 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 gun politics, and his 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 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,

" 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 social scientists 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:
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.
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." (Myths of Murder and Multiple Regression, Ted Goertzel, The Skeptical Inquirer, Volume 26, No 1, January/February 2002).

Media Bias Regarding Guns

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:

"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)

"...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)

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 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.

Twenty-eight different reporters wrote about the incident. Reporters who wrote on January 17 tended not to mention the defender's gun, while stories on January 18 2002 tended to mention the gun. Of the ten stories published on 18 January, 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. Of the eight-five stories published on the 17 January (not counting duplicates) only four made mention of the defender's use of a gun. Of the twenty-five stories published on the 16 January, 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.. 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).

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, using online pseudonyms in a manner which oversteps professional and ethical boundaries, and other unethical conduct.

Lott's major firearms-related analyses and conclusions

Some aspects of his model of the causes of violent crime appear counter-intuitive to critics. A review of his book, More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws, in New England Journal of Medicine 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 New England Journal of Medicine; December 31, 1998; Volume 339, Number 27

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 Emory University economics professors Hashem Dezhbakhsh and Paul Rubin describe in Lives Saved or Lives Lost: The Effect of Concealed Handgun Laws on Crime in American Economic Review in 1998:

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.

Even pro-gun researcher Gary Kleck 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 , 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 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 indicates that deregulation of concealed carry does not lead to a large 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.

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.

The 2% controversy

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 is found in only one sentence in his first book, Lott has referred to this study numerous times in public and in print, including in sworn testimony before legislative bodies even 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."

In the second edition "If national surveys are correct" was replaced by "If a survey I conducted is correct", with no explanation regarding the origins of the surveys. When he was asked which particular surveys contained this result, he attributed it to a variety of different sources, until the final the publication of the second edition of his book, 'national surveys' was changed to 'a national survey that I conducted', without any explanation. Further, his initial references to the 2% figure were made before the date on which Lott says the survey was completed.

Lott's figures contradict 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.

Lott was unable to provide 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. 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. One individual, David Gross, attorney for Concealed Carry Reform Now, a pro-gun lobbying orgnization, has come forward to report that they were associated with a survey that may either have been Lott's 1997 survey or a similar survey by Hemenway & Azrael conducted in 1996.

Some of Lott's critics (and one former supporter) believe that the 2% figure is the result of an error in his memory of a study by Gary Kleck which found that 2% of the defensive gun uses involved shooting the attacker, as opposed to merely firing the gun. Lott has denied several times that this is the origin of his 2% figure.

In a footnote to the controversy, Lott repeated his survey in 2002, this time meticulously documenting the survey's existence. The reported firing percentage in his new survey was 8%. Lott claimed that, after weighting, the number was reduced to 5%. Despite this well-documented result, however, Lott cited the older 2% figure on televised publicity tour for his new book (Book TV, CSPAN-2, May 15, 2004).

Mary Rosh online persona

In early 2003 Lott admitted that he had created and used "Mary Rosh" as a fake persona to defend his own works on Usenet. His 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."

Lott as "Rosh" argued 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."

Regarding his participation in online discussions, Lott at the time wrote:

"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. 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", but avoiding the detailed professional discussions of his work that Rosh participated in. There is no public record of any hostility to Lott's non-Rosh identity.

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".

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."

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)

Questions regarding the overall reliability of Lott's work

Other questions regarding the credibility of Lott's work have been raised.

  • Some of Lott's op-eds and other popular works have been found to contain assertions which were either false or debateable. Lott has sometimes blamed faulty editing on the part of the media, though identical errors were sometimes repeated in other Lott-authored papers. Lott has denied many of the errors, though at times he has replaced erroneous files with corrected ones. One of Lott's critics alleges that Lott has also backdated corrections. Jeff Koch (Lott's webmaster) and Lott attribute this to error rather than malicious intent , Koch did not responded to requests from Mother Jones contributor Chris Mooney to elaborate.

Bibliography

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

External links


Regarding Lott's research:


Regarding the Mary Rosh identity:


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

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