...and found the following:
John Lott's Coding Errors
Lott tries to rewrite history, again. Summary: Lott now claims that an incriminating file where he had been caught cooking his results was not meant to have been on his website and was only there because his webmaster screwed up. Unfortunately, his latest story is full of holes.
http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/guns/Lott/more_guns_less_crime/johnlottorg.html* * * * *
More guns means more guns
Why John Lott is wrong
May 21, 2001
By Robert Ehrlich John Lott’s 1998 book, More Guns, Less Crime contains many points with which I agree. For example, I believe that many criminals are leery of approaching potential victims who may be armed -- an idea at the core of his deterrence theory that guns help to prevent crime. I also believe that violent criminals are not typical citizens, and that the possession of a gun by a law abiding citizen is unlikely to turn him into a crazed killer. Lott also has a point when he speaks of the over-reporting by the media of gun violence by and against kids and the corresponding under-reporting of the defensive use of guns to prevent crime. As a gun owner myself, I was quite prepared to accept Lott’s thesis that the positive deterrent effect of guns exceeds their harmful effects on society, but as a scientist I have to be guided by what the data actually show, and Lott simply hasn’t made his case. Here’s why:
<SNIP>
Lott has correctly observed that by passing concealed carry laws in various states in various years, the U.S. has been in effect conducting an extremely interesting social experiment. That experiment, in principle, can give us an empirical answer to the relationship between easing restrictions on gun-carrying permits and crime. However, his one-sided analysis of the data inspires little confidence that we can count on him to tell us the true results of this experiment. From all indications it seems that the concealed carry laws probably have had almost no effect, one way or the other.
<MORE>
http://reason.com/hod/debate1.1.shtml* * * * *
And the following well-documented article from Mother Jones:
Double Barreled Double Standards
For years, John Lott has provided a vital scholarly basis to the pro-gun movement. But now his research and his integrity are drawing heavy fire.
By Chris Mooney
October 13, 2003 If economist John R. Lott didn't exist, pro-gun advocates would have had to invent him. Probably the most visible scholarly figure in the U.S. gun debate, Lott's densely statistical work has given an immense boost to the arguments of the National Rifle Association. Lott's 1998 book More Guns, Less Crime -- which extolled the virtues of firearms for self-defense and has sold some 100,000 copies in two editions, quite an accomplishment for an academic book -- has served as a Bible for proponents of "right to carry" laws (also known as "shall issue" laws), which make it easier for citizens to carry concealed weapons. Were Lott to be discredited, an entire branch of pro-gun advocacy could lose its chief social scientific basis.
That may be happening. Earlier this year, Lott found himself facing serious criticism of his professional ethics. Pressed by critics, he failed to produce evidence of the existence of a survey -- which supposedly found that "98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack" -- that he claimed to have conducted in the second edition of "More Guns, Less Crime". Lott then made matters even worse by posing as a former student, "Mary Rosh," and using the alias to attack his critics and defend his work online. When an Internet blogger exposed the ruse, the scientific community was outraged. Lott had created a "false identity for a scholar," charged Science editor-in-chief Donald Kennedy. "In most circles, this goes down as fraud."
Lott's recent baggage makes him an impeachable witness in the push to pass state-level right to carry laws, and raises questions about his broader body of work. Kennedy and others have even likened Lott to Michael Bellesiles, the Emory University historian who could not produce the data at the heart of his award-winning 2000 book "Arming America", which had seemed to undermine the notion that there was widespread gun ownership and usage in colonial America. But while Bellesiles resigned after a university panel challenged his credibility, thus far Lott has escaped a similar fate. An academic rolling stone, Lott has held research positions at the University of Chicago and Yale law schools, but currently works at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a Washington think tank much smiled upon by the Bush administration. AEI will not say whether it will investigate its in-house guns expert; by e-mail, AEI president Christopher DeMuth declined to comment on the possibility.
Lott's defenders rightly point out that the missing survey -- which was completely lost in a computer crash, Lott says -- isn't central to the argument of "More Guns, Less Crime". But as Harvard economist David Hemenway wrote in a recent critique of Lott's latest book, "The Bias Against Guns", one must have "faith in Lott's integrity" before accepting his statistical results. That is because in the dauntingly complex subfield of econometrics, statistical manipulation is a constant concern. In a recent attempt to rescue his beleaguered "More Guns, Less Crime" hypothesis from criticism, Lott has been caught massaging his data to favor his argument. In subsequent exchanges with Mother Jones, he changed his story several times about a key data table that was misleadingly labeled -- and then surreptitiously amended -- on his website. Nevertheless, most pro-gun scholars and political conservatives have yet to call Lott to account.
<more>
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2003/10/we_590_01.html
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