John Lott

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John R. Lott Jr., Ph. D. at the American Enterprise Institute where he was a resident scholar until 2006.

John R. Lott Jr., Ph. D. (born May 8 1958) is a former 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.

Lott has published in academic journals regarding the beneficial aspects of government deregulation of various areas, and has also been published in the popular press taking conservative positions on topics such as the validity of the 2000 Presidential Election results in Florida and how the murder rate in Baghdad since the U.S. 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.

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. In 2006, he left AEI.

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.

In rankings of economists from 1969 to 2000, based on total academic journal output, John Lott is ranked during that period of time as 26th. (Apparently he didn't get his Ph.D. until 1984 so that would have worked to lower his rating relative to older economists, though he is still ahead of older well-known economists such as Ed Lazear, Robert Barro, and Peter Diamond, as shown in that report's Table 8). Based upon citations during the 1969 to 2000 period he is 86th.

At the Social Science Research Network, his academic research papers are the 5th most downloaded among all academic economists, business school professors and law professors over their careers. In a recent ranking of business schools by SSRN, if Lott was a business school, he would personally rank 16th in terms of lifetime total downloads.

Concealed weapons and the crime rate

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.

Ted Goertzel refers to More Guns, Less Crime as "statistical one-upmanship" and claims that,

"[Lott] 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."

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." [Several such stories follow]

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.

Criticism

Lott's work is criticized by gun control groups as well as some skeptics 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 counter-intuitive to critics. A review of his book More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws in the New England Journal of Medicine states:

[Lott] 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

Emory University economics professors Hashem Dezhbakhsh and Paul Rubin argue in Lives Saved or Lives Lost: The Effect of Concealed Handgun Laws on Crime, published in the American Economic Review in 1998, that Lott's model makes unrealistic assumptions about uniformity of data and causality relations throughout all American counties, and must have errors in computing arrest rates due to meaningless results.

Gary Kleck, a researcher who has written many papers and op-eds critical of gun control laws, has also found that the actual increase in concealed carry is small after the passage of "shall issue" CCW laws, 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.

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.

Lott's defenders are quick to point out that Lott did not claim that the actual increase in legally carried guns caused the decrease. It is thought that the perception that more honest citizens may be armed that encourages the criminals to ply their trade elsewhere or seek a less dangerous line of work.

Debate over adequacy of data for definitive answer to the question of the relationship between guns and crime

The National Academy of Sciences 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 committee'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.

Lott's "2%" survey

Lott's critics also doubt Lott's claims to have conducted a survey in 1997, 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 of times even after the controversy over this survey had been made public, including in sworn testimony before legislative bodies.

In the first edition of More Guns, Less Crime (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).

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 U.S. 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.

Critics of Lott have made an active search for participants in the survey. One individual (David Gross, an attorney for Concealed Carry Reform Now, a pro-gun lobbying orgnization) has come forward to report that he recalled being called for such a survey which Lott asserted only later was the survey in question.

Lott repeated his survey in 2002, 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 U.S. 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 which contains the new survey.

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. 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.

At one point, Rosh engaged in a lengthy discussion of errors of fact in a newspaper op-ed piece Lott had written , 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. Two months later, however, Lott published another article on the same subject , 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.

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 and other sock puppets were used to post several five star reviews of his books on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble, in violation of their policies, as well as bad reviews of books by his rivals . 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)

In his defense, Lott alleged that the Rosh reviews had been written by his son and wife.

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 . 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 .

• 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. 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 .

• On April 10, 2006, Lott filed suit against Steven Levitt and HarperCollins Publishers for defamation, both in the book Freakonomics and in an email communication to economist John McCall, who had enquired for more detail regarding Levitt's statements about Lott in the book.[1] PDF of complaint

Bibliography

• Are Predatory Commitments Credible? (ISBN 0-226-49355-5)
• More Guns, Less Crime (ISBN 0-226-49364-4)
• The Bias Against Guns (ISBN 0-89526-114-6)

External links

• Dr. Lott's Primarily Rebuttals to the NAS Review
• Dr. Lott's Rebuttal in the New York Post to the NAS Review
• NAS Review listing on the NAP
• Review of "The bias against guns" in EuroHacker Magazine

Regarding Lott's research:

• John Lott's weblog
• John Lott's data, available for downloading
• John Lott's Research Papers at the Social Science Research Network
• Opinion pieces by Lott in the general press
• Disinfopedia: Summary of John Lott's errors
• Tim Lambert: John Lott's unethical conduct (weblog)
• National Academy of Science: NAS panel report on right-to-carry laws
• Tim Lambert: Do more guns cause less crime?
• Ted Goertzel: Myths of Murder and Multiple Regression
• Otis Dudley Duncan: Gun Use Surveys: In Numbers We Trust?
  • Lott's response
    • Tim Lambert's comments on the Duncan-Lott exchange
• Michelle Malkin The other Lott controversy
  • John Lott Response to Malkin
    • Tim Lambert: Comments on Lott's response

Regarding the Mary Rosh identity:

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

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

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