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Revision as of 02:31, 13 June 2003

John R. Lott Jr., is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who argues in favor of allowing Americans without a criminal record to own and carry guns.

"...the evidence is that, with more than 2 million defensive guns used each year, guns are used at least four times more frequently to stop crime than they are used to commit crime."

In his book More Guns, Less Crime, he presents statistical evidence for his claim that allowing adults to carry concealed weapons has significantly reduced crime in America.

Lott claims that selective reporting by US media fails to report instances of people defending themeselves (or others) via legal use of guns. For example a school shooting was reportedly ended by students who "tackled" the gunman, but Lott quotes eyewitnesses who say that Tracy Bridges pointed a gun at the killer, who then dropped his weapon before being tackled.

Opposition to Lott's views

His work is opposed by gun control groups and by some skeptics within the gun rights movement. Lott has been criticized for analyzing only those data which promote his pro-gun agenda, and ignoring the rest. In particular his analysis of crime statistics in those states that have tightened gun ownership laws has been criticized on these grounds.

Fake online personage

In early 2003 John Lott admitted that he had created and used the fake identity "Mary Rosh" to defend his own works in Internet discussion forums. Rosh claimed to be one of Lott's former students:

"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. . . . There were a group of us students who would try to take any class that he taught. Lott finally had to tell us that it was best for us to try and take classes from other professors more to be exposed to other ways of teaching graduate material."

While Lott refused to take part in such discussions under his real name, he repeatedly used the Rosh identity to defend his methods. The identity was also used for a five star review on Amazon.com, although Lott claims that his son and wife wrote it, and he merely approved it. He states that the name "Mary Rosh" derived from the first two letters of his four sons' first names.

The fake identity was discovered when weblogger Julian Sanchez noticed that the IP address Lott used to reply to an email was the same he had used to take part in discussions under the name "Mary Rosh".

Lott's critics have said that the incident calls into question Lott's trustworthiness, and therefore his entire work. His defenders reject such claims as ad hominem attacks, a claim which has been countered by some critics who state that they do not say Lott's work is logically incorrect because of his assumption of a fake identity, only that he is less trustworthy now .

External links

Regarding Lott's research:

• 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
  • Mysterious Lott survey, weblog

Regarding the Mary Rosh identity:

• Washington Post story about Lott's fake identity
• Archive of Mary Rosh posts
• Julian Sanchez' weblog