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John Lott

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John R. Lott Jr. (born May 8, 1958) is currently a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Fields of interest for research include Econometrics, Law and economics, Public Choice, Industrial Organization, Public Finance, Microeconomic Theory and Environmental Regulation. He studied Economics at UCLA, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in 1980, Masters of Arts in 1982 and Ph.D. in 1984, and spent several years as a visiting professor and as a fellow at University of Chicago, the home of the Law and economics movement; this school of thought holds that all laws should be derived from what produces the greatest good for the greatest number, rather than abstract notions of human rights or justice. In practice, this leads to a pronounced philosophical bias against government regulation in general, and has produced many of the policymakers (i.e. Robert Bork) and much of the policy of the US Republican party since the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Lott went on to work at other institutions, for instance Yale University School of Law, before taking a position at the American Enterprise Institute, generally considered a right-wing think tank.

More guns, less crime?

Although Lott has published prolifically in academic journals regarding the beneficial aspects of government deregulation of various areas, and has also published in the popular press on conservative topics as the validity of the 2000 Presidential Election results in Florida, he is primarily known outside of academic econometrics for his involvement in gun politics, and his arguments regarding the benefical results of freely allowing Americans 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 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.

Contested scholarship

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. Some aspects of his model of the causes of violent crime appear counter-intuitive; 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. 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. 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.

Nevertheless, Lott's work does serve to rule out the possibility that deregulation of concealed carry leads to a significant increase in violent crime; no interpretation or model of his data would support this, which had been predicted a priori by many of the gun-control proponents. With this result, and with the ground-breaking work of assembling the data and using it in this modeling process, Lott has added significantly to our understanding of the causes of crime.

Unfortuately Lott's stature began to fall in 2003. His academic rebuttals to subsequent peer-reviewed work which reached conclusions opposite to his have been plagued by coding errors and other systematic sources of bias, which all served, whether innocent, deliberate, or subconscious, to falsely support his theory. Lott's op-eds and other popular works have been found to contain a number of elementary errors of fact; rather than admit them and correct them, Lott has tended to blame faulty editing on the part of the media, then go on to repeat the same errors elsewhere. Similarly, the identifications of the errors in Lott's academic publications have been met not with agreements and subsequent correction, but with denials, attempts to replace the files with corrected ones while denying they had been changed, and even clumsy attempts to give the new files backdated file dates to match the originals.

The 2% Problem

Most tellingly, Lott's critics have 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 a single sentence in his first book, Lott has referred to this study result numerous 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.

Lott's 2% figure contradicts all other independent studies (although when he first began using the 2% figure he actually attributed it to 'national surveys', as in the first edition (May 1998) of his book, More Guns, Less Crime); the lowest figure from any of these is that more than 20% of the defensive gun users involve firing the gun. Lott's claimed size for the survey can be mathematically determined to be too small by a factor of at least ten, so that 2% of the defensive gun users found in his survey (approximately 25, from his recollection) would mean that only one half of one person claimed to have fired a gun. Lott counters this by saying that the data was weighted by demographic factors (using a process the details of which he cannot recollect), which could indeed result in such an inflation of a subsection of the original results; but such a process would also inflate the margin of error (which obviously, cannot be less than one person in the raw data) by a similar factor, so that there is no way a statistically significant result of this magnitude could have been attained. (Lott continues to subdivide his results, further claiming that only 1/4 of his 2% actually shot at the perpetrator; which would correspond to 1/8 of a person in his raw survey data.)

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. There are similarly no records of his having claimed any of this as a business expense or of the institutional Committee on Human Experimentation having reviewed the study, as required by law. 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 (which is unfortunate, given the apparent impossibility of achieving these results from a sample of that size, as detailed above). Despite this matter appearing 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 individual who recalls being surveyed about guns in that period of time and believes it was the Lott survey.

As stated above, Lott originally referred to the 2% figure as being the result of 'national surveys', in person and in his book. When this was proved not to be the case, 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 uncertainty, however, the initial references to the 2% figure were made before the date on which Lott says the survey was done.

Lott's detractors (and some former supporters) believe that the 2% figure is most likely the result of a slight mistake in Lott's memory (at one point, Lott attributed the 2% figure to a study by Gary Kleck, which 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 Lott has since denied several times that an incorrect memory of Kleck's study is the source of his 2% figure, continuing to maintain that it is his vanished survey); but a slight mistake that Lott, similarly to his reactions described above to other errors identified in his work, refuses to acknowledge and goes to extreme lengths to cover up, despite its playing only a minor role in his work.

Even if Lott actually did the survey, used a novel (or mistaken) mathematical method to generate the results he quotes, and is the victim of the worst luck ever, even his colleagues who oppose gun control consider it extremely unprofessional to continue to quote from memory a result for which the raw data are no longer available and the methodology is no longer remembered; in particular when that result is wildly at variance with every other study of the same subject, and appears to be mathematically impossible from the design of the survey. Nevertheless, the 2% figure for the percentage of defensive gun uses which involve firing the gun has been adopted by the anti-gun-control movement and has become a fixture in their canon of argument, including continuing appearances by Lott himself; the more unfortunate because this particular figure never really mattered in the gun law debate until 'Lott has made it matter'.

In a footnote to the controversy, Lott resolved to settle the matter by repeating his survey in 2002 before the publication of his most recent book, this time meticulously documenting the survey's existence. True to his word, his new survey was of similar size, inadequate to have a resolution down to the level of 2% of the defensive gun uses reported. Nevertheless, the reported percentage of defensive gun uses who actually fired the weapon in his new survey was 14%; not only is this much closer to the results reported by all the other surveys than to Lott's claimed previous result, but, ironically, even with the large margin of error due to his small sample size, it is sufficient to identify the likelihood of getting a result of 2% in a similar survey as insignificant.

Fake online persona

To add to Lott's troubles, in early 2003 he was forced to admit (after initial denials) that he had created and used "Mary Rosh" as a fake persona to defend his own works on Usenet. Lott's 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." While 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, academically it is considered somewhat unethical and unprofessional to use an anonymous identity to engage in substantive discussion of one's own work with critics, rather than defending one's work openly under one's own name. That could be viewed as a way to avoid the risk of damaging one's reputation; rather like hustling at a game like pool or chess or poker, or a professional fighter engaging in amateur bouts under an assumed name.

"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."

In fact, while Lott was posting as 'Rosh', he would normally decline requests to engage in such Unsenet discussions of his work under his own name, stating

"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. Yet, despite this statement, the 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', without apparent worry about attracting hostile attention, but avoiding the detailed professional discussions of his work that he left to 'Rosh'. Furthermore, among the replies to these posts, there is no evidence of any hostility to Lott, at least publicly.

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 thesis of 'More guns. less crime'. After 'Rosh' was finally forced to admit that the original piece did indeed omit some important facts, a corrected version subsequently appeared 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' suggests her opponent telephone Lott to discuss it; he does so, and, despite 'Rosh' having been discussing it online for over a week, Lott claims no knowledge of the controversy, and not to have even seen how the original newspaper had edited his work, implying that he had not in fact made an error then subsequently corrected it. Two months later, however, Lott publishes 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, Lott was willing to knowingly repeat the error, using 'Rosh' to give himself the appearance of a 'plausible deniability'.

Use of an anonymous posting identity can also be abused to make it appear that there is independent confirmation of one's views, or praise and approval from third parties. In fact, "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."

While this statement would be considered amusing ego-boost were it posted about oneself, posting it under an assumed name attempts to give it some credibility, while the revelation that it was posted about oneself anonymously makes it appear ludicrously self-serving. 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, 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)

Again, this would be amusing if one posted it about one's own work, but posting about one's own work under an assumed name adds another dimension to it.



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 .

Media bias?

Lott claims that selective reporting by US media fails to report instances of people defending themselves (or others) via legal use of guns. For example, a school shooting was reportedly ended by students who tackled the gunman, but Lott quotes Tracy Bridges who says he pointed his gun at the killer, who then dropped his weapon before being tackled. However, another witness contradicts this, saying that the killer put his (empty) gun down before Bridges arrived.

External links

Regarding Lott's research:

Regarding the Mary Rosh identity:

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