Less Guns, More Crime
Crime and Punishment
| January 9, 2003
| Tim
Those of you who knew me years ago know that when a concealed carry referendum came up in St. Louis, I opposed it, and encouraged others to do so. Some of you who owned weapons, I encouraged to get rid of them. My goal was to make society safer.
Later, I happened upon a debate on C-SPAN. It was kind of odd. I caught the part where an individual was taking the "con" position, but admitted he'd examined the work and that it seemed reasonable, and that he could only really argue for errors to the extent of the effect. What debatable position could be this strong? I wondered.
It was a debate between an opponent and economist John Lott, whose comprehensive statistical crime model provided strong empirical evidence that concealed carry laws saved lives by deterring criminals. Again, the reason for my dislike of guns was to save lives, so I purchased the book, read it, looked for responses and alternative evidence on the web, and ultimately changed my position.
Again, I wanted less people to die or be hurt, and the evidence indicated I was wrong, so I altered my position. That simple. Its called keeping an open mind.
The United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia also -- they said -- wanted less people to die. At least from guns. (Though I look at total deaths, not gun deaths. I figure more dead people is worse, even if fewer deaths involve guns. I don't think the dead people or their relatives feel better about it when it was a knife or baseball bat. Odd, I know.) But they took a different approach. They banned guns, to varying extents -- the UK to the greatest. And in doing so, offered to do a little experiment for all of us, using their people as guinea pigs.
So how's it working out? Many of you know. Today, the BBC's front page story is about England's soaring gun crime rate. The violent crime rate in England, even when firearms were legal, was always below ours -- now it soars. I have heard your chances of being robbed in London are now (gasp) six times that of New York City!
The theory is very simple: Criminals don't want to be hurt. Concealed weapons deter crime because crooks don't know who's packing heat, or abort the crime when they see a gun (and may not try it again). Increased policing is less effective because criminals see the police and simply decide to wait. Only a tiny percentage of population (like 1-2%) need carry concealed weapons to have a very big effect on crime -- and are usually those in the most danger, such as women being stalked. And criminals, people who by definition break laws, don't abide by gun laws, and thus are the last ones armed.
Score one more for predictive powers of John Lott's model.
But I feel sorry for all the unnecessary English crime victims who had to prove it for us. We're dealing with real people's lives here folks, not proving petty political points.
They've already done the big brother surveilence thing and limited civil liberties thing. According to the article, now they're going to try still more firearms laws, tougher sentences and banning gun-shaped toys. In the US, we've already shown tougher sentences aren't a significant deterrant, but, well whatever. The experiment continues...
I too was once a gun control advocate, until people presented me with real data. Then you discover a lot of the figures that float around are bogus, you start to think with an open mind, and then you notice the gun control model rests on shaky theoretical ground. Next thing you know, you're voting Yes on Prop B.
As an owner of various guns I get a lot of lip service from some of my liberal “gun control nuts” friends. They claim I have a great chance of killing an intruder in my own home. So, being a great compassionate man, I installed and alarm system in my house for the protection of any intruder. I even posted a sign on front of the house,
“FOR YOUR PROTECTION AND SAFETY, THIS HOUSE IS PROTECTED BY BRINKS ALARM SYSTEM. IF YOU ENTER THE PREMISES WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION AND THE ALARM IS ACTIVATED, RUN!! THE SECONDARY SECURITY SYSTEM (357 MAGNUM) WILL BE ACTIVATED 10 SECONDS AFTER FIRST SYSTEM ACTIVATION.”
speaking of losing data
I thought this might be of interest to you. I'd been opposing gun control using data from John Lott and decided to look into his background a bit. I came across the following.
The most disturbing charge, first raised by retired University of California, Santa Barbara professor Otis Dudley Duncan and pursued by Australian computer programmer
Tim Lambert, is that Lott fabricated a study claiming that 98 percent of defensive gun uses involved mere brandishing, as opposed to shooting.
When Lott cited the statistic peripherally on page three of his book, he attributed it to "national surveys." In the second edition, he changed the citation to "a national survey that I conducted." He has also incorrectly attributed the figure to newspaper polls and Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck.
Last fall, Northwestern University law professor James Lindgren volunteered to investigate the claimed existence of Lott's 1997 telephone survey of 2,424 people. "I thought it would be exceedingly simple to establish" that the research had been done, Lindgren wrote in his report.
It was not simple. Lott claims to have lost all of his data due to a computer crash. He financed the survey himself and kept no financial records. He has forgotten the names of the students who allegedly helped with the survey and who supposedly dialed thousands of survey respondents long-distance from their own dorm rooms using survey software Lott can't identify or produce.
Assuming the survey data was lost in a computer crash, it is still remarkable that Lott could not produce a single, contemporaneous scrap of paper
proving the survey's existence, such as the research protocol or survey instrument. After Lindgren's report was published, a Minnesota gun-rights activist named David Gross came forward, claiming he was surveyed in 1997. Some have said that Gross's account proves that the survey was done. I think skepticism is warranted.
...
But it wasn't an anti-gun zealot who unmasked Rosh/Lott. It was Internet blogger Julian Sanchez, a staffer at the libertarian Cato Institute, which staunchly defends the Second Amendment. And it was the conservative Washington Times that first reported last week on the survey dispute in the mainstream press.
Michelle Malkin 2003, WND
I posted all of this, and to his credit Lott confessed. "The MaRyRoSh pen name account," he explained, "was created years ago for an account for my children, using the first two letters of the names of my four sons."
... Bloggers unearthed old posts by "Rosh" and linked to them on their sites. Among the gems: "[Lott] was the best professor that I ever had....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."
source
speaking of losing data, Tim,
I thought this might be of interest to you. I'd been opposing gun control using data from John Lott and decided to look into his background a bit. I came across the following;
The most disturbing charge, first raised by retired University of California, Santa Barbara professor Otis Dudley Duncan and pursued by Australian computer programmer Tim Lambert, is that Lott fabricated a study claiming that 98 percent of defensive gun uses involved mere brandishing, as opposed to shooting.
When Lott cited the statistic peripherally on page three of his book, he attributed it to "national surveys." In the second edition, he changed the citation to "a national survey that I conducted." He has also incorrectly attributed the figure to newspaper polls and Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck.
Last fall, Northwestern University law professor James Lindgren volunteered to investigate the claimed existence of Lott's 1997 telephone survey of 2,424 people. "I thought it would be exceedingly simple to establish" that the research had been done, Lindgren wrote in his report.
It was not simple. Lott claims to have lost all of his data due to a computer crash. He financed the survey himself and kept no financial records. He has forgotten the names of the students who allegedly helped with the survey and who supposedly dialed thousands of survey respondents long-distance from their own dorm rooms using survey software Lott can't identify or produce.
Assuming the survey data was lost in a computer crash, it is still remarkable that Lott could not produce a single, contemporaneous scrap of paper proving the survey's existence, such as the research protocol or survey instrument. After Lindgren's report was published, a Minnesota gun-rights activist named David Gross came forward, claiming he was surveyed in 1997. Some have said that Gross's account proves that the survey was done. I think skepticism is warranted.
...
But it wasn't an anti-gun zealot who unmasked Rosh/Lott. It was Internet blogger Julian Sanchez, a staffer at the libertarian Cato Institute, which staunchly defends the Second Amendment. And it was the conservative Washington Times that first reported last week on the survey dispute in the mainstream press.Michelle Malkin 2003, WND
I posted all of this, and to his credit Lott confessed. "The MaRyRoSh pen name account," he explained, "was created years ago for an account for my children, using the first two letters of the names of my four sons."
... Bloggers unearthed old posts by "Rosh" and linked to them on their sites. Among the gems: "[Lott] was the best professor that I ever had....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."source
He defends himself heresource
Ryan! Was thinking about you, wondering how you were! Good to hear from you...
The most disturbing charge, first raised by retired University of California, Santa Barbara professor Otis Dudley Duncan and pursued by Australian computer programmer Tim Lambert, is that Lott fabricated a study claiming that 98 percent of defensive gun uses involved mere brandishing, as opposed to shooting.
Yeah, I heard about that and looked into it a while back. At the time, I thought he was probably guilty, and took this approach:
On one hand, most of Lott's work was available for anyone to download and double-check. This survey, while not unimportant, was arguably tangential to his case. And I don't know that anyone has blown holes in the rest of his data, so, as I understand it, whatever I might think of him and this incident, the argument still stands. (Also, I'd note that other studies have drawn the same conclusions, and my own direct observations (how's the crime rate over there in the UK?) certainly agree.) And it seemed odd that he would be so on-the-level about everything else, but fabricate this one small section.
On the other hand, I also decided I would look at anything new from him with a fairly suspicious eye.
Didn't know about the sock puppetry, though. That kind of "little fraud" is the sort of thing (as mentioned here) which sort of hints at the capacity to pull larger frauds. On the other hand, he readily admits it?!? This confuses me. Was he being tongue-in-cheek?
But I also didn't know about his defense you've linked to. The letters from Dan Kahan and Richard Manning, and Karpoff, and Mustard (if not also fraudulent in some way) certainly sounds like they thoroughly coorborate Lott's story. If that's true, then I'm glad you've cleared his name with me. I had no idea. Thank you!
So what's the parallel with the IPCC? Are you drawing any parallels or contrasts?
I see them as quite different: Lott's is a toss-off in a small section of his book. The IPCC's work was supposed to be massively peer reviewed. Lott has otherwise been seen and proven to be trustworthy. The IPCC's "hockey stick" was shown to be fraudulent long before this came to light. Lott readily admitted to the sock puppetry. The scientists in the other article won't even talk about it, and what little they say (they ran out of room???) are clearly lies. (I also was working with climate data in a university as early as 1984, and there was no problem with archiving it.) Lott could clearly describe (and corroborate, apparently!) the crash. These guys can't explain how they "lost" even *this years* data. Lott's critics included many who would prefer his conclusion (Malkin, others mentioned above), whereas it seems the pro-global-warming camp is a lot less willing to do the same.
Disagree?
Thanks for the response. I've only had a short time to go over the matter so I'm still mulling the significance of what I've read. I'm also going to tred a lot more carefully with anything coming from Lott for the time being and base any opinions on other sources. (Incidentally, is there any data on the UK crime rate that controls for cultural changes, demographic shifts and increases in drug use, which are crucial though typically omitted? Please let me know if you're aware of any such studies.)
Tim:On the other hand, he readily admits it?!? This confuses me. Was he being tongue-in-cheek?
As well as I understand it (I've only spent a few hours researching the topic) someone showed his IP address to match Mary Rosh's. "Mary" was previously asked about "her" relationship with Lott by internet posters, since "Mary" seemed to be defending Lott so vehemently. He admitted the sock puppetry only when he was actually caught.
Sanchez discovered the deception when he compared the IP address of one email he received from Lott and that behind one of Mrs. Rosh's comments -- they were identical. The Washington Post (Scholar Invents Fan To Answer His Critics) cites Lott: "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."
Kuro5hin source
(The advantage he got was high praise from a supposed former student for him, his book, his ideas and his impartial teaching methods.)
An interesting collection of Mary Rosh quotes
Lott's critics included many who would prefer his conclusion (Malkin, others mentioned above), whereas it seems the pro-global-warming camp is a lot less willing to do the same.
I agree, so far as I can tell. Gore's presentation of CO2 as a leading rather than a lagging indicator should have been counted as a larger blow against Gore's credibility as an information source. But AGW proponents don't seem to consider it particularly significant as a testament to Gore's character or veracity (or, perhaps, intelligence.) On the other hand, the fact that people like Malkin were distancing themselves from Lott led me to give a little more weight to the accusations for the time being.
P.S. Of the Mary Rosh quotes, I found this one particularly interesting. Not because of any ethical dilemma, but because it's a simple question that Lott should have been able to answer.
Tim Lambert: X is positively correlated with Y, r=0.7. X is positively correlated with Z, r=0.7. Does it follow that Y is positively corrrelated with Z?
Mary Rosh: Yes, of course.
Tim Lambert: Nope. Here's a simple counterexample: Let Y and Z be independant r.v.s and let X = Y+Z. Then X is positively correlated with Y, X is positively correlated with Z and Y and Z are not correlated.
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I too was once a gun control advocate, until people presented me with real data. Then you discover a lot of the figures that float around are bogus, you start to think with an open mind, and then you notice the gun control model rests on shaky theoretical ground. Next thing you know, you're voting Yes on Prop B.
Posted by: Kevin Murphy on January 10, 2003 11:29 AM