Asymmetrical Information

It depends on what you mean by "toast." As far as Lott's scholarly reputation, he doesn't have much of one to lose. People like Ludwig and Duggan have blown so many holes in "More Guns, Less Crime" that few non-ideological researchers take it seriously any more, and Lott's defensiveness and unresponsiveness in the face of legitimate criticisms of his scholarship has not won him many admirers.

But if you mean he's "toast" in terms of possibly losing his job, as Bellesiles did at Emory, it isn't going to happen. He's now at AEI, and as long as he keeps producing "studies" that make the right-wingers happy, he'll have a sinecure there as long as he wants.

John Lott will be OK. So will Lomborg. The left fights hard and dirty but, not well.

Reality has a way of sorting things out eventually. In Lott's case the Brit experiment of less guns leading undeniably to more crime is solid support for his thesis.

Actually what has been most amusing is the almost universal dishonesty of Lott's "critics". This is of a kind to the smears told about Lott when his and Mustard's study first came out.

Robin: which critics of Lott would you regard as dishonest? I doubt that you could say that about his academic critics--Ludwig, Duggan, et. al.--and they are the ones I was referring to.

What Lott found was a corelation between gun control legislation and an increase in crime.

What Duggan found was a statistical corelation between gun shows, gun magazine sales, and crime.

Duggan is not a refutation of Lott. He isn't addressing the gun legislation/crime finding.

As population increases one would expect gun shows, magazine sales, and crime to increase proportionally without there being any cause and effect corelation among them.

I don't find Duggan's work useful. Your mileage may vary depending on what use you have for his work.

Duggan's work is an embarrassment to no one but himself. His "proxies" such as the sales of a particular gun magazine, for firearm ownership are ludicrous and in fact smell more of sorting data until a bogus correlation appears. Ludwig's work has not blown a hole in anything except pro-control's arguments.

Sure, the lefties and the antis will squawk about this, but they won't change anyone's mind. The ones who quote Lott will continue to quote him, because the allegations don't touch the research at the core of his study (unlike Bellesiles, where the allegations were that he fabricated fundamental data). The ones who hate Lott will continue to do so. The new allegations against Lott should have little sway because they reek of me-tooism, coming as they do after Bellesiles, and are an obvious hit job.

The problem is, T. -- if he made this up, what else did he make up?

The trouble with "Arming America" was that the backup material does not support the main idea of the book, that colonial Americans were basically unarmed. With Lott, this is not the case, as the survey in question was redone (by an outside contractor) as soon as these questions arose and showed the same results. Repeatability is the issue, not any given data piece. If Bellesiles' data had supported his conclusion in the end, regardless of any error in his initial research, he would still have a job.

Until now, I was a big Lott supporter, and even now, I believe that the bulk of his conclusions are basically correct.

Nonetheless I am tremendously disappointed in him, and frankly, I think his credability is now shot. I am less concerned about the initial lie - if it is, in fact, a lie - than about the evasive way he has handled the criticisim that followed.

He can surprise me tomorrow and come up with evidence that vindicates him, but as of right now he is not a trustworthy voice and we have every right to doubt the truthfullness of all of his work.

I'm pro-gun because that's where the evidence has led me. We don't need to lie to make our point, and we should not tolerate it among our ranks. If Lott has lied about this, then he ought to come forward and come clean right now. If he remains evasive than he simply should not be trusted any more.

I never understood why anyone would have wanted to rely on Lott when Gary Kleck makes substantially the same points but doesn't use dodgy econometrics. To my certain knowledge, Lott's original estimates of the benefits of CCW were derived from a model which he knew to be flawed (Lott actually estimated the correct model in his original paper but reported the results of an incorrect model because they looked better). And his contribution to the Florida voter issue was just horrible.

Seriously, why does anyone bother with Lott when there is Kleck?

The interesting thing about Lott's critics is what they criticized.
The gun-control folks insist that more guns means more crime and more gun crime.
Lott's critics didn't attempt to prove that.
They tried to prove that the reduction in crime wasn't a matter of more guns. It was a matter of something else.
So, even if Lott's critics are correct, they are absolutely no help to the gun-control folks.
The gun-control lobby needs MORE crime, and here we have contention about why there actually is less.
No good.

"The trouble with "Arming America" was that the backup material does not support the main idea of the book, that colonial Americans were basically unarmed."

I would pick up a copy of "Arming America," except that I hate to generate sales for something that, based on other's reviews, seems to be filled with egregious and transparent lies.

For example, I've read that Arming America "quotes" the Militia Act of 1792 as saying citizens should be provided with guns. But it actually clearly says that the citizens should provide their own guns. Oh...here's a blurb about that on the Internet:

http://www.claytoncramer.com/BellesilesWrong3.PDF

I can think of no way that Bellesiles could make such a mistake honestly. The only possible explanation I can see is that Bellesiles deliberately misrepresented the Militia Act of 1792, because Bellesiles didn't like what it really said. His career as an accredited history teacher should certainly be finished, with such a huge and transparent lie as that.

I also can't imagine how a group of *historians* would actually honor such a book with a prize! What a bunch of bozos! (Good work by Clayton Cramer, though.)

The use of proxy variables in econometric analysis, far from being the "ludicrous" practice that Robin labels it, is a well-established way for researchers to deal with inadequacies in the data they work with.

In this case, Duggan used a proxy variable since good data on gun ownership are hard to come by. A significant portion of his paper is dedicated to demonstrating that his magazine sales numbers are a good proxy for gun ownership--he does at least three separate tests to show this.

Duggan then shows that high rates of gun ownership have a significant, positive effect on homicide rates. Contrary to Fred's claim, this research is directly contradictory to Lott's research, which carries the implication that higher gun ownership should reduce crime.

I'll get excited about this when it turns out that Lott gave names of graduate students who died in the San Francisco Earthquake.

I'd have to agree that this looks and smells a whole lot (no pun intended) like a bought-and-paid-for hit job. Unlike M. Bellsiles' egregious mangling of fairly clear original sources, Lott *may possibly* have had a HD failure that was insufficently documented.

Not even close, folks.

There's nothing contradictory about Lott & Mustard's conclusion "more guns = less crime" and Duggan's conclusion "more guns = more homicides," especially since homicides make up a tiny fraction of total crimes.

As for Duggan's use of instrumental (proxy) variables, I haven't read the piece but I'll say that if you're going to use proxies, you'd better justify them at least as well as you justify your econometric model and make a convincing (to a third party) explanation that the instrumental variables are good proxies, which requires more than simply showing they are correlated at a high level. (Sales of gun enthusiast magazines is probably correlated with levels of gun ownership, but there are other causal factors as well; I'd imagine gun magazines sell much better in rural areas than urban areas, for example.)

We have a nice empirical experiment going on in the UK. What happens when you make private gun ownership virtually impossible? Does crime go up or down?

It's obvious the gun control types want some revenge for Bellsiles, but what these theorists say doesn't matter all that much in the end.

You misrepresent my statement, Mark, I did not say that proxies are a ludicrous practice, I said that Duggan's proxies were ludicrous. His "tests" notwithstanding.

Lets not forget to adjust some numbers, I dare say. This adjusting business is important, you know. Very important.

Chief Pedro

PS. Now on to the serious comments, again.

OK, Robin, how about telling us _why_ Duggan's proxy for gun ownership is "ludicrous."

I'll take a stab at that, Mark -- most gun owners don't read magazines like that. While most magazine readers might own guns, that does not make them a reliable proxy for the population of gun owners; they are a non-representative subset.

Jane: Even if I agree to stipulate that most gun owners do not read gun magazines, if the proportion of gun owners who do read them is sufficiently stable across states and counties, then subscription figures should still be a good proxy for gun ownership.

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