[extropy-chat] Guns

Mike Lorrey mlorrey at yahoo.com
Mon Dec 1 17:04:48 UTC 2003


--- Charlie Stross <charlie at antipope.org> wrote:
> 
> On 1 Dec 2003, at 14:09, Mike Lorrey wrote:
> 
> >
> > --- Dirk Bruere <dirk at neopax.com> wrote:
> >> I doubt it.
> >> It's a religious issue that is a matter of faith.
> >
> > Sorry, Dirk, but the numbers really do prove my side. Dr. John
> Lott's
> > study was of ALL FBI crime data from 1980 to 1995 and proves that
> > right-to-carry reduces crime. Antyi-gun studies always cherry pick
> > their data sets from communities that fit their prejudices. NONE
> have
> > ever looked at even a large fraction of the data that Lott's study
> > covered.
> 
> Are we talking about the same John Lott who invents sock-puppets on  
> mailing lists ("Mary Rosh") to defend him against the accusations
> that  
> he cited figures from surveys that funnily enough nobody else can
> find  any records of?

Your refer to this?
"Second, Northwestern University law professor James Lindgren reported
that he had investigated Lott's claim of a 1997 survey which found that
"98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely
have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack," and found no
evidence of the survey's existence."

The Kleck study is very widely known and published, though I am sure
that anti-gunners would wish that it did not exist.
http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html

For critiques of Kellerman's flawed study (where the 43 to 1 claim
comes from) see:
http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdgaga.html

Nor did he use the pseudonym to defend himself from such claims, he
used the name to write a fictitious review of his book, which is far
less offensive than the offenses of anti-gunner Michael Bellisiles,
recently drummed out of Emory University for academic dishonesty and
stripped of literary prizes, in that he invented citations and
fabricated data on a broad scale.

> 
> http://www.jointogether.org/gv/news/features/reader/ 
> 0,2061,561876,00.html
> 
> Or switches statistical model without saying so then blames a
> computer  
> error?
> 
> http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/2003/09#0913b

Actually, he blames a computer error (on a Mac, mind you) for errors in
his data tables, essentially errors in labelling dates numerically,
which may more accurately be user errors from inexperience with the
software, which result in data files created in April (04) of one year
being confused with data files created in 2004...

Plassman and Tideman show that if there is any error, it is on the
conservative side. Their results show an even greater effect on crime
than Lott reported, though less consistent across all counties and
states.
"In this paper we use a Poisson-lognormal model to analyze
intertemporal and geographical variations in the effects of
right-to-carry laws on murders, rapes, and robberies. For each of these
crime categories our estimates suggest the existence of statistically
significant deterrent effects of right-to-carry laws for the majority
of the 10 states that have adopted such laws between 1977 and 1992, but
we also find that some of these states experienced statistically
significant increases in the numbers of certain crimes."
http://bingweb.binghamton.edu/~fplass/gun.pdf

Furthermore, Plassman and WHitley issued a response to critics of their
study as well as Lott's study:
http://lawreview.stanford.edu/content/vol55/4/Plassmann_Whitley.pdf

Ayers and Donohue attempt to counter, claiming their study that P&W
critique, was not to show that crime dropped or increased in
jurisdictions that passed right to carry laws, but that such laws
merely imposed a 'jurisdiction selection effect' in which criminals
take their criminal activity elsewhere where right-to-carry did not
exist.
http://lawreview.stanford.edu/content/vol55/4/Ayres_Donohue_comment.pdf

Furthermore, Black and Nagin are rightly criticized by Lott for using a
systematic means of cherry picking, excluding 86% of counties because
such counties have less than 100,000 population, in their study
refuting Lott's work. Since most states with right-to-carry are mostly
made up of counties with less than 100,000 population, Black and Nagin
are simply excluding those areas where right-to-carry is most heavily
practiced and would therefore result in the greatest effect on crime.
Black and Nagin are essentially studying ONLY urban centers in the US,
not the US as a whole, when it is urban centers that have far worse
criminal problems than guns, such as drug war activity, and which
vastly misrepresent the degree of ethnic and racial diversity in the US overall.

=====
Mike Lorrey
"Live Free or Die, Death is not the Worst of Evils."
                                       - Gen. John Stark
"Fascists are objectively pro-pacifist..."
                                       - Mike Lorrey
Do not label me, I am an ism of one...
Sado-Mikeyism: http://mikeysoft.zblogger.com

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