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fascinating. once again, this website peels back the ordinary view to get at the truth beneath. the only other scientist I can think of who attracts this much controversy is bjorn lomborg. probably for the same reason - challenging the commonly accepted perceptions.

thanks again.

John Lott was too restrained to note this, but Mr. Murphy's comment included a file from Mr. Lambert's web site. He saw to it to correct the error he stated in his post and I appreciate his manners and good sense. From my reading of Mr. Lambert's web site, the other critical commenter on John's research, it appears that Mr. Murphy may have gotten his erroneous information from Lambert's web site.

I have visited his site and find it unappealing and of little worth in this debate. It seems Mr. Lambert has something against John and searches out comments or posts about his gun research and then posts comments on web sites. He has been less than careful in his statements and contributed nothing to the debate. So, I have banned him as a commenter. No loss.

Dear Art:

1) As Mr. Lambert knows, I have provided a detailed discussion of the different surveys that have been done on defensive gun use (http://www.johnlott.org/files/GeneralDisc97_02Surveys.zip). In the last twenty-some years there have only been a couple of surveys besides mine that deal with brandishing rates and since 1990 there have been only four others that deal with defensive gun use rates. Among the differences with mine are that they asked respondents about incidents over the preceding five years while I asked about incidents only over the preceding year. The difference between my result and these surveys appears to be entirely driven by warning shots being fired (my survey did not find any).

2) Both of my books had one sentence that used these brandishing numbers and in both cases the number that I used was biased against the argument that I was making. Take the passage in The Bias Against Guns (p.24):

"Even though the survey I conducted during the fall 2002 indicates that simply brandishing a gun successfully stops crimes 95 percent of the time that guns are used defensively and other surveys have also found high rates, it is very rare to see such a story. No conspiracy explanation is really needed to explain why an editor finds a dead body on the ground very newsworthy (particularly if it is a sympathetic person like a victim). Take a story in which a woman brandishes a gun and a criminal flees, no shots are fired, no crime is committed, and no one is even sure what crime would have been committed had a weapon not been drawn. Nothing bad actually happened. It is not emotionally gripping enough to make the story 'newsworthy.'"

See page 3 of More Guns, Less Crime for a similar discussion. Given that the point of my books has been that the media is systematically biased in how it covers defensive gun use, using a lower percentage number would have made it harder to defend media coverage. The number that I used was thus biased against the overall claim that I was making. Mr. Lambert knows this also.

3) I have made my data available to the NAS panel, and they thanked me in their report for doing so. I have made my data available for research papers or books even prior to publication and in many cases even prior to their acceptance for publication. All the data for every single regression for both More Guns, Less Crime as well as The Bias Against Guns as well as my other papers on guns has been made available to others to examine. As to Mr. Murphy's claim that I have not provided the primary sources for my work, my books have a data appendix as well as discussions in the text on the sources used. My academic papers are similar.

Best,

John

Tim:

Can you tell me of these published surveys? I am unaware of any, though there may be some. What is the number if not "roughly 95%"? How far off is his statement?

Now to the real point, how does one do one of these surveys? I don't know, but it is easy to see that they would have wildly differing numbers and are subject to much interpretation as to what caused the attacker to stop. This is not something precise enough to come close to settling the issue.

No doubt the number is not precise or even hard (most surveys are not) and the error of estimate is quite large, maybe as high as 50%. But, the point is to see that there are benefits of even brandishing a weapon without having to use it. How to measure them is not something people are likely to agree on.

Let's go back to my example of the serial killers. Just one in the sequence of their cumulative victims numbering somewhere near 100 (and still not fully accounted) who could have brandished a gun (or better killed the would-be killer) could have ended the sequence for that particular killer by chasing him off and then reporting with a description and other leads. This would have been the kind break these cases need to be solved.

So what is the brandishing effect and how do you measure it? It is surely positive and of real value. But the number is hard to come up with. Does this mean one should dismiss the benefit? No, it should go on the positive side of the full benefit cost calculation. That is what I see as one of the many benefits of John's research, incomplete and imprecise as it may be and as his or anyone's research must be given the precision of answers to this amorphous question.

Remember, asking the question is more important and harder to do than calculating an answer. He asks the right questions and, thus, sends the research where new information is found. A great skill and one I did not see often in graduate students who had learned techniques, but had not learned to ask important questions.

Why do people have such a strong reaction to Lott's research? I guess the area is controversial, but why should it be? Research peels away the dark.

OK then, here is a simple challenge for you. In the interview you linked, Lott claims that

"Roughly ninety-five percent or so of the time, simply brandishing a gun was sufficient to stop an attack."

No published survey has found anything like that figure. Lott dismisses those results and instead uses the results from a survey he claims to have conducted in 1997 and a survey he did in 2002. He says he lost the data for the 1997 survey and there is no good evidence that it was ever conducted. But you can download the data for the 2002 survey from his site. It's a small data set and you don't need anything fancier than Excel to analyze it. It only takes a few minutes to see that the brandishing number you get from this data is not 95%.

I certainly agree with you concerning the media. Personally, I believe the truth is really that the media is basically in business to support advertisers and that they need to sensationalize everything to attract viewers (customers). We are, afterall, a nation of consumers.

"I note the committee downloaded the data from John's site and, yet, one of the points you said his critics made was that his data were not available."

I apologize for that, I should have been more clear that I was working from a vague memory of controversy, which appears to be that his data was falsified.

All your points are well taken. thank you.

But that is the kind of scrutiny of research, data, and model specification you expect in a developing science. It is remarkable how central a figure he is in all this and how much research has been generated by his work. I note the committee downloaded the data from John's site and, yet, one of the points you said his critics made was that his data were not available.

A leading figure in any field is someone who is either a target or an inspiration. I think he is both. And the research is better for his contributions. He has become a mandatory reference, as I have in the movies, for papers written on this subject.

By the way, I worked on National Academy of Science committees and it can be hard to do good science; one has to negotiate positions at times with others and there are often limitations in the scope of the committee's investigations that are not in the best interests of the science. Rarely do consensus reports represent the best science.

But, this topic risks boring others and John can respond, and has, to these assertions. He can do far better than I. If more people read him and his critics then all the better for having this important information as part of their decision-making.

I am not sure he passes your "simple facts and honesty" test.

http://timlambert.org/guns/lindgren.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A8884-2003Jan31¬Found=true

http://www.nap.edu/openbook/0309091241/html/120.html#pagetop

I don't want to hide from what is true. What a strange thing for you to say. I will read the report you mention. I just finished No Excuses, a book about the racial gap in US schools. It is so important that the truth is told so that the public will demand accountability in the schools, for students and teachers. The racial gap in learning is a primary cause of black poverty and the racial divide that some exploit for their political and financial power.

John Lott's research has withstood the test of time and replication. He has always made his data sets available to other scientists and you can go to his web site now and downioad his data, some sets are huge. Don't confuse accusations by critics, whose work he shows to be wrong, with the science. Read it and see the even-handed and often brilliant attempts to put propositions in testable form. Only by doing this can vague beliefs about guns be assessed according to the logic of probability.

hasn't john lott been dogged by controversy? while no michael beissesles (sp?) he has been accused of using statistics then refusing to provide the primary sources; inventing the on-line persona of a female grad student to glorify both himself and his work; a couple other controversies that showed him and his work in a poor light.

while I agree with his stance on gun control, I think that he may be one of those sources of bad information that you criticize. certainly, he has done little to lift the fog surrounding the issue.

Funny that you should mention "race baiting" in a post about bias in journalism. Members of the audience like yourself would probably scream bloody murder if ever presented with non-biased reporting in, say, race and crime statistics. Read The Color of Crime and tell me that you aren't secretly glad that you can rely on journalists to happily dispense with reality as it actually exists out there if they ever want to see their yapping in print.

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