John Lott

John R. Lott Jr. at the American Enterprise Institute where he is a resident scholar.

John R. Lott Jr. (born May 8 1958) is currently a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His research interests include econometrics, law and economics, public choice theory, industrial organization, public finance, microeconomics, and environmental regulation.

Academic career

Lott studied economics at UCLA, receiving his B.A. in 1980, M.A. in 1982, and Ph.D. in 1984. He spent several years as a visiting professor and as a fellow at the University of Chicago.

Lott has also worked at other institutions, including the Yale University School of Law, Stanford, UCLA, the Wharton Business School, and Rice University, and was the chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission (1988–1989), before taking a position at the American Enterprise Institute.

Lott has published over ninety articles in academic journals, as well as three books for the general public. Opinion pieces by Lott have appeared in such places as the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Chicago Tribune.

More guns, less crime

Although Lott has published in academic journals regarding education, voting behavior of politicians, industrial organization, labor markets, judicial confirmations, and crime, his research is hard to consistently tag as liberal or conservative. For example, some research argues for environmental penalties on firms.[1] While other research on guns is viewed as quite conservative. He has also published in the popular press on topics such as the validity of the 2000 Presidential Election results in Florida, or how low the murder rate in Baghdad is after the US deposed Saddam Hussein, he is primarily known outside of academic econometrics for his involvement in arguments regarding the beneficial results of allowing Americans to freely own and carry guns.

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 strong reduction in violent crime associated with the adoption by states of laws allowing the general adult population to freely carry concealed weapons. He also provides evidence that gun control laws such as the Brady Act, the Assault weapons ban, one-gun-a-month restrictions, and waiting periods have not reduced crime rates. He claims to be the first person to have studied the impact of the Brady Law. The National Academy of Sciences report on gun control comes to conclusions that seem similar to this research.[2] He challenges anyone who disagrees with him to download his data set and redo his calculations. Many academics who have studied his data.[3][4][5][6][7][8][9]

Media bias

Lott argues that in both More Guns, Less Crime and The Bias Against Guns he was trying to explain why media coverage of defensive gun use is rare. In both books he noted that only shootings that end in fatalities are likely to result in news stories. Since Lott was arguing that there is media bias, Lott argues that using this data instead of data that showed lower brandishing rates was biased against his conclusions. He wrote:

"If national surveys are correct, 98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack. Such stories are not hard to find; pizza deliverymen defend themselves against robbers, carjackings are thwarted, robberies at automatic teller machines are prevented, and numerous armed robberies on the streets and in the stores are foiled, though these do not receive the national coverage of other gun crimes. Yet the cases covered by the news media are hardly typical; most of the encounters reported involve a shooting that ends in a fatality.." [Several such stories follow] (More Guns, Less Crime p.3)

"... 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). By contrast, take a story in where a woman brandishes a gun and a criminal flees, with no shots are fired, no crime is committed, and one isn’tno 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.” (“Bias Against Guns”)

Lott claims that selective reporting by U.S. media fails to report instances of people defending themselves (or others) via legal use of guns. In one example, a school shooting at the Appalachian School of Law on January 16 2002, Lott cites Tracy Bridges who says he pointed his gun at the killer, who then dropped his weapon and was subsequently tackled. [10]. However, Ted Besen contradicted this viewpoint on the January 17 2002 edition of The Early Show, saying that the killer put his (empty) gun down before Bridges intervened. The true sequence of events remains unresolved.

218 different news stories about the incident. Only three actually mentioned that the guns were used by the students to stop the attack. [11] Lott interviewed both the students who used their guns to stop the attack, including Mikael Gross. [12] Of the reporters who did not mention Bridge's story, Maria Glod of the Washington Post cited "space constraints" for not including it. (The Bias Against Guns, p.26). Mikael Gross was one of the two students who claimed to have used a gun to stop the Appalachian Law School attack. After the preliminary hearing where the prosecutor put Gross on the stand and Odighizuwa had to made a public statement for his plea bargain a Washington Post news story noted: “Odighizuwa was subdued without incident by armed students”?[13] Gross was also interviewed by Lott and provided a discussion of how he claimed the attack was stopped. He also explains why Ted Besen did not see what Bridges and Gross were doing.[ http://johnrlott.tripod.com/postsbyday/9-11-03.html]

Criticism

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. He has been accused of fabricating a survey in support of his position and other unethical conduct. Some aspects of his model of the causes of violent crime appear counter-intuitive to some; 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. (Lott's book, More Guns, Less Crime, explains why this interpretation confuses who commits crimes with who are victims and other general characteristics of victims. He also makes several other responses.) 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. (Lott's book looks at lots of differences across different types of places such as by county population density.) 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.

The National Academy of Science conducted a review of current research and data on firearms and violent crime, including Lott's work, and found: [14]

There is no credible evidence that "right-to-carry" laws, which allow qualified adults to carry concealed handguns, either decrease or increase violent crime.

at least in part because data collection limitations obscure anything more than the largest effects, positive or negative, from being observable. The report calls for the development of a National Violent Death Reporting System and a National Incident-Based Reporting System in order to start collecting accurate and reliable information that describes basic facts about violent injuries and deaths.

However, there is a dissent by James Q. Wilson [15] who states, regarding Lott's work:

In view of the confirmation of the findings that shall-issue laws drive down the murder rate, it is hard for me to understand why these claims are called “fragile.”

but ends his dissent by noting that Lott's evidence only confirms the effect on the murder rate, not on violent crime as a whole:

In sum, I find that the evidence presented by Lott and his supporters suggests that RTC laws do in fact help drive down the murder rate, though their effect on other crimes is ambiguous.

and the comittee's response to Wilson [16] states:

Except for the effects of right-to-carry laws on homicide, the entire committee is in agreement on the material in Chapter 6 and the report overall. In particular, the committee, including Wilson, found that “it is impossible to draw strong conclusions from the existing literature on the causal impact” of right-to-carry laws on violent and property crime in general and rape, aggravated assault, auto theft, burglary, and larceny in particular.

and goes on to describe in more detail why they differ with Wilson in also remaining skeptical about the probative value of Lott's findings regarding murder.

Despite this controversy over the positive effects of gun ownership on reducing crime, the body of work reviewed by the NAS demonstrates that deregulation of concealed carry does not lead to an increase in violent crime. As Wilson wrote:

In addition, with only a few exceptions, the studies cited in Chapter 6, including those by Lott’s critics, do not show that the passage of RTC laws drives the crime rates up (as might be the case if one supposed that newly armed people went about looking for someone to shoot). The direct evidence that such shooting sprees occur is nonexistent.

Lott supporters assert that this in itself represents a significant contribution by Lott to our understanding of the causes of crime, while his detractors allege that overall his data and his analysis are too biased to clarify what was already a cloudy picture.

One of his critics alleges that Lott has also backdated corrections. Lott’s webmaster attributes this to a one day error that was quickly fixed rather than malicious intent. [17]

The 2% problem

Lott's critics have also 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 part of a single sentence in his first book, Lott has referred to this study result other 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.

In the first edition of More Guns, Less Crime (May 1998) he wrote:

"If national surveys are correct, 98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack."

But in the second edition "If national surveys are correct" was replaced by "If a survey I conducted is correct", with no explanation. Lott originally referred to the 98%/2% breakdown as being the result of "national surveys", in person and in his book. When he was asked which particular surveys contained this result, rather than identify them 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 confusion, his initial references to the 2% figure were made before the date on which Lott says the survey was completed.

In fact, Lott's 98%/2% figure contradicts the other two surveys over the last twenty years that estimated this rate. However, “Kleck and Gertz’s estimates rise to 92 percent when brandishing and warning shots are added together.”[ http://johnrlott.org/files/GeneralDisc97_02Surveys.zip]

Besides statements by someone who took the survey and contemporaneous statements by others, Lott was unable to provide any evidence for his survey.[ http://johnrlott.tripod.com/postsbyday/topic-mysurveys.html] 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. He has provided a copy of his tax records for the year that the survey took place to some academics, and it does show that he had large deductions for research assistants that year. Despite this matter being publicized 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 Second Amendment activist who recalls being surveyed about guns in that period of time and now believes it to have been the Lott survey.[18]

Some of Lott's critics (and one former supporter) believe that the 2% figure is very likely the result of a trivial error in his memory of a study by Gary Kleck. Lott is accused of attributing the figure at one point (Kleck's 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, David Kopel, who ran the website upon which the claim was made, later admitted to doing this himself. Kopel wrote: “makes me believe that I added Kleck to the 98% sentence in the belief that the 98% figure came from him. The fact that I added Kleck is, of course, also supported by the Rocky Mountain News version of the Lott article (a version I did not edit) which contains no reference to Kleck.”

In addition to both editions of More Guns, Less Crime, searches of print and online media have found Lott himself to have referred to this 98%/2% result at least 25 times (though many of these are the same publications being republished). (Does Allowing Law-Abiding Citizens to Carry Concealed Handguns Save Lives?, Valparaiso University Law Review, 31(2): 355-63, Spring, 1997; Gun-Lock Proposal Bound to Misfire, Chicago Tribune, August 6, 1998; Hardball, CNBC, August 18, 1999; Gun Locks: Bound to Misfire, online publication of the Independence Institute, Feb. 9, 2000; reply to Otis Duncan's article, The Criminologist, vol. 25, no. 5, September/October 2000, page 6; Others Fear Being Placed at the Mercy of Criminals Los Angeles Times, March 30, 2001)

Before the controversy arose, Lott had repeated his survey for a book that he had written in 2002, this time meticulously documenting the survey's existence. True to his word, his new survey was of similar size, equally inadequate to have a resolution down to the level of 2% of the defensive gun uses he counted. The reported percentage of defensive gun uses who actually fired the weapon in his new survey was 8%, not the 2% he cites from his original survey. Lott claimed that after weighting the number was reduced to 5%; however, the weighting scheme he claims to have used [19] actually increases the number to 9%. Despite this well documented result, however, Lott continued to cite the controversial 2% figure on televised publicity tours for his new book (Book TV, CSPAN-2, May 15, 2004).

Mary Rosh online persona

To add to Lott's troubles, in early 2003 he admitted that he had created and used "Mary Rosh" as a fake persona to discuss gun issues and defend his own works on Usenet. Lott's actions were discovered when weblogger [|Julian Sanchez|] noticed that Lott made statements that matched those from a poster named "Mary Rosh" and that used the IP address from the Southeast Pennsylvania area for Comcast. Lott states that the name "maryrosh" derived from the first two letters of his four sons' first names and it has served as the email address that the children had used. When Lott was asked about the use of the pseudonym he immediate admitted to using it, and stated that he had done it because of all the personal attacks and threats that he had suffered.

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.