John Lott's unethical conduct John Lott is embroiled in several controversial affairs: he almost certainly fabricated a mysterious survey and certainly behaved unethically in making claims for which he had no supporting data

he presented results purporting to show that "more guns" led to "less crime" when those results were the product of coding errors

he pretended to be a woman called "Mary Rosh" on the internet in order to praise his own research and accuse his critics of fraud.

he probably was the person who anonymously accused Steve Levitt of being "rabidly antigun" John Lott is embroiled in several controversial affairs:

If you look up “sneaky” in the dictionary…

At the The High Road there was some discussion of the cherry picked Lott article I discussed here. One poster, “agricola”, criticized Lott, linking to my blog. Another poster, “fallingblock”, responded:

I contacted John Lott a while back and asked him for the details of his discussions with Tim Lambert. According to Lott, he has offered several times to provide data for Tim and Lambert does not reply.

My opinion is that Tim Lambert is yet another anti-gun Australian of the academic elite - the sort who seem to drive so much of the riduculous firearms legislation here in Australia.

I contacted fallingblock to point out that Lott had not contacted me. He emailed Lott to seek an explanation, and sure enough, Lott’s story changed. Fallingblock posted:

I’ve had a few emails from John Lott and he quite correctly states that the data is all available at his website for anyone to view. Dr. Lott remains quite open to any specific questions concerning his research and generously offered to answer any of my own. He also maintains that Tim Lambert was among the first to receive the data when it became available.

10:16 | /guns/Lott/misc | 1 comment | link

Responses to my post on Lott’s cherry picking

Hunt Stilwell asks:

since the gun lobby’s statistical claims have been debunked so thoroughly and so often, why do they continue to use them, and why do people continue to buy them?

Brian Linse thinks there has been some progress, since not many progun bloggers linked to Lott’s piece, whereas

I remember the days when Instantman would have linked it within seconds of it being posted.

John Ray boasts that he quoted Lott in an attempt to bait me. He also offers an explanation for his earlier conduct in refusing to link to my post that he was responding to. Apparently it was “too intemperate” and “rage-filled”. Ray conveniently forgets to link or quote from this “rage-filled” posting so his readers aren’t able to see if his characterization is accurate: judge for yourself. Ray then attempts to side step the whole cherry-picking issue by asserting “almost any use of statistics has to be selective”. Well, yes, but if you do as Lott does and just select the statistics favourable to your position, then that’s cherry picking.

01:18 | /guns/Lott/misc | 11 comments | link

Washingtonian blog

To all the people arriving here via a search for “Washingtonian blog”: The following table is provided as a public service so that you can keep your pseudonymous posters straight:

Pseudonym Real name Writes about Blog link News story Mary Rosh John R Lott Jr How wonderful John Lott is here link Washingtonian John R Lott Jr How wonderful John Lott is here Washingtonienne Jessica Cutler Her sex life here link

In completely unrelated John Lott news, Kieran Healy is promoting Lott as a commencement speaker.

00:08 | /guns/Lott/MaryRosh | Add the first comment | link

More cherry picking from Lott

Lott has a new article at Fox News where he claims that gun control is unravelling:

Crime did not fall in England after handguns were banned in January 1997. Quite the contrary, crime rose sharply. Yet, serious violent crime rates from 1997 to 2002 averaged 29 percent higher than 1996; robbery was 24 percent higher; murders 27 percent higher. Before the law, armed robberies had fallen by 50 percent from 1993 to 1997, but as soon as handguns were banned, the robbery rate shot back up, almost back to their 1993 levels. Australia has also seen its violent crime rates soar after its Port Arthur gun control measures (search) in late 1996. Violent crime rates averaged 32 per cent higher in the six years after the law was passed (from 1997 to 2002) than they did the year before the law in 1996. The same comparisons for armed robbery rates showed increases of 45 percent. The 2000 International Crime Victimization Survey, the most recent survey done, shows that the violent crime rate in England and Australia was twice the rate in the US.

Lott as usual, has cherry picked his statistics. There are lots of different crime statistics to choose from and some show increases while other show decreases. Lott just tells his readers about the ones that show increases. Violent crime in England has actually decreased significantly since the gun ban. See the graph here. It looks like Lott chose to use the figures for police recorded crimes rather than the more accurate ones from the British Crime Survey. The police figures have gone up because of changes in recording practices and increases in the reporting rate, not because the actual number of violent crimes have increased. Of course he uses figures from the International Crime Victimization Survey in the last paragraph when it suits his purpose. These also show a violent crime decrease in England.

In any case, the advocates of the gun laws did not claim that they would reduce crimes committed without guns. Lott somehow forgot to mention what happened to the with-gun robbery rate. (The “armed robbery” rates he quotes include robberies committed with other weapons.) Here is a table containing the crime figures for Australia. (I also have them in a spreadsheet.) In the last column of my table I compare the average for 1993–1996 with the average for 1997–2002. The with-gun robbery rate has declined by 10%. Don’t expect Lott to ever admit this. Now, it is true that some rates have increased—for example the assault-with-firearm rate has increased, but the total gun crime rate has decreased. Certainly, Lott’s claim that gun control is “unravelling” is not supportable.

12:50 | /guns/Lott/misc | 2 comments | link

Just who is oblivious to facts here?

Last December I examined a posting by John Ray who dismissed ozone depletion as a “Greenie scare” using facts he seemed to have just made up by himself. Now he’s back, attacking gun control. This time he’s not using facts that he made up—he’s using facts that Lott made up. He quotes from a review of More Guns, Less Crime by Thomas Jackson:

“How strange it must be to be a liberal. Driven by slogans, blinded by superstitions, dazzled by fantasies, the liberal stumbles through life oblivious to facts. There is almost nothing the liberal thinks he knows about race, social policy, sex roles, individual differences, and even history that is not some combination of slogan, superstition, and fantasy. John Lott’s soberly brilliant More Guns, Less Crime could not possibly be a more convincing demonstration that what liberals think they know about guns is fantasy, too. The liberal view, of course, is that private citizens should not have guns and that gun control will stop violence. Prof. Lott, who teaches law and economics at the University of Chicago, makes an air-tight case for the opposite view”

Prof. Lott points out that it is partly due to the quiet, undramatic way in which civilian gun ownership works that makes it easy for liberals to ignore its benefits. He explains that the best survey data suggest that 98 percent of the time, when someone uses a gun to deter crime he doesn’t even have to fire it. All he has to do is show it.

Of course, the best survey data doesn’t say that brandishing a gun is sufficient 98% of the time. When Lott found this fact out, rather than admit to making an error, he fabricated a survey. And the rest of Lott’s “air-tight” case was completely deflated when more data showed that, if anything, carry laws increase crime.

To be fair, Jackson’s was reviewing the 1st edition of More Guns, Less Crime which Lott wrote before he starting claiming to have done a survey. (Though even then, if Jackson had checked the literature on defensive gun use he would have known that the 98% claim was wrong.) John Ray has no such excuse.

Update: I emailed a link to this post to John Ray. He replied:

Will link to your site probably tomorrow.

John Lott has of course been much criticized by Leftists because he could not produce the original data behind one of the surveys he quoted — a fact originally brought to light by a libertarian blogger. Lott says he lost the data in a computer disk crash. As I have myself lost stuff that way despite being generally very careful about backups, I sympathize with such problems. Conservatives are divided over Lott’s claim but I note that The person who knew Lott’s work best at that time has testified in Lott’s favour and that even the Leftist Mother Jones says that the particular survey concerned “isn’t central to the argument”.

Lott has not just been criticized by “Leftists”. It isn’t just that he can’t produce the data (though that’s bad enough, since even if you buy Lott’s story he continued to cite the number for years even though he knew he had no data to support it). He his being criticized for fabrication of research. The fact that he could not produce the data was not brought to light by a libertarian blogger, but by Otis Dudley Duncan, an eminent sociologist from UCSB. Mustard has not testified that Lott did a survey, but that Lott told him that he had done a survey. The full quote from Mother Jones is Lott’s defenders rightly point out that the missing survey – which was completely lost in a computer crash, Lott says – isn’t central to the argument of “More Guns, Less Crime”. But as Harvard economist David Hemenway wrote in a recent critique of Lott’s latest book, “The Bias Against Guns”, one must have “faith in Lott’s integrity” before accepting his statistical results. That is because in the dauntingly complex subfield of econometrics, statistical manipulation is a constant concern. In a recent attempt to rescue his beleaguered “More Guns, Less Crime” hypothesis from criticism, Lott has been caught massaging his data to favor his argument. In subsequent exchanges with Mother Jones, he changed his story several times about a key data table that was misleadingly labeled – and then surreptitiously amended – on his website. Nevertheless, most pro-gun scholars and political conservatives have yet to call Lott to account. Notice how Ray dismisses the survey as not central, but ducks the question of Lott’s cooking his “More Guns, Less Crime” results.

11:48 | /guns/Lott/survey | Add the first comment | link

Baghdad murder rate, again

In July last year, Lott, armed with no evidence at all, claimed that Washington DC had a higher murder rate than Baghdad. Faced with overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Lott stuck to his guns, even demanding that the New York Times “correct” an article and use Lott’s bogus murder rate. The whole discussion is here.

The New York Times has updated its figures:

April July October January Annualized Murder

Rate in Baghdad

per 100,000 (DC rate 43) 70 130 100 100

The authors also explain how they worked out the murder rate:

Our best estimates on murder rates in Baghdad — a difficult calculation given that many Iraqi families are burying their own dead without notifying the authorities — indicate some improvement, but they are still far higher than in the most crime-ridden American cities. These murder numbers, it’s worth noting, are compiled using data from the Baghdad morgue, a wide array of news accounts and our conversations with American officials in Washington and Iraq. (Despite repeated requests, the Pentagon has not provided us with any figures of its own.)

01:33 | /guns/Lott/baghdad | 5 comments | link

Hats off to Xrlq

A couple of weeks ago Xrlq wrote about me:

He’s the Australian blogger who aspires to do to John Lott what Clayton Cramer did to Michael Bellesiles. Unfortunately, he doesn’t do a very good job; while Cramer uncovered overwhelming evidence Bellesiles’s fundamental research was fabricated, the best Lambert has been able to do is to uncover a few really stupid things Lott has done on a few isolated occasions. The rest of his rebuttals consist of gratuitous attacks on Lott personally.

Tim Lambert’s ‘Hat of the Day award has been revoked and conferred on me, instead, for having issued it in the first place. That will teach me to issue ‘Hats to bloggers.

02:52 | /guns/Lott/links | 2 comments | link

Lott and Lasers, the update

The Australian published a letter to the editor the day after Lott’s piece on laser pointers:

John Lott (Opinion, 24/3) claims an Australian academic with a laser pointer would cause panic. I’m an Australian academic and when I use a laser pointer it does not cause a panic. Lott has confused high-powered lasers, which are resricted because they can cause eye damage, with the low power laser pointers we use in lectures. He also thinks that the Victorian ban on swords applies to steak knives. It’s funny when a foreign newspaper has a story about kangaroos hopping down George St. It’s not so funny when an Australian newspaper does the same thing.

Tim Lambert

Maroubra, NSW

A couple of people commented that Lott was just being sarcastic. I know he was trying to be sarcastic, but his starting premise that laser pointers were banned was wrong. Anyway, wbb demonstrates how sarcasm is done.

Lott’s continued ability to get published in newspapers caused John Quiggin to wonder if bloggers can make a difference. He writes:

Clearly bloggers have a lot more work to do.

Ken Parish criticizes Lott’s claim that the 1996 gun laws were a failure because:

Violent crime rates have gone up dramatically in Australia since the 1996 Port Arthur gun control measures. And violent crime rates averaged 20 per cent higher in the six years after the law was passed (from 1997 to 2002) than they did in 1996, 32 per cent higher than the violent crime rates in 1995. The same comparisons for armed robbery rates showed increases of 67 per cent and 74 per cent, respectively; for aggravated assault, 20 per cent and 32 per cent; for rape, 11 per cent and 12 per cent; murder, attempted murder and manslaughter rose by 5 per cent in both cases.

Lott’s numbers also contain several significant errors. A table containing all the crime figures is here. (I also have them in a spreadsheet.) Lott’s first error is that he doesn’t know what the crime categories are. He calls the figure for sexual assaults, “rape”, and that for assaults, “aggravated assaults”, making the crimes seem more serious than they actually are. Next, he compares the rate in 1996 with the average rate in the years following the law. Because rates fluctuate from year to year this is likely to lead to misleading results. In the last column of my table I instead compare the average for 1993–1996 with the average for 1997–2002. Another thing that is clear from the table is that gun crimes are only about 1% of violent crimes. The most important crime where guns are involved a significant fraction of the time is murder. The with-gun murder rate declined from 0.37 to 0.3, while the overall murder rate fell by a similar amount, from 1.7 to 1.65. So how did Lott manage to avoid telling his readers about the decline in murder rates? Look again at the figure he reports—it’s for the total of murders, attempted murders and manslaughters. This total increased because the number of attempts went up by more than the number of murders went down. Murder attempts became less lethal, but by carefully selecting the statistics to report, Lott tried to make it look like the law had not produced any crime decreases. If you look in the table you will see some other decreases as well, but naturally the only figures that Lott reports are increases.

I should note that the decrease in murders isn’t statistically significant. More data will be needed if we to find out if the decrease was caused by chance.

03:53 | /guns/Lott/misc | 2 comments | link

Lott on laser pointers

Lott has an opinion piece on page 15 of today’s Australian . Lott writes:

Americans may feel safe when an academic addresses a conference using a laser pointer. In the hands of an Australian, however, there is understandable fear that these devices could do untold harm. An Australian academic with a laser pointer would cause real panic.

As far as I can tell, the fact that the sale of high-powered laser pointers is not allowed has gone into Lott’s head, bounced around inside for a while and mutated into a “fact” that people are terrified of the low power ones used in lectures.

Lott then decides that Victoria’s ban on swords also applies to steak knives:

A licensing process will be set up so that a select few will be granted an exemption and pay a $135 fee, but they will have to lock their weapons in sturdy safes and put in burglar alarms. If properly enforced, the law could produce other benefits, such as ensuring that dishes are promptly washed after dinner so that any offending steak knives can be placed back in their safe. On the downside, the knives would still be available during dinner when many family arguments might get out of hand.

Now I’m used to seeing articles in foreign newspapers that get fundamental things wrong about life here. My favourite example is this article in the Dallas Morning News on “How to speak Australian”. Follow the advice in the article and you’ll have any Aussie you speak to rolling around in laughter. But Lott’s article appears in the Australian. You’d think that if the editors lived here and read the article they would have noticed that something was wrong

Lott also repeats bogus claims he made earlier about crime increases in Australia following the 1996 gun laws. I dealt with these here.

12:31 | /guns/Lott/misc | 6 comments | link

Congratulations to the Spooner Award Finalists!

Via David Bernstein I learn that the finalists for the Lysander Spooner award are:

James Bovard, Terrorism and Tyranny;

John Lott, Bias Against Guns;

Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment; and

[his] own, You Can’t Say That!

My congratulations to all the finalists. To get into the final four just required emailed votes and it wasn’t even against the rules to vote more than once by using multiple email accounts. Winning the award will be more difficult for Lott, since it will be decided by a jury of members of the Center for Independent Thought’s board of directors and other prominent libertarians and scholars. I hope that the scholars on the jury will check some of the references in the Bias Against Guns. Like this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this.

Update: Ralph Luker wonders how many times Mary Rosh voted for Lott.

11:56 | /guns/Lott/misc | 1 comment | link

Firearmsreg postings from September/October 2002

04:06 | /guns/Lott/links | Add the first comment | link

Dan’s Moral Dilemma

Dan from Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics has a problem:

I’m working in a fairly esoteric field in which there are very few existing academic papers (because it’s a highly politically charged topic, I’ve decided not to discuss it here until I have at least have all the data before me). One of the papers was co-authored by John Lott. I’m seriously queasy about citing Lott, given his spectacularly unprofessional behavior in the past surrounding “More Guns, Less Crime” and the Mary Rosh fiasco. So, the question is: do I cite Lott, cite Lott with a footnote indicating that the man is all but entirely discredited, or just ignore the paper?

22:13 | /guns/Lott/misc | Add the first comment | link

Bias against Guns nominated for Lysander Spooner awards

Via Randy Barnett we learn that Lott’s Bias Against Guns has been nominated for a Spooner award for the best book on liberty published in 2003. On the voting page they state:

only one vote per email address will be accepted

03:03 | /guns/Lott/misc | 2 comments | link

Mooney on the changing files at johnlott.org

01:10 | /guns/Lott/links | 3 comments | link

Lott tries to rewrite history, again.

Summary: Lott now claims that an incriminating file where he had been caught cooking his results was not meant to have been on his website and was only there because his webmaster screwed up. Unfortunately, his latest story is full of holes.

Way back in September last year I detailed how, after Ayres and Donohue showed that correcting Lott’s coding errors made his results go away, Lott changed his model to bring his results back. Then when I asked him questions about the changed model, he tried to cover up the change by replacing the file at johnlott.org which contained the changed model with a new, different one. And in what appeared to be a botched attempt to rewrite history and backdate the replacement, the date on the new file was set in the future. Lott’s response to all the questions about the changes to his model was to duck the most important one (why change the model?) and focus on the date on the file from the future. He dismissed the idea that he could have been trying to backdate the replacement as a “conspiracy theory” and argued that because he used a Mac he could not have messed up when changing the date on the file. This argument was met with wide derision and Lott soon removed it from his blog. Over a month later he replaced it with a new explanation: That incriminating file? It was posted accidently and wasn’t meant to be there. The new file that was created in September? That was supposed to have been there from May. Yes, after calling the idea that he was trying to backdate the new file a “conspiracy theory” his latest explanation involves backdating the new file. Read on for all the details.

On Oct 19 Lott posted this explanation from Jeff Koch, the webmaster for johnlott.org:

I’m hesitant to enter this debate with your critics. But since I am the one who screwed things up, I guess the least I can do is to explain what happened. No doubt, the scales will fall from the eyes of your critics after they read this. On August 20, at 5:23 p.m., I sent you an e-mail telling you that I had added, at your request, a link, “Statement regarding the data”. This was located just above the link “Confirming Figures and Tables 1 * 5.doc”. However, I was away from my “home” computer when I made this revision, and so rather than using my normal web-editing tool, I just used the little editor that is built into my browser, and made the change manually. On August 31, at 5:30 a.m., you forwarded an e-mail to me, saying that some fellow named Mooney could not download the “Tables 1 *5” file. Apparently, in the process of editing the page to add the link, “Statement regarding the data”, I broke the link to “Confirming Figures and Tables 1 * 5.doc” I was unavailable to fix the broken link right away, so on August 31 you added a link pointing to your JohnRLott.com site and offered the “Tables 1-5.doc” file there. It appears that I fixed the link to the “Tables 1-5.doc” file on September 1, 12:03 p.m. However, apparently when I did this, I clicked on an old copy of the file that you had corrected last spring. I still had it floating around on my computer, and didn’t pay attention to what I was doing, and so clicked on the wrong file name. Apparently, you noticed my error almost immediately; because you sent me an e-mil at 7:20 a.m. on September 2, with a new copy of the file, asking that I please correct it. It looks like I uploaded the corrected file on September 2 at 9:47 a.m. So it appears that I was distributing the old, uncorrected file, for less than 24 hours. Does that sound right? When I started looking into this, I thought I’d served the wrong file for a couple weeks. But it looks like it was less than a day. If someone has any questions, I can be reached at webmaster@JohnLott.org. Sincerely,

Jeff

There are severe problems with Koch’s story. The “corrected” file, which was supposed to have been present before Sep 1, was actually not created till Sep 2. He wasn’t serving the “wrong” file for a day or even for two weeks. David Powell downloaded it in May. I downloaded it in June. Not only did Chris Mooney download it in August, but Lott emailed him a copy of the same file. From Mooney’s article:

On the website, Lott claimed the “corrected” table used “clustering,” when it did not. In a heated interview on August 19 (transcript), Lott said this labeling claim must be an error. But the very next day, he e-mailed a file containing precisely the same table, claiming that all the tables on his website were “clearly and properly labeled.”

Both Chris Mooney and I emailed Koch to ask for an explanation. The only immediate response was that the invitation to send him questions was removed (you can see the current version on Lott’s site here), but eventually, weeks later, Koch responded. He asked that his email not be posted, so I’ll summarize it instead:

Koch conceded that his explanation was incorrect, but had no explanation for the fact that the “wrong” file had been served up since May. He conjectured that Lott had emailed the “wrong” file to Mooney because Lott had coincidentally also accidently clicked on the wrong file. He said that he thought that the “wrong” file might have been been created by a research assistant of Lott’s called James. He stated that as well as the “wrong” file (dated May 9) and the current file (dated Sep 2) there was a third file dated May 1 and that the Sep 2 file was just the May 1 file converted from Word to Acrobat. This May 1 file was the one that was supposed to have been available on the web site the whole time.

I asked him to send me a copy of this May 1 file, since no-one had ever seen it. He did not respond. Nor did he respond to repeated requests for the file. And even though he conceded that his explanation was incorrect, no correction has been made.

Some readers might be wondering if there really is a Jeff Koch or whether he is yet another one of Lott’s Internet personas. A whois search revealed that johnlott.org was registered to Jeff Koch and gave a Texas phone number. Calling the number got an answering machine with a message from Koch, so I think he is a real person.

Could the “wrong” file have been posted by mistake? Well, since it was the one at johnlott.org since May, the only way this could have happened is if Lott sent Koch the wrong file in the first place perhaps because he thought it contained the version of the table that is currently available on his web site. This could also explain why he sent that same file to Chris Mooney in August. Unfortunately, this explanation founders on Lott’s own statement about what the table shows. On August 20, he wrote:

As to the claim that “correcting his errors did eliminate his finding.” The data used in the Plassmann and Whitley paper can be downloaded at www.johnlott.org and one can readily see from the corrected tables and figures that while there are some changes in the results, this statement is false.

So what really happened? There isn’t any need to invoke a conspiracy between Lott and Koch. Lott needed to pretend that the incriminating table never existed, so he just told Koch that Koch had put the wrong file up at johnlott.org. Koch took Lott’s word that it was his fault (notice how in his explanation Koch assumes that it was his fault and he tries to deduce when he made the mistake), and took the blame for the “error”, when really it was just another one of Lott’s attempts to rewrite history.

03:30 | /guns/Lott/more_guns_less_crime | 1 comment | link

Lott’s bizarre claim about Florida 2000

Allan Lichtman posts on spoiled ballots in Florida 2000. (Hat tip: Ralph Luker). He rightfully refers to Lott’s claims about ballot spoiling as “bizarre”. Lott claims:

African-American Republicans who voted were 54 to 66 times more likely than the average African American to cast a non-voted ballot (either by not marking that race or voting for too many candidates). To put it another way: For every two additional black Republicans in the average precinct, there was one additional non-voted ballot. By comparison, it took an additional 125 African Americans (of any party affiliation) in the average precinct to produce the same result.

The Journal of Legal Studies

Lott’s numbers don’t even add up. He states that 5% of blacks are Republicans. If 50% of their votes were rejected, that means that 50% of 5% or 2.5% of black votes were rejected even if not one black Democrat ballot was rejected. But Lott claims that 1 out of 125 (less than 1%) of black votes were rejected. I guess the rejection rate for black Democrat votes must have been negative.

23:58 | /guns/Lott/misc | Add the first comment | link

Yet more book reviews

Amazon has now deleted the first two of the three Lott reviews of Targeting Guns and edited the third one to remove the praise of Lott. However, while they deleted two, I found three more of his self-reviews. I’ve put all of his reviews together on this page. It’s an impressive body of work, with eighteen five-star reviews of his own books and ten anonymous pans of rival’s books.

Two of the newly discovered reviews aren’t very interesting—they just repeat stuff about how wonderful Lott’s book is, but this one is almost poignant:

Powerful book that sets the standard for academic research, April 19, 2003

Reviewer: A reader from USA

Few books have had their conclusions evaluated as closely and carefully as this book. Academic after academic has replicated his results, and since he has made his data available to others many have examined to see how sensitive to including other variables to explain whether the crime rate declines after shall issue concealed handgun laws are adopted. The data has been re-examined by academics at many universities and has survived remarkably well. The fact that Lott can write so well and clearly and that his findings can be understood by a large audience only helps explain why gun control advocates attack him so viciously. This classic has stood the test of time.

11:25 | /guns/Lott/MaryRosh | 1 comment | link

Found on Amazon.de – another Lott review

After finding some clues on Amazon’s Canadian site that revealed three more of Lott’s reviews, I decided to check their other sites. On their German site I found the review below. This review seems to have also been deleted when the Mary Rosh review was deleted. I think that was because this review was posted anonymously from Mary Rosh’s Amazon account (it’s from Philadelphia, just like Mary’s one). and when Amazon deleted deleted all of Mary Rosh’s reviews they also deleted the anonymous ones.

Very well written, solid researched book, 30. Januar 2000

Rezensentin/Rezensent: Rezensentin/Rezensent aus Philadelphia

This book is an excellent read that demolishes the many myths spread in the popular press about guns and crime. By grossly exaggerating the risks of having a gun in the home and failing to report the frequent defensive uses of guns, the media endangers people’s lives. I have a hard time believing that most of the negative reviewers have even read the book. The reviewer who worries about the impact of Florida on the results could not have read the book (see for example pp. 139-41). It is simply bizarre to claim that Lott doesn’t give enough attention to the issue of causality. Not only does the decline in crime occur in many different states when those states adopted their laws in many different years. But the decline is closely related to the number of permits issued. Lott also goes through evidence of counties which border each other in neighboring states with and without the right to carry laws. Guess what the crime rate goes down in the county with the law at the same time that it is going up in the neighboring county without the law. Lott has about 5 other points on the issue of causality. The earlier reviewer from Australia who mentions the international comparison has definitely not read the book. Lott specifically points out how when you look at all the countries for which the data is available higher gun ownership countries do not have higher homicide rates. This myth is because of the selective picking of only a few countries to make a comparison with. Finally, let me say that those who attack the book because it is supposedly not a fun read are just trying to discourage others from reading the book. I have seen statements from everyone from Tom Sowell to Milton Friedman to James Q. Wilson saying what a well written book this is and how valuable of a factual source it is. Those attacking the book will stop at nothing to keep other people from even looking at it. They know that once people read it they will understand that all the attacks on it are completely bogus. The media has done a horrible job covering this book. It is so easy to verify whether Lott has taken into account the other explanations for why crime rates have changed over time, and they are afraid that those who have lied about Lott’s research will lose their credibility. Those attacking Lott will stop at nothing to keep you from reading this book. Don’t let them succeed. As Sean Hannity says, “this is the most important, best written book that has ever been written on guns.”

Once again we have Lott replying to previous reviews. His claim that the reviewer who said his book was not a fun read was trying to stop people from reading it seems rather paranoid. That reviewer was recommending the book despite its dullness. Here’s the review that set Lott off:

In More Guns Less Crime, John Lott fires away at the fatuous assumptions that empower most forms of gun control. While he hits many bulls-eyes and scores several important points, the book misses the mark of being a real page-turner. It reads more like an extensive case study (in reality it summarizes the findings of numerous case studies) and fails to really engage the lay reader. Tumescent with charts and graphs, it plods along rather than flying like a bullet. I certainly admire the author for being a straight shooter who relies more on facts than emotionally-charged but empty slogans. He is destined to be ambushed by Rosie O’Donnell and her myopic clones in Hollywood for daring to tell the truth rather than their version of reality. I just wish it could have presented with more of a blast. Although he sends a barrage and hits many targets in the gun control movement’s poorly defended arguments, the dragging pace of this book may turn off some readers. However, those who complete the book will learn quite a few facts that gun control advocates do [not] want disseminated

01:57 | /guns/Lott/MaryRosh | 1 comment | link

Even more self-reviews by Lott

When I saw the story about the Amazon.ca unmasking anonymous reviewers, I took myself over there to see what I could find. Well, they had fixed the glitch, but I noticed that for some reviews, the location given for the reviewer was different on the Canadian site. This difference lets me more more certain that Lott has reviewed his own books, and also helped me find three more Lott self-reviews.

Amazon’s Canadian and US sites treat the location of the reviewer differently. On the US site, all the reviews by a reviewer have the same location—the one given for the most recent review. On the Canadian site the location is the one given when the review was posted. For example, in Lott’s review of Joyce Lee Malcolm’s book his location is listed as Swarthmore on the US site and as Washington DC on the Canadian site. There are several other reviews with the same pattern—these ones are certain to have been written by Lott. This table lists all the reviews for which there are two locations—notice how the Canadian location is always some place where Lott lived or worked.

And notice that two reviews did not have a location at the US site. I picked them as probable Lott reviews because of the style. The Canadian site places them in Philadelphia and in Washington, confirming that Lott wrote them.

Also this review, posted at Barnes and Noble on April 19, 1999 by “A reviewer, from Madison, Wisconsin”, was also posted to Amazon on January 15, 1999. Amazon.com doesn’t give any location, but Amazon.ca says it’s from Chicago.

There was no location given for the reviewer below at Amazon.com, and while the writing style is Lott’s it was too short for me to be certain enough to call it as another Lott review, but at Amazon.ca, the reviewer’s location is Madison, where Lott was living at the time.

Extremely well written book, August 10, 1998

Reviewer: A customer from Madison, Wisconisn

This book explodes many myths about crime and guns. Professor Lott has put together a truly monumental study on crime. This is one book that people will be discussing for many years to come.

This review has no location at Amazon.com. Lott was working in Chicago at the time.

A straight forward accounting of both the benefits and costs, April 30, 1999

Reviewer: A customer from Chicago, Illinois

This book may not have completely changed my mind on the issue of gun control, but I have certainly gone from automatically supporting controls to a much more agnostic position. A friend of mine had been begging me for a while to read the book, and I have to confess that I am glad that she did. It has surely caused me to think more critically about the current debate. I must say I have been most impressed by Professor Lott’s ability to acknowledge both the costs and bennefits of guns. When there are costs or benefits Lott lays them out and tries to measure them. I have also been learned that what might appear to be the most obvious response is not always the best. With all the heat that this debate has generated, it is nice to see someone clearly and dispationately lay out all the evidence.

Lott pretends to be a gun control supporter swayed by his book. And promotes himself to Professor again. Cute.

Anyway, I’ve found three more Lott self-reviews, and strongly confirmed Lott as the author of several other reviews.

01:41 | /guns/Lott/MaryRosh | Add the first comment | link

Gender genie on Mary Rosh

Seems like everybody is trying out the Gender Genie, which analyses a piece of text and guesses the gender of the writer.

So I gave it Mary Rosh’s writings to analyse. The verdict? Male. Well done, Gender Genie!

01:53 | /guns/Lott/misc | 3 comments | link