From the LIES Of JTO 
Inequitable Penalties? The Tales of Two Gun Researchers
Feature Story
by Dick Dahl
Early this year, it looked as though researcher John R. Lott, Jr.'s days
as an influential voice on domestic gun policy in the U.S. were over.
Lott, widely touted by pro-gun activists since the publication of his
book, "More Guns, Less Crime," in 1998, found himself under attack for
his
inability to provide evidence to support some of his claims about the
effectiveness of guns for self-defense.
Most significantly, when asked to provide details of a survey that
supposedly proved that 98 percent of gun defenses involved the mere
brandishing of the weapon, Lott said that his computer crashed. And
despite his claim that the survey was large and national, he could produce
neither any records of it nor names of anyone who knew anything about it.
Then, to top off Lott's apparent disgrace, a resourceful Weblogger named
Julian Sanchez conducted research to show that Lott had created a fake
persona named Mary Rosh for the purpose of providing rave reviews of John
Lott's work.
Much of the media response to these developments was predictable. Only one
year earlier, Emory University historian Michael Bellesiles had resigned
from his job under fierce pressure from pro-gun advocates over his own
inability to substantiate a claim in his book, "Arming America," published
in 2000. In it, Bellesiles wrote that levels of gun ownership in early
America were not as high as is generally believed. It was an argument that
calls into question the gun lobby's assertion that firearms have always
been an intrinsic part of American culture, but when he said that he could
not produce notes to prove a section about the paucity of guns in early
probate records because he'd lost the notes in an office flood, the
National Rifle Association went on the attack. The effort was successful
and Bellesiles resigned.
So when Lott's various credibility problems emerged earlier this year, the
press called him the pro-gunners' Bellesiles. Understandable though the
comparison may be, however, the media portrayal of the two men as equals
within the two opposing ideological camps is misleading. Where Bellesiles'
contribution to the overall gun-control argument was primarily interesting
on a historical level, Lott's work is critically important to the pro-gun
side. The pro-gun argument for minimal or no restrictions on gun ownership
essentially rests on two claims: (1) The Constitution ensures individual
rights to guns, as opposed to the militia-ensuring "collective rights"
interpretation of the U.S. Supreme Court, and (2) Society is safer when
people can arm themselves without restriction for self-defense purposes.
No one is cited more often as an authority for the self-defense argument
than John Lott.
While the cases of John Lott and Michael Bellesiles appear to be similar,
their subsequent stories have played out quite differently, however. Where
Bellesiles was forced to resign, to relinquish the prestigious Bancroft
Prize that his book had won for him, and to move to Europe for a time,
Lott has continued to push his pro-gun agenda as a researcher at the
conservative American Enterprise Institute as though nothing has happened.
And judging by the frequency with which journalists use him as an "expert"
on gun policy and on the fact that mainstream newspapers are running his
opinion pieces, he's getting away with it.
Meanwhile, according to people who continue to monitor his work, Lott is
still playing fast and loose with the truth. On July 13, the Los Angeles
Times ran an opinion article by Lott, who claimed to have evidence that
arming teachers is a good idea. Lott has consistently argued that
concealed-carry gun laws deter crime, and in the Times piece he focused
his argument on schools. Acknowledging that the notion of armed teachers
may alarm many people, Lott said that, on the contrary, gun-toting
teachers are a very good idea. "My research ... shows that citizens with
guns helped stop about a third of the post-1997 public school shootings,
stepping in before uniformed police could arrive," he wrote.
The claim that about one third of shootings in public schools had been
averted by armed citizens over a five-year period does indeed sound
impressive. But according to people who have looked into the statistic,
there's just one small problem: It seems to be bogus.
Chris McGrath, executive director of the nonprofit organization
Handgun-Free America, calls the statistic "an outright lie." He said that
his organization contacted Lott for evidence of that claim and Lott
referred them to pages in "More Guns, Less Crime," and in his new book,
"The Bias Against Guns." McGrath said neither reference supports the
claim. One of them, he said, describes an incident last year at the
Appalachian School of Law in which he claimed a shooter was stopped by two
armed students. "What he doesn't say," McGrath said, "is that both
students were off-duty police officers and they were using their service
guns." (Another Lott critic, Weblogger Elton Beard, theorizes that's why
Lott uses the term, "uniformed police," in his LA Times sentence.) In
addition, a number of newspaper accounts about the incident report that
the shooter had finished firing and laid his gun down before the off-duty
police officers arrived.
McGrath said that he and people in his office have gone through Lott's new
book and found other unsubstantiated claims. For instance, the book
states, "And contrary to popular misconception, [concealed carry] permit
holders are virtually never involved in the commission of any crime, let
alone murder."
"It's simply false," McGrath said. "Of course permit holders commit
crimes, including murder."
McGrath said that Lott appeared to provide an answer for this amazing
claim because he footnoted it. Turning to the notes, McGrath found the
following explanation: "Unfortunately, no data are available on whether
handguns lawfully bought by permit holders are used in crimes by another
party at a later date."
In other words, said McGrath, there is little or no connection between the
footnoted sentence and the footnote.
Bellesiles: Seeking Vindication
It may have seemed like Michael Bellesiles disappeared from the face of
the earth in early 2002 after he resigned from Emory. In fact, he spent
much of the last year teaching in the United Kingdom. These days, he is
resuming his effort to recapitulate the notes, which he says were
destroyed in an office flood, upon which he made the challenged claim that
early-American probate records reveal a paucity of gun ownership. He told
Join Together Online that he's gotten through about a quarter of the
records so far, and that his findings are once again showing what he'd
claimed in the book.
He's also preparing for the re-publication of the book, set for this fall
by Soft Skull Press of New York City, with a lengthy new introduction and
the three-paragraph section on the probate records re-written. In
addition, he recently completed a long essay, to be distributed in
pamphlet form following Sept. 15, which will attempt to examine the
brouhaha he experienced in a broader way. According to publisher Richard
Nash, "This will be the place where he puts his experience in the context
of other academic witch hunts, in addition to going through the book page
by page, saying what he changed, what he didn't, and why." And with tongue
only slightly in cheek, Nash adds, "And it will kick start the opprobrium
that is certainly going to be visited upon us in some organized fashion."
Bellesiles says that in addition to reworking the probate data, he's
examined every accusation of error leveled against the book. He says the
accusations number about 60. The majority, he said, were baseless and some
were accurate criticisms that he says he's correcting. In addition, some
of the accusations led to a gray area of interpretation, "which is what
historians always deal in."
While criticism of Bellesiles' writing about the probate claim without
physical evidence to prove it is apparently valid, writer Jon Wiener wrote
in the Nov. 4, 2002 issue of The Nation that the NRA-led attack against
him claimed something more serious, that "Bellesiles has faked evidence to
support an otherwise untenable position. The charge, in other words, is
fraud."
While Bellesiles is assembling the evidence once again, there has been no
word that John Lott is doing anything to validate the "survey" showing
that mere brandishing of a gun deters crime 98 percent of the time. And if
Bellesiles acted fraudulently, many may assume that John Lott's "Mary
Rosh" creation could be considered an even more egregious act of fraud.
Furthermore, Bellesiles' assertion of low gun-ownership rates in pre-Civil
War America is not really a ground-breaking discovery to those who have
studied the issue. "The important thing about Bellesiles' work is that
it's almost irrelevant," said Ernest McGill, who heads the Potowmack
Institute, a small enterprise that studies the Second Amendment and
firearms history in the U.S. "They condemn him for fudging his data or
whatever, but there's plenty of evidence that there weren't that many guns
around in those days."
McGill claims that the Second Amendment's purpose was to ensure the
existence of state militias. He also says that the militia system never
worked well, in large part because "there just weren't that many weapons
around." (McGill says that the militia system was finally scrapped by
President Monroe and Secretary of War John C. Calhoun after the War of
1812.)
Even though Bellesiles apparently is standing on relatively safe ground
with his essential message that gun ownership wasn't always such an
intrinsic part of American life, the pro-gunners' withering attack over
the lost notes may have dissuaded Bellesiles' potential defenders,
including Emory, from defending him. "My biggest regret in all of this,
and I don't pretend to understand it, is that ordinarily, if a scholar has
lost material or notes, the scholar is allowed to go back into the
archive. But my university, Emory, chose not to support that effort on my
part, but rather to investigate me."
How has the incident affected him? "It destroyed my life," Bellesiles
said. "I had dedicated myself to teaching, not writing, and it's been
devastating to me not being able to teach. It shattered my family. It was
devastating in every way, shape, and form. I can barely give it words."
Bellesiles said that he is very aware of how his case parallels that of
John Lott. "I think of it all the time," he said. "He's still being
cited.
And I, of course, have ceased to exist."
John Lott's name, meanwhile, has been summoned in statehouses across the
land this year as still more legislatures have passed the concealed-carry
laws that Lott says are good for society -- despite the mounting evidence
that they are nothing of the sort. As Stanford Law School professor John
J. Donohue and Yale Law School professor Ian Ayres have shown in an
exhaustive analysis of concealed-carry laws, for instance, there is now
more evidence to suggest that these laws increase crime than to reduce it.
Donohue and Ayres, of course, have faced their own version of orchestrated
attack from the pro-gunners, including the following passage that appeared
on the Internet last September, when their work first appeared: "The Ayres
and Donohue piece is a joke."
The author? Mary Rosh.
Inequitable Penalties? The Tales of Two Gun Researchers
Feature Story
by Dick Dahl
Early this year, it looked as though researcher John R. Lott, Jr.'s days
as an influential voice on domestic gun policy in the U.S. were over.
Lott, widely touted by pro-gun activists since the publication of his
book, "More Guns, Less Crime," in 1998, found himself under attack for
his
inability to provide evidence to support some of his claims about the
effectiveness of guns for self-defense.
Most significantly, when asked to provide details of a survey that
supposedly proved that 98 percent of gun defenses involved the mere
brandishing of the weapon, Lott said that his computer crashed. And
despite his claim that the survey was large and national, he could produce
neither any records of it nor names of anyone who knew anything about it.
Then, to top off Lott's apparent disgrace, a resourceful Weblogger named
Julian Sanchez conducted research to show that Lott had created a fake
persona named Mary Rosh for the purpose of providing rave reviews of John
Lott's work.
Much of the media response to these developments was predictable. Only one
year earlier, Emory University historian Michael Bellesiles had resigned
from his job under fierce pressure from pro-gun advocates over his own
inability to substantiate a claim in his book, "Arming America," published
in 2000. In it, Bellesiles wrote that levels of gun ownership in early
America were not as high as is generally believed. It was an argument that
calls into question the gun lobby's assertion that firearms have always
been an intrinsic part of American culture, but when he said that he could
not produce notes to prove a section about the paucity of guns in early
probate records because he'd lost the notes in an office flood, the
National Rifle Association went on the attack. The effort was successful
and Bellesiles resigned.
So when Lott's various credibility problems emerged earlier this year, the
press called him the pro-gunners' Bellesiles. Understandable though the
comparison may be, however, the media portrayal of the two men as equals
within the two opposing ideological camps is misleading. Where Bellesiles'
contribution to the overall gun-control argument was primarily interesting
on a historical level, Lott's work is critically important to the pro-gun
side. The pro-gun argument for minimal or no restrictions on gun ownership
essentially rests on two claims: (1) The Constitution ensures individual
rights to guns, as opposed to the militia-ensuring "collective rights"
interpretation of the U.S. Supreme Court, and (2) Society is safer when
people can arm themselves without restriction for self-defense purposes.
No one is cited more often as an authority for the self-defense argument
than John Lott.
While the cases of John Lott and Michael Bellesiles appear to be similar,
their subsequent stories have played out quite differently, however. Where
Bellesiles was forced to resign, to relinquish the prestigious Bancroft
Prize that his book had won for him, and to move to Europe for a time,
Lott has continued to push his pro-gun agenda as a researcher at the
conservative American Enterprise Institute as though nothing has happened.
And judging by the frequency with which journalists use him as an "expert"
on gun policy and on the fact that mainstream newspapers are running his
opinion pieces, he's getting away with it.
Meanwhile, according to people who continue to monitor his work, Lott is
still playing fast and loose with the truth. On July 13, the Los Angeles
Times ran an opinion article by Lott, who claimed to have evidence that
arming teachers is a good idea. Lott has consistently argued that
concealed-carry gun laws deter crime, and in the Times piece he focused
his argument on schools. Acknowledging that the notion of armed teachers
may alarm many people, Lott said that, on the contrary, gun-toting
teachers are a very good idea. "My research ... shows that citizens with
guns helped stop about a third of the post-1997 public school shootings,
stepping in before uniformed police could arrive," he wrote.
The claim that about one third of shootings in public schools had been
averted by armed citizens over a five-year period does indeed sound
impressive. But according to people who have looked into the statistic,
there's just one small problem: It seems to be bogus.
Chris McGrath, executive director of the nonprofit organization
Handgun-Free America, calls the statistic "an outright lie." He said that
his organization contacted Lott for evidence of that claim and Lott
referred them to pages in "More Guns, Less Crime," and in his new book,
"The Bias Against Guns." McGrath said neither reference supports the
claim. One of them, he said, describes an incident last year at the
Appalachian School of Law in which he claimed a shooter was stopped by two
armed students. "What he doesn't say," McGrath said, "is that both
students were off-duty police officers and they were using their service
guns." (Another Lott critic, Weblogger Elton Beard, theorizes that's why
Lott uses the term, "uniformed police," in his LA Times sentence.) In
addition, a number of newspaper accounts about the incident report that
the shooter had finished firing and laid his gun down before the off-duty
police officers arrived.
McGrath said that he and people in his office have gone through Lott's new
book and found other unsubstantiated claims. For instance, the book
states, "And contrary to popular misconception, [concealed carry] permit
holders are virtually never involved in the commission of any crime, let
alone murder."
"It's simply false," McGrath said. "Of course permit holders commit
crimes, including murder."
McGrath said that Lott appeared to provide an answer for this amazing
claim because he footnoted it. Turning to the notes, McGrath found the
following explanation: "Unfortunately, no data are available on whether
handguns lawfully bought by permit holders are used in crimes by another
party at a later date."
In other words, said McGrath, there is little or no connection between the
footnoted sentence and the footnote.
Bellesiles: Seeking Vindication
It may have seemed like Michael Bellesiles disappeared from the face of
the earth in early 2002 after he resigned from Emory. In fact, he spent
much of the last year teaching in the United Kingdom. These days, he is
resuming his effort to recapitulate the notes, which he says were
destroyed in an office flood, upon which he made the challenged claim that
early-American probate records reveal a paucity of gun ownership. He told
Join Together Online that he's gotten through about a quarter of the
records so far, and that his findings are once again showing what he'd
claimed in the book.
He's also preparing for the re-publication of the book, set for this fall
by Soft Skull Press of New York City, with a lengthy new introduction and
the three-paragraph section on the probate records re-written. In
addition, he recently completed a long essay, to be distributed in
pamphlet form following Sept. 15, which will attempt to examine the
brouhaha he experienced in a broader way. According to publisher Richard
Nash, "This will be the place where he puts his experience in the context
of other academic witch hunts, in addition to going through the book page
by page, saying what he changed, what he didn't, and why." And with tongue
only slightly in cheek, Nash adds, "And it will kick start the opprobrium
that is certainly going to be visited upon us in some organized fashion."
Bellesiles says that in addition to reworking the probate data, he's
examined every accusation of error leveled against the book. He says the
accusations number about 60. The majority, he said, were baseless and some
were accurate criticisms that he says he's correcting. In addition, some
of the accusations led to a gray area of interpretation, "which is what
historians always deal in."
While criticism of Bellesiles' writing about the probate claim without
physical evidence to prove it is apparently valid, writer Jon Wiener wrote
in the Nov. 4, 2002 issue of The Nation that the NRA-led attack against
him claimed something more serious, that "Bellesiles has faked evidence to
support an otherwise untenable position. The charge, in other words, is
fraud."
While Bellesiles is assembling the evidence once again, there has been no
word that John Lott is doing anything to validate the "survey" showing
that mere brandishing of a gun deters crime 98 percent of the time. And if
Bellesiles acted fraudulently, many may assume that John Lott's "Mary
Rosh" creation could be considered an even more egregious act of fraud.
Furthermore, Bellesiles' assertion of low gun-ownership rates in pre-Civil
War America is not really a ground-breaking discovery to those who have
studied the issue. "The important thing about Bellesiles' work is that
it's almost irrelevant," said Ernest McGill, who heads the Potowmack
Institute, a small enterprise that studies the Second Amendment and
firearms history in the U.S. "They condemn him for fudging his data or
whatever, but there's plenty of evidence that there weren't that many guns
around in those days."
McGill claims that the Second Amendment's purpose was to ensure the
existence of state militias. He also says that the militia system never
worked well, in large part because "there just weren't that many weapons
around." (McGill says that the militia system was finally scrapped by
President Monroe and Secretary of War John C. Calhoun after the War of
1812.)
Even though Bellesiles apparently is standing on relatively safe ground
with his essential message that gun ownership wasn't always such an
intrinsic part of American life, the pro-gunners' withering attack over
the lost notes may have dissuaded Bellesiles' potential defenders,
including Emory, from defending him. "My biggest regret in all of this,
and I don't pretend to understand it, is that ordinarily, if a scholar has
lost material or notes, the scholar is allowed to go back into the
archive. But my university, Emory, chose not to support that effort on my
part, but rather to investigate me."
How has the incident affected him? "It destroyed my life," Bellesiles
said. "I had dedicated myself to teaching, not writing, and it's been
devastating to me not being able to teach. It shattered my family. It was
devastating in every way, shape, and form. I can barely give it words."
Bellesiles said that he is very aware of how his case parallels that of
John Lott. "I think of it all the time," he said. "He's still being
cited.
And I, of course, have ceased to exist."
John Lott's name, meanwhile, has been summoned in statehouses across the
land this year as still more legislatures have passed the concealed-carry
laws that Lott says are good for society -- despite the mounting evidence
that they are nothing of the sort. As Stanford Law School professor John
J. Donohue and Yale Law School professor Ian Ayres have shown in an
exhaustive analysis of concealed-carry laws, for instance, there is now
more evidence to suggest that these laws increase crime than to reduce it.
Donohue and Ayres, of course, have faced their own version of orchestrated
attack from the pro-gunners, including the following passage that appeared
on the Internet last September, when their work first appeared: "The Ayres
and Donohue piece is a joke."
The author? Mary Rosh.
