I'm back with Dr. Lott's comments, Tim.....
With regards to providing data which you requested:
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"I guess that I don't understand what Lambert is getting at here.
I did not deal with him personally because he was abusive, but I directed my RA to provide him what he wanted.
So I directed my RA to provide him with the data and indeed I believe that he was the first person to receive this particular data. Any other data had he asked for it would have been provided and the RA (James Knowles,
[email protected]) would have answered any questions he
had and I believe that James did answer whatever questions were directed
towards him. The bottom line is that Lambert was given whatever he
asked for."
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On the subject of the 2002 survey:
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Tim Lambert wrote:
""If fallingblock believes that Lott provides information when
requested, I suggest he ask Lott for the details of the calculations
Lott made to come up with the 95% of DGUs involve just brandishing that
he says comes from his 2002 survey."
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John Lott's reply:
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"The actual data has been available on one of my websites at
www.johnlott.org since February 2003. The Appendix
of my book, The Bias Against Guns, goes through and discusses the data in depth. I talk about how the survey was done, the questions used in the survey, who did the survey, how it was weighted, etc. there. The
www.johnlott.org website also has some downloads discussing the survey debate in general.
On this last point, Lambert has been extremely dishonest.
For example, he has a long list of surveys but he lists the date for
them as the mid 1990s when that was just when a particular paper cites
them as opposed to when virtually all of them were done primarily in
the early 1980s or earlier. Anyway, if you tell me exactly what you
want, I can point to the discussions that I have written up. The
book's appendix isn't very long and the paper on the surveys at
the above website won't take very long to read (though no one seems to
have read it)."
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And finally, on the 2002 survey:
John Lott wrote:
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".....actually read what I wrote on the brandishing issue. Here is the quote from my book:
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.â€
____________
The point here is a simple one.
I want to show that the media is biased. Therefore a lower percent of brandishing would make my case stronger. Instead with the 95 percent figure I was providing an explanation for why the media doesn't cover a lot of cases. If he believes that the 95 percent number is too high, the results are BIASED against my claim."
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Tim, this is obviously NOT a guy who is unresponsive to polite requests for any of his data.
Is that old saying -
"getting more flies with honey than vinegar"?
used here in Australia?