John Lott sues "Freakonomics" author Steven Levitt

[Malum Prohibitum]

Carl N. Brown

I love your rundown on the Michael Bellesiles issue at the top of page 4. To make it complete, however, you need to add one fact.

None of the above facts stopped the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals from citing to Michael Bellesiles as a source in the Silveira v. Lockyer case. They cited him in finding no Second Amendment right exists for individuals long after he had been exposed as a fraud.

No excuse for that!

And it says a lot about the court out there . . .

 

[Carl N. Brown]

Carl N. Brown

I love your rundown on the Michael Bellesiles issue at the top
of page 4. To make it complete, however, you need to add one fact.

None of the above facts stopped the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals
from citing to Michael Bellesiles as a source in the Silveira v.
Lockyer case. They cited him in finding no Second Amendment right
exists for individuals long after he had been exposed as a fraud.

No excuse for that!

And it says a lot about the court out there . . .

The court's opinion in Silveira v Lockyear was
filed 5 Dec 2002.

The law offices of Donald Kilner filed a Notice of Fraud in
the Case of Silveira v Lockyear 30 Dec 2002:

In his Silveira v. Lockyer, F.3d , 2002 U.S. App.
LEXIS 24612 (2002) opinion, Judge Reinhardt cites the academic
works of Michael A. Bellesiles in Footnotes 1 and 37.
Plaintiff/Appellants respectfully submit that the academic
integrity of the authors of law review articles cited in
appellate decisions are at least as important as the cite
checking of cases and statutes.

The integrity of the academic work by Michael Bellesiles
must be seriously questioned in light of the actions taken
by the Columbia University Board of Trustees. The recission
of the Bancroft Award was in part based upon a report
issued by a panel of scholars from other universities.
The panel was established at the request of Emory University.
(Mr. Bellesiles also recently resigned from his tenured
teaching post at Emory.) That report found "evidence of
falsification" and "serious failures of and carelessness
in the gathering and presentation of archival records and
the use of quantitative analysis."

The court's opinion was amended 27 Dec 2003.

ORDER
The majority opinion filed Dec. 5, 2002, is hereby amended
as follows:

1. At Slip Op. at 7, footnote 1, replace
"See Michael A. Bel-lesiles, Gun Control: A Historical Overview,
28 CRIME & JUST. 137, 174-76 (2001) (discussing the enactment
of the National Firearms Act of 1934, ch. 757, 48 Stat. 1236
5801-72)), as a reaction to the use of machine guns by mobsters
and the depiction of such violence in films such as Scar-face)."
with
"See EARL R. KRUSCHKE, GUN CONTROL: A REFERENCE HANDBOOK 84, 170
(1995) (discussing the enactment of the National Firearms Act of
1934, ch. 757, 48 Stat. 1236 (1934) (current version codified
as 26 5801-72), as a reaction to the use of machine guns by
mobsters and "organized crime elements")."

2. At Slip Op. at 44, footnote 37, delete
"(quoted in Michael A. Bellesiles, The Second Amendment in
Action, 76 CHI.-KENT L. REV. 61, 65 (2000))"

 

[Malum Prohibitum]

And so it is!

I had printed the opinion off as soon as it came out, and I did not know of the revision.

It makes me feel a little better.

I would have felt a lot better if they had reversed themselves!

They struck out mention of the fraud upon whom they relied, but left the opinion unchanged.


Thanks for the info.

They still have the John Adams quote with ellipses to change the meaning, though

 

[Carl N. Brown]

for further reading

a summary of the legal issues
Levitt's motion to dismiss
Lott's counter
Lebitt's reply to Lott's counter

PDF files require Acrobat Reader

Filing Date Filesie Filename·
2006 June 2 73,341 joint_initial_status_report_june_2_2006.pdf·
2006 June 2 49,668 motion_to_dismiss_levitt.pdf·
2006 July 10 334,331 Opposition_to_Dismissal.pdf·
2006 July 24 132,178 motions_to_dimiss_defendants_reply.pdf·

 

[Carl N. Brown]

So far....

TAILORING THE LAW SUIT

2006 Jan 11 - Lott wrote Levitt requesting a correction on Levitt's
claim that other scholars have been unable to replicate Lott's results.

2006 May 17 - Lott's lawyer wrote Levitt and his publisher requesting
a correction and a retraction.

2006 Apr 10 - Civil Action 06C 2007 (defamation) filed by John Lott
against Steven Levitt and his publisher over comments about Lott's
work in the book Freakonomics, and over Levitt's e-mail to John McCall.

2006 Jun 2 - Joint Initial Status Report

2006 Jun 2 - Defendant Levitt's Motion to Dismiss Filed.
Defense: Levitt's comments on Lott were not presented as a matter of
fact but as a statement of opinion.

2006 Jul 10 - Plaintiff Lott's Opposition to Defendant Levitt's Motion
Rebuttal: no they were not, they were presented as matters of fact.

2006 Jul 24 - Reply Memorandum in Support of Motions to Dismiss
Defense: nobody would take the word of Steven Levitt as a matter of
fact, so there cannot be any defamation.


ISSUE ONE: REPLICATE

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics
(Harper Collins, 2005) Excerpt:
Then there was the troubling allegation that Lott actually invented
some of the survey data that supports his more-guns/less-crime theory.
Regardless of whether or not the data was faked, Lott's admittedly
intriguing hypothesis doesn't seem to be true. When other scholars
have tried to replicate his results, they found that right-to-carry
laws simply don't bring down crime.

ISSUE TWO: THE J LAW ECON SYMPOSIUM ISSUE

e-mail John McCall to Levitt May 2005
"I went to the website you recommended--have not gone after the round
table proceedings yet--I also found the following citations--have not
read any of them yet, but it appears they all replicate Lott's research.
The Journal of Law and Economics is not chopped liver...."

e-mail Steven Levitt to McCall
"It was not a peer refereed edition of the Journal. For $15,000 he was
able to buy an issue and put in only work that supported him. My best
friend was the editor and was outraged the press let Lott do this...."

2, 4, 6, 8 WHAT THE HECK IS REPLICATE?

Replication is part of the peer-review or referee process used by
academic journals. Replicate means to run an author's data through
the author's math to verify that the published results were not
miscalculated or falsified. A very common problem in economics is
an author getting preliminary results, writing an article, extending
his data set or tweaking his equation in what the author thinks
are minor ways, and not double-checking the results before
publication. (Then there is out-and-out fraud: in Michael Bellesiles'
Arming America, there is a table of probate records for 1850s
San Francisco County; when researchers went to the sources Bellesiles
claimed he used, they found that the records had burned in the
fire following the 1906 San Fancisco earthquake. In other tables,
where records could be found, researchers found ten times the number
of guns that Bellesiles claimed he found.)

Levitt's motion to dismiss 24 Jul 2006:
The Book's audience consists of mainstream, everyday readers.
To these readers, one reasonable meaning of the Excerpt is that
other scholars disagree with or criticize Plaintiff's ideas.

Two scholars who disagree with and criticize Lott's results, Ian
Ayres and John Donohue, in one of their critiques wrote: "....we were
gratified to see that we had basically succeeded in replicating Lott's
2SLS results...." When they criticize and disagree, they say "criticize"
and "disagree," they do not say "try (and fail) to replicate."

If Levitt's "reasonable meaning" was the meaning intended, why not
write "disagree with" or "criticise" rather than "try to replicate"?
If that was the intended meaning, why not comply with Lott's 11 Jan 06
request for an erratum?

Please--any mainstream, everyday readers--read the excerpt[.b] and then
ask yourself if you agree with Levitt's (or more likely Levitt's
lawyer's) "reasonable meaning." To me, the Plain Jane reading of the
excerpt is that Lott invented and faked his data, and when other
scholars checked Lott's More Guns/Less Crime hypothesis, the results
could not be replicated.

Levitt-Dubner cite as a source Ayres-Donohue "Shooting Down the More
Guns Less Crime Hypothesis" yet when A-D discuss Table 9:

. . . line 1 presents our replication of Lott's 2SLS estimates for
the 1977-1992 time period. According to this method, shall-issue law
adoption reduces violent crimes by 61%, murders by 43%, rapes by 20%,
robberies by 51%, and aggravated assaults by 64%. While these numbers
should seem implausibly large, we were gratified to see that we had
basically succeeded in replicating Lott's 2SLS results....

Ayres-Donohue tried and succeeded in replicating Lott's results
even though they criticised those results and disagreed with them,
using different data and different math ("weighting of variables") to
demonstrate their points. It is clear from the Ayres-Donohue quote
that replicating results and disagreeing with or criticising those
results are two seperate issues.

Reporter Linnet Myers responds to Lott:
"Various researchers have praised John Lott's thorough research,
although some disagree with his results, which indicate that
crime drops when laws allow citizens to carry concealed guns.
Whether his findings have been "confirmed" may depend on exactly
what that means. Three professors interviewed at separate
universities said Lott's data and computations were mathematically
correct. But because each professor's analysis differed,
one didn't find significant drops in crime
while another found more dramatic decreases than Lott did.
The third said Lott's results have been "confirmed in the
sense that they've been replicated.""
Chicago Tribune - June 20, 1999 Sunday
(emphasis added by cnb)

The statements by those three scholars reported by Myers refute the
Levitt-Dubner claim that "When other scholars have tried to replicate
his results, they found that right-to-carry laws simply don't bring
down crime." This is from a newspaper reporter in 1999: there is no
excuse for a scholar in 2005 to be unaware of other scholars
replicating Lott's results.


SO THE J LAW ECON IS UP FOR SALE

Levitt told McCall the J Law Econ symposium articles were
not evidence that other scholars had replicated Lott's results
because the edition was not peer-refereed and Lott had bought the
issue and put in only work from supporters. The articles were
peer-reviewed and it is common for sponsors of symposia special
issues or festschriften to defray the expenses of printing and
distribution. Lott did solicit work from his critics--including
Levitt--for the symposium.

2006 Jul 24 - Reply Memorandum in Support of Motions to Dismiss
"The E-Mail is susceptible to the reasonable non-defamatory per se
construction that Plaintiff merely provided funding for the publication
of articles which supported his position and that one individual
disagreed with that decision."

Levitt did not tell McCall that he or his friend disagreed with the
finding of the articles: Levitt told McCall those articles were not
proof that other scholars had replicated Lott's work.

2005 May - e-mail Steven Levitt to McCall
"For $15,000 he was able to buy an issue and put in only work that
supported him. My best friend was the editor and was outraged the
press let Lott do this...."

YOU GOTTA LOVE LAWYERESE

According to Levitt's lawyer, when Steven Levitt told the public that
scholars cannot replicate Lott's results and when Levitt told McCall
the articles in the The Journal of Law & Economics symposium are
not evidence that Lott's results have been replicated because Lott had
bought that issue of the J Law Econ, that is not defamatory
because --drum roll please-- the public, and McCall, should have known
that Levitt's declarations were not meant to carry the weight of fact,
but were meant to be lightweight opinions. Please, read the 24 Jul 06
Reply Memorandum in Support of Motions to Dismiss. It's hilarious.

 

[Malum Prohibitum]

So, I take it "truth" has not even been asserted as a defense?

 

[Father Knows Best]

So, I take it "truth" has not even been asserted as a defense?

While I haven't read the pleadings, I am confident that truth has been asserted. It's a defense based on facts, however, which means it can't be established until trial. More to the point, Mr. Lott has to plead and prove falsity at trial.

What is going on now is typical pre-discovery motion practice. Levitt is trying to get the case thrown out quickly without having to incur the expense, hassle and delay of discovery and a trial. Since statement of "opinion" cannot be false, and are protected by the First Amendment, they also cannot form the basis for a claim of defamation. Whether a statement is an assertion of fact or is merely an expression of opinion is a legal question, meaning the Judge gets to decide. Therefore, defendants in defamation actions will always bring an early motion to dismiss the action on the grounds that the identified statements are merely opinion. If the Judge agrees, the case is thrown out. If the Judge disagrees, and holds that they are statements of fact that could be proven or disproven, then the motion is denied and the case goes forward with discovery and, ultimately, trial on the merits. Thus, the defendant has nothing to lose by bringing the motion to dismiss, and stands to save a whole lot of trouble and money if the motion is granted.

 

[Carl N. Brown]

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE NORTERN DISTRICT OF ILINOIS (sic)
EASTERN DIVISION

John R. Lott, Jr. Plaintiff
v
Steven D. Levitt and,
HarperCollins Publishers Inc, Defendants,

No. 06 C 2007

Judge Rueben Castillo


. . . . .

CONCLUSION

The Seventh Circuit has stated that "judges are not well equipped to
resolve academic controversies, . . . , and scholars have their own
remedies for unfair criticisms of their work--the publication of a
rebuttal." Dilworthy v. Dudley, 75 F.3d 307, 310 (7th Cir. 1996).
The statements about Lott in Freakonomics reflected just such
an academic controversy, and nothing more. In his email to McCall,
however, Levitt made string of defamatory assertions about Lott's
involvement in the publication of the Special Issue of the Journal
that--no matter how rash or short-sighted Levitt was when he made
them--cannot be reasonably interpreted as innocent or mere opinion.

After studying the parties' briefs and the book, Freakonomics, and
viewing all facts alleged in the complaint and all inferences reasonably
drawn from those facts in the light most favorable to Lott, the Court
finds that Lott does not state a claim upon which relief can be granted
in Count I of his Complaint. Accordingly, Harper Collins' and Levitt's
motion to dismiss Count I of Lott's Complaint is granted. (R. 15.)
Since Harper Collins is only mentioned in Count I, it is hereby dismissed
with prejudice. Levitt's motion to dismiss Count II of the Complaint is
denied. (R. 16.)

This lawsuit is hereby set for a status hearing on January 24, 2007 at
9:45 a.m. The parties are requested to fully exhaust all settlement
discussions in light of this opinion.

Entered: Judge Reuben Castillo
Dated: January 11, 2007

On the issue of replication or non-replication:

"... a reading of the entire chapter of Freakanomics supports
an innocent interpretation of the the disputed sentence. The chapter,
entitled "Where Have All the Criminals Gone?", reviews multiple
theories as to why crime decreased in the 1990's and discredits every
theory except Levitt's own theory, that the legalization of abortion
in Roe v Wade in 1973 prevented the birth of would-be criminals
of the 1990s. See generally, Freakonomics, Ch. 4, "Where Have
All the Criminals Gone?", pp. 115-144. In this context, the allegedly
defamatory sentence could be innocently read as disagreeing with the
results of Lott's research--that more guns decreases crime--in the
same way that Levitt disagreed with the results of multiple other
theorists on the topic of why crime decreased in the 1990s. Levitt
disagrees with a host of theories and theorists including: the theories
of criminologists James Alan Fox, James Q. Wilson, and George Kelling;
the theories that crime dropped because of tougher gun-control laws
(the opposite view of Lott's); the bursting of the cocaine bubble;
innovative policing strategies; the increased number of police;
increased punishment; the aging of the population; and improvement
in the economy. Id.[/] In fact, while Levitt sets forth his own
theory of what actually caused the crime rate to decrease in the 1990s,
he does not claim to definitely know the answer. Rather, the chapter
demonstrates that scholars and academics have widely debated the
controversial issue of whether gun control laws reduce crime. ...

Levitt claims in Freakonomics: "When other scholars have
tried to replicate his results, they found that right-to-carry laws
simply don't bring down crime."

Chicago Tribune reporter Linnet Myers:
"Three professors interviewed at separate universities
said Lott's data and computations were mathematically
correct. But because each professor's analysis differed,
one didn't find significant drops in crime while another
found more dramatic decreases than Lott did.
The third said Lott's results have been "confirmed
in the sense that they've been replicated." "
--Chicago Tribune June 20, 1999 Sunday

Ian Ayres and John Donohue:
"Table 9, line 1 presents our replication of Lott's 2SLS
estimates for the 1977-1992 time period. . . . we were
gratified to see that we had basically succeeded in
replicating Lott's 2SLS results. . . . Line 2 of Table 9
presents the results of the identical 2SLS regressions of
line 1, except excluding the logs of crime rates as
instruments." Stanford Law Review, Vol 55 Iss 4 2003.
"Shooting Down the "More Guns, Less Crime" Hypothesis,"
p. 1193

I do know that John Lott has served as peer-referee for thirty or
more economics journals and I do know that in economics, replication
in the referee process means verification of published results from
the data and math used by the author: failure to replicate means the
data and math do not add (or multiply or log) right, indicating
incompetency or fraud. Ted Frank with very little effort was able to
find six instances where Levitt had used "replicate" in the review
sense that Lott claims is the usual sense of the word in economics.
For crying out loud, Lott's critics claim to have replicated his
results: Ian Ayres and John Donohue in "Shooting Down the More Guns
Less Crime Hypothesis" and the NAS in their review of firearms
policy, before going on to test his theory, by adding data or giving
different weight to variables.

The fact is that in 1986 the US murder rate was 8.6 per 100,000 per
year. In twenty years, about twenty states went "shall issue"
right-to-carry. The murder rate for 2005 was 5.9 per 100,000 per year.
Murder went down nearly 30%. Lott attributes 5% of the decrease to
R-T-C, the rest to the other variables of the Lott-Mustard regression.
The Lott-Mustard regression includes weights for per capita income,
police per 100,000 population, arrest rates, population demographics
(age, race, etc). It is not--as some have implied--just weighted for
right-to-carry laws. Like the U of Wisconsin study of the late 1970s,
mentioned in Donald B. Kates' Restricting Handguns (North River 1979),
the Lott-Mustard regression tried to weigh every known factor
believed to influence the crime rate. (The U of WI study used state
data; the Lott-Mustard study used 300 megabytes of county data.) Like
the U of WI study, Lott-Mustard found that there was no benefit
attributable to any anti-gun laws. Except, Lott-Mustard found benefits
from right-to-carry, which has been a recent development. Both CDC and
NAS could not find measurable benefits from any gun control law.
NAS found that the Ayres-Donohue hybrid Lott model showed that R-T-C
caused a temporary spike in numbers of crimes but accelerated the rate
of decline thereafter. NAS did not consider that very strong or robust.

But after all is said and done, "judges are not well equipped to
resolve academic controversies, . . . , and scholars have their own
remedies for unfair criticisms of their work--the publication of a
rebuttal." Dilworthy v. Dudley, 75 F.3d 307, 310 (7th Cir. 1996).

 

[glen avon]

"I'm with Mr. Bowman. That's some real bad forum shopping."

yeah.

it happens to be a notoriously conservative circuit.

 

[Malone LaVeigh]

Leftist extremists invariably refer to academics who disagree with them as "discredited."

Some people will invariably use the phrase "leftist extremists" to refer to anyone who disagrees with them.

 

[agricola]

I must admit, I am surprised that the whole caboodle wasnt thrown out along with the "replicate" issue. Its sad though that the likes of Carl throw up yet more irrelevance and disproved statements (not only in that decision, but also earlier on this thread where even Lott showed that "replicate" did not have the exclusive meaning he claimed it did).

 

[Carl N. Brown]

Since I posted the others, here is the 11Jan07 judges opinion.

 

[agricola]

"The litany of partial dictionary definitions of "replicate" cherry-picked by Lott do not change this analysis."

 

[Carl N. Brown]

NAS: Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review (2004)
from Chapter Six: Right-To-Carry Laws
The statistical analysis of the effects of these laws was initiated by
John Lott and David Mustard (1997) and expanded by Lott (2000) and Bronars
and Lott (1998) (hereinafter simply referreed to as Lott). Lott concludes
that the adoption of right-to-carry laws substantially reduces the
prevalenace of violent crime. Many other researchers have carried out
their own statistical analyses using Lott's data, modified versions of
Lott's data, or expanded data sets that cover the more recent time period
not included in the original analysis.[2]

[2]Two other general responses to Lott's analysis deserve brief mention.
First, some critics have attempted to discredit Lott's findings on grounds
of the source of some of his funding (the Olin Foundation), the methods by
which some of his results were disseminated (e.g., some critics have
claimed erroneously that Lott and Mustard, 1997, was published in a student-
edited journal that was not peer reviewed), and positions that he has taken
on other public policy issues related to crime control. Much of this
criticism is summarized and responded to in Chapter 7 of Lott (2000). The
committee's view is that these criticisms are not helpful in evaluating
Lott's data, methods, or conclusions: Lott provides his data and computer
programs to all who request them, so it is possible to evaluate his
methods and results directly. In the committee's view, Lott's funding
sources, methods of disseminating his results, and opinions on other
issues do not provide further information about the quality of his
research on right-to-carry laws.

A second group of critics have argued that Lott's results lack credibility
because they are inconsistent with various strongly held a priori
beliefs or expectations. For example, Zimring and Hawkins (1997:59) argue
that "large reductions in violence [due to right-to-carry laws] are quite
unlikely because they would be out of porportion to the small scale of the
change in carrying firearms that the legislation produced." The committee
agrees that it is important for statistical evidence to be consistent with
established facts, but there are no such [established] facts about whether
right-to-carry laws can have effects of the magnitudes that Lott claims.
The belief or expectations of Lott's second group of critics are, at best,
hypotheses whose truth or falsehood can only be examined empirically.
Moreover, Lott (2000) has argued that there are ways to reconcile his
results with the beliefs and expectations of the critics. This does not
necessarily imply that Lott is correct and his critics are wrong. The
correctness of Lott's arguments is also an empirical question about which
there is little evidence. Rather, it shows that little can be decided
through argumentation over a priori beliefs and expectations.

Even researchers with strong prior committments to supporting
gun control and opposing R-T-C, when they test the Lott-Mustard
regression with different data or different weighting of variables,
simply do not find great pernicious effects from the passage of
R-T-C laws. And contrary to Levitt, the allegedly invented survey
is not part of the Lott-Mustard regression. Contrary to Levitt, the
Lott-Mustard regression is not based on survey data at all.
The Lott-Mustard regression is based on using county-level UCR
crime stats, 3085 counties for 1977-1992, to test the effect
not only of R-T-C but a whole slew of factors.

(model and table numbers reflect NAS numberinng in Chapter 6)

The database and the program supporting the Lott-Mustard formula are
freaking huge, about 300 megabytes. Scholars who have run the data
and regression have confirmed Lott's published figures. Scholars who
have tested by giving different weight to different variables are in
four camps: some find greater benefits from R-T-C, some find the same
benefits Lott did, some find no benefit and some find slightly more
costs than benefits.
Here is the NAS committee's replication of Lott's results:

The line LOTT is Lott's published results using the dataset before
his summer 1997 harddrive crash. The line NAS(1) is NAS replication
using the reconstructed dataset and the line NAS(2) is the NAS
replication with an extended dataset. The NAS went on to show how
one can get different results than Lott's.

Lott's critics Ayres and Donohue combined Lott's 6.1 and 6.2 regression
to a "hybrid" model, which, according to NAS, produced this:

The NAS had no confidence in the "robustness" of either Lott or his
critics' results. Speaking of both Lott and his critics, the NAS said
it is impossible to draw strong conclusions from the existing literature
on the causal impact of these laws. NAS opted for the "out" of calling
for more research, preferrably a survey of convicts to see if criminal
behavior is changed by R-T-C, similar to the DOJ survey reported by
Wright and Rossi in Armed and Dangerous (Aldine, 1985), but with
questions designed to test effect of R-T-C on criminal decision-making..

I look through chapter six for examples of the "miscoding"
charge leveled against Lott by his critics. Lott includes in his
regression nearly all of 3,000 US counties and to avoid divide-by-zero
errors codes 0 crimes or 0 arrests as 0.1 (I know Sullivan Co TN
(1999 pop 149,000) had no murders in 1999 and probably other years
as well.) Lott's critics call this "missing" data. Lott critics Nagin
and Black exclude 85% of the counties from their regression (WV was
represented in Nagin and Black by Kanawha Co alone which includes
the city of Charleston (WV was the only state in their test to show
a "statistically significant" increase in murder. If in a regression
to test if various laws affect the crime rate, you exclude counties
with no reported crimes or count only urban centers, to me that is
worse than coding 0 as 0.1.)

Also Lott-Mustard counted AL and CT as being R-T-C in 1977 but
Vernick and Hepburn (2003) coded CT and AL as not having R-T-C.
(In my late step-dad's books I found a 1979 CT application for CCW
license, and I do know that today CT issues more carry permits
than TX; so could you apply for and recieve a CCW in CT in 1977?
Would any CT readers with knowledge about CT CCW ca 1977 care
to respond?)

The coding of the date of adoption of R-T-C is another thorny issue.
Some discretionary permit systems are near prohibitory (NY Sullivan
Act 1911) while some discretionary permit systems were and are laxer
than current TX and TN "shall-issue" right-to-carry. In some counties
of VA under the descretionary law, the judge would approve permit
applications with a rubber stamp, while in other counties the judge
would not approve any. A state like VA going from discretionary to
shall-issue may actually be going to a system with more uniform
standards of control. Lott-Mustard code ND and SD as R-T-C in 1977
but Vernick and Hepburn code ND and SD as adopting R-T-C in 1985.
Would any SD-ND readers with knowledge about SD-ND CCW ca 1977 care
to respond?) Some of Lott's critics rely on Handgun Control Inc.'s
evaluation of gun laws which are notoriously skewed.

Lott's regression does not include some folks' favorite pet causes.
The economic control is per capita income: he does not include
rate of poverty or rate of unemployment. Some consider those
economic factors included in per capita income; others think they
should be evaluated seperately. Many disagree on what weight these
and other variables should have. Lott does not include measures of
the crack epidemic "bubble" (Donohue's pet) or the rate of abortion
(Levitt's pet). Others complain that the data set at 300MB is too
huge and and the regression is unwieldy to work with.

Chapter Six sounds like the usual academic bickering about my kung
fu dojo is superior to yours (always amusing to spectators) and does
not evidence the charges of fraud, fabrication and blatant lying
leveled by Lambert against Lott.

Lott was not a priori[/b] pro-gun: he became pro-gun a posteriori
based on his own studies. He was not "bought" by Winchester. He was not
"bought" by the NRA.

The same thing was true of James Wright (James D. Wright, Peter Rossi and
Kathleen Daly, Under the Gun (Aldine, 1983)). Wright was selected
by the Carter Administration to study guns, crime and violence in 1977.
Part of Wright's credentials was that he was involved in demographic
research at the U of MA at Amherst and had published an article on
the demographics of gun control in the Nov 1975 issue of the Nation.
The study for the DoJ was released by the government in 1981, and
expanded into the book Under the Gun. (Wright's Nov 1975 Nation
article became Chapter 6 "Characteristics of Private Weapons Owners"
of Under the Gun.)

(We at Kingsport Press worked on typesetting that book in 1982: I still
have a set of VideoComp proofs of their chapter one: Weapons, Crime
and Violence: an Overview of Themes and Findings dated 5 Jan 83 07:34;
I state this because I have been accused before of "mis-citing" Under
the Gun as 1982 which is when I worked on the book. I also worked on
Robert G. Sherrill's Saturday Night Special book in the mid-70s.
I state this because I am tired of being accused of being "duped" by
John Lott when I have being doing my own, independent research on
gun control off-and-on since 1959. Robert Sherrill remarked in
his book that he was surprised in researching for his book to find
that he had written a vast number of the articles listed on gun control:
I laughed when I read that because in the sixties and seventies I yearly
went to the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature, subject Firearms
Legislation, and it was not news to me.)

Starting as anti-gun liberals, Wright, Rossi and Daly concluded:
"We conclude that the probable benefits of stricter gun controls
. . . in terms of crime reduction are at best uncertain and at worst
close to nil and that most such measures would impose rather high
social costs."

Chapter 7 "On Crime and Private Weapons" Wright et al. looks at
private weapons as 1) a cause, 2) an effect and 3) as a deterrent
to crime. "The existing research on all three hypotheses is highly
inconclusive. ... {1)} there is little or no conclusive, or even
suggestive, evidence to show that gun ownership among the population
as a whole is, per se, an important cause of criminal violence."
Wright et al. found that {2)} few guns were bought based solely on
fear of crime and on {3)} "... the risk to a home robber or to a
burglar striking an occupied residence of being shot and wounded or
killed by the intended victim is on the same order of magnitude as
the risk ... of being apprehended, convicted, and imprisoned . ...
It is thus plausable that much crime is deterred because those who
would otherwise commit it fear the possibility of being shot. ..."

Lott's major conclusions in More Guns, Less Crime (that most
gun control measures do not work against criminals and self-defense
deterrs crimes) were presaged by Wright et al. In fact, they were
presaged by Donald B. Kate's Restricting Handguns: the Liberal
Skeptics Speak Out (1979). Wright and Rossi questioned their own
a priori assumptions on gun control and they, too, were
attacked by those who will not objectively analyse their own a priori
assumptions because hating guns and NRA and feeling superior to gun
owners is so essential to their concept of who they are.

On: the troubling allegedly invented statistic

Even though Lott's questioned 1997 survey is not part of the
Lott-Mustard regression model, I would like to say this about the
98-2% question:

Approximately 1,000 to 3,000 USA voluntary manslaughters are adjudicated
as justifiable homicide by prosecutor, grand jury, judge, trial jury,
appellate court. Handguns are usually used in justifiable homicides
and the handgun kill-to-wound ratio is about 1 to 4, giving about 4,000
to 12,000 justifiable woundings. Police reports on shooting incidents
show about 4 shots fired for every shot that hits. That projects to
20,000 to 60,000 shots fired for every killing and wounding. If Gary
Kleck's NSDS 2.5 million DGUs or Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig's NSPOF
4.7 million DGUs are accurate, then 20,000 to 68,000 shooting DGUs
represent less than 3% of all DGUs.

I am aware that the Kleck-Gertz survey, from self-reporting by the
NSDS positive DGU respondents, shows 23.9% shooting (600,000 shooting
DGU per year, 213,000 wounding DGU per year). I am also aware that
in evaluating the positive respondents of the NSPOF survey,
Cook-Ludwig wrote that the number of positive respondents could give
you an estimate of the number of DGU among the general population,
but the subset of DGU respondents is too small to give a statistically
reliable projection about details of over-all DGU.

 

[Carl N. Brown]

Clash of the Titan Egos, Part II

As settlement of part two of the Lott v Levitt lawsuit, Levitt
sent this letter to John McCall. Recall that Levitt told McCall
that the Conference Issue was NOT peer-refereed (even though
Levitt was one of the referees); Levitt acted like Lott had done
something improper by paying the conference issue espenses;
and Levitt told McCall that Lott put in only articles that supported
him, even though Lott invited Levitt to submit an article.

July 26, 2007

John B. McCall, Ph.D.
576 Rocky Branch
Coppell, Texas 75019

Dear Mr. McCall:

You may recall that I sent you emails on May 25 and 26, 2005,
which made certain statements about the Conference Issue of the
Journal of Law and Economics ("JLE") which was dated October 2001
(the "Conference Issue"). I now want to clarify and correct some
of the statements I made in, and impressions I may have created
by, those emails.

In those emails, I did not mean to suggest that Dr. John R,
Lott, Jr, or anyone acting on his behalf, engaged in bribery or
exercised improper influence in the editorial process with
respect to the preparation and publication of the Conference
Issue. I acknowledge that the articles that were published in the
Conference issue were reviewed by referees engaged by the editors
of the JLE. In fact, I was one of the peer referees. As far as I
know, all papers published in the JLE are refereed.

At the time of my May 2005 emails to you, I knew that scholars
with varying opinions had been invited to participate in the 1999
conference and had been informed that their papers would be
considered for publication in what became the Conference Issue.
Along with other people, I received an email from Dr. Lott
inviting my own participation in that conference. I also was
aware at the time of the May 2005 emails to you that in
connection with the preparation of conference issues for the JLE,
that the organizer of each conference issue needs to provide
funding to JLE to cover publication and mailing expenses. I did
not mean to sugggest that Dr. Lott did anything unlawful or
improper in arranging for the payment of the publication expenses
for the Conference Issue. I have discussed the wording of this
letter with my counsel and am willingly signing it.

I hope the foregoing clarifies and corrects my statements
contained in the emails which I sent only to you.

Very truly yours,
(signed)
Steven D. Levitt.

But the fat lady aint sung. Lott's new lawyer wants to revive the
first part, on the issue of replication, dismissed by the Chicago lawyer.

In more than one of my postings on the seperate Lott 98% issue,
I have claimed that exact statistics and sociology do not belong in
the same sentence and cited The Numerical Reliability of Econometric
Software by B. D. McCullough and H. D. Vinod from Journal
of Economic Literature, Vol. XXXVII (June 1999), pp. 633-655.

The replication issue is related to the Lott-Mustard econometric
regression, as applied to 1977-1992 county-level Uniform Crime Report
data. The Lott-Mustard 1997 journal article and John Lott's
book More Guns Less Crime (1998) claim to show measurable crime
reduction attributable to passage of Right-To-Carry (RTC) laws.

In re-reading McCullough and Vinod 1999 recently, I found this
passage especially striking:

Even in rare instances when a software package is
identified in an article, and the package is later discovered
to be defective in a way which affects the article's results,
updating the results with a reliable software package is
problematic. The reason is that virtually no journals require
authors to archive either their data or their code, and this
constitutes an almost insurmountable barrier to replication
in the economic science. Scientific content is not dependent
merely on writing up a summary of results. Just as important
is showing the precise method by which the results were
obtained and making this method available for public scrutiny.

To our knowledge, only the journal Macroeconomic Dynamics (MD)
requires both data and code, while the Journal of Applied
Econometrics (JAE) requires data and encourages code, and the
Journal of Business and Economic Statistics (JBES) and
The Economic Journal require data; all four journals have
archives which can be accessed via the worldwide web. In the
context of replicability and the advancement of science,
the advantage of requiring code in addition to data is obvious.
While it may be trivial to use the archived code to replicate
the results in a published article, only if the code is available
for inspection will other researchers have the opportunity to
find errors in the code. Just as commercial software needs to be
checked, so does the code which underlies published results.

(this was five years before the publication of Freakonomics
and six years before the Lott v Levitt lawsuit)

In discussion of the accuracy of econometric software in June
1999, authors McCullough and Vinod used "replication in the
economic science" in the same sense that John Lott claims is the
"objective and factual meaning in the world of academic research".
This is the meaning that I derived while doing computer typesetting
for a major economics journal from 1974-2003. To quote myself:
"Replication is part of the peer-review or referee process used by
academic journals. Replicate means to run an author's data through
the author's math to verify that the published results were not
miscalculated or falsified." When the Lott v Levitt lawsuit came
up, I contacted the managing editor of the journal asking for the
usual uses of "replicate" in economics and I was informed:

I have usually heard "replicate" in economics to mean either
you use the author's model and data and get the same results OR
you use the model with different data and verify the result -
the same thing is happening with different data.

I had always read using a model with a different data set as
"testing the robustness" of an econometric model. So there are
two common uses of replicate in economics: the peer-referee
sense of verifying published results and the testing sense of
using different data to test the same model.

I would like to point out that John Lott has made his data and
his code available publicly even before publication, irregardless
of the data and code requirements of the journals. Lott critic
David Hemenway rejected Lott's results because they seemed
"counter-intuitive" to him. At least Lott's data and code can be
tested, unlike Hemenway's intuition. In fact, if Lott did not
openly share his data and code, if Lott kept his data and code
deeply closeted, like Arthur Kellermann or David Hemenway, neither
replicating nor testing of his results would be possible.

There is a movement in the social sciences promoted by
Prof. Gary King of Harvard to make the social sciences more
respectable as sciences by requiring stricter discipline, in
particular making "replicate" and other terms used in science
have the same strict definitions in the social sciences as used
in the physical sciences.

So, in the "soft" social sciences, there has traditionally been
a laxer approach to issues of replication of results and publishing
of data and code than in the "hard" physical sciences. McCullough,
Vinod, King, Lott and other social scientists independently
advocate the stricter approach.

Steven Levitt claimed in Freakonomics (HarperCollins, 2005):
"When other scholars have tried to replicate [Lott's] results, they
found that right-to-carry laws simply don't bring down crime."

In the peer-referee sense, even Lott critics Ayres and Donohue
claimed to have successfully replicated Lott's published results
from his data and math in their Table 9, Line 1. The National
Academy of Sciences claimed they replicated Lott's published
results in their Table 6.1 Line 2. Given that Levitt cited the
Ayres-Donohue article in Freakonomics, it is hard to see
how he missed that. I guess that happened the same way he
missed the fact that the conference issue had been peer refereed.

In the "test the robustness" sense of replicate, the finding
that "right-to-carry laws simply don't bring down crime" is not
universal. By using different data or different variables in the
math, some scholars have shown that RTC laws:
1. don't bring down crime,(*)
2. bring crime down about as much as Lott claimed, or
3. bring crime down even more than claimed by Lott.
When other scholars have tried to replicate Lott's results, they
have found results all over the map: less, similar or more.

To claim that Lott's results cannot be replicated in either the
peer-review or test-the-robustness sense is simply not true.
Levitt's use of "replication" in his court papers in answer to
Lott's lawsuit appears so soft as to be formless. Ted Frank, with
very little search, found six instances where Steven Levitt used
replicate in the sense that Lott claims is the "objective and
factual" use of the term.

Lastly, Lott did not "sue out of the blue" as some have claimed:

2006 Jan 11 - Lott wrote Levitt requesting a correction on Levitt's
claim that other scholars had been unable to replicate Lott's results.

2006 Mar 17 - Lott's lawyer wrote Levitt and his publisher requesting
a correction and a retraction.

2006 Apr 10 - Civil Action 06C 2007 (defamation) filed by John Lott
against Steven Levitt and his publisher.


{ None of this addresses the issue of whether a court of law is
the proper venue to resolve an academic dispute. In dismissing
Count 1 over the Freakonomics/replicate dispute, Judge Ruben Castillo
quoted an earlier court ruling: "judges are not well equipped to
resolve academic controversies, ... , and scholars have their own
remedies for unfair criticisms of their work--the publication of a
rebuttal." Dilworth v Dudley, 17 F.3d 307, 310 (7th Cir. 1996).
On Count 2 over Levitt's comments about Lott to economist John McCall,
Judge Castillo opined "Levitt made a string of defamatory assertions...
(which) ... cannot be reasonably interpeted as innocent or mere
opinion." None of this seems to advance the cause of elevating the
soft standards of the social sciences to something worthy of the
name science. }

 

[wjustinen]

Interesting

Self-Defence is not a reason to get a s1 or a shotgun licence, it is however a reason to get a s5 licence (which covers handguns).

Seems Britain is just like any other "gun ban" nation in the world. Self-defence isn't a legitimate reason to own a gun, but we reserve the right to authorize those with sufficient economic or political clout to own and carry.

I wonder how long the approval process takes compared to the fellow who wants to shoot at a club.

 

[SWMAN]

Freakanomics says gun control has no effect on crime.

Then why do we have gun control??? It only makes gun prices higher and government more costly while doing nothing to control crime.

 

[willbrink]

Though not relating to replication of Lott’s conclusion(s) per se, having multiple Nobel Prize winners in economics finding his work robust and worthy of great praise, lends credibility to his conclusions and methodology for those conclusions:


"John Lott's thoughtful study should be read by everyone interested in the control of violent crime, and protection against terrorism." --Vernon L. Smith, 2002 Nobel Prize Winner in Economics

"John Lott's 1998 book, More Guns, Less Crime, created quite a stir among the gun-control romantics, whose expressive advocacy involves neither sound analytics nor empirical evidence. In this follow-on book, The Bias Against Guns, Lott continues the struggle, and responds to his critics, motivated by his strong conviction that analysis and evidence must, finally, win the day." --James Buchanan, 1986 Nobel Prize Winner in Economics

"Another major contribution by John Lott to the evidence on the effects--good and bad--of gun-control legislation. An important supplement to his More Guns, Less Crime."--Milton Friedman, 1976 Nobel Prize Winner in Economics

"John Lott is a scholar's scholar and a writer's writer--and his book shows why. That gun ownership might bring social benefits as well as costs is a story we do not often see in the press, and Lott here explores why. With a blend of new data, evidence, and examples, he unpacks the bias against such stories in the media."--J. Mark Ramseyer, Harvard Law School professor

 

[Carl N. Brown]

Both Steven Levitt and John Lott have published what many
consider pop lit which is SO infra dig. REAL scholars only
publish in peer-refereed academic journals or university
presses with circulation of no more than a few thousand
readers. Real scholars certainly do not make the New York
Times bestseller list and -- shudder -- do not make a profit
off their writings. And Lott writes incredibly facile one-page
op-eds on subjects that require at least a 300 page thesis
(and half of that footnotes and source citations). Heresy!!

And Lott claims that his empirical research contradicts the
academically fashionable assumptions about gun control
based on surmise and speculation that have stood the test
of time as axioms of conventional wisdom. How dare he!
That forces defenders of the conventional wisdom to do
their own empirical research, which has been known to
induce headaches. Surmise and speculation are easier on
the brain.

Yes, yes, Levitt in Freakonomics points out that no gun
control measure has had a beneficial effect; which only
differs from Lott's position that no gun law except shall-issue
carry license has a beneficial result, while Levitt claims
shall-issue has no effect either. In Restricting Handguns (1979)
Don B. Kates cited a federally-funded study at the U of WI that
looked at state-level crime data and demographic statistics believed
to affect crime and found no benefit from any state gun law, years
before either Freakonomics or More Guns Less Crime.
Obviously they are all either insane or on the payroll of the
NRA, for all university people capable of abstract reason are
anti-gun (see the Wikipedia talk section on the John Lott article,
commentary by Gzuckier).

And if I sounded funny, that's how I talk with my tongue in cheek.
(Some wish I kept my tongue in check.)