More common sense from John Lott

[RoadkingLarry]

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,352006,00.html

Americans' fears over the safety of schools continues.Last Monday, three colleges and four K-to-12 schools were shut down by threats of violence.

This week over 25,000 college students at 300 chapters in 44 states belong to a group, Students for Concealed Carry on College Campuses, that will carry empty handgun holsters to protest their concerns about not being able to defend themselves.

With the first anniversary of the Virginia Tech attack last week and the discussions that it created, we clearly have not been able to put that and other attacks behind us. There are good reasons why the safety measures adopted over the last year to speed up response times or hiring more police haven't eliminated the fear people feel.....

.....In cases from the church shooting in Colorado Springs, Colo., last December, where a parishioner who was given permission by the minister to carry her concealed gun into the church quickly stopped the murderer, to an attack last year in downtown Memphis, to the Appalachian Law School, to high schools in such places as Pearl, Miss., concealed handgun permit holders have stopped attacks well before uniformed police could possibly have arrived......

Go John Go!

 

[JCMAG]

I don't know who this John Lott person is, but he is sounding like a fine individual.

 

[Henry Bowman]

John Lott is an ecomomist who approached the issue of guns and crime from a neutral perspective and then became very pro-gun as a result of his research. Author of More Guns, Less Crime; The Bias Against Guns; and others.

 

[yokel]

From one perspective, there is a certain incongruity, indeed, a certain irony, inherent in the fact that the author is a senior research scientist at the University of(may issue)Maryland.

 

[JCMAG]

I've heard of them books. Yes, I reckon that name is familiar. I like him more already.

Funny, we need guys like him to report the victories over violent crime while the media only fills our heads with tragedies...

It's a shame. But it is good that he is around helping us out.

 

[Dick1911]

Mr. Lott has a very interesting blogg site and heavily covers 2A issues.

John Lott's Website

 

[Catherine]

Dear Henry Bowman,

You beat me to the answer since I was late reading and signing in here.

To the other poster... check LOTT out and read his books. There is a THREAD on here where I answered a lady/original poster who needed some pro gun information. I can't remember the title and many of us answered her. In that THREAD... I posted a bunch of links, books and information along with other people. You may want to check that thread out and find out about other fine gun and political writers.

Sincerely,

Catherine

 

[.cheese.]

John Lott's work unfortunately has come under intense criticism, such as claims he falsified data.

I'm not taking sides.

 

[LawBot5000]

There was ONE claim of falsified data, a phone survey that he used to produce a 1 million defensive gun uses per year figure. He couldn't find his original data. Since then, that figure has been backed up by similar surveys with large sample sizes.

99 percent of John Lott's research has never been challenged in any real way. The reason he comes under such intense attack is because his research utterly destroys the anti-gun policy arguments by showing that gun control only produces bad results.

 

[.cheese.]

if I remember correctly, there is a whole website dedicated to taking shots at his work.

 

[CBS220]

There was ONE claim of falsified data, a phone survey that he used to produce a 1 million defensive gun uses per year figure. He couldn't find his original data. Since then, that figure has been backed up by similar surveys with large sample sizes.

This would be interesting if you could show some of these surveys.

if I remember correctly, there is a whole website dedicated to taking shots at his work.

I believe it was tied more to his "Mary Rosh" persona, IIRC.

 

[poor_richard]

John Lott is an ecomomist who approached the issue of guns and crime from a neutral perspective and then became very pro-gun as a result of his research. Author of More Guns, Less Crime; The Bias Against Guns; and others.
__________________

I thought he started it from an anti-gun perspective, and then was converted by his own findings?

 

[novaDAK]

I got to meet Mr. Lott a few weeks ago when he came to my college to speak...he really knows what he's talking about when it comes to this stuff

 

[Carl N. Brown]

DGU Defensive Gun Use and Lott

Lott's 2% 1997 and 5% 2002 shooting DGU figures are contradicted by some other surveys that show 20% to 40% DGUs. These surveys were summarised by Otis Dudley Duncan in The Criminologist newsletter, "Gun Use Surveys: In Numbers We Trust?" vol. 25, No.1, Jan/Feb 2000. Lott responded to that article with a short letter in the Sep/Oct No. 5 issue in which he mentioned that he had lost the data set to that 1997 survey in a harddrive crash.

To Lott's critics, the idea that Lott's low shooting (2-5%) contradicted the higher shooting rate in the other surveys called Lott's results into question. However, Duncan did not describe those surveys as genuine: he considered them all flawed and questionable. In his AEI write-up on his 2002 DGU survey, Lott cited Duncan 2000 as a source on DGU surveys.

Tim Lambert cites "NSPOF 27% DUNCAN 2000" as one of the surveys that contradicts Lott's results. The NSPOF survey was designed by Gary Kleck, carried out by Chiltons in 1994 and written up by Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig in 1996 and 1997. Cook and Ludwig stated that while the 45 raw (19 vetted) DGU respondents of the 2568 sample polled might allow you to project the frequency of DGU (2568 being a good national sample size) the subset of positive respondents was too small to project national details about defensive gun use. When Duncan projected 27% shooting of the 45 raw NSPOF respondents, he was doing something Cook and Ludwig considered statistically wrong. The raw NSPOF figure was 23 million DGU incidents; 27% would be 6.2 million shooting DGUs. Of the vetted "true positive" 19 DGU respondents, Duncan claimed 8 (42%) fired their guns; from the 19 of 2568 sample Cook and Ludwig projected 4.7 million DGUs by 1.5 million individuals per year (some of the 19 used a gun more than once in a year). The vetted NSPOF shooting figure would be almost two million shooting DGUs. Those figures contradict Lott, but they are also unrealisticly high.

Lott's figures were about 2 million DGUs per year of which 42,000 to 105,000 were shooting DGUs. Lawrence Southwick projected 59,000 shooting DGUs from justifiable homicide stats. Gary Kleck projected 80,000 to 160,000 shooting DGUs based on his projection of more than 2,000 but less than 3,000 homicides eventually adjudicated as justifiable. Fifteen or so private sector surveys have given a range of DGU (alltypes) from 700,000 to 3.6 million per year. Lott's figures of 2 million DGU with 42,000 to 105,000 shooting are actually quite reasonable, compared to a projection from NSPOF 27%: 23 million DGU with 6.2 million shooting DGU.

Back in 1988 Gary Kleck originally published a 2% wounding or killing, 98% brandishment and warning shot figure. Otis Dudley Duncan claimed that figure was originally derived from the Peter Hart survey of 1981. When a few years later, Lott started publishing a 98% brandishment only figure from a lost survey, Lambert claimed that Lott had simply misquoted Kleck, then made up a story about a lost survey rather than admit an error to Lambert. But when Lambert cited Otis Duncan's list of DGU surveys, Lambert did not mention the Peter Hart 1981 survey (which Duncan cited as the source of Kleck's 98% stat). Peter Hart, a professional polling firm, had lost the data set for their 1981 DGU survey. According to Duncan, the Hart results exist only in notes made by Gary Kleck when he talked to a Hart researcher in the mid-1980s.