Please, if you favour gun control, read some of the work by John Lott.
I favoured gun control until I began reading his studies. Recently I posted something about this on Facebook, making the point that now, given the extent of gun ownership in the US, Lott's points and his evidence make good sense. States with conceal-carry permits have less gun violence and fewer gun deaths than states that do not allow conceal-carry permits.
After I posted this, a Facebook friend posted a series of accusations and ad hominems about John Lott. Let's get a few things straight:
- Yes, John Lott was dishonest in using sock puppets to praise his work.
- Yes, John Lott receives support from the pro-gun lobbyists, but most of that support came as a result of his academic research, after his initial results were published.
But most importantly, his research had stood up (I use the past-perfect tense because I have not followed recent developments).
Here is what I wrote about Lott (and the false accusations against him by Steve Levitt and that are unfairly repeated by too many people) many years ago:
Lott v. Levitt
August 17, 2006 — eclectecon
When I first heard about the defamation suit John Lott launched against Steve Levitt, I wondered if maybe Lott was acting a bit crazy. Now that I’ve read this (courtesy of Tyler Cowen) I wonder if Levitt was perhaps a bit more than injudicious (my take on the article is apparently different from that of the first commenter at Marginal Revolution). I realize there is a sizable gap between “more than injudicious” and “defamation”, but where does this fall? And the debates continue — be sure to see all the comments at Marginal Revolution. It sure looks as if there is considerable animosity between the two economists and between their supporters/champions.
Lott’s lawsuit hangs on two seemingly simple but academically fraught statements: the research was not replicated and the special issue of the journal was not peer refereed. …
In May 2005, an economist in Texas challenged Levitt’s characterization of Lott’s research and pointed out that Lott had guest-edited the October 2001 special issue of The Journal of Law and Economics, published by the University of Chicago Press. As a whole, the ten articles in the journal backed Lott’s conclusions. According to the lawsuit, Levitt e-mailed back: “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.” …
Lott contends that “‘replicate’ has an objective and factual meaning in scholarship”—it means that other researchers using the same data in the same way will get the same results. Thus, he says, Levitt’s use of the term amounts to “alleging that Lott falsified his results.” Levitt’s lawyers reply that Freakonomics is written in “everyday language” and is aimed at the general reader.
“Peer refereed” (or “peer reviewed”) refers to the standard practice at scholarly journals of sending a potential article to several other scholars to vet and approve before the work is published. To uphold academic impartiality, the writer does not know the peers’ names. In an e-mail to me, Lott said, “If you were to look at a physical copy of the journal you would see that all of the papers thank anonymous referees for refereeing their papers.” (As for whether he was able to “buy an issue,” Lott says in the suit that he “raised funds for” publishing the special issue.)
The “best friend” editor whom Levitt mentioned in his e-mail was Austan Goolsbee. “I was the lead editor at the time that special issue was printed, but not when it was prepared,” Goolsbee says. The journal collected papers delivered at a conference sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute and the Center for Law, Economics and Public Policy at Yale Law School.
“In one sense,” Goolsbee says, symposium papers are peer reviewed “in that the articles sometimes go out” for critiquing. “But Steve Levitt is quite right that the standards are infinitely lower on a conference volume. The acceptance rate for papers at The Journal of Law and Economics is something like 8 to 10 percent. This issue had something like ten papers and like most conference articles, none [I believe] were rejected. That’s a one-in-a-billion event that you would get all of those papers in.”
At least two contributors, however, told me that their papers were indeed reviewed. Bruce Benson of Florida State University says he made “significant revisions” in the article he coauthored to address criticism from two referees. “I was surprised when I heard that Levitt made this claim because I actually had guessed that he was one of the anonymous reviewers of my paper. . . . Apparently this was not the case.”
T. Nicolaus Tideman of Virginia Tech, coauthor of another article in the journal, saw his paper at first rejected by a referee, but he rewrote it and then it was accepted. Tideman said the article analyzed Lott’s More Guns, Less Crime data in two different ways and the data held up both times.
I knew John Lott back then. He is very smart and back then was very careful with his research. Further, I am not aware of any good research that has refuted his initial findings. And the replications also have not been refuted so far as I know.
As I said at the outset, given that there are guns in the US, I'd be more comfortable being in places where someone from the NRA has a gun than being in a so-called "gun-free" zone.
Note: I have fired a gun twice in my life (when I was a boy scout in my early teens). I am not a gun owner. I probably should not post this, but I disclose it possibly to influence my creds.
I have friends who have guns and who have concealed-carry permits. I am confident they continue to train and practice. But more importantly I am confident I would stand a better chance in a potential terrorist attempted mass shooting if they are around than if there are no gun owners present.
We don't often read about the attempts at mass killings that are thwarted because the shooters are deterred or shot by legal gun owners. The MSM [main-stream media] doesn't report these events, but the gun-lobby-fringe does, of course.
Mostly I urge you to read the work with an open mind. Some of it does seem to push too hard (so far as I am concerned). But it is compelling.
Update: I had and have no specific evidence that John Lott received funding from pro-gun lobbyists. In fact I have no idea about his financial backers. I thought I remembered that he did, but he denies it, writing to me,
If you have evidence that I receive support from pro-gun lobbyists, please provide some evidence of that. Have I lost jobs because of my research? Yes (one example, http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/02/01/scary-encounter-chicagos-mayor-richard-daley.html). Have I been offered chances to do consulting on gun cases? Yes, but I have always turned them down. If you have some evidence for your claim, provide it.