Everyone is blogging about Lott

Julian Sanchez is on the case again. This time he has a bit more detail from Mustard. The key point is that Mustard is "fairly confident" that Lott told him in 1997 that he had done a survey. This suggests that Lott didn't invent the survey in 1999 to explain his 98% figure. Well, this makes me lean more towards Lott having done a survey, but it's still not conclusive. Mustard isn't sure about being told in 1997. All this back and forth is making me dizzy. I'm not going to express another opinion on whether he did a survey until I see Lindgren's new report.

Kevin Drum gives us one, two three postings on the weighting, lack of IRB review and some more implausibilities. For what it's worth, I enquired about the IRB thing last year and was told that folks in Law schools often ignore it, so it was no big deal. Ted Barlow outdoes him with four postings. Ted makes a good point about the sheer quantity of paper you get with even a small survey and has a good summary of the problems in his top posting. ArchPundit costs Lott's survey and also has two postings with a nice list of possible explanations of what Lott actually did, all of which are bad for Lott, though some are less bad. Lott says he got student volunteers to do it, so it would not have cost as much as ArchPundit estimates. Tom Spencer posts twice. Meanwhile Atrios only posts once. Well, actually he posts a bajillion times, but only one is about Lott.

Steve Verdon comes round and agrees that Lott should withdraw the 98% figure but thinks I should lay off now that I've won. But, Steve, Lott has not withdrawn the 98% figure. In fact, he just sent a message to firearmsregprof where he says:

Would one want even larger samples for brandishing so as to get even tighter confidence intervals? Sure, but I have limited personal resources and the point estimate gives us the best guess that we have for the rate of brandishing. I do not believe you can point to anything that has me claiming more for this result than was appropriate. The sentence in the second edition (2000) even added a cautionary phrase at the beginning of the sentence.

Look at that, he insists that 98% is the "best guess that we have for the rate of brandishing." And look at what he says about the change between the first edition and the second edition. Here's the sentence in the first edition:

"If national surveys are correct, 98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack."

and here it is in the second:

"If a national survey that I conducted is correct, 98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack."

He didn't add a cautionary phrase at all. He changed the attribution of the 98% figure. And he won't admit to doing it.

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Atrios points us to Tim Noah's article at Slate. After the Washington Times whitewash, and the US News and Washington Post completely ignoring Lott's survey, we at last have a mainstream media article that gets to the heart of the matter. One interesting feature that bears repeating because it…
[On Sep 27 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof and emailed it to Lott.] Peter Boucher, replying to this post, writes: I don't have a copy of Point Blank handy, but I seem to recall the 98% figure either explicitly in the text of that book, or directly derivable from the figures in…
[On Sep 14 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof. I also emailed it to John Lott. ] Way back in 1993 in talk.politics.guns, C. D. Tavares wrote: The answer is that the gun never needs to be fired in 98% of the instances of a successful self-defense with a gun. The criminals just leave…
compiled by Otis Dudley Duncan and Tim Lambert revised 23 Oct 2005 by Tim Lambert Note: With the exception of academic publications, some tapes and some found by LexisNexis search, these were found on the Internet. The web is, of course, not perfectly reliable, and items appearing there…