Lott has a new posting where he responds to a letter from John Donohue to the Columbus Dispatch replying to a Lott op-ed. I earlier posted a link to the op-ed and a letter from Michael Maltz replying to it.
I'll post more on Lott's comments later, but for now I want to point to the most important thing in his posting:
see also the data and updated results available at www.johnlott.org.
"Updated results?" If you go to his site you will find corrected versions of the graphs and tables that Ayres and Donohue said were incorrect because of coding errors. The most interesting of these corrected tables is Table 3a (registration required), because Ayres and Donohue also give a corrected version. After ducking the question of coding errors for weeks and weeks it would seem that by issuing corrected graphs and figures Lott is at last sort of conceding that he made the errors. Of course, he also needs to correct the text that refers to the incorrect tables. For example, commenting on Table 3a:
Table 3a provides the exact results and significance levels behind these specifications, and reports the robust standard errors that adjust for clustering at the state level. The spline and the hybrid models indicate positive, but statistically insignificant, trends in violent crime rates prior to the right-to-carry law. After the law has been passed, however, violent crime rates decline. The change in trends is statistically significant at least at the ten-percent level for all individual violent crime categories for the spline estimates, implying that murder, rape, and robbery fall by over two percent per year during each additional year that right-to-carry laws are in effect.
When will Lott produce a corrected version?