Lott letter in The Columbus Dispatch

Lott has a letter in the 26 July Columbus Dispatch replying to an earlier letter from Paul van Doorn. Lott repeats his claim from his 21 July letter:

Yet, in the very same issue, another paper appeared by professors Plassmann and Whitley, who examined three additional years' worth of data and found "annual reductions in murder rates between 1.5 and 2.3 percent for each additional year that a right-to-carry law is in effect. The total benefit from reduced crimes usually ranges between about $2 billion and $3 billion per year."

Once more he pretends that he never miscoded his data.

Another example of the same sort of behaviour occurs later in his letter:

[van Doorn] was wrong that I attributed my survey work to other researchers.

So, Lott insists that he isn't attributing the 98% number to the Los Angeles Times, Gallup, Roper, and Peter Hart here:

"There are surveys that have been done by the Los Angeles Times, Gallup, Roper, Peter Hart, about 15 national survey organizations in total that range from anything from 760,000 times a year to 3.6 million times a year people use guns defensively. About 98 percent of those simply involve people brandishing a gun and not using them." (cite)

And he's not attributing the 98% to "national surveys" here:

"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." (cite)

and he isn't attributing the 98% number to the Los Angeles Times, Gallup, and Peter Hart polls here:

"Polls by the Los Angeles Times, Gallup and Peter Hart Associates show that there are at least 760,000, and possibly as many as 3.6 million, defensive uses of guns per year. In 98 percent of the cases, such polls show, people simply brandish the weapon to stop an attack." (cite)

And he isn't attributing the 98% number to the Los Angeles Times, Gallup and Kleck polls here:

"There have been sixteen national surveys, everything from the Los Angeles Times, to Gallup, Gary Kleck from Florida State University, which show that over two million times a year people use guns defensively. The vast majority of times (98%) they merely have to brandish a gun and that is sufficient to cause the criminal to break off the attack." (cite)
Tags

More like this

Howard Nemerov has a post defending Lott and responding to Chris Mooney's Mother Jones article. Unfortunately, he gets his facts wrong, leaves out inconvenient facts and indulges in fallacious arguments. I'll go through his post and correct these, but first some general comments. Even…
Lott's 6/13/03 entry on his blog links to a letter from David Mayer printed in the Columbus Dispatch replying to a letter from Donohue. Mayer asserts: The recent letter by Stanford law professor John Donohue (June 7) nicely illustrates the propensity of gun-control advocates to play…
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…
Last December I examined a posting by John Ray who dismissed ozone depletion as a "Greenie scare" using facts he seemed to have just made up by himself. Now he's back, attacking gun control. This time he's not using facts that he made up---he's using facts that Lott made up. He quotes…