More Guns Less Crime by John Jr (best free e book reader .txt) 📕

Nor did they even classify states consistently across their own press releases issued within months of each other. 65

During the Missouri campaign, many reporters called me up to comment about the "FBI numbers" on crime rates. 66 When I would point out that the claim was actually based on a report produced by Handgun Control, they said that they didn't know what to do with the conflicting claims. Editorials and news stories in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Kansas City Star normally just accepted the Handgun Control assertion as established truth.

After repeatedly encountering this response from reporters, I started suggesting to reporters that they ask some local academic (a statistician, criminologist, or economist) to evaluate the two conflicting claims. One reporter with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Kim Bell, expressed the concern that they might run into a professor with a preconceived bias and that would make the test unfair. I told her that I was willing to take that risk, but that if she were concerned about that problem, she could always approach a few different academics. Others who refused to take me up on this challenge included Bill Freivogel, deputy editor at the Post-Dispatch, and Rich Hood, an editor at the Kansas City Star. Rather, their newspapers simply presented Handgun Control's claims as fact.

Criticisms of the Book

Some reviewers clearly have not even bothered to read my book, or at least it didn't matter to them whether they read it. A review in the British Journal of Criminology claimed that "there is nothing in Lott's study to con-

nect this more general information to the specific county-based data on the issuing of concealed-carry permits," "Lott is dealing with a time frame entirely prior to the introduction of the non-discretionary concealed-carry laws in most of the states which now have them," and "he has preoccupied himself exclusively with 'good guns' owned by 'good people.'" 67 Another book review, in the New England Journal of Medicine, starts off by falsely claiming that I "approvingly" quote Archie Bunker's suggestion to stop airplane hijacking by arming "all the passengers." 68

As of this writing (September 1999), Handgun Control's Web site still continues to assert the same "major criticisms" of my research—"where are the robbery effects?" "auto theft as a substitute for rape," "Lott fails to account for other initiatives—including other gun control laws," "Lott fails to account for cyclical changes in crime rates"—and the same claims about misclassifying state laws. 69 Ironically, they also continue citing the McDowall et. al. (1995) study that we discussed in chapter 2, which examined a total of only five counties picked from three states, attempted to account for no other factors that might be changing over the same period of time, and examined only murders with guns. 70

Time magazine reported that "Other critics raise questions about whether Lott massaged the numbers. One arcane quarrel: for statistical purposes, Lott dropped from his study sample any counties that had no reported murders or assaults for a given year." 71 It also said that "the book does not account for fluctuating factors like poverty levels and policing techniques." After the story on my book ran, I called up the reporter, Romesh Ratnesar, and said that I knew that he had read the book carefully, so I was surprised that he would write these claims as if they were true. I, as well as critics like Black and Nagin, had looked at the evidence once arrest rates were excluded so as to include those counties with zero arrest rates. What was particularly disappointing was that I had spent the time to obtain all the data that were available. The county-level data were used for all the years and for all the counties for which they were available, both when I did the original paper and when I wrote the book. As to the other claim, I had measures of poverty and policing techniques like the broken-window strategy included.

While I appreciated that the Time magazine piece was published, claims that "the book does not account" for these factors are clearly wrong. Ratnesar agreed that these issues were dealt with in the book, but that his role was not to serve as a "referee" between the two sides. His job was to report what the claims were. 72

I keep on being amazed at the absolute faith that so many news media people place in the gun-control organizations and the "facts" issued by them. Take another example: Molly Ivins, a syndicated columnist, as-

serted that "[Lott] himself admits, he didn't look at any other causative factors—no other variables, as they say." 73 She also argued that "Lott's study supposedly showed that when 10 Western states passed 'right-to-carry' laws between 1985 and 1992, they had less violent crime" and that "according to the author's research, getting rid of black women older than 40 would do more to stop murder than anything else we could try." Syndicated columnist Tom Teepen wrote a very similar column a year earlier in which he also claimed that this book "failed to consider other anti-crime variables in making its cause-and-effect claims, a fundamental gaffe." 74

I did get a chance to talk with Mr. Teepen, and he told me that he wrote his review without even reading the book. He apparently relied on conversations that he had with people at Handgun Control and the Violence Policy Center. When I talked to Cynthia Tucker, an editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where Mr. Teepen is based, about having a letter responding to the charges Mr. Teepen made, she found it "unbelievable" that he would have written the review without first looking at the book. She grudgingly said that if it were true, they would publish as a response a short letter, but that she would have to check into it first. Needless to say,