Shyster wrote:Tico Rick wrote:I like your insertion of the word "drastically" there. The link I provided earlier shows that states with stricter gun laws have fewer deaths from gun-related violence.
I see your link and raise you an entire book that says that
higher gun ownership rates lead to
less crime.
http://www.amazon.com/More-Guns-Less-Cr ... 0226493660
Before accepting this book at face value, it's worth examining how he derives these supposed ironclad statistics.
http://mediamatters.org/research/2012/12/17/who-is-gun-advocate-john-lott/191885. Scoff at the website if you will, but everything there is linked to studies including:
PW [Lott's co-authors Florenz Plassmann and John Whitley] seriously miscoded their new county dataset in ways that irretrievably undermine every original regression result that they present in their response. As a result, the new PW regressions must simply be disregarded. Correcting PW's empirical mistakes once again shows that the more guns, less crime hypothesis is without credible statistical support. [Stanford Law Review, accessed 12/3/12 via Deltoid]
In Ayres and Donohue's response to that paper, they found that Lott's data contained numerous coding errors that, when corrected, reversed the results. Furthermore, this was the second time these sorts of errors had been found in Lott's data. Lott had presented to the NAS [National Academy of Science] panel figures showing sharp declines in crime following carry laws. Declines which disappeared when the coding errors were corrected. Finally, when Lott saw Ayres and Donohue's response he had his name removed from the final paper. [Deltoid, 4/25/03]
Lott Attempted To Cover Up Debunking Of "More Guns, Less Crime" Thesis By Changing His Statistical Model. From an October 12, 2003 Mother Jones article describing how Lott reacted to Yale Law School professor Ian Ayres and Stanford Law School professor John Donohue's revelation that fixing coding errors in his research caused Lott's conclusions to be undermined:
And finally, how can I be 100% sure that this isn't Lott himself posting as Shyster considering:
Washington Post: Lott Posted Online Under The Pseudonym "Mary Rosh," Who Called Lott "The Best Professor I Ever Had." For three years, Lott repeatedly posed as an imaginary former student named "Mary Rosh." Rosh "tirelessly defended Lott against his harshest critics" in numerous online debates. From a February 1, 2003 article: