Jim Lindgren has two posts about John Lott. First, on Lott’s lawsuit against Levitt he concludes: I think that Freakonomics is misleading in its juxtaposition of different studies, a juxtaposition that might bring one to conclude that the reason that the main More Guns, Less Crime research was not usually replicated in other studies is…

Stephen Dubner reports that Freakonomics is the 7th best-selling book for 2005. According to Nielsen BookScan, it is has sold 584,000 copies so far this year. Freakonomics discusses the survey that Lott claims to have conducted in 1997, but that he appears to have fabricated. Lott says that eight Chicago university students made the phone…

Under the title “Academics drag feet on giving out data” Lott quotes extensively from an article about the hockey stick by Steve Milloy. One part Lott doesn’t quote is this: Well, a scientist’s refusal to provide colleagues with his data and methodology is suspicious. Now, Milloy is being deceitful by implying that Mann, Bradley and…

When people raise questions about the mysterious 1997 survey, Lott’s standard line of defence is: “the survey was replicated, and I obtained very similar results.” So how similar are the results? Well, Lott claims that the 2002 survey gave a 95% brandishing number, quite close to the 98% he claims he found in 1997. However,…

In an email to a poster at The High Road forum Lott writes “The actual data has been available on one of my websites at www.johnlott.org since February 2003. The Appendix of my book, The Bias Against Guns, goes through and discusses the data in depth. I talk about how the survey was done, the…

It has now been two years since I asked him for evidence that he had conducted a survey. The original email is here. In all that time, the only evidence for a survey that he has been able to come up with is David Gross’s story.

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 from a review…

In April 2000, Lott published an article in Economic Inquiry entitled “Does a Helping Hand Put Others at Risk?: Affirmative Action, Police Departments, and Crime” (subscription required). This is what he had to say about women police and their need to shoot: “If criminals believe that they have a greater chance of resisting arrest when…

Lott is at it again. In a Tech Central Station column he claims: Over 90 percent of the time simply brandishing the weapon stops an attack. I suppose we should be glad that rather than his 98% estimate based on a fictional survey, or his 95% estimate based on a survey that gives a different…