MORE GUNS, LESS CRIME?

This legal decision (Lott v. Levitt) tells us the tide is truly turning. I'll explain why below, but first some background ...

If you’ve ever wondered why this country was going to Hell in a Handbasket under President Bush and his Order of the Inept we need look no further than the methods and evidence conservative "researchers" use versus what real researchers use to make their case.

Among the conservative "researchers" pushing an agenda was John Lott, who argued in More Guns, Less Crime that if more Americans carried guns there would be less crime in the streets. Hmmm, sounds intriguing. Maybe we should all start packing.

But what does the evidence say? The LA Times wrote this almost three years ago:

COULD IT BE that more guns cause less crime? Could it be that criminals who suspect their potential victims are armed would be deterred from committing crimes? That's what John R. Lott Jr. argued in his 1998 book, "More Guns, Less Crime." … If you Google "John Lott" and "research fraud," you get nearly 150 results, starting off with a 2003 article published in Science magazine by Donald Kennedy, the editor in chief, which criticizes Lott's "cooked data." …

The charges that some of Lott's research was "faked" or "cooked" refer to the first statistic cited in "More Guns, Less Crime," in which Lott says "98% of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack." In Op-Ed articles in the Chicago Tribune and elsewhere, he said the source of the 98% figure was "polls by the Los Angeles Times" and other organizations. When critics noted that no such polls existed, Lott changed his story, and the second edition of "More Guns, Less Crime" gave a new source for the 98% figure: "a national survey I conducted." But when critics asked to see the data, Lott told the Washington Post and others that he had lost it all in a computer crash.

Imagine that. Inventing information to fit a preconceived conclusion. Now where has this happened before? Hmmmm.

But wait, the LA Times article gets better. According to the LA Times Lott couldn’t even provide evidence of the "false" surveys that he later claimed to have conducted after his initial "data" was proven to be non-existent. He couldn't produce phone records, tally sheets, pay stubs for employees who made the calls, etc. Ouch.

Why is all of this important? Because John Lott sued the author of Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt, because of his suggestion in Freakonomics that John Lott's conclusions couldn't be replicated (because it was all made up). Guess what happened? Drum roll please ...

For the second time, John Lott has had his case thrown out of court. Finally, we are moving back into a world where the truth and facts matter. No more putting ideology above the facts.

Next up, Intelligent Design.

- Mark