Tim Lambert
tlambert
Posts by this author
I've been nominated for another blog award. This one is for Best NSW Blog. I don't you should take such awards too seriously, but they do provide a way to find interesting blogs to read, so check them out.
Lott has a post (scroll to 1/10/04 entry on his blog) on the meaningless poll that discussed earlier. Lott's headline is:
A BBC Poll Shows that Most British Want a Law authorizing homeowners to use any means to defend their home from intruders
Of course, as I explained earlier phone-in…
Michael Peckham has an interesting post looking at Bellesiles and Lott and how they relate to other research frauds. He thinks that they might serve as examples that deter others from research fraud.
R2 values using county-level 1977-2000 (Corresponds to Lott's corrected Table 3a)
Violent Crime
Murder
Rape
Aggrvtd Assault
Rbbry
Prprty Crimes
Auto Theft
Brglry
Lrcny
R2 without any shall-issue variable
0.86
0.81
0.76
0.80
0.91
0.81
0.84
0.81
0.80
R2 (Single dummy variable model)…
In a post on his blog Keith Burgess-Jackson wrote:
First, studies by law professor John Lott and others show that private gun-ownership reduces crime rates. This may be counterintuitive, but it's true. There would be more crime than there is if guns were banned.
In an attempt…
Brad DeLong quotes the Economist on "rabidly anti-gun" Steve Levitt:
If you browse through the working papers circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research (at www.nber.org) you will find that in 2003 alone Mr Levitt wrote or co-wrote seven. His topics included the effect of…
I'm one of the nominations for best single issue blog over at Wampum's Koufax weblog awards. Google tells me that Koufax is left-arm pitcher, so translating it to cricket that's the equivalent of a Wasim Akram award. (Sorry, I was at the SCG yesterday to farewell Steve…
Site Meter says that I have now had 100,000 visits to this blog in just under a year. My thanks to everyone who has dropped by. It's gratifying to see such interest in my writings.
Last month I detailed how Lott posted at least six and probably ten five-star reviews of his books to Amazon.com. Well, it may be that Lott isn't the only conservative author who does this. Someone posting as "A reader from New York, NY" (which is where Coulter lives), has posted…
Glenn Reynolds links approvingly to a post by Thomas Lifson on the results of a BBC phone-in and email poll that allowed people to propose a new law that they would like to see passed. The winning proposal was a law that would allow home-owners to use any means to defend their home…
Will Baude has asked Julian Sanchez 20 questions, including a couple about Lott. When asked if Lott is a liar or not, he wrote:
That depends on whether you count as a liar someone who's convinced himself that he's telling the truth: I think he may have. I guess there's no rock solid…
The New York Post has an article that claims that Baghdad has a lower murder rate than New York. The source, of course, is John Lott. Lott advances the numbers released by the 1st Infantry Division and deliberately conceals the contradictory data from the Baghdad morgue that shows…
Earlier I commented on Lott's op-ed where claimed that Albuquerque and O'Hanlon got the Baghdad murder rate wrong. In an update on his blog, Lott writes:
Update: Michael O'Hanlon, a co-author of one of the articles that I commented on in my Investors' Business Daily piece, was…
On his blog, John Ray makes a remarkable claim: "Greenies" are wrong about ozone depletion. He writes:
In 1991, the Greenies got everyone to ban CFC chemicals. CFCs were the normal gases that has always been used to make refrigerators and air conditioners work. CFCs even used…
The last time I looked at the reviews of More Guns, Less Crime at Amazon.com I noted how, after a negative review was posted, Lott would post a five-star review to push the negative review off the front page. On December 11, someone posted a negative review of More Guns,…
Say Uncle writes:
Lott's credibility issues have essentially damaged any real positive impact his research may have had on the gun debate. It's a pity Lott and I are on the same side.
He's not as bad as Bellesiles (who Tim is hard on as well) but when comparing fraud with sloppiness…
A new edition of Arming America has just been drafted and Michael Bellesiles has written a response to his critics, excerpted at HNN. I read it, and do not find it even slightly persuasive. It sort of reminds me of some of Lott's defences. Anyway, HNN has comments from James…
Last time I commented on Lott's claims about the Baghdad murder rate, I noted his pathological refusal to admit that he was wrong about the rate. Even though dozens of newspapers have reported that there are hundreds of murders each month in Baghdad (see the table with some of…
Ken Miles links to my posts on Lott's anonymous reviews and writes:
Tim Lambert has destroyed any possible remnants of John Lott's credibility.
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…
Kevin Drum links to the latest installments in my exposure of Lott's sock puppetry and generously nominates me for Best Single Issue Blog in the Koufax awards. In a clarification of the rules, John Lott's blog was ruled ineligible for "Best Group Blog" because "A group…
Some commentators have not been persuaded that the reviews by "A reader from Swarthmore, PA USA" were really by Lott. Fine. I rummaged around in Google's cache and found older versions of the reviews of the books by Kevin Hassett, Robert Ehrlich and Cook and Ludwig. In those versions the…
Links from Chris Mooney, Atrios and Buzzflash. Ted Barlow wonders what John Lott has to do to get fired from the AEI. "Sadly, No!" helpfully suggests that with two more personalities Lott can start a boy band. John Quiggin asks "why so few individual conservatives and libertarians…
These are extracts from stories about homicides in England found by searching Factiva for "self-defence and (burglar or robber)".
No Charge Over Death Of Burglar.
By Duncan Campbell Crime Correspondent. 23 January 1996 The Guardian
A businessman will not be prosecuted over the…
Congratulations to John Lott for making number 16 on Jesse Taylor's list of the Twenty Most Annoying Conservatives of 2003. Well done!
Mark Kleiman has some apposite words from Master K'ung for Lott, while Chris Mooney calls me a "super sleuth". I'm just in it for the scooby snacks.
Bob Somerby nails Bernard Goldberg's repetition of Lott's false claim that the media deliberately concealed defensive gun use in the shootings at the Appalachian School of Law.
In my previous entry on the Baghdad murder rate I noted that pretty well every paper that had reported the Baghdad murder rate had given a vastly higher figure than Lott's number and the only paper out of step was the Wall Street Journal. So, in Lott's 11/19/03 entry on his…
I was reading the normally sensible Steve Bainbridge when I came across this post that seems to have come from the planet Zebulon in the galaxy Warblogger. Bainbridge offers his interpretation of an intelligence memo in parallel with Kevin Drum's. I was struck by the complete…
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…