survey

[On Sep 27 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof and emailed it to Lott.] Peter Boucher, replying to this post, writes: I don't have a copy of Point Blank handy, but I seem to recall the 98% figure either explicitly in the text of that book, or directly derivable from the figures in the book. Yes, as I noted at the beginning of the discussion, the 98% figure could have come from a misreading of "Point Blank". However, the problem with this theory is that Lott has specifically denied it. He says that the figure comes from his survey. It also seems far too much of a…
[On Sep 25 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof. I also emailed it to John Lott. ] I have replies to queries about Lott's survey from Tom Smith and Al Alschuler. Neither had heard anything about it. Other than Kleck, Tom Smith would be the logical person to discuss the survey design with---Lott acknowledges his assistance on other survey-related questions in MGLC. He'd also be a good source to obtain a CD of phone numbers from, but apparently Lott obtained this elsewhere. Alschuler is in the U of Chicago Law School and wrote a reply to the paper where Lott first made…
[On Sep 20 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof and emailed it to Lott.] James Lindgren writes: After my post to this list saying that "a big national study doesn't just disappear without a trace" because a computer crashes, John Lott called me and told me a long story about how the study was done (which I don't choose to share just yet, if ever; Lott can speak for himself on his methods, if he wishes).  He didn't ask me to do anything about it, and I wasn't planning on posting anytime soon, but given the recent posts I thought I would. Whether the study should be given credence is a…
[On Sep 18 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof and emailed it to Lott.] Some more information about DGU surveying from a Kleck email: "We got 4,977 completions over 3 months, using an average of about 10 callers per day (and I believe all of them were FSU students)" Also, look at the acknowledgments of Kleck and Gertz's paper: "The authors wish to thank David Bordua, Gary Mauser, Seymour Sudman, and James Wright for their help in designing the survey instrument. The authors also wish to thank the highly skilled staff responsible for the interviewing: Michael Trapp (…
[On Sep 17 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof.] I've had replies to my queries about Lott's survey from David Mustard and Gary Kleck. Mustard said that he was not involved with the survey. All he was able to say was what he had been told by Lott: that Lott had conducted the survey in 1997 and lost the results in a computer crash. Kleck felt that Lott's survey should be ignored unless and until Lott publishes the results and methodology. This would be reasonable except for the fact of the 25+ occasions that Lott has made the "98% merely brandishing" claim. Nothing from Lott.
[On Sep 15 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof.] In response to my appeal for any information about this survey Lott claims to have carried out in 1997 I received this email from Geoffrey Huck. Unfortunately, as you can see, he was not able to provide any support for the existence of the survey, so I repeat my appeal: it seems increasingly likely that the survey is fictional---I seek evidence to the contrary. From: Geoffrey Huck I was John Lott's editor at the University of Chicago Press for his book, More Guns, Less Crime, published originally in 1998 and then in a second edition in…
[On Sep 14 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof. I also emailed it to John Lott. ] Way back in 1993 in talk.politics.guns, C. D. Tavares wrote: The answer is that the gun never needs to be fired in 98% of the instances of a successful self-defense with a gun. The criminals just leave abruptly, instead." When I queried him about this, he quickly corrected his error: Kleck says in the magazine "Social Problems" (2/88): "there were about 8,700-16,600 non-fatal, legally permissible woundings of criminals by gun armed civilians" annually, and "the rest of the one million estimated…