http://timlambert.org/2003/07#0728
Lott has an op-ed in the New York Post where he comments on the recent
NYC City Hall shooting. Lott seems to believe that concealed handguns
would have prevented the shooting. Lott's logic is especially hard to
follow in this case--the victim was actually carrying a concealed
handgun and the killer was shot almost immediately by a police
officer. Having more people with concealed handguns present could not
have prevented this crime, and might have led to more people getting
shot in the general confusion. On the other hand, the policy that Lott
dismisses, requiring everyone to pass through metal detectors, could
have prevented this shooting.
Lott also claims, yet again:
Examining all the multiple-victim public shootings from 1977 to
1999 shows that, on average, states that adopt right-to-carry laws
experience a 60 percent drop in the rate at which the attacks
occur, and a 78 percent drop in the rate at which people are
killed or injured from such attacks.
As usual, Lott fails to mention the results of the study by Duwe et
al, which found no support for the hypothesis that such laws decrease
mass public shootings. (He's only ever mentioned it once, and then to
claim that their study "gets the same results I do".)
Lott continues:
the vast majority of academic research finds that concealed
handguns reduce violent crime generally.
This is not true. The table below shows that there are more works
finding that they don't reduce violent crime. Note also that fully
half of the ones finding that they reduce crime have Lott as an
author, and that Michael Maltz, the only researcher with papers on
both sides of the table has repudiated the paper that found that carry
laws reduced crime. In any case, not all papers should be weighted
equally, and Ayres and Donohue, the most comprehensive paper, found
that carry laws tended to increase violent crime.
[Table is on my blog: 16 papers finding carry laws don't reduce
violent crime, 8 (4 of them with Lott as an author) finding they do.]
Lott also claims:
Despite all the national studies that have been done, there is not
a single refereed academic journal publication concluding the
opposite.
Since Ayres and Donohue's article was published in the Stanford Law
Review, which is not refereed, Lott gets to ignore it. Of course
earlier in his piece, Lott cites his own research on multiple-victim
public shootings which has not been published in a journal, let alone
a refereed one, while ignoring Duwe et al's study which was published
in a refereed journal.
--
Tim
