-- http://timlambert.org/2003/10#1004b
Clayton Cramer tells us that he doesn't believe the criticism of Lott
because his opponents are clearly fierce anti-gun advocates, and
not above a few tricks of their own.You read their work outside of
the statistical area, and it's clear that the are either not very
careful thinkers, or are playing fast and loose.
Earlier, he told me:
I don't know if you actually found Dr. Lott engaged in a lie or
not, but I do know that your irrational desire to see victims
disarmed and murdered by criminals puts you on my list of people
not to bother with anymore.
Cramer doesn't dispute any of the criticism of Lott made by John
Donohue, or by Jim Lindgren, or by myself. Instead, he picks on two
minor points in Donohue's paper "The Final Bullet in the Body of the
More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis". Cramer is trying to argue, not just
that Donohue is wrong on these two small points, but that he is so
wrong that it calls Donohue's entire scholarship on Lott into
question. Cramer faces a heavy burden here--he has to show not that
there is a difference of opinion, or that Donohue made a mistake, but
that no fair-minded person could have made such an error.
On the first point Cramer writes:
Donohue points to the recent example of actor Sean Penn, who has a
California concealed weapon permit (apparently issued in violation
of California law), and how two of his guns were stolen from his
car. While Donohue acknowledges that Penn "succeeded in getting
one of the relatively few gun permits in the non-RTC state of
California," raising this issue as part of a discussion of RTC
laws makes no sense at all.
Cramer appears to have missed the reason why Donohue raised this
issue, even though it was in the same paragraph:
By some estimates 1.5 million guns are stolen every year, which
means that anything that increases gun ownership (and carrying a
la Sean Penn) is likely to put more guns into the hands of
criminals.
On the second point Cramer presents this passage from Donohue's paper:
During the first 5 and one-half years of the Texas RTC law, the
Violence Policy Center was able to identify that 41 permit holders
were arrested for murder or attempted murder (the number would be
too low if the researchers didn't capture every permit holder in
their count or if some permit holders committed murder and didn't
get arrested, and would be too high if some were falsely
accused). The Violence Policy Center, License to Kill IV (June
2002). The current murder rate in the U.S. across all groups is
roughly 5 per 100,000, so if one takes 150,000 as the average
number of permits over the first five year period, one would
expect roughly 7.5 murders per year from gun permit holders (if
they killed at the same rate as the average American today), which
totals 41 murders over the full period.
and proceeds to criticise it because the 41 permit holders arrested
include attempted murders, those who don't end up being convicted,
those who did not use a gun and those who used a gun on their own
property (where a carry permit was not relevant).
Now Cramer's criticism would make sense if Donohue was arguing that
the 41 murders and attempts were somehow enabled by the carry laws,
but that is not the point of the passage. It is actually part of
footnote 18, and footnote 18 is offered in support of this sentence:
But is it clear how concealed handgun laws could increase crime
even if only 1 or 2 percent of the public goes to the trouble of
getting a concealed gun permit and that group seems not to have
unusually high rates of criminal involvement?18
That's right, Donohue is arguing the opposite of what Cramer
implied. It is not relevant whether the alleged criminals used guns or
not if you are looking at how often permit holders commit crimes. Just
as in his complaint about the reference to Sean Penn, Cramer seems to
have just read a sentence or two and not looked at the surrounding
context.
Cramer concludes:
If the claim is that John Lott has violated professional standards
in how he has presented his information, Donohue is in no position
to cast any stones. Using VPC's information, while not discussing
its serious shortcomings, is clearly misleading.
The important claim about Lott is not that he violated professional
standards in how he presented his information (though he did that as
well), but that he violated professional standards in how he conducted
his research. It is professional misconduct to present a result (the
famous 98% brandishing statistic) for which there is no supporting
data. It is professional misconduct to present a result (the new,
improved 95% brandishing statistic) based on a sample size of just
seven. It is professional misconduct to modify your model just so you
can contrive a significant result.
Donohue used the information from the VPC to argue that permit holders
do not have a high level of criminal involvement. Donohue also noted
the limitations of the VPC data when you used for that task. The
shortcomings that Cramer complains about are only shortcomings if the
data was used for another task, something that Donohue did not
do. Cramer's post was clearly misleading, using an out-of-context
quote to imply that Donohue did something that he did not do. Using
Cramer's reasoning he is now no position to throw stones at, say,
Bellesiles.
Postscript: Both Kevin Baker and Greg, while accepting Cramer's claim
to have found errors in Donohue's work, aren't buying Cramer's claim
that this defeats the criticism of Lott.
Tim
