One sign that the Antis are dead wrong in everything they do is their exclusive use of in-house “Studies” and statistics. The one exception is when they cook down various valid studies but ONLY judge the metric of “Gun Death”, and I hope my efforts on the “Gun Death?” files has cleared that little refuge of scoundrels out.
Still I was REALLY amused by this little back-and-forth by Joan Peterson. In her latest post she quotes the Kellerman Study, which anybody who’s been in this game for long enough will know is a HORRIBLE study.
Among many flaws the big ones are: A) it makes zero distinctions between guns used by criminals in the commission of crimes, and counts a gang assassination, the proverbial “Drug Deal Gone Wrong”, A woman shooting a stalker or a violent Ex, and family member killing their kin in error as equal data points as the shooter “knew the victim”.
B) Only counts a “Defensive use of a Gun” if a dead body was produced.
c) Only counts the event if it happens INSIDE the home
And the big D) He has never shown his data sets, nor what calculations he did to develop his conclusion. Just in case that wasn’t fishy enough, he’s changed his results numbers (the how many more “times likely” you are alleged to be if you have a gun in your home) several times without explanation.
Oh and of course he was compensated for his work from the Joyce Foundation.
Now reader Brenton Adams calls her on it to which she responds.
I noticed that you guys haven’t backed off John Lott after he was debunked.
Now I haven’t really boned up on the controversies behind the “More Guns Less Crime” study. I will say I know that Dr. Lott does claim to have lost the original data set in a computer crash, and he was involved in a controversy involving a sockpuppet (something VERY common with the Antis, I may add)
The reason I don’t know much about this is because I hear controversy about Dr. Lott’s work, so I stopped citing it in debates. I’ll add that I’ve met Dr. Lott and I first introduced myself to him as “A Huge Fan!”, but as great as he is, we don’t NEED him. Arthur Kellerman is the ONLY person to produce a study that says that a gun in the home is more dangerous than a home without a gun.
Meanwhile Dr. Lott is NOT the only Dog in town to find that Crime decreases as gun ownership increases, and even at best studies show that gun control is more-or-less irrelevant in factors of crime.
The NRA has conducted a bunch of studies on guns…I ignore them. The NRA is a massive portion of the 2nd Amendment Lobby, weather the study is valid or not, the ethics of using a gun lobby study about guns just brings too much to question.
Still while the antis HAVE raised QUESTIONS about Dr. Lott’s work, they have not proven him wrong. Nowhere do you find any studies that say that as lawful guns increase in an area, violent crime increasing.
Well at least studies not paid to say exactly that.
I think the major “debunking” of Lott has to do with how he controlled for specific variables in his study. They basically point out that correlation isn’t causation and that the trends Lott points out have more to do with things like income than lawful access to arms. His data set also has some weird correlations that people think are squirrelly like 40 something black women being highly correlated to the crime rate.
Their studies mostly state that guns poorly correlate to any sort of crime rate changes. Which is great for them until someone makes the obvious conclusion that reducing gun availability via gun control also doesn’t work. If guns largely don’t matter then individual liberty ought to prevail in the argument.
I KNEW Madea and her ilk were responsible to street crime!
You are correct, whenever there is a doubt, individual Liberty should prevail…but that’s the difference between libertarian-minded people and the Authoritarians whom we labor against.
The conclusion that I’ve drawn by looking at one study after another is that the mere presence and number of guns makes no statistically significant difference in crime rates or in self defense successes. What a shock! That is to say, guns aren’t objects of pure malice with their own will, nor are they magical weapons that will save us from ourselves. A gun is a tool, and every tool requires its owner to learn how to use it.
Lott was correct but he harmed his credibility going forward. Still, he simply did what the anti’s do all the time. The difference is, we have standards.
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