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Thursday, March 13, 2003
Where should I send the thank you card?
If I can get the address of her coven, I intend on sending Ann Coulter a thank you card. Why? Because she makes it soooooooo easy. How easy?
This easy:
Since new competitive media have forced liberals to confront opposing points of view, they seem to have abandoned emotionalism as their main argument. Their new posture is mock hardheaded realism. Liberals flex their spindly little muscles and announce that everything that used to make them cry – guns, racial profiling, torturing suspects – simply doesn't work: The fact is, it doesn't work, this is according to several studies, and no, you can't see them, why would you ask?
Quick recap: liberals attempt to defend their side of issues with non-existent studies. (You can see where this going, can't you?). Then Little Annie Footnote writes (with my emphasis):
Thus, for example, after decades of womanly hysteria about guns, we started getting statements like this from Fox News Channel's Alan Colmes to Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America: "Let's talk about some hard and cold facts, Larry. The fact of the matter is, Larry, that the odds that a home will be the scene of a homicide are much greater if there's a gun in the home." Soccer moms across America shot up straight at that one and said: I did not know that!
As the inestimable economist John Lott has shown, the study behind this flagrantly dishonest "cold hard fact" assumed that anyone killed by a gun in or near a home where anyone owned a gun was, therefore, killed by "a gun in the home." The study merely attests to the fact that people who live in high-crime neighborhoods tend to own guns. This is like the joke about diets causing people to be fat because most people on diets are fat. Or, as Lott says, on that theory of causation, hospitals must cause people to die because lots of people who die have been hospitalized recently. (Lott exposes dozens of such phony "studies" and shibboleths about guns in his splendid new book, "The Bias Against Guns.")
John Lott. This John Lott:
What is it about statistics and guns? Last year, Michael Bellesiles, a historian at Emory College, came under criticism for his Bancroft Prize-winning book, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, which argued that gun ownership was far less common during the 18th and 19th century than is generally supposed. His analysis, which was obviously pleasing to proponents of gun control, was drawn from probate records. But Bellesiles was unable to produce all of his data, owing, he said, to a flood in his office. After a committee of three scholars examined Bellesiles' research, they concluded that "his scholarly integrity is seriously in question." Bellesiles resigned from Emory in disgrace.
Now one of Bellesiles' principal critics, a Northwestern law professor named James Lindgren, has turned his skeptical attention to a scholar who is Bellesiles' ideological opposite: John R. Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime. Once again, the issue is the disappearance of supporting data.
Lott's More Guns, Less Crime is the bible of the national movement to persuade state legislatures to pass so-called "concealed carry" laws, which permit citizens to carry concealed firearms. The book's thesis is that populations with greater access to firearms are better able to deter crime. Some scholars have quarreled with Lott's interpretation, but this controversy is about underlying data. Lindgren and others want to know where Lott got the evidence to support the following sentence, which appears on Page 3 of Lott's book: "98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack."
Initially, Lott sourced the 98 percent figure to "national surveys." That's how the first edition of More Guns, Less Crime put it. In an August 1998 op-ed for the Chicago Tribune, Lott appeared to cite three specific surveys:
Polls by the Los Angeles Times, Gallup and Peter Hart Research Associates show that there are at least 760,000, and possibly as many as 3.6 million, defensive uses of guns per year. In 98 percent of the cases, such polls show, people simply brandish the weapon to stop an attack.
But polls by the Los Angeles Times, Gallup, and Peter Hart show no such thing.
Alternatively, Lott would sometimes attribute the 98 percent figure to Gary Kleck, a criminologist at Florida State University. In a February 2000 op-ed for Colorado's Independence Institute, Lott wrote: "Kleck's study of defensive gun uses found that ninety-eight percent of the time simply brandishing the weapon is sufficient to stop an attack." But Kleck's research shows no such thing.
Eventually, Lott settled on yet another source for the 98 percent figure: "a national survey that I conducted," as Lott put it in a second edition of More Guns, Less Crime. When asked about the survey, Lott now says it was done by telephone in 1997 and that the data was lost a few months later in a computer crash.
Lott's conflicting explanations naturally attracted suspicion, first from Otis Dudley Duncan, a retired sociologist at the University of California, San Diego, who wrote an article on the matter for the Criminologist, and eventually from Lindgren, the Bellesiles gumshoe, who has been posting his findings online. (Chatterbox is indebted to Tim Lambert, a computer scientist and gun-control advocate at the University of New South Wales, for compiling various documents relating to the Lott case.) When Chatterbox asked Lott about the serial attributions to "national surveys," to three specific polls, and to Kleck, Lott conceded, "A lot of those discussions could have been written more clearly." He said that in the computer crash, he lost all his data for the book and had to reconstruct it, but that he couldn't reconstruct the survey. Lott has been able to produce witnesses who remember him talking about this obviously traumatic event soon after it occurred. But none of these people specifically remember him talking about losing data for a survey he'd conducted. Nor has Lott been able to produce the names of the college students he says conducted the phone surveys in Chicago, where Lott was teaching at the time. (Lott is now at Washington's American Enterprise Institute.)
The only compelling evidence that the 1997 survey ever took place is the testimony of David M. Gross, a Minnesotan who contacted Lott after the controversy spread to various Weblogs. (To date, the only mainstream news organization that's covered the data dispute is the Washington Times, whose Robert Stacy McCain had a piece about the Lott affair on Jan. 23. The Feb. 1 Washington Post examined a bizarre side issue, but we're getting ahead of ourselves.) Gross told Chatterbox, "I have come to the conclusion that I in fact did" participate in the study, "based on some of the details of my recollection." What Gross recalls is that in January 1999—a year before questions were first raised about Lott's data—he attended a talk Lott gave at the Minneapolis Athletic Club. (Gross can pinpoint the date, he says, because he bought a tape.) After Lott's remarks, Gross walked up to Lott and told him he'd figured out, while listening to Lott discuss the 1997 survey, that he, Gross, had participated in that survey. Both the timing and the content, as described by Lott, match what Gross remembers about the survey, which is the only gun poll he recalls ever participating in.
That John Lott.
Nice going Ann. You managed to discredit your own column in a mere 168 words. I don't think even George Will can beat that record.
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