John Lott Defends against Critics Claims, 2015

 A response that shows that John Lott's critics refuse to examine his defenses.

Recently Evan DeFilippis and Devin Hughes claimed that defensive gun use was a myth.  Gary Kleck wrote a response where he noted that these authors were merely repeating earlier criticisms and ignored the responses that he and others have made to those critiques.

Well, DeFilippis and Hughes use the same approach in discussing my research (a screen shot of their original post is saved here).  Let's try to go through these points in order that they are presented:

-- Tim Lambert as a source.  Professor Jim Purtilo at the University of Maryland put up a post in 2004 that he has updated over the years that shows that Lambert has been caught falsifying evidence on multiple occasions and has otherwise been dishonest.  See:

• Tim Lambert types are the reason nobody can trust WP presentations
• History of namecalling in WP talk sections
• Detailed history of edits on WP's Lott page
• Other points

-- Cherry picking surveys on gun ownership.

In an audacious display of cherry-picking, Lott argues that there were “more guns” between 1977 to 1992 by choosing to examine two seemingly arbitrary surveys on gun ownership, and then sloppily applying a formula he devised to correct for survey limitations. Since 1959, however, there have been at least 86 surveys examining gun ownership, and none of them show any clear trend establishing a rise in gun ownership. Differences between surveys appear to be dependent almost entirely on sampling errors, question wordings, and people’s willingness to answer questions honestly.

My paper with Mustard as well as my book looked at all the crime data available when those pieces were written and I updated that data with each successive updated edition of my book.  

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