Date: Wed, 4 Sep 1996 17:43:50 -0400 (EDT)
From: [g--y] at [rsvl.unisys.com]
To: Multiple recipients of list <[n--b--n] at [mainstream.net]>
Subject: Lott defense, Chicago Tribune (fwd)

Useful in showing the integrity of our side and the lack of integrity on the
other side:

As per the Chicago Tribune, under fair use

Aug 15th
Stephen Chapman.   
Chicago Tribune

TAKING AIM A GUN STUDY AND A CONSPIRACY THEORY   

   Some years ago, shortly after being hired by the Tribune, I was asked to
do an article for an obscure national magazine arguing the case against
federal funding of public broadcasting. After it appeared, though, the
magazine's editors got a letter from a reader exposing something shocking:
The Tribune's parent company owned several commercial TV stations, and it
stood to make more money if public broadcasting were to disappear. His
conclusion was that I could only be doing the bidding of my corporate
masters.

   Damning? Well, not quite. What the letter writer didn't know is that I had
written a similar article long before coming to the Tribune, while working
for a magazine that had no broadcast investments, that I hadn't discussed the
article with anyone at the Tribune and that the newspaper itself, in blind
disregard of its own interests, had editorialized consistently in favor of
public broadcasting subsidies.

   Conspiracy theories are easy to spin and hard to refute. But absent
serious evidence, they are simply the idle conjectures of overheated minds.
Showing a coincidence is not the same as proving a cause. What may look
incriminating to the uninformed may in fact be perfectly irrelevant. Consider
the case of John Lott.

   Lott is an economist at the University of Chicago Law School who last week
presented a paper in Washington based on his examination of crime rates in
states that have passed laws granting ordinary people licenses to carry
concealed handguns. The first comprehensive study of the subject, scheduled
for publication in the prestigious Journal of Legal Studies, it reached a
conclusion that did not ingratiate Lott to gun-control advocates.

   The new laws, the study found, actually reduced the volume of blood
running in the streets--not increased it, as feared by opponents. Lott and
his co-author, graduate student David Mustard, calculated that if other
states had also adopted such measures, there would have been 1,570 fewer
murders, 4,177 fewer rapes and 60,000 fewer aggravated assaults in the United
States each year.

   Like any academic monograph, this one was open to expert criticism based
on the data used, the assumptions made, the variables considered and so on.
But to Lott's surprise, the main line of attack was on something else: his
scholarly integrity. According to critics, he was nothing more than a venal
hireling of the gun industry, paid to prove its official line.

   The argument, made at a Chicago press conference sponsored by several
gun-control groups, goes like this: Lott is currently the John M. Olin Fellow
at the University of Chicago Law School. Olin fellows are funded by the John
M. Olin Foundation, which got its money from the Olin Corp., which owns
Winchester Ammunition, which has a stake in lax gun laws.

   "That's enough to call into question the study's legitimacy," said Dan
Kotowski, executive director of the Illinois Council Against Handgun
Violence. "It's more than a coincidence." In the stories that followed,
several news organizations highlighted the connection.

   But there are some serious defects in this conspiracy theory. The first is
in the facts. The Olin Foundation was created with money not from the Olin
Corp. but from the personal fortune of John M. Olin upon his death. The
foundation has no parent corporation and, in fact, is entirely independent.
To suggest that it is merely an arm of the gun industry is like regarding the
Ford Foundation as a puppet of American carmakers.

   Another problem is that the foundation didn't 1) choose Lott as a fellow,
2) give him money or 3) approve his topic. It made a grant to the law
school's law and economics program (one of many grants it makes to top
universities around the country). A committee at the law school then awarded
the fellowship to Lott, one of many applicants in a highly competitive
process.

   Even the committee had nothing to do with his choice of topics. The
fellowship was to allow Lott--a prolific scholar who has published some 75
academic articles--to do research on whatever subject he chose.

   His critics prefer not to think he may have actually reached his
conclusion through honest investigation. Instead, they clutch at a wild
hypothesis.

   To accept their conspiracy theory, you have to believe the following: A
company that derives a small share of its earnings from sporting ammunition
somehow prevailed on an independent family foundation to funnel money to a
scholar who was willing to risk his academic reputation (and, since he does
not yet have tenure, his future employment) by fudging data to serve the
interests of the firearms lobby--and one of the premier research universities
in the world cooperated in the fraud.

   For some people, that absurd fantasy is perfectly credible. But then, some
people could believe that Lott was on the grassy knoll in Dallas.

Mack

**********************************************************************************
   A well educated Electorate, being necessary to the security of a free State, 
       the right of the people to keep and read books, shall not be infringed.              
**********************************************************************************
 "This universe will never be completely good as long as one being isunhappy,
      or as long as one poor cockroach suffers the pangs of unrequited love."
 -  William James
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[g--y] at [visi.com], a former Winternet customer
Democrats want to saw an inch off my right leg.  Republicans want to saw
an inch off my left leg.  I don't want to get cut on--especially by quacks--
so I'm voting Libertarian.  A pox on both their houses!