Date: Sun, 17 Nov 1996 23:05:02 -0500 (EST)
From: [E--rS--r] at [aol.com]
To: Multiple recipients of list <[n--b--n] at [mainstream.net]>
Subject: Lott's defense against Teret's attack

Stephen Teret JD MPH of the Johns Hopkins Violence Research Group is one of
the few high-level strategists in the gun prohibition movement that has
anything resembling a pleasant personality and the only such high-level
strategists that can actually hold a conversation without foaming at the
mouth.  Oddly at variance with his personality, Teret has authored or
co-authored some of the most egregious distortions of fact on the subject -
to wit, his piece co-authored with Jon Vernick on the 2nd Amendment.
 Recently Teret authored an attack on the Lott & Mustard article.  It appears
that the prohibitionists recognize that the Lott & Mustard research on
concealed carry, like Kleck & Gertz' research on the protective benefits of
guns and Kates et al's decimation of the medical literature on guns, will
frame the public policy debate on guns for at least the coming decade.
 Kellermann, Rivarra, Loftin, McDowall, Wiersema and the CDC's other
poster-boy prohibitionist "researchers" have been discredited to Congress ---
where it matters, from where the funding comes.   Establishment media still
fawns over these discredited researchers, but to little avail.  Despite the
enormous weight of propaganda that the establishment media and the
deep-pocket prohibitionist foundations (e.g. California Wellness Foundation,
Joyce Foudation, etc.) have applied, Right to Carry reform continues.
 Obviously, the public - as even the media's  own polls show - and state
legislatures have rejected the propaganda.

Truly fearing the devasting impact that Lott & Mustard's meticulous research
will have on the prohibitionist cause,  Teret and others are doing all they
can to discredit Lott & Mustard's study.  Teret has been circulating an
eroneous critique of Lott & Mustard's article.  Here is a brief defense from
a private list for your review so that you will be able to counter the lies
and distortions against the media's attack on Lott & Mustard.

****


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                      Subject:                              Time:  12:54 AM
  OFFICE MEMO         Response to Peter K. Boucher          Date:  9/4/96

Anyone (Polsby?  Lambert?) care to address these "flaws" in Lott 
and Mustard's CCW study?

1. Lott and Mustard (L&M) do not take into account rates of arrest or
convictions in their samples. (i.e., if arrest rates and conviction
rates were going up before the scope of the study, then through the
theory that the best deterrence is certainly of punishment, a theory I
think we all agree on, violent crime rates may have gone down anyway.)

This is a strange comment.  We do control for arrest rates in all the
regressions (something no other gun control study has done), and when data is
available on the conviction rates we also control for that.

The general changes in crime rates is not a problem for our paper since we
control for individual year dummies which take out any year-to-year changes
that are occurring in crime rates.

2. In addition to arrest and conviction rates, L&M don't take into
account other factors that might account for rising or falling crime
rates. Were more cops put on the streets? A new anti-drug initiative
that may have worked? Community policing? Their samples are so
widespread that it would be impossible to draw any conclusions without
ensuring that each area shares the same characteristics, something they
did not do in much detail.

We also control for police employment and payroll.  We control for changes in
several different types of gun laws.  If you can think of some other law that
just happened to change in all these different states in the different years
that they adopted the "shall issue" law, I would be most interested in
hearing what it is.  We tried circulating the paper to gun control advocates
before we released it, but out of all the people that we sent it to only one
gave us more than the most prefunctary comments.  Anything that was brought
up to us we controlled for.

3. They admit outright that demographic trends have changed, but refuse
to admit that it might affect their study. They acknowledge that the
population percentage of black males aged 10-19 has gone down
significantly. If this segment of the population was responsible for a
disproportionate amount of murders, then the proportion of murders would
change significantly...

We control for the % of the population that is black males between 10 and 19,
the % of the population that are black males between 20 and 29, the % of the
population that are black males between 30 and 39, the % of the population
that are black males between 40 and 49, the % of the population that are
black males between 50 and 64, the % of the population that are black males
over 65, and the same break downs for white males, black females, white
females, other males, and other females.  No study of crime has had as
detailed a breakdown of demographic changes as this study.

4. (Taken right from their study):
"Using county level data has some drawbacks. Frequently, because of the
low crime rates in many low population counties, it is quite common to
find huge variations in the arrest and conviction rates between years."

Their solution is "to limit the sample to only counties with large
populations. For counties with a large numbers of crimes, these waves
have a significantly smoother flow of arrests and convictions relative
to offense," but this again ignores the 3 points I raised above.

They say that "an alternative solution is to take a moving average of
the arrest or conviction rates over several years," but then go on to
say that this "reduces the length of the usable sample period, depending
upon how many years are used to compute this average. Furthermore, the
moving average solution does nothing to alleviate the effect of multiple
suspects being arrested for a single crime."

Apparently you think that everyone who works in this area is an advocate for
a particular position.  We were not.  We attempted to openly point out both
the strengths and weaknesses of the data that we used.  I would also point
out that we used both state level and county level data and obtained fairly
similar results with respect to the "shall issue" variable for violent crime.

5. (Also straight from their study):
"The only real effect from making concealed handguns legal could arise
from people being more willing to use handguns to defend themselves,
though this might also imply that they more likely to make mistakes
using these handguns."

Thus, they admit there is a possibility that accidental deaths will
increase under right-to-carry laws.


When one does hypothesis testing, assuming one is objective, one should, to
the best of their ability, clearly state the strongest hypotheses that exist
on either side of a debate.  The point is then to test these hypotheses.  We
did that and the evidence rejects the hypothesis advanced in point 5.