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That isn't data, it is conclusions.

If we don't have the original data, we don't know what kind of statistical analysis has been done, so we can't test the conclusions.

I'm writing a load of fiction. My latest story starts here... This is the index of all the stories...

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 Frazzled wrote:
 Monster Rain wrote:
The purpose of arguing against making schools harder targets than they are currently is what, exactly?


Don't know. Cost? Some sort of Civil Liberties argument. Are there people arguing about that?


It's what I interpret the arguments against arming a percentage of a school faculty, or otherwise making schools less vulnerable, to be.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
 Kilkrazy wrote:
That isn't data, it is conclusions.

If we don't have the original data, we don't know what kind of statistical analysis has been done, so we can't test the conclusions.


Are you qualified to test the conclusions with the raw data in the first place?

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2012/12/18 22:00:44


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 KalashnikovMarine wrote:


No way to accurately suss that out that I can see. Unless you have access to a reliable crystal ball.



Indeed.

Of course one would have to point out then this same flaw kind of throws a wrench into the calculation of avoided muggings, rapes etc etc as well no ? Whilst I'm sure that no doubt some -- maybe even most who knows ? -- of these instances were prevented by a firearm we'll never know how many wouldn't have happened anyway. Or how many were.... hmm... "feared incorrectly" shall we say ?

We are more or less now trying to make claims about crimes that didn't happen or that we don't know about ?! So I think a degree of caution is advisable either way.

England: why do we type everything with "our" instead of "or."


In all honesty it's just so we can consistently and honourably beat you at Scrabble.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2012/12/18 22:05:59


The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all
We love our superheroes because they refuse to give up on us. We can analyze them out of existence, kill them, ban them, mock them, and still they return, patiently reminding us of who we are and what we wish we could be.
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Nice to know that the TSA has prevented 375 airplanes from falling into terrorist hands and becoming missiles
   
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 reds8n wrote:
 KalashnikovMarine wrote:


No way to accurately suss that out that I can see. Unless you have access to a reliable crystal ball.



Indeed.

Of course one would have to point out then this same flaw kind of throws a wrench into the calculation of avoided muggings, rapes etc etc as well no ? Whilst I'm sure that no doubt some -- maybe even most who knows ? -- of these instances were prevented by a firearm we'll never know how many wouldn't have happened anyway. Or how many were.... hmm... "feared incorrectly" shall we say ?

We are more or less now trying to make claims about crimes that didn't happen or that we don't know about ?! So I think a degree of caution is advisable either way.


I'd agree, but the citations above do a pretty good example of explaining where their information's coming from. Mostly surveys on crime victimization for the stats on Defensive Gun Uses. That's why I normally use the "100000 per year" number because it's the lowest number provided instead of the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology's 2 Million+, or the average of fifteen surveys provided by Dr. Gary Kleck in his book.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
That isn't data, it is conclusions.

If we don't have the original data, we don't know what kind of statistical analysis has been done, so we can't test the conclusions.


"I don't like the cited information you've provided me from professional associations, peer reviewed journals, the FBI and people with Doctorates who should hopefully know what they're talking about in their field, so I'm going to dismiss it out of hand"

I beg of you sarge let me lead the charge when the battle lines are drawn
Lemme at least leave a good hoof beat they'll remember loud and long


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Well that's actually the subject of a research book by John Lott "More Guns, Less Crime", it's worth a read.


http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2003_09/002120.php




YES, JOHN LOTT AGAIN....If you are an econometrician — a person who evaluates the real world using complex statistical models — there are two basic ways you can go about your job:


You can do your best to figure out which statistical model does the best job of mirroring the real world, and then plug in your data and see what pops out. We will call this methodology tolerably honest.


You can plug in your data first, and then tweak your model until it provides the results you want. We will call this methodology dishonest bs.


The alert reader has probably guessed that I am talking here about the latest sad chapter in the John Lott saga, and indeed I am. The indefatigable Tim Lambert is on the case, and assuming I have been able to put the timeline together correctly, here's what's happened:


Lott and two coauthors produced a statistical model ("Model 1") that showed significant crime decreases when states passed concealed carry gun laws.


Back in April, two critics discovered that there were errors in the data Lott used. When the correct data was plugged into Lott's model, his results went away.


After a long silence, Lott admitted the data errors and posted a table with new results. Oddly, though, his new results were similar to his old ones and continued to show significant drops in crime. So who's right, Lott or his critics?


Answer: his critics. It turns out that since he really had no choice but to use the corrected data, and the corrected data erased his results, he decided to invent a different model ("Model 2") for use in this new table — but without disclosing the fact that he had switched to a new model specifically constructed to keep his results intact. Note: In less refined circles this would be called "lying."


When Tim discovered that Lott had surreptitiously changed his model, he emailed Lott. No response.


It turns out Lott was busy covering his tracks. How? By quietly removing the corrected table from his website and replacing it with a new corrected table. This one uses Model 2 but has the old, incorrect data.


Here's where you have to pay attention. Why would Lott do this?

Answer: this new table claims to be "corrected: April 18, 2003," and it turns out that Lott is trying to pretend that this was the original table he had posted all those months ago. That way, he could claim that he had never changed his model at all. Model 2 is the one he's been using all along!


Unfortunately, when Lott changed the revision date on the document to make it look like it had been created on 4/18/03, he changed it to 1/18/04 instead. What's more, Lott apparently doesn't know that you can check the create date of PDF documents anyway, and this one was created on 9/2/03. That is, it was created in September, not April.


Basically, Lott wants to pretend that Model 2 is the one he's always used. That way, when he corrects the data errors, his results still hold up. Unfortunately for Lott, his attempts to rewrite history were as clumsy as they were dishonest. His original table did use Model 1, his results do go away when the corrected data is plugged in, and he did respond to this by furtively devising a new model that would continue to give him the results he wanted.

If you're not sure you understand what's going on here, reread the timeline. Reread it five or six times. Eventually it will all become clear.

And a note to Glenn Reynolds, who has said he is "not sufficiently knowledgeable to opine on the statistical questions": my timeline deliberately avoids discussing the validity of the competing econometric models, which I'm not competent to judge either. Rather, it simply shows how Lott works, something that anyone is competent to judge. He's a liar and a cheat, and merely being "quite reluctant" to rely on him is far too weak a response.

The evidence is clear. John Lott should be fired from the American Enterprise Institute forthwith and banned from polite society.


http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2003/10/double-barreled-double-standards


If economist John R. Lott didn't exist, pro-gun advocates would have had to invent him. Probably the most visible scholarly figure in the U.S. gun debate, Lott's densely statistical work has given an immense boost to the arguments of the National Rifle Association. Lott's 1998 book More Guns, Less Crime -- which extolled the virtues of firearms for self-defense and has sold some 100,000 copies in two editions, quite an accomplishment for an academic book -- has served as a Bible for proponents of "right to carry" laws (also known as "shall issue" laws), which make it easier for citizens to carry concealed weapons. Were Lott to be discredited, an entire branch of pro-gun advocacy could lose its chief social scientific basis.
That may be happening. Earlier this year, Lott found himself facing serious criticism of his professional ethics. Pressed by critics, he failed to produce evidence of the existence of a survey -- which supposedly found that "98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack" -- that he claimed to have conducted in the second edition of "More Guns, Less Crime". Lott then made matters even worse by posing as a former student, "Mary Rosh," and using the alias to attack his critics and defend his work online. When an Internet blogger exposed the ruse, the scientific community was outraged. Lott had created a "false identity for a scholar," charged Science editor-in-chief Donald Kennedy. "In most circles, this goes down as fraud."

Lott's recent baggage makes him an impeachable witness in the push to pass state-level right to carry laws, and raises questions about his broader body of work. Kennedy and others have even likened Lott to Michael Bellesiles, the Emory University historian who could not produce the data at the heart of his award-winning 2000 book "Arming America", which had seemed to undermine the notion that there was widespread gun ownership and usage in colonial America. But while Bellesiles resigned after a university panel challenged his credibility, thus far Lott has escaped a similar fate. An academic rolling stone, Lott has held research positions at the University of Chicago and Yale law schools, but currently works at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a Washington think tank much smiled upon by the Bush administration. AEI will not say whether it will investigate its in-house guns expert; by e-mail, AEI president Christopher DeMuth declined to comment on the possibility.

Lott's defenders rightly point out that the missing survey -- which was completely lost in a computer crash, Lott says -- isn't central to the argument of "More Guns, Less Crime". But as Harvard economist David Hemenway wrote in a recent critique of Lott's latest book, "The Bias Against Guns", one must have "faith in Lott's integrity" before accepting his statistical results. That is because in the dauntingly complex subfield of econometrics, statistical manipulation is a constant concern. In a recent attempt to rescue his beleaguered "More Guns, Less Crime" hypothesis from criticism, Lott has been caught massaging his data to favor his argument. In subsequent exchanges with Mother Jones, he changed his story several times about a key data table that was misleadingly labeled -- and then surreptitiously amended -- on his website. Nevertheless, most pro-gun scholars and political conservatives have yet to call Lott to account.

Lott's colleagues credit him with having a brilliant empirical mind and for publishing an impressive array of scholarly papers, as well as for being a pioneer in making his data available on the Internet. Yet Lott is also known for a fiery personality. Yale economist Ian Ayres, who helped Lott get a research job at the Yale Law School but has since criticized his former colleague's work, says: "A lot of people would say, thank God Lott is still in the academy, but thank God he's not at my school."

Lott made his name as a guns expert in the standard academic way: By publishing in a peer-reviewed journal. In an influential 1997 article in the Journal of Legal Studies, Lott and co-author David Mustard examined crime data from all 3,054 U.S. counties from 1977 to 1992 to test the impact of right to carry laws. During those years ten states passed such legislation, and Lott and Mustard's regression analyses -- complex statistical techniques used to uncover apparent causal links by controlling for other variables -- found right to carry laws had stunningly deterred violent crime, particularly rape and murder. Their study, they wrote, showed concealed handguns to be "the most cost-effective method of reducing crime thus far analyzed by economists."

In a country with over 200 million guns in circulation and some 29,000 gun deaths a year, Lott's work fed into a fraught political debate. U.S. firearms researchers, notes University of California-Berkeley criminologist Franklin Zimring in a recent article, find themselves "organized into sectarian groups" even on seemingly straightforward empirical questions, such as the number of times per year that guns are used for self defense. In this fray, Lott portrays himself as a dispassionate scientist rifling through mounds of data. "My only objective is to study the measurable effect that gun laws have on incidents of violence," he writes in "The Bias Against Guns".

But this is not the first time Lott has been accused of overstating his results. In early 1997, Lott testified before Nebraska lawmakers with advance galleys of his Journal of Legal Studies article in hand, claiming to have proven a causal link between right to carry laws and lower crime. Yet soon afterwards in the same journal, economist Dan Black and criminologist Daniel Nagin found that slight alterations to Lott's data and model dramatically skewed the outcome. For instance, removing Florida from the analysis caused the beneficial impact of right to carry laws on murder and rape to vanish entirely.

Lott had an answer to Black and Nagin -- as he has for each subsequent critic. They tend to be mind-bogglingly complicated, involving things like ordinary least squares and Poisson distributions. In calling Lott's overall thesis junk science, Skeptical Inquirer magazine noted his tendency to make "arguments so complex that only other highly trained regression analysts can understand, let alone refute, them." This was not meant as praise.

Still, economists like Stanford's John Donohue and Georgetown's Jens Ludwig say that when first published in 1997, Lott's work was novel and even cutting edge. But the intervening years -- and increased scholarly scrutiny -- have not been kind to the "More Guns, Less Crime" idea. In fact, social scientists have turned away from the thesis even as Lott has stuck by his original conclusions. As a result, to maintain his argument Lott has had to go to considerable lengths, as demonstrated by a recent brouhaha over a massive critique of his work in the Stanford Law Review.

The Stanford Law Review critique, authored by Yale's Ayres and Stanford's Donohue, analyzed more recent crime statistics, extending Lott's original 1977-1992 crime dataset to include data through the late 1990s. As it turned out, after 1992, partly due to the end of the 1980s' crack cocaine-related crime wave, crime rates dropped dramatically in states with large urban centers, many of which had not passed right to carry laws. This fact proves highly inconvenient to the "More Guns, Less Crime" argument. After testing Lott and Mustard's analysis with more years of data and different econometric tweakings, Donohue and Ayres conclude, "No longer can any plausible case be made on statistical grounds that shall-issue laws are likely to reduce crime for all or even most states"; their analysis even suggested such laws might increase violent crime.

This may seem like an ordinary scholarly dispute, but it quickly devolved into the sort of controversy that has followed much of Lott's recent work. Lott was invited to write a response to Ayres and Donohue, scheduled to run simultaneously in the Stanford Law Review. He accepted the invitation, but then suddenly withdrew his name from the response as the editorial process wound down. The cause, according to then Stanford Law Review president Benjamin Horwich, was a minor editing dispute involving literally one word; Lott, however, complains of an editorial "ultimatum" from the journal.

And so Lott's response was published under the name of two co-authors, economists Florenz Plassmann and John Whitley. They accused Donohue and Ayres of having "simply misread their own results" and, in a feat of statistical one-upmanship, claimed to extend the crime data even further -- through 2000 -- thereby rescuing the "More Guns, Less Crime" hypothesis in the process. But when Ayres and Donohue analyzed this new data, they say they found severe coding errors that, when corrected, thoroughly obliterated the attempt to confirm the "More Guns, Less Crime" thesis. Similar coding errors, wrote Donohue and Ayres, have cropped up elsewhere in Lott's work, including in his new book, "The Bias Against Guns".

A charge of coding errors, while not unheard of, is embarrassing, since it implies that only by using mistaken data can Lott preserve his thesis. The errors might have been accidental, but since the Stanford Law Review exchange, Lott has continued to defend the erroneous work. "There's a bit of concern over making the error, but now there's huge concern over not backing away from the results now that it has been pointed out," says Ayres.

In May, Lott told the Chronicle of Higher Education that the claim of coding errors had not been reviewed by a third party. Now, though, he admits the errors but calls them "minor" and claims they don't appreciably affect the results of the Plassmann-Whitley paper (which is, of course, really his own). "I knew he was going to say that," says Donohue when informed of Lott's response.

To get to the bottom of the dispute -- which goes to the heart of the continuing validity of "More Guns, Less Crime" -- Donohue and Ayres responded to Plassmann-Whitley by contrasting two key tables, one that uses their (read: Lott's) data and one that corrects the coding errors. The first table, using miscoded data, shows statistically significant decreases in murders, rape, and robbery. The second, using corrected data, shows statistically insignificant decreases in murder, rape, and robbery, along with statistically significant rises in property crimes, auto theft, and larceny, which Plassmann and Whitely had also noted in their paper.

In the face of this evidence, how can Lott continue to claim the coding errors don't matter? In an interview conducted on August 18 (transcript), Lott told me that he had posted "corrected" tables on his website for all to see. But when I downloaded Lott's "corrected" version of the contested table, it showed the same numerical values as that of Donohue and Ayres -- that is, the coding errors were gone -- but bizarrely claimed the properly coded data still indicated statistically significant drops in murder, rape, and robbery. That's because Lott had introduced a new twist: Rather than simply fixing the incorrectly coded data, he omitted a key calculation regarding statistical significance used in the Plassmann-Whitley paper. (For statistics geeks, it's called "clustering at the state level.") Faced with no other way to save his thesis, you could say that Lott changed the rules -- rules his own team had laid down -- in the middle of the game.

Confronted with this, Lott's subsequent actions raise even more questions. On the website, Lott claimed the "corrected" table used "clustering," when it did not. In a heated interview on August 19 (transcript), Lott said this labeling claim must be an error. But the very next day, he e-mailed a file containing precisely the same table, claiming that all the tables on his website were "clearly and properly labeled."

On September 2, Lott changed his story yet again, emailing me that "the file should now be returned to what had been up there before." But when I downloaded the new file, the key table had been altered to remove the questionable clustering assertion, but had inexplicably reverted to the incorrectly coded Plassmann-Whitley findings that Donohue and Ayres had long since debunked, and Lott himself had admitted to me were incorrectly coded. And despite all these changes, as of October 13, Lott's website still labels the table as last being corrected "April 18, 2003."

Perhaps because correcting Lott's coding errors sinks his latest attempt to revive his "More Guns, Less Crime" hypothesis, Lott since has taken to criticizing the Stanford Law Review for not being "a refereed academic journal," as he put it in an e-mail. That's true: The nation's most prestigious law reviews are run and edited by students, which hardly keeps leading academics from publishing in them. Yet Lott's critique is once again misleading: His own newspaper op-eds aren't peer reviewed, and Lott admits that Regnery Press, his latest book publisher, does not use peer review. Furthermore, now that Lott has left academia and has an ethics cloud over his head, he may have difficulty being published in peer-reviewed publications. "It's strange that he's putting so much of his weight on the fact that Stanford is not a refereed journal," says Ayres, "because there's a possibility that this is where he's going to be moving towards himself."

Given all the questions about Lott's ethics -- and his stubborn reluctance to back away from his mistakes -- pro-gun scholars might feel an intellectual obligation to challenge him. Some do: Randy Barnett, a "pro-gun rights" legal scholar at Boston University, insists that a non-politicized investigation is needed to determine whether the missing defensive gun use survey actually existed, since "fraud is what is on the table." One of Michael Bellesiles' most dogged critics, Northwestern University law professor James Lindgren, also prepared a report investigating Lott's survey claims. "I have serious doubts whether he ever did the study," says Lindgren, "and the only evidence that he's brought forward for having done the study is ambiguous" -- an NRA activist who claims to remember having been called and asked about defensive gun uses.

But many gun rights conservatives have taken a pass on the Lott issue. A glowing review of "The Bias Against Guns" in National Review -- which made much hash of the Bellesiles affair -- failed to mention Lott's recent difficulties in corroborating the existence of his survey. "It's so interesting that Michael Bellesiles gets hung from the highest tree, while Lott, if anything, he's been more prominent in the last couple of months," says Donohue.

The right has good reason to stick by Lott: "The entire ideology of the modern gun movement has basically been built around this guy," says Saul Cornell, an Ohio State University historian who has written widely on guns. Over the years the pro-gun intellectual agenda has had two prongs: Defending a revisionist legal understanding of the Second Amendment in constitutional law, and refuting social scientists and public-health researchers who argue that the widespread availability of guns in America plays a key role in the nation's staggering number of homicides and suicides. Without Lott's work, the latter argument becomes much harder to make.

More conservative soul searching may result from a forthcoming National Academy of Sciences report from an expert panel dedicated to "Improving Research Information and Data on Firearms." Scheduled for release in late fall, the panel's report will address Lott's work. Duke University economist Philip Cook, co-editor of the Brookings Institution book "Evaluating Gun Policy", draws a historical analogy: In the late 1970s, after economist Isaac Ehrlich published a complex analysis supposedly proving that every execution in America deters about eight murders, the NAS released a devastating expert report debunking Ehrlich's findings. The same thing could happen to Lott.

If it does, we can be reasonably sure of one thing: Lott will have a response ready. "Lott will never say, 'that's a good point.' Lott will offer you some rebuttal," says Georgetown gun policy expert Jens Ludwig. But if Lott won't fully address the errors that undermine his thesis, it may fall to someone else -- his conservative peers, the American Enterprise Institute, perhaps -- to step in and do it for him.



and

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2011/03/24/john-lotts-mysteriously-changing-blog-post/177924

so.. I'm not really impressed with his claims I'm afraid.

The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all
We love our superheroes because they refuse to give up on us. We can analyze them out of existence, kill them, ban them, mock them, and still they return, patiently reminding us of who we are and what we wish we could be.
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KalashnikovMarine wrote:From the Reverend Jesse Jackson: "It's easier to buy a gun then coffee in America"

what I want to know is where Jesse Jackson is that you have to go through a background check at Starbucks?


Jesse Jackson is functionally slowed.

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Come check out my Blood Angels,Crimson Fists, and coming soon Eldar
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 reds8n wrote:
Spoiler:
Well that's actually the subject of a research book by John Lott "More Guns, Less Crime", it's worth a read.


http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2003_09/002120.php




YES, JOHN LOTT AGAIN....If you are an econometrician — a person who evaluates the real world using complex statistical models — there are two basic ways you can go about your job:


You can do your best to figure out which statistical model does the best job of mirroring the real world, and then plug in your data and see what pops out. We will call this methodology tolerably honest.


You can plug in your data first, and then tweak your model until it provides the results you want. We will call this methodology dishonest bs.


The alert reader has probably guessed that I am talking here about the latest sad chapter in the John Lott saga, and indeed I am. The indefatigable Tim Lambert is on the case, and assuming I have been able to put the timeline together correctly, here's what's happened:


Lott and two coauthors produced a statistical model ("Model 1") that showed significant crime decreases when states passed concealed carry gun laws.


Back in April, two critics discovered that there were errors in the data Lott used. When the correct data was plugged into Lott's model, his results went away.


After a long silence, Lott admitted the data errors and posted a table with new results. Oddly, though, his new results were similar to his old ones and continued to show significant drops in crime. So who's right, Lott or his critics?


Answer: his critics. It turns out that since he really had no choice but to use the corrected data, and the corrected data erased his results, he decided to invent a different model ("Model 2") for use in this new table — but without disclosing the fact that he had switched to a new model specifically constructed to keep his results intact. Note: In less refined circles this would be called "lying."


When Tim discovered that Lott had surreptitiously changed his model, he emailed Lott. No response.


It turns out Lott was busy covering his tracks. How? By quietly removing the corrected table from his website and replacing it with a new corrected table. This one uses Model 2 but has the old, incorrect data.


Here's where you have to pay attention. Why would Lott do this?

Answer: this new table claims to be "corrected: April 18, 2003," and it turns out that Lott is trying to pretend that this was the original table he had posted all those months ago. That way, he could claim that he had never changed his model at all. Model 2 is the one he's been using all along!


Unfortunately, when Lott changed the revision date on the document to make it look like it had been created on 4/18/03, he changed it to 1/18/04 instead. What's more, Lott apparently doesn't know that you can check the create date of PDF documents anyway, and this one was created on 9/2/03. That is, it was created in September, not April.


Basically, Lott wants to pretend that Model 2 is the one he's always used. That way, when he corrects the data errors, his results still hold up. Unfortunately for Lott, his attempts to rewrite history were as clumsy as they were dishonest. His original table did use Model 1, his results do go away when the corrected data is plugged in, and he did respond to this by furtively devising a new model that would continue to give him the results he wanted.

If you're not sure you understand what's going on here, reread the timeline. Reread it five or six times. Eventually it will all become clear.

And a note to Glenn Reynolds, who has said he is "not sufficiently knowledgeable to opine on the statistical questions": my timeline deliberately avoids discussing the validity of the competing econometric models, which I'm not competent to judge either. Rather, it simply shows how Lott works, something that anyone is competent to judge. He's a liar and a cheat, and merely being "quite reluctant" to rely on him is far too weak a response.

The evidence is clear. John Lott should be fired from the American Enterprise Institute forthwith and banned from polite society.


http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2003/10/double-barreled-double-standards


If economist John R. Lott didn't exist, pro-gun advocates would have had to invent him. Probably the most visible scholarly figure in the U.S. gun debate, Lott's densely statistical work has given an immense boost to the arguments of the National Rifle Association. Lott's 1998 book More Guns, Less Crime -- which extolled the virtues of firearms for self-defense and has sold some 100,000 copies in two editions, quite an accomplishment for an academic book -- has served as a Bible for proponents of "right to carry" laws (also known as "shall issue" laws), which make it easier for citizens to carry concealed weapons. Were Lott to be discredited, an entire branch of pro-gun advocacy could lose its chief social scientific basis.
That may be happening. Earlier this year, Lott found himself facing serious criticism of his professional ethics. Pressed by critics, he failed to produce evidence of the existence of a survey -- which supposedly found that "98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack" -- that he claimed to have conducted in the second edition of "More Guns, Less Crime". Lott then made matters even worse by posing as a former student, "Mary Rosh," and using the alias to attack his critics and defend his work online. When an Internet blogger exposed the ruse, the scientific community was outraged. Lott had created a "false identity for a scholar," charged Science editor-in-chief Donald Kennedy. "In most circles, this goes down as fraud."

Lott's recent baggage makes him an impeachable witness in the push to pass state-level right to carry laws, and raises questions about his broader body of work. Kennedy and others have even likened Lott to Michael Bellesiles, the Emory University historian who could not produce the data at the heart of his award-winning 2000 book "Arming America", which had seemed to undermine the notion that there was widespread gun ownership and usage in colonial America. But while Bellesiles resigned after a university panel challenged his credibility, thus far Lott has escaped a similar fate. An academic rolling stone, Lott has held research positions at the University of Chicago and Yale law schools, but currently works at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a Washington think tank much smiled upon by the Bush administration. AEI will not say whether it will investigate its in-house guns expert; by e-mail, AEI president Christopher DeMuth declined to comment on the possibility.

Lott's defenders rightly point out that the missing survey -- which was completely lost in a computer crash, Lott says -- isn't central to the argument of "More Guns, Less Crime". But as Harvard economist David Hemenway wrote in a recent critique of Lott's latest book, "The Bias Against Guns", one must have "faith in Lott's integrity" before accepting his statistical results. That is because in the dauntingly complex subfield of econometrics, statistical manipulation is a constant concern. In a recent attempt to rescue his beleaguered "More Guns, Less Crime" hypothesis from criticism, Lott has been caught massaging his data to favor his argument. In subsequent exchanges with Mother Jones, he changed his story several times about a key data table that was misleadingly labeled -- and then surreptitiously amended -- on his website. Nevertheless, most pro-gun scholars and political conservatives have yet to call Lott to account.

Lott's colleagues credit him with having a brilliant empirical mind and for publishing an impressive array of scholarly papers, as well as for being a pioneer in making his data available on the Internet. Yet Lott is also known for a fiery personality. Yale economist Ian Ayres, who helped Lott get a research job at the Yale Law School but has since criticized his former colleague's work, says: "A lot of people would say, thank God Lott is still in the academy, but thank God he's not at my school."

Lott made his name as a guns expert in the standard academic way: By publishing in a peer-reviewed journal. In an influential 1997 article in the Journal of Legal Studies, Lott and co-author David Mustard examined crime data from all 3,054 U.S. counties from 1977 to 1992 to test the impact of right to carry laws. During those years ten states passed such legislation, and Lott and Mustard's regression analyses -- complex statistical techniques used to uncover apparent causal links by controlling for other variables -- found right to carry laws had stunningly deterred violent crime, particularly rape and murder. Their study, they wrote, showed concealed handguns to be "the most cost-effective method of reducing crime thus far analyzed by economists."

In a country with over 200 million guns in circulation and some 29,000 gun deaths a year, Lott's work fed into a fraught political debate. U.S. firearms researchers, notes University of California-Berkeley criminologist Franklin Zimring in a recent article, find themselves "organized into sectarian groups" even on seemingly straightforward empirical questions, such as the number of times per year that guns are used for self defense. In this fray, Lott portrays himself as a dispassionate scientist rifling through mounds of data. "My only objective is to study the measurable effect that gun laws have on incidents of violence," he writes in "The Bias Against Guns".

But this is not the first time Lott has been accused of overstating his results. In early 1997, Lott testified before Nebraska lawmakers with advance galleys of his Journal of Legal Studies article in hand, claiming to have proven a causal link between right to carry laws and lower crime. Yet soon afterwards in the same journal, economist Dan Black and criminologist Daniel Nagin found that slight alterations to Lott's data and model dramatically skewed the outcome. For instance, removing Florida from the analysis caused the beneficial impact of right to carry laws on murder and rape to vanish entirely.

Lott had an answer to Black and Nagin -- as he has for each subsequent critic. They tend to be mind-bogglingly complicated, involving things like ordinary least squares and Poisson distributions. In calling Lott's overall thesis junk science, Skeptical Inquirer magazine noted his tendency to make "arguments so complex that only other highly trained regression analysts can understand, let alone refute, them." This was not meant as praise.

Still, economists like Stanford's John Donohue and Georgetown's Jens Ludwig say that when first published in 1997, Lott's work was novel and even cutting edge. But the intervening years -- and increased scholarly scrutiny -- have not been kind to the "More Guns, Less Crime" idea. In fact, social scientists have turned away from the thesis even as Lott has stuck by his original conclusions. As a result, to maintain his argument Lott has had to go to considerable lengths, as demonstrated by a recent brouhaha over a massive critique of his work in the Stanford Law Review.

The Stanford Law Review critique, authored by Yale's Ayres and Stanford's Donohue, analyzed more recent crime statistics, extending Lott's original 1977-1992 crime dataset to include data through the late 1990s. As it turned out, after 1992, partly due to the end of the 1980s' crack cocaine-related crime wave, crime rates dropped dramatically in states with large urban centers, many of which had not passed right to carry laws. This fact proves highly inconvenient to the "More Guns, Less Crime" argument. After testing Lott and Mustard's analysis with more years of data and different econometric tweakings, Donohue and Ayres conclude, "No longer can any plausible case be made on statistical grounds that shall-issue laws are likely to reduce crime for all or even most states"; their analysis even suggested such laws might increase violent crime.

This may seem like an ordinary scholarly dispute, but it quickly devolved into the sort of controversy that has followed much of Lott's recent work. Lott was invited to write a response to Ayres and Donohue, scheduled to run simultaneously in the Stanford Law Review. He accepted the invitation, but then suddenly withdrew his name from the response as the editorial process wound down. The cause, according to then Stanford Law Review president Benjamin Horwich, was a minor editing dispute involving literally one word; Lott, however, complains of an editorial "ultimatum" from the journal.

And so Lott's response was published under the name of two co-authors, economists Florenz Plassmann and John Whitley. They accused Donohue and Ayres of having "simply misread their own results" and, in a feat of statistical one-upmanship, claimed to extend the crime data even further -- through 2000 -- thereby rescuing the "More Guns, Less Crime" hypothesis in the process. But when Ayres and Donohue analyzed this new data, they say they found severe coding errors that, when corrected, thoroughly obliterated the attempt to confirm the "More Guns, Less Crime" thesis. Similar coding errors, wrote Donohue and Ayres, have cropped up elsewhere in Lott's work, including in his new book, "The Bias Against Guns".

A charge of coding errors, while not unheard of, is embarrassing, since it implies that only by using mistaken data can Lott preserve his thesis. The errors might have been accidental, but since the Stanford Law Review exchange, Lott has continued to defend the erroneous work. "There's a bit of concern over making the error, but now there's huge concern over not backing away from the results now that it has been pointed out," says Ayres.

In May, Lott told the Chronicle of Higher Education that the claim of coding errors had not been reviewed by a third party. Now, though, he admits the errors but calls them "minor" and claims they don't appreciably affect the results of the Plassmann-Whitley paper (which is, of course, really his own). "I knew he was going to say that," says Donohue when informed of Lott's response.

To get to the bottom of the dispute -- which goes to the heart of the continuing validity of "More Guns, Less Crime" -- Donohue and Ayres responded to Plassmann-Whitley by contrasting two key tables, one that uses their (read: Lott's) data and one that corrects the coding errors. The first table, using miscoded data, shows statistically significant decreases in murders, rape, and robbery. The second, using corrected data, shows statistically insignificant decreases in murder, rape, and robbery, along with statistically significant rises in property crimes, auto theft, and larceny, which Plassmann and Whitely had also noted in their paper.

In the face of this evidence, how can Lott continue to claim the coding errors don't matter? In an interview conducted on August 18 (transcript), Lott told me that he had posted "corrected" tables on his website for all to see. But when I downloaded Lott's "corrected" version of the contested table, it showed the same numerical values as that of Donohue and Ayres -- that is, the coding errors were gone -- but bizarrely claimed the properly coded data still indicated statistically significant drops in murder, rape, and robbery. That's because Lott had introduced a new twist: Rather than simply fixing the incorrectly coded data, he omitted a key calculation regarding statistical significance used in the Plassmann-Whitley paper. (For statistics geeks, it's called "clustering at the state level.") Faced with no other way to save his thesis, you could say that Lott changed the rules -- rules his own team had laid down -- in the middle of the game.

Confronted with this, Lott's subsequent actions raise even more questions. On the website, Lott claimed the "corrected" table used "clustering," when it did not. In a heated interview on August 19 (transcript), Lott said this labeling claim must be an error. But the very next day, he e-mailed a file containing precisely the same table, claiming that all the tables on his website were "clearly and properly labeled."

On September 2, Lott changed his story yet again, emailing me that "the file should now be returned to what had been up there before." But when I downloaded the new file, the key table had been altered to remove the questionable clustering assertion, but had inexplicably reverted to the incorrectly coded Plassmann-Whitley findings that Donohue and Ayres had long since debunked, and Lott himself had admitted to me were incorrectly coded. And despite all these changes, as of October 13, Lott's website still labels the table as last being corrected "April 18, 2003."

Perhaps because correcting Lott's coding errors sinks his latest attempt to revive his "More Guns, Less Crime" hypothesis, Lott since has taken to criticizing the Stanford Law Review for not being "a refereed academic journal," as he put it in an e-mail. That's true: The nation's most prestigious law reviews are run and edited by students, which hardly keeps leading academics from publishing in them. Yet Lott's critique is once again misleading: His own newspaper op-eds aren't peer reviewed, and Lott admits that Regnery Press, his latest book publisher, does not use peer review. Furthermore, now that Lott has left academia and has an ethics cloud over his head, he may have difficulty being published in peer-reviewed publications. "It's strange that he's putting so much of his weight on the fact that Stanford is not a refereed journal," says Ayres, "because there's a possibility that this is where he's going to be moving towards himself."

Given all the questions about Lott's ethics -- and his stubborn reluctance to back away from his mistakes -- pro-gun scholars might feel an intellectual obligation to challenge him. Some do: Randy Barnett, a "pro-gun rights" legal scholar at Boston University, insists that a non-politicized investigation is needed to determine whether the missing defensive gun use survey actually existed, since "fraud is what is on the table." One of Michael Bellesiles' most dogged critics, Northwestern University law professor James Lindgren, also prepared a report investigating Lott's survey claims. "I have serious doubts whether he ever did the study," says Lindgren, "and the only evidence that he's brought forward for having done the study is ambiguous" -- an NRA activist who claims to remember having been called and asked about defensive gun uses.

But many gun rights conservatives have taken a pass on the Lott issue. A glowing review of "The Bias Against Guns" in National Review -- which made much hash of the Bellesiles affair -- failed to mention Lott's recent difficulties in corroborating the existence of his survey. "It's so interesting that Michael Bellesiles gets hung from the highest tree, while Lott, if anything, he's been more prominent in the last couple of months," says Donohue.

The right has good reason to stick by Lott: "The entire ideology of the modern gun movement has basically been built around this guy," says Saul Cornell, an Ohio State University historian who has written widely on guns. Over the years the pro-gun intellectual agenda has had two prongs: Defending a revisionist legal understanding of the Second Amendment in constitutional law, and refuting social scientists and public-health researchers who argue that the widespread availability of guns in America plays a key role in the nation's staggering number of homicides and suicides. Without Lott's work, the latter argument becomes much harder to make.

More conservative soul searching may result from a forthcoming National Academy of Sciences report from an expert panel dedicated to "Improving Research Information and Data on Firearms." Scheduled for release in late fall, the panel's report will address Lott's work. Duke University economist Philip Cook, co-editor of the Brookings Institution book "Evaluating Gun Policy", draws a historical analogy: In the late 1970s, after economist Isaac Ehrlich published a complex analysis supposedly proving that every execution in America deters about eight murders, the NAS released a devastating expert report debunking Ehrlich's findings. The same thing could happen to Lott.

If it does, we can be reasonably sure of one thing: Lott will have a response ready. "Lott will never say, 'that's a good point.' Lott will offer you some rebuttal," says Georgetown gun policy expert Jens Ludwig. But if Lott won't fully address the errors that undermine his thesis, it may fall to someone else -- his conservative peers, the American Enterprise Institute, perhaps -- to step in and do it for him.



and

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2011/03/24/john-lotts-mysteriously-changing-blog-post/177924


so.. I'm not really impressed with his claims I'm afraid.


There's a reason I don't quote any of his stats and research. Even if I do agree with his thesis of "More firearms in the hands of the people reducing crime."


Automatically Appended Next Post:
 AustonT wrote:


KalashnikovMarine wrote:From the Reverend Jesse Jackson: "It's easier to buy a gun then coffee in America"

what I want to know is where Jesse Jackson is that you have to go through a background check at Starbucks?


Jesse Jackson is functionally slowed.


I always just assumed he was functionally from another planet, a world that is similar to ours, yet functions completely differently.

This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2012/12/18 22:44:02


I beg of you sarge let me lead the charge when the battle lines are drawn
Lemme at least leave a good hoof beat they'll remember loud and long


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 d-usa wrote:
Nice to know that the TSA has prevented 375 airplanes from falling into terrorist hands and becoming missiles


Er...what?

-"Wait a minute.....who is that Frazz is talking to in the gallery? Hmmm something is going on here.....Oh.... it seems there is some dispute over video taping of some sort......Frazz is really upset now..........wait a minute......whats he go there.......is it? Can it be?....Frazz has just unleashed his hidden weiner dog from his mini bag, while quoting shakespeares "Let slip the dogs the war!!" GG
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The Void

 Frazzled wrote:
 d-usa wrote:
Nice to know that the TSA has prevented 375 airplanes from falling into terrorist hands and becoming missiles


Er...what?


I believe he was trying to make a comment about statistics on things (crimes specifically) that didn't happen. Except defensive gun uses DO happen so we can collect statistics on them, unlike the TSA doing something useful which has never happened.

I beg of you sarge let me lead the charge when the battle lines are drawn
Lemme at least leave a good hoof beat they'll remember loud and long


SoB, IG, SM, SW, Nec, Cus, Tau, FoW Germans, Team Yankee Marines, Battletech Clan Wolf, Mercs
DR:90-SG+M+B+I+Pw40k12+ID+++A+++/are/WD-R+++T(S)DM+ 
   
Made in us
Fixture of Dakka







I Was Wrong...It's Not Just A Tool...
For decades now I have tried to explain to those who don't understand that firearms are neither good or bad, they are simply a tool or object that can be used for good or bad depending upon the intentions of the user.

But with all this talk about possible bans and concessions that we must make in order to placate those who want to get rid of all guns and possibly keep some of what we have I realized it simply isn't true. Firearms are NOT just a tool.

If there was some kind of massacre involving just "tools" where some mentally broken person ran around killing people with a hammer, screwdriver or any other "tool" I might actually be willing to surrender those items from my toolbox deemed "offensive." It would of course completely mystify me that I would have to surrender such an item due to the misuse by mentally broken person but I'd probably go along with it.

And of course I'd bitch and complain every time I had to work on a project that would be done more efficiently with the now banned item as I tried to complete the job with the more "safe and compliant" version of the tool I was no longer able to own.

But firearms simply aren't "just a tool."

They are also a heritage, a way of life and for some part of who we are.

I grew up with guns. I had my first handgun by the fourth grade and it wasn't a .22. By the age of 10 I was shooting my .357 (usually loaded with .38s) once a week with my father. I was a shooter in the same way that professional baseball players play baseball with relative skill level being the only actual difference, that and I didn't get paid to do it.

By the time I was in Junior High I had more guns than many of the adults I knew and I was focused on completing a collection centered around WWII and acquiring historical knowledge of every firearm involved. While other kids could quote baseball stats, I knew who made Lugers in 7.65mm and who made them in 9mm.

And I certainly didn't become a FFL because it was an easy path to getting rich. You are lucky if you get to do a job that you that you are truly interested in and knowledgeable about, but doing what you are good at is hardly a guarantee of financial rewards. Some jobs you just have to want to do despite the challenges. I could have possibly done something else and made quite a bit more money, I decided I wanted to work with guns for a living.

I have firearms for many, many reasons.

I have firearms that I enjoy shooting recreationally.
I have firearms that I own for personal defense.
I have firearms that I own for the same reason people buy works of art.
I have firearms that I own for the same reason people buy rare collectibles.
I have firearms that were once owned by family members who are now gone.
I have firearms that I own because I feel my Dad would have been proud to see me finally get one of them.
I have firearms that I own for the same reason people buy things that make them feel they have achieved some measure of success.
I have firearms that I own for the same reason people buy things that make them feel complete.

I only feel that way about a single tool I own and that would be a wrench that belonged to my Grandfather. I suppose if legislation were passed I would surrender all my tools except for that one. That one I would fight for, because it too is more than just a tool.

But my firearms are still more than just that.

My firearms ARE my chosen religion. My firearms ARE my free expression and speech. My firearms ARE my right to redress government. My firearms ARE my protection from being forced to quarter troops. My firearms ARE my protection from unreasonable search and seizure. My firearms ARE my protection from having private property seized.

My firearms are a means of making sure all my rights are respected. I'd have a hard time doing that with just a hammer or screwdriver.

I have firearms because that is simply who I am and asking me to surrender them would be like asking a peaceable Muslim to surrender his Koran because it has been misused by others.

So perhaps we should simply focus on addressing all the people who are an actual threat to others because they are mentally broken and figure out how to protect society from them rather than believing we can simply take away their "tools" and they will no longer be a threat.

 Avatar 720 wrote:
You see, to Auston, everyone is a Death Star; there's only one way you can take it and that's through a small gap at the back.

Come check out my Blood Angels,Crimson Fists, and coming soon Eldar
http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/391013.page
I have conceded that the Eldar page I started in P&M is their legitimate home. Free Candy! Updated 10/19.
http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/391553.page
Powder Burns wrote:what they need to make is a fullsize leatherman, like 14" long folded, with a bone saw, notches for bowstring, signaling flare, electrical hand crank generator, bolt cutters..
 
   
Made in us
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Leerstetten, Germany

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:
 Frazzled wrote:
 d-usa wrote:
Nice to know that the TSA has prevented 375 airplanes from falling into terrorist hands and becoming missiles


Er...what?


I believe he was trying to make a comment about statistics on things (crimes specifically) that didn't happen. Except defensive gun uses DO happen so we can collect statistics on them, unlike the TSA doing something useful which has never happened.


But we still get people claiming "x number of crimes prevented because a gun owner was there and people changed their minds and didnt commit the crime". Those instances are more what I was aiming for.
   
Made in us
Hallowed Canoness





The Void

Love that post Auston! Exalted.

Here's some interesting stuff, this is the testimony of Dr. Suzanna Gratia Hupp. Dr. Gratia Hupp was in the restaurant during the Luby's Massacre in 1991, while she had a revolver, per Texas's gun laws at the time she had to leave her weapon in the car. She was influential in getting Texas's concealed carry laws changed and spent a decade in the Texas House of Representatives.




http://www.wired.com/geekmom/2012/12/sandy-hook-safe/

This article from Wired is also fairly interesting, but the most important thing in there is this graph:



So while the media sensationalizes all of this mess, we're safer then we've ever been.

I beg of you sarge let me lead the charge when the battle lines are drawn
Lemme at least leave a good hoof beat they'll remember loud and long


SoB, IG, SM, SW, Nec, Cus, Tau, FoW Germans, Team Yankee Marines, Battletech Clan Wolf, Mercs
DR:90-SG+M+B+I+Pw40k12+ID+++A+++/are/WD-R+++T(S)DM+ 
   
Made in us
Decrepit Dakkanaut






Leerstetten, Germany

This might very easily make me sound like the heartless bastard of the Dakka OT, but anyway:

Yes I know 26 people died. Yes I know it is a tragedy. But one of the questions now asked is this: "Is it worth it to have people die like this to have a 2nd amendment?". And as a country we have to be honest with ourselves and admit that yes, as a country we are perfectly 100% A-OK with people dying on a regular basis for our rights including children. To do otherwise would be a bold faced lie and would make us nothing short of hypocritical. We mighty not like it, but we are okay with it and have accepted it as a fact of our life.

Cigarettes are perfectly legal, and they have no purpose what-so-ever other than to be smoked. 3,000 non-smokers a year die from cigarettes a year, and we are okay with that.

How many non-drinkers are killed by people under the influence of alcohol? How many people are eating themselves to death?

We are okay with kids starving to death because welfare is not the job of the government and having people die because they can't afford healthcare is perfectly reasonable because they made a choice not to have insurance or they just didn't try hard enough to be successful.

How many children were abused and neglected on the same day as the shooting? How many grade school children were molested by family members, beaten, and then went to bed hungry because we think that DHS is just the government getting into peoples lives and on witch hunts to punish parents.

So as a country we are fine with having rights that result in the deaths of thousands of people every year, we accept that. Or at the very least we don't care, we refuse to think about the fact that our "rights" come at a price that includes the deaths of innocent people that had nothing to do with any of that.

I think 5 kids a day die from abuse and neglect in our country. On one day 26 people get shot, and we care and have a national outrage about this. People are crying in the streets, politicians have meetings, news channels run 24 hour coverage of the event. But even on the day that is all about the poor children that died, nobody mentioned the 5 that dies that day after starving for months, being sick for months, being abused for months.

Maybe I am just overly bitter. But today I am just kind of tired of everybody suddenly caring that 20 children died, when they didn't care about the other 5 children that died that day, or the day before, or every day since.
   
Made in gb
Fixture of Dakka




Manchester UK

Aren't you German?

 Cheesecat wrote:
 purplefood wrote:
I find myself agreeing with Albatross far too often these days...

I almost always agree with Albatross, I can't see why anyone wouldn't.


 Crazy_Carnifex wrote:

Okay, so the male version of "Cougar" is now officially "Albatross".
 
   
Made in us
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Curb stomping in the Eye of Terror!



Totally... agree D...

Hey... our friends accross the pond think it's the thunderdome here... shall we spoil the surprise?


Automatically Appended Next Post:
 reds8n wrote:
Well then it depends upon how many rapes, murders, muggings and home invasions only occur as the perpetrators are "enabled" by such easy access to guns surely ?

As a sidenote I feel like a lot of the non-US posters intentionally misread what is posted. And that there is a tone of superiority in their comments about how to "fix" our country.


I think you'll find that's balanced out by what the non USA members are forced to put up with and feel in the threads not about America or that reference their countries/laws/etc etc

Funny that eh ?

Funny eh?

Lemme let you on a secret then... 'tis ain't bad here.

This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2012/12/18 23:46:21


Live Ork, Be Ork. or D'Ork!


 
   
Made in us
Decrepit Dakkanaut






Mesopotamia. The Kingdom Where we Secretly Reign.

Where does this notion that since people are upset that 26, 20 of which were children between the ages of 6 and 7, people were shot for no reason all at once that they don't don't care about the day to day horror all around us?

I think you should look at the charitable giving of money and time in the US before throwing around that sort of rhetoric.

Drink deeply and lustily from the foamy draught of evil.
W: 1.756 Quadrillion L: 0 D: 2
Haters gon' hate. 
   
Made in us
Decrepit Dakkanaut






Leerstetten, Germany

 Monster Rain wrote:
Where does this notion that since people are upset that 26, 20 of which were children between the ages of 6 and 7, people were shot for no reason all at once that they don't don't care about the day to day horror all around us?

I think you should look at the charitable giving of money and time in the US before throwing around that sort of rhetoric.


I'm talking about the fact that 20 kids getting shot is too high a price to pay for "freedoms" when the number of people that die each day because of many different "freedoms" is much higher and nobody cares.

8 non-smokers died today because of cigarettes. Yet where is their candle light vigil and where are the politicians screaming "how many more have to die before we get rid of something that has no purpose other than to poison yourself"?

If each kid was shot in a gun related crime over 20 days, nobody except their family and friends would care. And that is the truth of it. I just look at the 3 year old that shot himself with the pistol that belonged to his law enforcement uncle and died.

Sorry if I am a bastard today, just not feeling it right now.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2012/12/19 00:09:25


 
   
Made in us
Decrepit Dakkanaut






Mesopotamia. The Kingdom Where we Secretly Reign.

I mean, just numerically a mass shooting like this is different from sundry violence.

The fact that all those people died at once is kind of the point. It's the same reason people don't like seeing plane crashes. Yes, millions of people die all the time from all kinds of awful things. This doesn't mean we shouldn't care. I think it means we should care more.

Drink deeply and lustily from the foamy draught of evil.
W: 1.756 Quadrillion L: 0 D: 2
Haters gon' hate. 
   
Made in ca
Stone Bonkers Fabricator General






 d-usa wrote:
This might very easily make me sound like the heartless bastard of the Dakka OT, but anyway:

Yes I know 26 people died. Yes I know it is a tragedy. But one of the questions now asked is this: "Is it worth it to have people die like this to have a 2nd amendment?". And as a country we have to be honest with ourselves and admit that yes, as a country we are perfectly 100% A-OK with people dying on a regular basis for our rights including children. To do otherwise would be a bold faced lie and would make us nothing short of hypocritical. We mighty not like it, but we are okay with it and have accepted it as a fact of our life.

Cigarettes are perfectly legal, and they have no purpose what-so-ever other than to be smoked. 3,000 non-smokers a year die from cigarettes a year, and we are okay with that.

How many non-drinkers are killed by people under the influence of alcohol? How many people are eating themselves to death?

We are okay with kids starving to death because welfare is not the job of the government and having people die because they can't afford healthcare is perfectly reasonable because they made a choice not to have insurance or they just didn't try hard enough to be successful.

How many children were abused and neglected on the same day as the shooting? How many grade school children were molested by family members, beaten, and then went to bed hungry because we think that DHS is just the government getting into peoples lives and on witch hunts to punish parents.

So as a country we are fine with having rights that result in the deaths of thousands of people every year, we accept that. Or at the very least we don't care, we refuse to think about the fact that our "rights" come at a price that includes the deaths of innocent people that had nothing to do with any of that.

I think 5 kids a day die from abuse and neglect in our country. On one day 26 people get shot, and we care and have a national outrage about this. People are crying in the streets, politicians have meetings, news channels run 24 hour coverage of the event. But even on the day that is all about the poor children that died, nobody mentioned the 5 that dies that day after starving for months, being sick for months, being abused for months.

Maybe I am just overly bitter. But today I am just kind of tired of everybody suddenly caring that 20 children died, when they didn't care about the other 5 children that died that day, or the day before, or every day since.


Yes, you are right. We non-Americans find it hard to comprehend but you are exactly right. Most Americans think it is a fair trade off for the occasional theatre or elementary school getting shot up for the right to bear arms. You are a democracy and you've made that choice. This isn't one of those laws that doesn't reflect the majority of the people's will. We non-Americans need to understand that.

 
   
Made in us
Dwarf High King with New Book of Grudges




United States

 Monster Rain wrote:

It's what I interpret the arguments against arming a percentage of a school faculty, or otherwise making schools less vulnerable, to be.


I think the argument against arming school faculty is sound. Teachers already have to jump through enough hoops to earn their meager living.

However, police liaison agreements are always a good idea. They put armed personnel in schools, and help to teach children that police aren't inherently terrible people.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
 Frazzled wrote:
 hotsauceman1 wrote:
What do you mean by "Consolidated" Frazzled?


Sorry good question. In the US, at least in Texas, the elementary schools are rather small. multiple elementary schools often feed into a Jr. High, and in turn multiple Jr. highs will feed into one High School. I could see consolidation into much larger elementariy schools that could have greater security on them. Its probably a cost issue.


From a policy perspective there are few problems with it. The most obvious one, as you've noted, is cost. Building new facilities, especially when they are going to be very large, is quite expensive as is maintaining them. Even aside from the front end cost, it is often cheaper to maintain a series of smaller facilities than one very large one (this is especially true in very cold climates*). Transportation is another key variable. When you consolidate your cost of transportation spikes massively and, because it simply takes longer to get students to school, you have to start school later in the day; which often means parents will have to leave their kids at home when they go to work. This is fine in in grades 6-12, but many parents are not comfortable leaving their child alone at younger ages.

Security is an issue, but its a bit of a messy one. On one hand the absence of a personal relationship with students and their families caused by a large school prevents familiarity from causing breaches of protocol. On the other hand, it seems likely that a small school environment will enable staff to detect and deal with issues at a higher rate. You also have a much smaller group of relevant people to police.


*Very warm ones get away with it because of summer vacation.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2012/12/19 02:33:05


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 dogma wrote:
 Monster Rain wrote:

It's what I interpret the arguments against arming a percentage of a school faculty, or otherwise making schools less vulnerable, to be.


I think the argument against arming school faculty is sound. Teachers already have to jump through enough hoops to earn their meager living.

However, police liaison agreements are always a good idea. They put armed personnel in schools, and help to teach children that police aren't inherently terrible people.


I'm not advocating every teacher packing heat, but a few willing and responsible people with access to a firearm might help. Even if it dropped the death toll from 26 to 25 (using this incident's tally as an example) would be progress. Is it a perfect solution? No.

If there is one I'd love to hear it.

As to your second point, I fully agree. To go a step further: If the money could be scrounged up I'd say making the schools as secure as, say, a bank or courthouse, wouldn't be a bad idea either. There are a few things that we as a society should be able to take for granted; one of these things should be that the schools that we are (generally) required by law to send our children to are as safe as possible.

This message was edited 4 times. Last update was at 2012/12/19 03:05:39


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The Void

 KamikazeCanuck wrote:
 d-usa wrote:
This might very easily make me sound like the heartless bastard of the Dakka OT, but anyway:

Yes I know 26 people died. Yes I know it is a tragedy. But one of the questions now asked is this: "Is it worth it to have people die like this to have a 2nd amendment?". And as a country we have to be honest with ourselves and admit that yes, as a country we are perfectly 100% A-OK with people dying on a regular basis for our rights including children. To do otherwise would be a bold faced lie and would make us nothing short of hypocritical. We mighty not like it, but we are okay with it and have accepted it as a fact of our life.

Cigarettes are perfectly legal, and they have no purpose what-so-ever other than to be smoked. 3,000 non-smokers a year die from cigarettes a year, and we are okay with that.

How many non-drinkers are killed by people under the influence of alcohol? How many people are eating themselves to death?

We are okay with kids starving to death because welfare is not the job of the government and having people die because they can't afford healthcare is perfectly reasonable because they made a choice not to have insurance or they just didn't try hard enough to be successful.

How many children were abused and neglected on the same day as the shooting? How many grade school children were molested by family members, beaten, and then went to bed hungry because we think that DHS is just the government getting into peoples lives and on witch hunts to punish parents.

So as a country we are fine with having rights that result in the deaths of thousands of people every year, we accept that. Or at the very least we don't care, we refuse to think about the fact that our "rights" come at a price that includes the deaths of innocent people that had nothing to do with any of that.

I think 5 kids a day die from abuse and neglect in our country. On one day 26 people get shot, and we care and have a national outrage about this. People are crying in the streets, politicians have meetings, news channels run 24 hour coverage of the event. But even on the day that is all about the poor children that died, nobody mentioned the 5 that dies that day after starving for months, being sick for months, being abused for months.

Maybe I am just overly bitter. But today I am just kind of tired of everybody suddenly caring that 20 children died, when they didn't care about the other 5 children that died that day, or the day before, or every day since.


Yes, you are right. We non-Americans find it hard to comprehend but you are exactly right. Most Americans think it is a fair trade off for the occasional theatre or elementary school getting shot up for the right to bear arms. You are a democracy and you've made that choice. This isn't one of those laws that doesn't reflect the majority of the people's will. We non-Americans need to understand that.


....Not sure how you got that from what D posted there

I beg of you sarge let me lead the charge when the battle lines are drawn
Lemme at least leave a good hoof beat they'll remember loud and long


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United States

 Monster Rain wrote:

I'm not advocating every teacher packing heat, but a few willing and responsible people with access to a firearm might help. Even if it dropped the death toll from 26 to 25 (using this incident's tally as an example) would be progress. Is it a perfect solution? No.

If there is one I'd love to hear it.


Obviously security is the paramount concern, and you are correct that there is no perfect solution. However, one issue that always needs to be addressed in matters of policy is belief. Policymakers not only need to ensure that children are protected, but that their parents believe they are protected. And there are a lot of people that do not trust armed individuals that do not train with their weapons on a daily basis, which most teachers surely would not.

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 dogma wrote:
 Monster Rain wrote:

I'm not advocating every teacher packing heat, but a few willing and responsible people with access to a firearm might help. Even if it dropped the death toll from 26 to 25 (using this incident's tally as an example) would be progress. Is it a perfect solution? No.

If there is one I'd love to hear it.


Obviously security is the paramount concern, and you are correct that there is no perfect solution. However, one issue that always needs to be addressed in matters of policy is belief. Policymakers not only need to ensure that children are protected, but that their parents believe they are protected. And there are a lot of people that do not trust armed individuals that do not train with their weapons on a daily basis, which most teachers surely would not.

What's your take on what I posted earlier? http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/780/494653.page#5088971

I would think retired police/military G'pa would mitigate some angst...

Live Ork, Be Ork. or D'Ork!


 
   
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Mesopotamia. The Kingdom Where we Secretly Reign.

No one trains with their weapons on a daily basis. Not even Marines.

Ask me how I know.

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Lakewood, Ohio

 Monster Rain wrote:
No one trains with their weapons on a daily basis. Not even Marines.

Ask me how I know.


Didja marry one?

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 Seaward wrote:
We don't often have suicide bombers in the US. I'm fairly certain there are other forms of terrorism than suicide bombing, however. There have been an awful lot of mass shootings stopped by a civilian with a concealed weapon.


None of that has anything to do with the claim that guns are an effective means of stopping terrorist attacks. I'll ask once again, exactly how does people walking around with concealed weapons prevent a suicide bomber?

And, interestingly, every mass killing in recent history, save one, has been in a place where guns have been banned.


You need to come to terms with the reality that the gun lobby lies to its members as a matter of course. Because what you just claimed is laughably wrong.

Well, that's just not true at all. You should read the fact sheet Kalashnikov posted a few pages ago. According to ATF statistics, for example, 6850 violent crimes are prevented per day in America just by showing a gun.


That's a highly disputed number. The Department of Justice says it's about 60,000 defence uses of firearms every five years, which is a mile from frankly goofy 2.5 million a year that you claim.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
 KalashnikovMarine wrote:
Roughly 100,000 defensive gun uses a YEAR

and that's the conservative estimate, the numbers go into the millions with other surveys.


And some go as low as 12,000 per year.

So that's one hundred thousand, rapes, murders, kidnappings, assaults, home invasions and muggings foiled PER YEAR in the United States.

Not all DGUs (in fact the majority) involve shots fired or dead/wounded bad guys. Mostly, like Seaward said all it takes is drawing down to make the scumbag du jour decide to leg it.


And in many cases you get two strangers and a darkened alley, one shows he's carrying, both parties withdraw and no-one knows if the guy with the gun stopped a mugger or just scared the gak out of some guy who was walking down an alley way. The information on this stuff is light on and really subjective. The evidence on the number of serious violent crimes is basically non-existant.

Except at the top level, where we can look at the overall crime rate... and we can see there's no impact from gun ownership.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
 Frazzled wrote:
Its a coherent argument, and the one the Founding Fathers subscribed to. All authoritarian entities love gun control.


No, it's not true. Hitler gun reforms didn't ban guns, but actually relaxed many restrictions. Reality fething matters. Don't fething play make believe games.

This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at 2012/12/19 03:54:42


“We may observe that the government in a civilized country is much more expensive than in a barbarous one; and when we say that one government is more expensive than another, it is the same as if we said that that one country is farther advanced in improvement than another. To say that the government is expensive and the people not oppressed is to say that the people are rich.”

Adam Smith, who must have been some kind of leftie or something. 
   
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The Void

 sebster wrote:
 Seaward wrote:


Well, that's just not true at all. You should read the fact sheet Kalashnikov posted a few pages ago. According to ATF statistics, for example, 6850 violent crimes are prevented per day in America just by showing a gun.


That's a highly disputed number. The Department of Justice says it's about 60,000 defence uses of firearms every five years, which is a mile from frankly goofy 2.5 million a year that you claim.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
 KalashnikovMarine wrote:
Roughly 100,000 defensive gun uses a YEAR

and that's the conservative estimate, the numbers go into the millions with other surveys.


And some go as low as 12,000 per year.


Citation needed. I cite everything I list so it would seem acceptable for everyone to do the same no?

For example the Department of Justice sponsored a survey in 1994 titled, Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms that concluded 1.5 Million DGU annually.

The low number I regularly see, and that I personally tend to use is the National Crime Victimization Survey which concluded 108,000 DGU annually. This is despite some issues that have been brought up with how the NCVS was collected, but I tend to stick with the conservative number.

I personally believe the actual number is somewhere between the NCVS and the higher numbers.

This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2012/12/19 03:59:00


I beg of you sarge let me lead the charge when the battle lines are drawn
Lemme at least leave a good hoof beat they'll remember loud and long


SoB, IG, SM, SW, Nec, Cus, Tau, FoW Germans, Team Yankee Marines, Battletech Clan Wolf, Mercs
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 Frazzled wrote:
No other democracy besides the UK has survived this long with at least some of their rights intact. Show me these democracies two hundred years from now.


Oh look, and now it's the 'okay guns haven't stopped these countries becoming totalitarian hell holes, but they totally will at some point in the future!'

I like guns. I think there is one extremely good reason for people to have access to guns - because they're a really fun hobby for lots of people. But all this crazy ass bs about guns stopping governments from going bad is crazy nonsense. Armed societies go bad all the time, look at Nazi Germany for feth's sake - this is because a guy with a gun is not a freedom fighter. And unarmed societies can still mount resistance movements, because once you have the cell structures that allow a resistance to continue, getting guns is a piece of cake.


These are just things that are simply, completely, utterly true. No debate. Just facts, versus noise and bs from people who like pretending their guns make them exciting freedom fighters, and not just working schlubs like the rest of us. So stop the bs, and if you really can't deal with the idea that your guns are nothing but a fun hobby, at least stop posting this bs where sane people can hear you. Because it's really fething annoying.

“We may observe that the government in a civilized country is much more expensive than in a barbarous one; and when we say that one government is more expensive than another, it is the same as if we said that that one country is farther advanced in improvement than another. To say that the government is expensive and the people not oppressed is to say that the people are rich.”

Adam Smith, who must have been some kind of leftie or something. 
   
 
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