Burnt Orange Report

I seem to run into the strangest people...

By Jim Dallas

In high school, I did a week-long job-shadowing program at KGBC, the thousand-watt AM radio station in Galveston. I got to follow around the news director (who, given the fact that Galveston is small-enough so that everybody-knows-everybody, was kind of a local celebrity) for a week. His name was Tim Kingsbury.

Only, it wasn't. His name was really Patrick Welsh, who had left his home in Ohio in 1983 after running afoul of the law. A few months after my mini-internship, he got caught and sent back to Ohio to face justice. The story later became the basis of a Lifetime channel movie and was covered on CBS's news magazine program 48 Hours.

For me, this was really shocking, as it was for many Galvestonians.

In high school, I figured that was going to be my one run-in with history. Although I find out now that may not be the case.

In a Daily Texan column last summer, I made a casual reference to pro-gun scholar John Lott's work, which by then (as I noted) had been heavily criticized if not outright-refuted. I had done my homework, read the journal articles, and felt it was not unreasonable to say that Lott's More Guns, Less Crime hypothesis (to wit, that "shall issue" concealed permit laws were responsible for a drop in crime) had not held up under scrutiny.

Incidentally, I still happen to personally believe in "shall issue" permit laws, simply because I feel that "may issue" laws can become discriminatory, which they have been in the past.

Back to the story. So about a week afterwards, I got an e-mail from an irate John Lott arguing that More Guns, Less Crime had not been debunked. I didnt get into an argument over the details; instead I told him that he was more than welcome to submit a guest column laying out his case to the Texan and that, as a researcher, surely his analysis would be taken seriously by the Texan editorial board. I didn't hear anything from Lott after that, which I thought was unfortunate because I wanted to hear what he had to say.

(And Mr. Lott, if you're out there, consider this a standing invitation from the Burnt Orange Report family to make a guest post on our blog).

Unfortunately the e-mail has long been purged from my inbox; I should have printed it out and framed it.

In any case, this last year has not been a pleasant one for Mr. Lott, and it gets even worse with a full-scale expose in Mother Jones:

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.

Ouch.

Chris Mooney is all over John Lott like white-on-rice on his blog. Check it out.

So here's my second rendezvous with history.

Actually, I hope I'm not being cruel by not considering the multiple occasions on which I shook Marty Akins hand, or the time that Ron Kirk spilled tea on me at a TCDP fundraiser. as my second and third rendezvous (and the John Lott affair as number four).

But as much as I like Marty Akins and Ron Kirk, the whole 2002 election debacle is something I'd rather forget.

ASIDE: Part of why John Lott is being taken to task is because of what some consider the exaggerated use of regression models. I tried recently to predict the 2004 election on the basis of such models -- and unless you believe Bush is going to carry the District of Columbia by a landslide, you'd be well-advised to note that it's a particularly prickly enterprise!