I am aware that Lott is a controversial figure. I carefully stated that his book should be read to provide background on how hard it is to establish causation. His book is an excellent source to investigate how complex this issue is.Originally Posted by DMF13
If you want to keep our side of the debate honest you will need to find a better source than John Lott, aka Mary Rosh, and "More Guns, Less Crime."
http://reason.com/archives/2003/05/0...y-of-mary-rosh
. . . consider the case of John R. Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime, which argues that concealed-carry gun laws reduce crime. In 1999 the sociologist Otis Dudley Duncan questioned Lott's claim that "if national surveys are correct, 98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack."
The major research on defensive gun use, Duncan objected, had shown firing rates ranging from 21 percent to over 60 percent. Lott replied that "national surveys" actually referred to his own heretofore unknown survey of 2,424 households. When Duncan pressed him for the survey data, Lott demurred, saying a hard drive crash had destroyed his data set and the original tally sheets had been lost. In fact, there seemed to be no record at all of the study, nor could Lott recall the names of any of the students who he said had worked on it. Some people began to suspect the study, which is tangential to Lott's conclusions in More Guns, didn't exist. . .
. . . Meanwhile, several of the bloggers who had been writing about the controversy -- a group that included me -- drew the ire of someone called Mary Rosh. Rosh, who identified herself as a former student of Lott's who had long admired his fairness and rigor, said that it was irresponsible to post links to the survey debate without calling Lott first. This sounded odd, not only because bloggers very seldom do that kind of background research before posting a link, but because Lott had made precisely the same criticism several times in e-mails to bloggers covering the story.
A Google search revealed that Rosh had for several years been a prolific contributor to Usenet forums, where she regularly and vociferously defended the work of Lott. On a whim, I compared the I.P. address on Rosh's comment to the one on an e-mail Lott had sent me from his home. They were the same.
I posted all of this, and to his credit Lott confessed. "The MaRyRoSh pen name account," he explained, "was created years ago for an account for my children, using the first two letters of the names of my four sons."
The news spread quickly, and the second round of distributed investigation began. Bloggers unearthed old posts by "Rosh" and linked to them on their sites. Among the gems: "[Lott] was the best professor that I ever had....Lott finally had to tell us that it was best for us to try and take classes from other professors more to be exposed to other ways of teaching graduate material." Many were troubled by Rosh's apparent attempt to get an online interlocutor, who claimed to have anonymously peer-reviewed one of Lott's papers, to reveal his identity. (Lott later told The Chronicle of Higher Education that he was merely trying to force his opponent to confess that he had lied about being an academic.) . . .
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