You can tell the conservatives liberals fear most because they are automatically referred to as “discredited.” (Ask Sen. Ted Cruz.) But no one is called “discredited” by liberals more than the inestimable economist John Lott, author of the groundbreaking book, More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws
Lott’s economic analysis of the effect of concealed-carry laws on violent crime is the most thoroughly vetted study in the history of economics, perhaps in the history of the world.
Some nut Dutch professor produces dozens of gag studies purporting to find that thinking about red meat makes people selfish and that litter leads to racism — and no one bothers to see if he even administered questionnaires before drawing these grand conclusions.
But Lott’s studies of concealed-carry laws have been probed, poked and re-examined dozens of times. (Most of all by Lott himself, who has continuously re-run the numbers. By now, he has controlled for thousands of factors.)
Tellingly, Lott immediately makes all his underlying data and computer analyses available to critics — unlike, say, the critics. He has sent his data and work to 120 researchers around the world. At this point, there have been 29 peer-reviewed studies of Lott’s work on the effect of concealed-carry laws.
Eighteen confirm Lott’s results, showing a statistically significant reduction in crime after concealed-carry laws are enacted. Ten show no harm, but no significant reduction in crime. Only one peer-reviewed study even claimed to show any negative effect: a temporary increase in aggravated assaults.
Then it turned out that study was based on a flawed analysis by a liberal activist professor. (That was John Donohue. As we shall see, his name keeps popping up in all fake studies purporting to debunk Lott.)
Let’s look at the ethics of Lott’s critics. In 1997, a computer crash led to the loss of Lott’s underlying data. Fortunately, he had previously sent this data to three of his critics — professors Dan Black, Dan Nagin and Jens Ludwig. When Lott asked if they would mind returning it to him so he could restore his files, they refused.
(One former critic, Carlisle Moody, conducted his own analysis of Lott’s data and became a believer. He has since co-authored papers with Lott.)
Unable to produce a single peer-reviewed study to discredit Lott’s conclusions, while dozens of studies keep confirming them, liberals have turned to their preferred method of anathematizing someone. They simply sneer at Lott and neurotically refer to him as “discredited.” No actual discrediting ever takes place, mind you. But liberals feel that as long as they smirk enough, their work is done.
Average readers hear that Lott has been “discredited” and assume that there must have been some debate they didn’t see. To the contrary, the leading source for the claim that Lott’s research doesn’t hold up, left-wing zealot John Donohue, has been scheduled to debate Lott, one-on-one, at the University of Chicago twice back in 2005. Both times, Donohue canceled at the last minute.
Donohue accuses Lott of libel for pointing this out. Suggestion for Mr. Donohue: Instead of writing columns insisting you’ve been libeled, wouldn’t it be better just to agree to a debate? It’s been eight years!
Scratch any claim that Lott’s research has been “debunked” and you will find Donohue, Donohue’s co-author and plagiarist Ian Ayres, or one of the three “scholars” mentioned above — the ones so committed to a search for the truth that they refused to return Lott’s data to him. (Can you imagine the consequences if Lott had been forced to admit to plagiarism, as Ayres has? They’d finally have discredited him!)
Donohue’s previous oeuvre includes the racist claim that the crime rate declined in the 1990s as a result of abortion being legalized in the ’70s. (Nearly 40 percent of the abortions since Roe v. Wade were of black children.)
This study was discredited (not “discredited”) by many economists, including two at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, who pointed out that Donohue’s study made critical mistakes, such as failing to control for variables such as the crack cocaine epidemic. When the Reserve economists reran Donohue’s study without his glaring mistakes, they found that there was “no evidence in (Donohue’s) own data” for an abortion-crime link.
Curiously, the failure to account for the crack epidemic is one of Donohue’s complaints with Lott’s study. I guess the missing crack epidemic worked so well against Donohue’s own research he thought he’d try it against Lott.
The problem is: Lott did account for the crack epidemic, over and over again, in multiple regressions, all set forth in his book.
Donohue and plagiarist Ayres took a nasty swipe at Lott in the Stanford Law Review so insane that the editors of the Review — Donohue’s own students — felt compelled to issue a subsequent “clarification” saying: “Ayres and Donohue’s Reply piece is incorrect, unfortunate, and unwarranted.”
But the easily-fooled New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof repeatedly calls Lott “discredited,” based on a non-peer-reviewed law review article by charlatans Donohue and Ayres. In a 2011 column, for example, Kristof dismissed Lott’s book, “More Guns, Less Crime,” with the bald assertion that “many studies have now debunked that finding.” The only study that was discredited was the one purporting to discredit Lott.
The chicanery of Donohue, plagiarist Ayres, and Lott’s other critics, are dealt with point by point in the third edition of Lott’s More Guns, Less Crime
Suffice it to say that of the 177 separate analyses run by all these critics, only seven show a statistically significant increase in crime after the passage of concealed-carry laws, while 90 of their own results show a statistically significant drop in crime — and 80 show no difference.
“Discredited” in liberal lingo means, “Ignore this study; it didn’t come out well for us.”
COPYRIGHT 2013 ANN COULTER
DISTRIBUTED BY UNIVERSAL UCLICK
