Some charts have been cited that support the notion that there is not only no correlation between gun ownership and gun violence, but that the opposite is true, that an inverse relationship exists between gun ownership and gun violence.
These charts were produced by an economist named Dr. John Lott, and cited on a website for a 503c he started called the Crime Prevention Research Center.
This website furthers the premise originally stated in Lott's 1998 book "More Guns, Less Crime" in which Lott attempts to make an econometric justification of the above premise.
The only problem is that Lott's methods and conclusions have been thoroughly discredited.
Ted Goertzel, a retired professor of Sociology at Rutgers University, published a paper in The Skeptical Inquirer in 2002, cataloging the most egregious abuses of econometrics in criminology. Unsurprising, John R. Lott’s most significant work, More Guns, Less Crime, was at the top of the list.
Goertzel argues that Lott’s studies consistently rely on extremely complicated econometric models, often requiring the computational data-crunching power exceeding that of an ordinary desktop computer. Lott then assumes the rather convenient position of insisting that his critics use the same data and the same methods he used to rebuke his claims, even after both his data and methods are repudiated.
Within a year, two econometricians, Dan Black and Daniel Nagin validated this concern. By altering Lott’s statistical models with a couple of superficial modeling changes, or by re-running Lott’s own methods on a different grouping of the data, they were able to produce entirely different results.
University of Arkansas Law Professor Andrew J. McClurg, in a critical review of Lott entitled, “‘Lotts’ More Guns and Other Fallacies". As McClurg notes, Lott manages to control for a dizzying array of irrelevant or redundant demographic variables, while ignoring a nearly endless list of important factors that could influence crime.
National Research Council Verdict
In response to the growing controversy over gun violence and particularly Right-to-Carry (RTC) laws, the National Research Council (NRC) convened a panel of 16 experts to examine the existing literature. In 2004, they released their findings. Most of their report was typical academic fare and caused little stir. Not so for their findings on RTC laws.
The NRC panel closely followed Lott’s previous work, using his data, specifications, and method of computing standard errors. Even using this approach, the panel found inconclusive results. Further, as the panel stressed, the results were extremely sensitive to minute changes in the models and control variables. These findings mirrored the existing literature on the subject, which was heavily divided. One member of the panel went so far as to suggest that finding the true effect of RTC laws simply wasn’t possible with econometric analysis. In the end though, 15 of the 16 panel members concluded that the existing evidence could not support claims that RTC laws had a beneficial (or detrimental) impact on crime rates.
In 2011 Dr. John Donohue and two of his colleagues examined and improved on the NRC panel’s findings in “The Impact of Right-to-Carry Laws and the NRC Report: Lessons for the Empirical Evaluation of Law and Policy.” This paper has undergone two updates (the newestpublished this September) and is considered “the best study on the topic” by Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research.
"Whereas the NRC panel found contradictory yet statistically significant results across most of the crime categories, Donohue and his coauthors found very few statistically significant effects of RTC laws on crime rates, but almost all of them, significant or not, show crime increases."
TL;DR
Anything you read from John Lott or the Crime Prevention Research Center has been thoroughly academically discredited.
These charts were produced by an economist named Dr. John Lott, and cited on a website for a 503c he started called the Crime Prevention Research Center.
This website furthers the premise originally stated in Lott's 1998 book "More Guns, Less Crime" in which Lott attempts to make an econometric justification of the above premise.
The only problem is that Lott's methods and conclusions have been thoroughly discredited.
Ted Goertzel, a retired professor of Sociology at Rutgers University, published a paper in The Skeptical Inquirer in 2002, cataloging the most egregious abuses of econometrics in criminology. Unsurprising, John R. Lott’s most significant work, More Guns, Less Crime, was at the top of the list.
Goertzel argues that Lott’s studies consistently rely on extremely complicated econometric models, often requiring the computational data-crunching power exceeding that of an ordinary desktop computer. Lott then assumes the rather convenient position of insisting that his critics use the same data and the same methods he used to rebuke his claims, even after both his data and methods are repudiated.
Within a year, two econometricians, Dan Black and Daniel Nagin validated this concern. By altering Lott’s statistical models with a couple of superficial modeling changes, or by re-running Lott’s own methods on a different grouping of the data, they were able to produce entirely different results.
University of Arkansas Law Professor Andrew J. McClurg, in a critical review of Lott entitled, “‘Lotts’ More Guns and Other Fallacies". As McClurg notes, Lott manages to control for a dizzying array of irrelevant or redundant demographic variables, while ignoring a nearly endless list of important factors that could influence crime.
National Research Council Verdict
In response to the growing controversy over gun violence and particularly Right-to-Carry (RTC) laws, the National Research Council (NRC) convened a panel of 16 experts to examine the existing literature. In 2004, they released their findings. Most of their report was typical academic fare and caused little stir. Not so for their findings on RTC laws.
The NRC panel closely followed Lott’s previous work, using his data, specifications, and method of computing standard errors. Even using this approach, the panel found inconclusive results. Further, as the panel stressed, the results were extremely sensitive to minute changes in the models and control variables. These findings mirrored the existing literature on the subject, which was heavily divided. One member of the panel went so far as to suggest that finding the true effect of RTC laws simply wasn’t possible with econometric analysis. In the end though, 15 of the 16 panel members concluded that the existing evidence could not support claims that RTC laws had a beneficial (or detrimental) impact on crime rates.
In 2011 Dr. John Donohue and two of his colleagues examined and improved on the NRC panel’s findings in “The Impact of Right-to-Carry Laws and the NRC Report: Lessons for the Empirical Evaluation of Law and Policy.” This paper has undergone two updates (the newestpublished this September) and is considered “the best study on the topic” by Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research.
"Whereas the NRC panel found contradictory yet statistically significant results across most of the crime categories, Donohue and his coauthors found very few statistically significant effects of RTC laws on crime rates, but almost all of them, significant or not, show crime increases."
TL;DR
Anything you read from John Lott or the Crime Prevention Research Center has been thoroughly academically discredited.
