David Frum calls BS on John Lott

Okay, so this took some research on my part, but not much. I happened to catch sight of a blogpost from GOP strategist-turned CNN pundit David Frum. In his post that you can read here, Frum implores President Obama to use the power of the Presidency to tackle the gun industry with Surgeon General Reports and Senate Panels on gun violence. Weak tea? Perhaps, but Frum points to similar success in tackling the tobacco industry in years passed. Remember, doctors used to to recommend cigarettes as a means to prevent coughing.

Former Bush-advisor turned sensible person, David Frum.

But more importantly, Frum refutes Lott's oft-repeated and bogus statistic that individual gun ownership prevents 2.5 million crimes per year, which translates to one crime deterred every 13 seconds. Frum provides a link to an earlier blogpost, written in the wake of the Aurora move theater massacre, which you can read here.

Basically, Frum cuts right to the core of Lott's sloppy research. Frum lays out five obvious flaws. Some of them are as follows:

1. Lott published his 2.5 million prevented crimes statistic in 1995. In the last 18 years, crime has decreased by one third, yet Lott and his supporters maintain that the number of crimes prevented by "good guys with guns" has remained constant. How can this be?

2. Lott did conduct a singular study from the year preceding 1995 to produce his result. Instead, his statistic is culled from 13 polls of gun users who said they used a gun to prevent a crime. And by "used" they meant owner of said gun heard a rustle in the bushes, walked outside with a gun, only to find nothing. Maybe the shotgun scared away a burglar, or maybe the wind picked up and died down. Hardly definitive methodology.

 3. The FBI counted an average of 213 justifiable homicides in the United States from 2005 through 2010. If Lott's 2.5 million number is anywhere near accurate, that would mean that defensive gun use would only result in a fatality 0.0052 percent of the time.

Which leads to Frum's final point. When one combines the actual statistics on crime with Lott's 2.5 million number, we see merely the illusion of the gun enthusiast crowd. To them, a bad guy has a gun, a good guy pulls out his gun, and problem solved. In reality, most crimes are committed among acquaintances, not strangers. Sometimes one person has a gun, sometimes both parties a gun. In either case, the likelihood of a fatality is higher than if no person had a gun, period.

Nancy Lanza thought her guns would protect her. They didn't.

His final thoughts are telling, and cut to the core of the gun culture. I will reprint, rather than paraphrase:

. . . Most of the time, gun owners are frightening themselves irrationally. They have conjured in their own imaginations a much more terrifying environment than genuinely exists -- and they are living a fantasy about the security their guns will bestow. And to the extent that they are right -- to the extent that the American environment is indeed more dangerous than the Australian or Canadian or German or French environment -- the dangers gun owners face are traceable to the prevalence of the very guns from which they so tragically mistakenly expect to gain safety.

Tragedy indeed. CNN published Frum's wise words on July 30th, 2012, five and half months before yet another "law-abiding citizen," Nancy Lanza, was shot and killed with a gun she purchased for self-protection.

John Lott's Myth Busted

Has a "good guy" with a gun ever lowered the crime rate? John Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime, answers strongly in the affirmative. Ironically, the biggest critic to Lott's research, is Lott none other than Lott himself.

Before we delve into statistics, it is important to analyze the evidence pool from which Lott and other concealed carry proponents draw from. The story is always the same: a good guy had a gun, you just didn't hear it because the "liberal media" didn't tell you. Somehow, John Lott got his hands on the information.

One such story, told from the prospective of a "law-abiding" gun owner, is actually perfect at illustrating Lott's logical fallacies.

From the Hartford Courant's write-up of Tuesday's legislative hearing on the Newtown massacre:

Gun owner Andrew Starczewski of New Britain testified against the magazine restrictions by relating a harrowing story about thugs surrounding him and his fiance years ago in a Hartford parking garage.

"They were all young men, and all looked thuggish and dressed that way. … They had at least two bats and two guns, all deadly weapons. We would be overwhelmed by the thugs in seconds. Luckily I was armed, a very small handgun with only six rounds of minor caliber ammunition. … I would have given an eye, an arm, my teeth for a 15-round magazine," Starczewski said.

"When I released the safety of the gun … while it was still in my small-of-the-back holster … it made a click … and the lead guy did an about-face and waved off the other guys" and they ran off, Starczewski said later.

There are several problems with Starczweski's story. Let's start with the setting: a parking garage in Hartford, Connecticut. Fair enough. But according to Starczweski's account, there are several young men, dressed "thuggish," and carrying "at least two bats and two guns." 

Stop right there. First of all, how many thugs are there? Are there just two thugs, each armed with a bat and a gun? Or two thugs, one with two guns, the other with two bats? Four people, each with either a bat, or a gun? Perhaps there were so many people, that Starczweski was simply unable to estimate, solely because he was trained to look for danger, and saw only the bats and guns that were presumably pointed in his direction. And there must be a lot of people, because Starczweski says he would forfeit a limp for the use of a 15-round magazine.

In any case, how did a group of people, armed with baseball bats and guns, bypass the gate attendant and the security cameras of the parking garage? A handgun can be concealed, but baseball bats?

Any willing suspension of disbelief goes out the window when Starczewski concludes his story. He had a gun. The "lead" guy called off his attackers. Think like the thief for a minute. You are about to rob someone. You find out he has a gun. Are you going to just walk away and give him a chance to shoot you in the back?

Even we assume that this highly dubious story is true, in spite of it incredulity, there is no evidence that Starczewski actually prevented a crime from being committed. Why? Well, for starters, he never reported this incident to the police. Stalking somebody with a deadly weapon is against the law, and by his own admission, Starczewski let them go unharmed. Now, this group of thugs is free to terrorize the next person they say in the parking garage.

The steering-wheel lock, known universally as the "club," is analogous to the aforementioned situation. The club does not reduce aggregate car theft, because a would be thief could simply walk past the "clubbed" car and steal the next one. Or, if the "clubbed" car was new model Mercedes/Audi/BMW, etc, the thief could just cut the club with a hacksaw in about two minutes, or slice right through with an angle grinder in about ten seconds. If a good citizen were to witness the thief and probe his actions, all he would need to do is smile and say, "I forgot my key."

But that's just me talking. What about Lott? For over a decade, Lott insisted that law-abiding gun owners were responsible for "preventing 2 million crimes per year." He said these were FBI statistics. Unfortunately, no one from the FBI has ever validated this claim. Lott now says that the number is somewhere "between 1.5 million and 3.4 million crimes every year."

That's right. 1.5 million to 3.4 million. By his own admission, Lott has a margin of error of 1.9 million crimes. If we hold that margin up to his original calculation of 2 million, we can conclude that Lott's margin of error is 95 percent. If we accept Lott's lower estimate of 1.5 million, we can conclude "more guns" translates into an increase of 400,000 crimes per year.

But hey, those are his numbers. And whatever model he is operating is completely at odds with basic statistical calculation. More guns and less crime? Using Lott's own research, let's consider this myth busted.

Post script: I decided to investigate Lott's claim that England's handgun ban, instituted in 1997, had caused murder rates to "double" by 2003.  So, I checked. England and Wales recorded slightly under 800 murders in 1998, and slightly over 1,000 in 2003. Hardly a double, but an increase, right?However, 176 of those "2003" murderers were due to the conviction of serial killer Harold Shipman, a sick doctor who killed his patients. After his conviction, 176 previous "accidental deaths" were subsequently recorded as homicides. So, in 2003, the murder rate was about the same. Until the next year, and the year after, in which England and Wales recorded progressively lower murder rates, with 2012 being the lowest on record. It took me all of two minutes to this look this up.