By Ann Coulter
You can tell the conservatives liberals fear most because they start
being automatically referred to as “discredited.” Ask Sen. Ted Cruz. But
no one is called “discredited” by liberals more often 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 purportedly
finding 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 about
humanity.
But Lott’s decades-long 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 controlling 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. By now,
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 purported to show any negative effect: a temporary increase
in aggravated assaults. Then it turned out this was based on a flawed
analysis by a liberal activist professor: John Donohue, whose name keeps
popping up in all fake studies purporting to debunk Lott.
In 1997, a computer crash led to the loss of Lott’s underlying data.
Fortunately, he had previously sent this data to his critics —
professors Dan Black, Dan Nagin and Jens Ludwig. When Lott asked if they
would mind returning it to him to 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 simply sneering at Lott and
neurotically attaching “discredited” to his name. No actual discrediting
ever takes place. But liberals think 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 Donohue, was 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, his 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. (Imagine
the consequences if Lott had been forced to admit to plagiarism, as
Ayres has.)
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 the 1973 case of 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. It worked so well against his
own research he thought he’d try it against Lott. The difference is:
Lott has, in fact, accounted 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.”
When you have to be corrected on your basic anti-gun facts by an ABC
correspondent — as Donohue was by “Nightline” correspondent John Donvan
in a 2008 televised panel discussion — you might be a few shakes away
from a disinterested scholar.
But the easily fooled New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has
repeatedly called Lott “discredited,” based on a 2003 article by
charlatans Donohue and Ayres — a non-peer-reviewed law review article.
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 details of the chicanery of Donohue, plagiarist Ayres, as well as
all of Lott’s other critics, are dealt with point by point in the third
edition of Lott’s “More Guns, Less Crime,”
and in a number of published articles by Lott and others, you can see
how his critics cherry-picked the data, made basic statistical errors,
tried every regression analysis imaginable to get the results they want
and lied about Lott’s work (such as Donohue’s claim that he neglected to
account for the crack epidemic).
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.”
SoRo: Links to Federal Reserve of Boston studies debunking the Donohue and Ayres' studies:
The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime
Testing Economic Hypotheses with State-Level Data
The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime
Testing Economic Hypotheses with State-Level Data
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