[Volokh] Jim Lindgren: John Lott Update on His Reported 1997 Study.--

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Posted by Jim Lindgren:
John Lott Update on His Reported 1997 Study.--
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_06_11-2006_06_17.shtml#1150212677


   I have been meaning to post on several developments this spring
   relating to economist John Lott, which I am doing in two posts.

   As some of you may be aware, there was a dispute over whether John
   Lott ever did a study of defensive gun uses in 1997, as he claimed to
   have done. Interested people can review most of the ins an outs of
   that dispute at Tim Lambert's [1]Deltoid site (Lambert is Lott's most
   vigorous critic). In December 2002 and January 2003 I wrote a long,
   tediously detailed, and ultimately inconclusive [2]report on whether
   Lott ever did a study in 1997, finding good evidence that Lott had a
   major data loss, but little evidence that Lott conducted a study in
   that year.

   Immediately after that report appeared, Minnesota gun activist and
   former NRA board member David Gross came forward to say that he had
   been interviewed for a gun survey, and he thought that he was
   interviewed in the spring of 1997, probably by people working for
   Lott.

   Here is [3]what I later wrote to Instapundit about the Gross account:

     As people may have heard, but may have not quite understood, I
     found Gross a credible witness. Unfortunately, that is a lawyerâs
     term of art. It is possible to have credible witnesses on both
     sides of a case telling inconsistent stories. What I meant is my
     opinion that most people who heard him would give credence to his
     account (and that I found him generally believable), not that his
     account would necessarily trump any other evidence.

     The part of Mr. Grossâs written public statement that was slightly
     different from what he told me concerned who called him for the
     interview. When I asked him if he remembered anything about who
     called, he said that he âwas beginning to thinkâ that the call came
     from students in Chicago, perhaps at Northwestern or the University
     of Chicago, but he was very uncertain about whether the call came
     from a Chicago area source. In his public statement issued after he
     talked with me more than once, however, Grossâs very uncertain
     memory became a bit more certain, suggesting that the call probably
     came from the University of Chicago. That and the timing (which he
     was also not certain about) were the only things that pointed to
     him having been called by Lott as opposed to another survey
     organization.

     As I delved into the other studies being done in the 1996-97
     period, I found that Grossâs description of the questions that he
     was asked fit a 1996 Harvard study by Hemenway & Azrael better than
     Lottâs account of his study questions. First, Gross said that the
     person who called him was interested in a defensive gun use that
     happened a few years before he was surveyed, but was not interested
     in a defensive use that occurred many years before that. This would
     not fit Lottâs survey, since Lott [told me that he] asked only
     about DGUs in the prior year. It would fit the Harvard study
     perfectly, which asked about DGUs in the prior 5 years, but
     excluded events before that. Further, Gross said that he gave a
     narrative account of the event, which the caller was interested in.
     Lottâs study had asked closed-end questions, which would make the
     narrative superfluous, while the Harvard study was one of the first
     to ask for a narrative account of DGUs. Last, Gross reported that
     there was a question about state gun laws, which Lott did not ask,
     but the Harvard study did.

   Some weeks ago John Lott emailed me to report that the data for the
   1996 Hemenway study had been released and that the demographics for
   each respondent from the state where Gross lived (Minnesota) did not
   fit Gross. I checked those data and also downloaded and checked the
   open-ended narrative accounts in the 1996 Hemenway study of defensive
   gun uses from Minnesota. Since neither the demographics nor the
   descriptive accounts matched Gross to any Minnesota respondent, it
   seems clear that Gross was not surveyed by Hemenway in 1996.

   Interestingly, even in 2003 neither Tim Lambert nor David Hemenway
   thought it likely that Gross had been surveyed in the 1996 Harvard
   study. Since Gross's account of the questions asked fit Lott's claims
   about his 1997 study in some respects but not others, we are left with
   several possibilities. If Gross is not lying (and despite his strong
   pro-gun orientation and some minor changes in his story, I still think
   that it is more likely than not that Gross is basically telling the
   truth as he remembers it), then either Gross or Lott misremembered
   some of the questions asked or Gross was surveyed for yet another
   survey.

   By the way, John Lott also wrote me that another survey participant
   came forward a year ago, but I have not interviewed him or her.

   Last, it appears that Lott is no longer fulltime at AEI. Although
   [4]his page there is still reachable from Google, it is no longer
   linked from the [5]AEI scholars page. He is listed as "Former Resident
   Scholar."

References

   1. http://www.deltoid.timlambert.org/lott/
   2. http://timlambert.org/guns/lindgren.html
   3. http://instapundit.com/archives/011786.php
   4. http://www.aei.org/scholars/scholarID.38/scholar.asp
   5. http://www.aei.org/scholars/filter.all/scholar_byname.asp