"Unfortunately, Black's and Nagin's evidence was not based on statewide crime rates but on the crime rates for counties with over 100,000 people. This fact is important, for instance, in West Virginia, where it means that only one single county - Kanawha - was examined. The other fifty-four counties in West Virginia, which include 89 percent of the state's population, were excluded from their estimates. They used only one county for three of the ten states, and only three counties for another state. In fact, Black and Nagin managed to eliminate 85 percent of all counties in the nation in their analysis.
The Black and Nagin paper excludes Florida after they have already excluded the 86 percent of the counties with populations fewer than 100,000. Eliminating Florida as well as counties with fewer than 100,0000 does eliminate the significance in the one particular type of specification that they report for a couple of crimes, but the vast majority of estimates were unaffected from this extreme data mining and they ignore that doing this actually strengthens some of the results. - [John Lott's response to Webster]
Texas issued over 192,000 permits during the first three years of its right-to-carry law from January 1, 1996 to December 31, 1998.
Yet, the experience in Texas is probably best summarized by Glenn White, president of the Dallas Police Association: "I lobbied against the law . . . because I thought it would lead to wholesale armed conflict. That hasn't happened. All the horror stories . . . didn't happen. No bogeyman. I think it has worked out well . . . I am a convert." - [John Lott's response to a HCI web page]
David Friedman - David Friedman’s comments on Black and Nagin’s JLS article
| Extract from "Goodbye
Dodge City" www.dvc.org.uk/johnny/dunblane/dodge.html Dr. Paul Gallant In concluding their attack on Lott and his research, Black and Nagin dropped a quiet bombshell: "We find no statistically significant evidence that RTC laws have an impact on any of the crime rates." In fact, try as they might - no matter how they twisted Lott's data - they could not demonstrate that harm resulted from RTC laws. In re-examining the findings of Lott and Mustard, they used a different model relating RTC laws to crime and a different set of variables. But unlike Bartley and Cohen, Black and Nagin didn't use all the data in their analysis and very carefully hand-picked the data that they did use. Their conclusions, published in the January 1998 issue of the Journal of Legal Studies, were entirely different from those of Lott and Mustard. Black and Nagin's paper was a blatant attempt to prove that RTC laws harm the public. In the face of overwhelming proof to the contrary, they came up empty-handed in finding support for the premise that harm resulted from armed law-abiding citizens. Nevertheless, that didn't prevent them from advising against premising public policy on Lott's findings. Dr. Joanne D. Eisen is engaged in the private practice of Family Dentistry. She is President, Association of Dentists for Accuracy in Scientific Media (ADASM), a national organization of dentists concerned with preserving the integrity of the professional dental literature, against the politicization which has corrupted America's medical literature. Dr. Paul Gallant is engaged in the private practice of Family Optometry, Wesley Hills, NY. He is Chairman, Committee for Law-Abiding Gun-Owners, Rockland (LAGR), a 2nd Amendment grassroots group, based in Rockland County, NY. Guns &
Ammo Magazine, December 1998. |