Mr. Gilson would be well advised to check his own factual assertions before condemning others. (Full disclosure: John Lott and I overlapped in graduate school and have been friends for many years.) Lott's findings on gun ownership and crime rates in fact have been replicated multiple times by every scholar who has attempted to do so, and the findings have proven robust in papers published in peer-reviewed journals. The "coding errors" to which Gilson refers were made by other scholars attempting to extend Lott's analysis to additional years; Lott is not responsible for those mistakes. Lott's purportedly "sloppy research" has resulted in the publication of approximately 100 papers in peer-reviewed journals; so much for the sloppiness accusation, which is ill-defined in any event. In the lawsuit referenced above, the judge ruled against Lott on one cause of action; but the other cause of action remains. Only were Lott's work as sloppy and dishonest as Gilson's comments would Lott have anything about which to apologize.

Benjamin Zycher

In case anyone hasn't noticed: crime happens in poor neighborhoods and gun ownership happens in higher income neighborhoods. And while illegal drug use happens in both neighborhoods, the ones who use them in poorer neighborhoods don't have cushy jobs to pay for those overpriced drugs - AND they get access to lower priced illegal drugs to boot. If Lott wanted to subsidize the purchase of guns in lower income neighborhoods eliminating the choice for nonusers of overpriced addictive drugs between rent and guns maybe he could get a more accurate survey. Crime has everything to do with economics and little to do with moral choices. Spread the opportunity for family wage jobs around and watch crime go down with it - despite the best efforts of drug warriors to sock it to the [mostly lower income] bad guys.

This warrants further investigation into the author's methods. For example, I would imagine that gun ownership by higher income earners is more likely to be reported (i.e., guns purchased legally and then registered) than gun ownership by lower income groups (i.e., blackmarket purchasing of guns). If his metric is 'registered guns', then the conclusion is not surprising. Even more, registered vs. non-registered metrics aside, it would not surprise me at all that wealthier populations would own more guns: this population tends to own more of everything else, too! However, concluding that an inverse correlation of gun ownership to crime rates results in causality is where Mr. Lott dives into murky waters. In the United States at the turn of the last century, we could also correlate the decrease in mules and mule ownership with the increase in ice cream consumption if we so desired. Both of these changes relate to the industrial revolution, but only a fool would claim that a decrease in mule ownership directly led to an increase in ice cream comsumption, or vice versa.
Bottom line: Any economist should take care to avoid using statistical methods in an effort to convince folks that correlation = causality. We know that you are smarter than that!

So if it is true that gun ownership lowers crime then that explains why MAD (mutual assured destruction) works and that must be why Iran wants 'the bomb'. So Mr. Boosh should deign to allow them to have nukuler weapons, WMD just as we and so many other countries do. Amazing that---ain't logic wonnerful.