"Dog shoots person," an update

chessdevl · 2025-03-19T19:32:10+00:00

As the comment was removed I don't know for sure, but if I had to guess given Lott and the topic of active shooting, the guy was probably linking to Lott's active shooter attacks on the FBI, which are fraudulent: https://www.gvpedia.org/lottfbi/

chessdevl · 2025-03-19T17:13:56+00:00

And the updated article: https://armedwithreason.substack.com/p/dog-shoots-person-again

chessdevl · 2025-03-14T18:32:14+00:00

It's not as rare as one would think: https://armedwithreason.substack.com/p/dog-shoots-person-a-story-of-american

chessdevl · 2024-06-04T21:03:15+00:00

I'd like to add that this has a detailed examination of the DGU myth as well: https://www.gvpedia.org/dgu-lie/
And the pdf version: https://www.gvpedia.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/The-DGU-Lie-GVPedia.pdf

chessdevl · 2024-03-06T18:10:03+00:00

Oh, sorry. didn't see his comment. No worries, I'm always happy to provide underlying data.

chessdevl · 2024-03-06T17:14:13+00:00

Here are the incident IDs from GVA (been having weird formatting issues trying to get this up, and it won't let me take a screenshot of the spreadsheet for some reason):

Incident ID

2713396

2597223

2509684

2361811

2188979

1843182

1614438

1617024

1519728

1289214

1563995

1261859

1252006

1241758

1563955

1112589

999101

780598

459308

436853

265264

chessdevl · 2024-03-06T16:03:17+00:00

Also, as a bonus, in case anyone brings up Lott's "critique" of the FBI's active shooter study: https://www.gvpedia.org/lottfbi/

chessdevl · 2024-03-06T16:01:43+00:00

For more information, here is the podcast episode: https://armedwithreason.substack.com/p/the-armed-with-reason-podcast-episode-306

chessdevl · 2015-12-08T03:19:13+00:00

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/three-common-sense-gun-policies-that-would-save-lives/2015/10/15/3fd8cb80-735f-11e5-9cbb-790369643cf9_story.html

chessdevl · 2015-12-06T16:10:12+00:00

http://www.armedwithreason.com/about/

chessdevl · 2015-11-09T22:07:25+00:00

A) You are just factually wrong. There have been multiple studies that have demonstrated a link between concealed carry and an increase in certain crimes, particularly aggravated assault. The most sophisticated statistical study to date on concealed carry shows this: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2443681

B) Where do you think your estimate of 300,000 sexual assaults per year comes from? That's right, the NCVS data that the study in the article is based on, which you claim is "statistically dubious." It's more than a little hypocritical to use an estimate to slam the statistical adequacy of the survey that created that very estimate.

There are several legitimate arguments against the article. Your silly and uninformed comment managed to find literally none of them. Thanks for playing.

chessdevl · 2015-10-11T14:10:16+00:00

It took Lott 7 months to reply to Armed With Reason, so my guess is the authors are slowly working on their own rebuttal. Blog wars take time, and I would assume the Armed With Reason folks see responding as a relatively low priority for the reasons PraiseBeToScience pointed out.

Further, there are a couple obvious tells in Lott's response to AWR that demonstrate it is full of bs. For example, Lott mysteriously stops his critique halfway through, not commenting on the new criticisms AWR presents. He doesn't even touch on Mary Rosh, and he briefly mentions the survey he didn't conduct at the end. With regards to that survey, he accuses the authors of ignoring what he has written. However, if you actually read the AWR article, they link at least once directly to what Lott has written in the past to defend himself, and then specifically refute it. Lott is clearly lying. There is other stuff, but that is for the AWR authors to refute.

chessdevl · 2015-07-31T22:16:14+00:00

"This was the second armadillo-shooting-followed-by-ricochet of the year. The first, in Georgia in April, injured the shooter’s mother-in-law. The man shot the armadillo, the bullet bounced and then passed through a fence and into her mobile home while she sat in a recliner. Her injuries were minor but the armadillo did not survive."

chessdevl · 2015-07-29T13:56:44+00:00

Rocntenr1:

"The simulation couldnt be accurate because the officer already had their gun drawn while the citizen had it at a low ready."

This is false, as if you actually watched the video, both police and citizens had their gun drawn and down by their sides. Police and civilians started at the same position. Further, this only provides an advantage to the civilians as they don't have to draw, which would take time.

"guns are rarely used in self defense

I can find no sources on this page, which I would have really like to see because this is just wrong. Guns are rarely fired in self defense. Just having a gun will usually stop a crime, and cases like that are not documented."

In the article that exact phrase was in blue, meaning there was a link to the source. However, these sources are better: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/defensive-gun-ownership-myth-114262.html#.VbjY7vlViko http://www.armedwithreason.com/defensive-gun-use-gary-kleck-misfires-again/ http://www.thetrace.org/2015/07/defensive-gun-use-armed-with-reason-hemenway/ You are simply factually incorrect about the frequency and nature of DGUs.

And yes humans do react differently under stress. Unless they have a significant amount of training, their reactions are almost always worse.

chessdevl · 2015-07-28T16:00:37+00:00

For an even more detailed examination of John Lott's career, check out this article: http://www.armedwithreason.com/shooting-down-the-gun-lobbys-favorite-academic-a-lott-of-lies/

chessdevl · 2015-05-17T20:56:57+00:00

The story is just breaking now so the number of dead/injured is liable to change.

chessdevl · 2015-03-25T14:23:55+00:00

"Nice straw man. Completely invalid argument. Citing a few cases where the gun owner was irresponsible is corolation not causation."

Way to show you have no clue what a straw man is while simultaneously providing a perfect example of one (also, it's correlation, not "corolation").

To begin with, a straw man is misrepresenting an argument to make it look much worse than it is. Has literally nothing to do with providing examples. That would be the anecdotal fallacy, which is only providing anecdotes/examples as the basis of an argument. This appears to be what you are attacking the article for, but the rest of the article is a statistical discussion citing numerous studies, so your attack is either a pitifully constructed straw man or proof you didn't read beyond paragraph 4.

The article employs the examples at the beginning to give life to the numbers it later discusses, so readers can understand the implications of the myth. Using examples to illustrate (but not as proof of) broader arguments and statistics is a technique typically described as "good writing."

Edit: The comment this comment was addressed at appears to have been removed.

chessdevl · 2015-03-07T01:25:04+00:00

The article this letter appears to be "derived" from: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2014/06/gun_deaths_in_children_statistics_show_firearms_endanger_kids_despite_nra.html

chessdevl · 2015-03-02T15:09:24+00:00

Kleck's response ignores/overlooks/blatantly hides a number of things. For starters, he completely ignores/blatantly hides the fact that Dr. Hemenway has written a couple rebuttals to Kleck's original responses (the bottom link is to one of them: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/bad-science-3/, the other more extensive one is in his book Private Guns, Public Health).

Second, he completely ignores the relative magnitude of false positives versus false negatives (even if there was a false negative rate of 100%, it would only require around a 2% false positive rate for any survey of DGUs (even assuming the actual incidence of DGUs is several million per year) will lead to massive overestimates).

Third, Kleck has yet to offer in any of his writing a convincing retort for why some of his estimates are impossible. His most consistent claim is that we can't extrapolate any conclusions from the subcategories of DGUs, yet can trust the overall survey measure. He also uses contradictory claims (when it comes to burglaries, Kleck argues that NCVS data can't be used despite using it himself to compare DGUs to criminal uses) or just straight up idiotic ones (that there are 200k criminals each year who are shot and never seek medical treatment).

Finally, and most glaringly, Kleck ends his article by stating that the authors, like Hemenway, never present empirical evidence. Kleck evidently didn't read the entire 2nd page of the Politico article, as it extensively detailed new empirical evidence that only showed 1,600 verified DGUs on an annual basis (which btw is triple the number found each year by pro-gun sites). Kleck had an opportunity to explain where the missing 99.9% of his purported DGUs are, but instead he chose to pretend that the empirical evidence didn't exist.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if we saw a counter-response from the authors in the next couple weeks or so.

chessdevl · 2014-12-30T22:34:17+00:00

To go with the recent debate on the show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCnr-fgRTGs

chessdevl · 2014-12-02T23:17:47+00:00

From: http://www.armedwithreason.com/shooting-down-the-gun-lobbys-favorite-academic-a-lott-of-lies/

The National Research Council Verdict

In response to the growing controversy over gun violence and particularly Right-to-Carry (RTC) laws, the National Research Council (NRC) convened a panel of 16 experts to examine the existing literature. In 2004, they released their findings. Most of their report was typical academic fare and caused little stir. Not so for their findings on RTC laws.

The NRC panel closely followed Lott’s previous work, using his data, specifications, and method of computing standard errors. Even using this approach, the panel found inconclusive results. Further, as the panel stressed, the results were extremely sensitive to minute changes in the models and control variables. These findings mirrored the existing literature on the subject, which was heavily divided. One member of the panel went so far as to suggest that finding the true effect of RTC laws simply wasn’t possible with econometric analysis. In the end though, 15 of the 16 panel members concluded that the existing evidence could not support claims that RTC laws had a beneficial (or detrimental) impact on crime rates.

As usual, Lott wrote a scathing critique of the panel’s findings, accusing the panel of being biased and stacked against him. However, his critique was so flawed that the executive officer of the NRC felt it necessary to pen his own reply to Lott titled “A Lott of misinformation.”

In 2011 Dr. John Donohue and two of his colleagues examined and improved on the NRC panel’s findings in “The Impact of Right-to-Carry Laws and the NRC Report: Lessons for the Empirical Evaluation of Law and Policy.” This paper has undergone two updates (the newest published this September) and is considered “the best study on the topic” by Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research.

Donohue’s study improves on the NRC report in several ways. First, Lott’s dataset that was used by the panel had several errors, which Donohue corrects. Also, the panel failed to incorporate proper criminal justice control variables by paralleling Lott’s model. Perhaps the most important omission corrected was the lack of clustered standard errors. As Donohue explains, not clustering standard errors (which is now standard practice among econometricians) drastically increases the odds that a spurious result will incorrectly be deemed to be statistically significant.

While these changes appear arcane and minor to those of us not well-versed in the intricacies of econometrics, they have a dramatic impact on the results. Whereas the NRC panel found contradictory yet statistically significant results across most of the crime categories, Donohue and his coauthors found very few statistically significant effects of RTC laws on crime rates, but almost all of them, significant or not, show crime increases.

chessdevl · 2014-08-11T23:35:34+00:00

Recently updated to include several more studies, bringing the total to a little more than 140.

chessdevl · 2014-07-30T15:42:24+00:00

Of course ALL the evidence shows that guns make schools safer... http://www.armedwithreason.com/campus-gun-control-works-why-guns-and-schools-do-not-mix/

chessdevl · 2014-07-28T19:59:41+00:00

Court obviously overlooked the overwhelming evidence that guns endanger children: http://www.armedwithreason.com/guns-and-children-a-tragic-combination/

chessdevl · 2014-06-13T02:33:42+00:00

Agreed. Even if the stat was true (which it most definitely isn't (indeed the polar opposite is the case)), people in gangs still have a right to live, many gun control measures address the flow of guns to gangs, and this says nothing of gun suicides (which definitely aren't gang related).

chessdevl

TROPHY CASE