Mary Rosh (John Lott) Lies Again!

[MrBenchley]

Yes, the gun nuts' favorite make-believe scientist is back, with a fresh new public lie...

"John Lott - whose survey evidence for More Guns, Less Crime disappeared in a mysterious computer hard drive crash - is trying to make the case that an armed Iraq is a safe Iraq...
Let's focus on a smaller point - are John Lott's statistics even accurate? Is the murder rate in Washington DC higher than the murder rate in Bagdhad?
The DC murder rate is easy to find. Washington had 262 murders in 2002, out of a population on 600,000.
The murder rate in Baghdad? Well ... you see ... the evidence of that is hard to find. In fact, it's non-existent.
"Although crime rates are said to rise every summer - something that could not be verified, because national crime statistics were burned during looting at the Ministry of the Interior - this July is stranger than any most Baghdadis remember." International Herald Tribune, July 15, 2003 (reprinted from The Boston Globe)"

http://www.whoismaryrosh.com/wyeth.html

[CO Liberal]

1. I Can See Why You Didn't Post This in "Latest Breaking News"

John Lott lies every time he opens his mouth or lifts his pen.

[MrBenchley]

2. So true

Like nothing else, this phony crackpot demonstrates the utter emptiness and dishonesty of the RKBA position...

[Emoto]

3. Lott does not analyze foreign countries, does he?

I thought he wrote about how things work here, not in Iraq.

Oh, and as for the hard drive crash. Here is a letter to the editor that shows what nonsense you post: (there is no harm in posting the letter, as it was written to be published in order to dispell exactly the sort of disinformation that you typically post)

The Crash That Killed My Data

Saturday, March 22, 2003; Page A15


Eight academics at eight different universities have informed me that they have written to your paper in response to two recent attacks on me and my research. But your paper has chosen not to publish the letters, not even one from an academic who wanted to correct a statement attributed to him that was the opposite of what he had written.

A Feb. 11 Federal Page article questioned the existence of a 1997 survey that was used to "support claims in provocative book." My discussion of the survey actually involved only one number in one sentence, and even then I qualified my statement by beginning that sentence: "If a national survey that I conducted is correct." In any case, despite my past willingness to talk to your reporters, no one at your paper asked me about my survey. The bottom line is that I lost data for most of my various research projects, as well as the files for my book "More Guns, Less Crime," in a computer crash in July 1997. With the help of other scholars, primarily David Mustard at the University of Georgia, the massive data sets using county and state level crime data were reconstructed so the data could be given to academics who requested it. This enabled researchers at dozens of universities to re-estimate every single regression in my book. I redid the survey last year and obtained similar results. (Academics have confirmed my hard-disk crash as well as discussions that I had back in 1996 and 1997 regarding the survey, and there is also verification by a participant in the survey.)

This data set and all the other data used in my new book, "The Bias Against Guns," have also been made available to anyone who requests them at www.johnlott.org.

As to the claim, raised in a Feb. 1 Style article, that I used a fictitious identity in making posts in Internet chat rooms, I did indeed do that. I originally used my own name but switched after receiving threatening and obnoxious telephone calls from other Internet posters.

-- John R. Lott Jr.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A8021-2003Mar21¬Found=true

[CO Liberal]

4. Maybe Someone Should Investigate How John Lott's Mind Works

Because it's obviously defective.

[Emoto]

5. How do you figure?

Ad hominem (sp?) attacks don't exactly make for constructive debate.

[CO Liberal]

6. It's Hard To Have a Constructive Debate On This Issue.....

...when the pro-gunners look upon JOhn Lott as a god, and us pro-control folks look upon him as scum.

[Emoto]

12. curious

I certainly don't think of him as anything more than an economist who knows how to crunch numbers. I have yet to read any of his books, but may do so when I have a chance. I think it is more telling that the gun control folks think of him as scum instead of coming back with scientific rebuttal for his work.

[CO Liberal]

13. We Have Better Things To Do......

...than to waste our time reading his drivel.

[Emoto]

15. Too bad

To condemn something as "drivel" without having examined it seems wrong to me. I like to decide things for myself. Maybe it is drivel, maybe it isn't, but if I were to let someone or some organization with an agenda tell me how to think, I would be ashamed of myself.

To each his own.

[CO Liberal]

16. I Don't Need to Go Down Into a Sewer.....

...to know that it's full of shit.

The same thing applies to anything written by John Lott.

[Emoto]

18. It would appear...

...that your objectivity has fallen by the wayside. Is anything that either disagrees with your point of view, or is liked by someone you don't like, now automatically shit? If not, please describe the decision making process.

[CO Liberal]

19. As Has Your Objectivity

You appear as unable to understand or accept the gun control side of issues, as I am to understand or accept yours.

[Emoto]

20. Not really

You characterized someone's work as sewage without any firsthand knowledge that I was aware of, and I asked you if anything that disagreed with you was automatically sewage and if not, to explain your decision making process. You reached a conclusion, but I couldn't tell how you got there. I offered one possibility, which was you taking someone else's word for it, and if that was not it, asked you to explain it to me. Obviously, you are under no obligation to explain yourself to me or anyone else. I was just hoping that could find someone on the anti side who is there because of thought, logic, and careful consideration who would therefore be able to explain a thought process that is completely opaque to me.

[CO Liberal]

21. I've Read Enough and Heard Him Enough On The Radio......

...to know first-hand that John Lott is full of shit, just like a sewer.

[Emoto]

22. I don't suppose...

...you would care to let us in on where you did this reading and what sort of radio you heard him on, would you?

It is all well and good to post such generalities, but when one seeks to discredit the work of an academic, much less prove it to be "shit" it is usually the convention to offer something with credibility.

[CO Liberal]

23. OK.....

I have read drivel-filled op-ed columns writted by John "Cook the Books" Lott and published in my local paper, the Pueblo CHieftain.

I have also heard him as a guest on Sean Hannity's radio pukefest.

And just because he's an "avcademic" doesn't make his incapable of beiing called full of shit. After all Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams are academics as well, and I think THEY'RE full of shit, too.

[MrBenchley]

14. There's plenty of scientific criticism

which gun nuts call "biased".

Lott's pseudoscience is a preposterous muddle of fraud and error...as one scientist put it, "He doesn't show there are more guns, he lies about there being less crime, and he fails to prove any correlation between the two."

[iverglas]

17. the old old pattern

Having several years' experience watching the anti-choice brigade "debate" abortion on the net, that summation looks all too familiar:

"He doesn't show there are more guns,
he lies about there being less crime,
and he fails to prove any correlation
between the two."

Replace a very few words, and the speaker could be talking about Mark Crutcher of the Life Dynamics Institute, just for one instance; your John Lott sounds like a twin brother, apparently born with the same congenital inability not to dissemble and obfuscate. (One of Crutcher's team's finest performances was in front of a US congressional committee, where the team member was caught in an utterly outrageous and quite foolish, but nonetheless widely and longly and loudly asserted, lie.)

And oddly enough, another of the champions of the anti-choice brigade has a slightly different but plainly related disability: an unfortunate tendency to mislay the boxes containing the "documentation" she regularly claims to have, to back up all sorts of wild allegations of fact that she makes, often having to do with "science" ... and has just never been able to produce. Mind you, I won't breathe that one's name here; she also has a fondness for denouncing, and threatening action in respect of, the "libel per se" she sees all around her whenever anyone gently suggests she may not be speaking the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Sigh. Lose your credibility (assuming someone had any to start with), and you just may never get it back. And no matter how many people claim to believe you anyway, sensible people won't believe you when you say the sky is blue unless you can produce a video to that effect. ;)

.

[MrBenchley]

7. The imbecile DID make the claim

And like all his other ones, it was complete horseshit.

"Eight academics at eight different universities have informed me that they have written to your paper in response to two recent attacks on me and my research."
Wonder how many of them Mary, er, John made up?

[Emoto]

8. Unfounded assertion and name calling

Why don't you back up your claims? Making an assertion and then calling names does not add up to a rebuttal. In fact, such tactics tend to destroy one's credibility.

[CO Liberal]

9. And John Lott's Credibility Has Been Destroyed A Little More.....

....each time he spews his lies on Faux News.

[MrBenchley]

10. A phony expert for fake news

That's Lott in a nutshell...

[CO Liberal]

11. With an Emphasis on the "Nut"

:crazy:

[Lefty48197]

24. Here's one good thing about John Lott...

he makes Dumbyah look honest in comparison.

[CO Liberal]

25. John GOTTI Made Dumbyah Look Honest By Comparison!

John "Cook the Books" Lott is totally beneath contempt.

[Paladin]

26. A Little Reading For You John Lott Groupies

For those of you RKBA absolutists who feel compelled to defend John Lott and his research, I suggest a reading of Michelle Malkin's February 5, 2003 column (michelle/malkin020503asp). If Lott's actions cause this kind of outburst from a shrill, right-wing, NRA pin-up girl like Malkin, do you really expect true Democrats to accord him any respect?

[SyracuseDemocrat]

27. Lott is much more believable

than say, Michael Moore, when it comes to gun crime statistics. :eyes:

[CO Liberal]

28. I Have a Dog That's a Better Statistician Than John "Cook The Books" Lott

And she can't count......

[MrBenchley]

29. What a pantload

Michael Moore doesn't lie...nor does he try to pretend his lies are "science."