Posted on 06/12/2006 12:03:59 PM PDT by neverdem
Re "Shooting holes in a lawsuit," Opinion, May 31
Jon Wiener claims that "nobody" tried to replicate my research, which demonstrated that right-to-carry laws reduce crime rates.
This is false. Not only has everyone who tried managed to replicate my findings, but many academics have gone beyond that and shown that right-to-carry laws reduce violent crime under a variety of approaches (see johnrlott.tripod.com/postsbyday/RTCResearch.html).
Wiener fails to note that since my research was published, not a single peer-reviewed publication has found that right-to-carry laws increase crime, and there is research that finds even larger drops than I found.
Wiener's Google search implies that many other scholars agree with his claims of research fraud. Yet Wiener fails to note that only about a sixth of the postings are actually scholars of any type.
Wiener claims that my defamation suit wants to "silence" certain claims of fraud. I and other academics have tried to engage Stephen D. Levitt in discussions on the accuracy of his claims, but he won't respond to us.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
I am in Ohio and am really upset about having to take a class. Since CCW has been enacted, I have been pregnant or nursing and unable to take the course. I have my PA CCW, and wish it was as simple here!
My husband did take the course and has his CCW.
Papermaker, CCW, PING!
Why?
Maybe I carry; maybe my wife carries; maybe guessing wrong is fatal. That's why "concealed carry" reduces crime.
HERE download 2004 vs 2005 FBI crime statistics
http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/2005preliminary/exceldownload.htm
Read the thread that I linked at the top of the letter.
A woman who demands further gun control legislation is like a chicken who roots for Colonel Sanders. - Larry Elder.
"Hold tape.
"Dr. Phil never defined what he meant by "children." Independence Institute researcher Dave Kopel notes that many of the reported gun deaths involving "children" include those aged 14 through 19, many of them gangbangers. If, by children, Dr. Phil meant 10 and under, approximately 50 children--or less than one child per state per year under 10--die from handgun violence."
- Larry Elder, "Kids, Guns, And Dr. Phil," townhall.com, November 29, 2002.
Do buybacks reduce crime? The Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington-based group of big-city police chiefs, evaluated buybacks in Boston, Seattle, St. Louis and other major cities and found they had no effect. In Seattle, researchers checked coroner's records and hospital admissions data for six months following a buyback and said it hadn't reduced gun violence at all. Small wonder that University of Pennsylvania professor Lawrence Sherman told Congress that buybacks are "a sellout to doing what works to make news, not public safety." - Edwin J. Feulner, "Gun Buybacks: A Misfire," www.heritage.org, July 31, 2000.
"In particular, more than eight in 10 American parents in this poll supported various gun control measures, from trigger locks to licensing and registration of all guns.
"Boy, did I feel like the odd mom out. Me? I wish I had a gun. As a mom, I feel guilty about the fact that my sons may grow up entirely gun-free. I don't know why I feel so strongly. I didn't have guns as a kid, and neither did my brother or my dad (except for the Navy stint). Maybe it is one too many Heinlein novels, or maybe it's the research that shows armed citizens play a key role in saving their fellow citizens from Columbinesque mass attacks, but I have this weirdly politically incorrect, deeply personal sense of civic responsibility: If there's a madman or a bad man threatening my kids or my neighborhood, I feel like I ought to be in a position to do something a little more effective than screaming, fainting, calling for smelling salts or summoning the police."
- Maggie Gallagher, "Moms For Guns," May 31, 2000.
"When I began my research on guns in 1976, like most academics, I was a believer in the 'anti-gun' thesis.... It seemed then like self-evident common sense which hardly needed to be empirically tested.... [But] the best currently available evidence, imperfect though it is (and must always be), indicates that general gun availability has no measurable net positive effect on rates of homicide, suicide, robbery, assault, rape, or burglary in the U.S.... Further, when victims have guns, it is less likely aggressors will attack or injure them and less likely they will lose property in a robbery.... The positive associations often found between aggregate levels of violence and gun ownership appear to be primarily due to violence increasing gun ownership, rather than the reverse." - Professor Gary Kleck, Florida State University School of Criminology, speech to the National Academy of Sciences, 1991.
"Actual research tells just the opposite story. People who have not resisted have gotten hurt twice as often as people who resisted with a firearm. Those who resisted without a firearm of course got hurt the most often.
- Thomas Sowell, "Gun Control Myths: Part II," townhall.com, November 27, 2002.
(San Francisco, CA) - "Like a child who fears monsters under the bed at night, California Assemblyman Louis Caldera has an irrational and unjustifiable fear of good citizens with guns. He and his allies in the anti-self-defense lobby have ignored or defamed the mountain of research that shows guns in the hands of good citizens have an enormous public safety benefit--as many as 2.5 million lives protected annually. They have ignored or defamed the research showing the public safety benefits of reforming concealed weapon licensing as California's AB 638 would do." - "Doctors Treat Assemblyman's Unfounded Fears with Facts," Press Release, Doctors for Integrity in Policy Research, Inc., Edgar A. Suter MD, National Chair, February 25, 1996.
Here's the link to Lott's complaint:
http://www.overlawyered.com/lott_complaint.pdf/Lott%20v%20Levitt.pdf
We are also in Ohio and it was just a matter of plunking down the dough and doing the class. We had a great instructor through Target World in Cincinnati.
I won't ask permission to exercise a Right. It is the law that is in error, not my Rights. And yes, I understand the risks involved.
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