A few days ago I wrote about the number of pundits making their names on the web, and posted a little parody on the ease of becoming a pundit. Well it seems one of these pundits is on his way to the big time. I'll let him speak for himself, from a recent post on his personal web page

"MY VIRGINAL FOXNEWS COLUMN IS UP My first foray into Big Media centers on the Justice Department's recent decision to recognize that the Second Amendment confers an individual right to bear arms. Needless to say, I am indebted to people like Glenn Reynolds and Eugene Volokh , who have done so much work on Second Amendment scholarship that it made my research easy. Thank you Professors.

Okay, I'll stop now.
Pejman Yousefzadeh

Now while I'm certainly no expert on the subject of the Second Amendment it occurred to me that his article for FOX was not dissimilar to the posts on his site. .The issue of whether the Second Amendment confers an individual right and not just a collective right is a hot topic these days. I tend to think it is collective( this seems to support my view added to post 9/18/02) in spite of the arguments presented by both the Attorney General and Mr. Yousefzadeh in his article. At this point that is simply my opinion. The article was interesting because it has much in common with the standard pundit post, for example links to other pundits namely Professor Eugene Volokh and Professor Glenn Reynolds. It is not my purpose to present counter arguments to the conclusions they reached, I'll leave that for others. What I did find worthy of discussion was the following statement by Pejman Yousefzadeh

"In addition to the legal arguments, the policy reasons behind the Justice Department’s new decision are compelling. Yale statistician John Lott persuasively shows in his book More Guns, Less Crime that "right-to-carry" laws lead to a dramatic reduction in crimes against the person, due to the deterrent effect of those laws.

The logic is simple: A criminal will be less likely to attack a person if the potential victim may be armed."

The source he cites "More Guns, Less Crime" by John Lott rang a bell. In addition to the fact that John Lott is something of a poster child for the N.R.A., I had seen a reference to his book before, in an article by Ted Goertzel , a professor in the Sociology Department at Rutgers University in Camden, NJ. He specifically mentions the Lott Book. It is one of five myths he explores. It is important to note that he discusses it in the context of a larger and more important issue namely that of econometric studies, what they are, how reliable they are, and perhaps more important how we can go about testing their reliability.


Here is the introductory paragraph from Ted's well-reasoned article.

"Do you believe that every time a prisoner is executed in the United States, eight future murders are deterred? Do you believe that a 1% increase in the number of citizens licensed to carry concealed weapons causes a 3.3% decrease in the state's murder rate? Do you believe that 10 to 20% of the decline in crime in the 1990s was caused by an increase in abortions in the 1970s? Or that the murder rate would have increased by 250% since 1974 if the United States had not built so many new prisons?

If you were misled by any of these studies, you may have fallen for a pernicious form of junk science: the use of mathematical models with no demonstrated predictive capability to draw policy conclusions. These studies are superficially impressive. Written by reputable social scientists from prestigious institutions, they often appear in peer reviewed scientific journals. Filled with complex statistical calculations, they give precise numerical "facts" that can be used as debaters’ points in policy arguments. But these "facts" are will o' the wisps. Before the ink is dry on one study, another appears with completely different "facts." Despite their scientific appearance, these models do not meet the fundamental criterion for a useful mathematical model: the ability to make predictions that are better than random chance."

I highly recommend you read the rest of this article it is very well done.

So having come full circle it seems that rather than, as Pejman contends "More Guns, Less Crime" was a persuasive example, it is more likely what Ted is calling junk science. And to the statement that the logic is simple, Mr. Yousefzadeh is commiting the fallacy of begging the question. It is not enough just to state that the logic is simple one must also show evidence as to why that is so and in this case that is a very difficult task.

Did I find Pejman's article right on target. No, I think he was well wide of the mark with at least one of his arguments. Get it? Guns? Off target?

Some more current links on the subject of Lotts Book

http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/guns/lott/lott.html

http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/guns/lott98update.html