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john lott hackacad

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April 30, 2024 rww

Donald Trump thinks he’s identified a crucial mistake of his first term: He was too nice.

It is a popular quote and many people still attribute it to Bonhoeffer; but it can’t be found in any of his writings, nor is there a record of it in his sermons or speeches.

President Joe Biden’s eating habits are no longer just the subject of Fox News host Jesse Watters’ invaluable scrutiny, after Newsmax host Eric Bolling grew increasingly angry Monday with the president eating salad at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner over the weekend.

Randall Terry, the founder of the far-right group Operation Rescue, has been chosen as the Constitution Party’s presidential nominee for the 2024 election.

Over the weekend people gathered at West Virginia’s Berkeley Springs castle to attend a conference held by VDARE — a white nationalist hate group. Speakers at the event included well-known white nationalists and antisemites such as Jared Taylor, Steve Sailer, and Kevin DeAnna. It also included former Department of Justice official John Lott.

Conservative activist and author Christopher Rufo declared in his Substack newsletter that pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses are a “disaster” for the left that conservatives should “exploit.”

In arguing to the Supreme Court that he cannot be charged for acts while in office, Donald Trump has asked the justices to enforce a norm that he has long threatened to shatter.

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2016 list crowdsource?

claims no longer list funder bc of harrass: (not funders but bd w/ email, and dean's [presumably both public]

https://crimeresearch.org/2015/08/gun-control-organizations-and-media-try-to-intimidate-cprc-academic-board-of-advisors/

twt taylor woolrich ghost wrote

?]

Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV) has spent some time putting together contact information for the CPRC’s academic board of advisors and the deans of their schools (see here and here).  The notion is that they think that they can intimidate all these prestigious academics into hiding.  Media Matters and other gun control media have tried getting others  to join in getting people to contact the deans of our academic advisors.  However, as one of our academic board members wrote back to us: “I don’t think they can intimidate any of us at this point.  It won’t work.”

George Mason University Professor Tim Groseclose posted these tweets in response to the CSGV:

twt]

... CSGV relies on recent false information provided by Buzzfeed, Mother Jones, and others (these last three links provide responses to the CSGV false claims).

Of course, the very notion that Lott is the very last academic researcher whose work has provided support for gun ownership is absurd.  Most economists who have done research on gun control find large net benefits from guns.  A survey of academic research on concealed handgun laws shows that most find a benefit from these laws.  The hope by gun control groups is simply to silence those that they disagree with so that there is only one academic left.

As some have pointed out to us, all these recent attacks on Lott, the CPRC, and our board of academic advisors and our board show we must be doing something.

https://www.csgv.org/whos-backing-last-pro-gun-academic/

who’s Backing The Last Pro-Gun “Academic,” John Lott?

On August 13, 2015, Buzzfeed published a fascinating interview with stalking victim Taylor Woolrich that revealed that prominent pro-gun “academic” John Lott had authored an op-ed in her name for Fox News entitled, “Dear Dartmouth, I Am One of Your Students, I Am Being Stalked, Please Let Me Carry a Gun to Protect Myself.”

Woolrich had indeed been stalked for years by an older man and became concerned about her safety while attending Dartmouth College. She reached out to Students for Concealed Carry on Campus (SCCC) and ended up speaking at one of their annual meetings, which was funded in part by the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), the organization that Lott started after effectively being exiled from the academic community following years of personal controversy.

Woolrich was considering carrying a gun to protect herself at that point, and that made her an “asset” to Lott. She describes Lott as being “extremely, inappropriately pushy…controlling and kind of snappy.” He urged her to reach out to the media to tell her story, and when Fox News rejected an op-ed co-authored by the two of them, Lott offered to write it on her behalf on his own, in the first person. “I don’t know if I should just say yes and not piss him off,” Woolrich recalls worrying, so she assented. “It was actually easier for me to write this in the first person for her than the way I had originally written it,” Lott bragged to a Fox editor.

In the piece, Lott cited and praised the work of his start-up, CPRC. This was not the first time Lott seized an opportunity to shower praise on himself. Previously, he had created a personae he called “Mary Rosh” and written positive reviews about his book “More Guns, Less Crime” on Amazon. “SAVE YOUR LIFE, READ THIS BOOK — GREAT BUY!!!!” wrote “Mary,” who claimed to be a former student of Lott’s at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School (“the best professor I ever had”). Once his deception was revealed, Lott would explain he  “used a pseudonym” because “earlier postings under my name elicited threatening and obnoxious telephone calls.”

Lott was so desperate for support by the time he founded CPRC that he had to resort to crowdfunding his organization on Indiegogo. And yet he was able to recruit numerous individuals to support the organization as Board Members, Academic Advisory Board Members, and Fellows. They do so knowing that CPRC produces no peer-reviewed research on the issue of gun violence. Even their own input into CPRC’s work is minimal. “If they have comments, while there is no formal review by them, they let us know,” Lott explained to Mother Jones.

So who are these academics, and others, who are putting their names behind a discredited researcher’s last ditch effort at relevancy? We decided to find out.

Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC)

Board of Directorshttp://www.csgv.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Ted-Nugent-Confederate-Flag.jpg

Ted Nugent (Secretary)—Nugent is a longstanding Board Member of the National Rifle Association who regularly makes headlines with his racist, misogynistic, homophobic and anti-immigrant comments. In 2012, he was visited by the Secret Service after declaring, “If [President] Barack Obama becomes the president in November again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year.” He has also called our first African-American president a “subhuman mongrel.” More recently, Nugent said, “If you believe the Confederate flag is one of honor for the Southern tradition, I believe you should have every right in the world to display that flag and wave it proudly.” He then asked rhetorically, “If we burned every Confederate flag today, would they stop shooting each other in Chicago? If we burned every Confederate flag today, would westop sanctuary cities from accommodating murderers and rapists and savage people?”

Sheriff David Clarke—Clarke is the Sheriff of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin. He has repeatedly made headlines with a series of paranoid, insurrectionist statements threatening the U.S. government. Two months after the massacre of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Clarke warned that executive orders issued by President Barack Obama in response could trigger “the second coming of an American Revolution, the likes of which would make the first revolution pale by comparison.”More recently, Clarke suggested that it might take a “**Lexington-Concord type moment**” to stop the advancement of LGBT rights in the United States. Clarke has been recognized as “Sheriff of the Year” by the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), a radical organization that embraces radical Posse Comitatus theory, which holds that the county sheriff is the ultimate legal authority in the United States.

Brad Thor—Thor is a novelist and a regular on conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck’s radio and television programs. His books have been described as “Islamophobic” and an “emotional demonization of Islam and Muslims.” On Fox News, Thor declared, “If Muhammad came back today and handed out trophies for the people best practicing the religion the way he wanted it, ISIS would be the premiere on the podium.” On the subject of race, Thor has stated, “There is no more institutionalized racism in the United States.” On the other hand, he has opined that private businesses posting “No Guns Allowed” signs amounts to “institutionalized discrimination.” In June 2015, Thor sarcastically observed that the Obama administration’s reaction to the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling on gay marriage was “The only major event the #Obama administration wasn’t caught off guard by and didn’t have to read about in the papers.”

Edgar K. Browning—Browning is the Professor Emeritus of Economics at Texas A&M University and the author of the book, “Stealing from Each Other: How the Welfare State Robs Americans of Money and Spirit.” He is currently a Research Fellow at theIndependent Institute, a conservative think tank based in Oakland,California. He can be reached at ekbrowning@comcast.net or (979) 845-7355.  The Texas A&M Dean of Faculties is Dr. Blanca Lupiani, who can be reached at (979) 845-4274 or blupiani@tamu.edu.

Tracey Wyatt, Treasurer—Little public information is available about Wyatt, a graduate of Tuck Business School. In an online bio, Wyatt lists herself as an officer with a number of start-ups whose domain names are now for sale.

Academic Advisory Board

William M. Landes (Chair)—Landes is the Clifton R. Musser Professor Emeritus of Law and Economics at theUniversity of Chicago Law School.He is a past president of the American Law and Economics Association and is a member of the American Economic Association, the Mont Pelerin Society, and the Council of Economic Advisers of the American Enterprise Institute. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Landes has co-published studies with Lott arguing that “Shall-Issue” concealed carry permitting laws are a deterrent to mass shootings. He can be reached at (773) 702-9606 or wlandes@uclaw.uchicago.edu. The dean of the Law School, Geoffrey Stone, can be reached at (773) 702-4907 or gstone@uchicago.edu.

J. Scott Armstrong—Armstrong is a professor at the Wharton Business School of the University of Pennsylvania who is best known as a climate change denier. He has published articles and testified before Congress on forecasts of polar bear populations, arguing that previous estimates were too flawed to justify listing the bear as an endangered species. Armstrong is listed as an “expert” on climate change by the industry-funded climate denier group the Heartland Institute despite the fact that he once declared, “I actually try not to learn a lot about climate change.” He can be reached at armstrong@wharton.upenn.edu or (215) 898-5087. The dean of the Wharton School, Geoffrey Garrett, can be reached at ggarrett@wharton.upenn.edu or (215) 898-4715.

Arthur Z. Berg—Arthur Berg is a a former associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a life fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. In the wake of the Fort Hood shootings, he wrote an editorial in the Wall Street Journal arguing that soldiers legally permitted to carry concealed handguns should be allowed to carry their guns on base. He also co-authored a New York Post op-ed with Lott arguing that better funding for mental health treatment will not help prevent mass shootings. “If someone poses a true danger to others, why not lock them up?” the piece advocated. “No one wants a dangerous person to have a weapon. But our mental-health system simply can’t be the last line of defense … Potential victims need to be able to defend themselves [with guns].” The American Psychiatric Association can be reached at press@psych.org or (703) 907-8640.

Tim Groseclose—Groseclose is the holder of the Adam Smith Chair at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.He is the author of “Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind” and “Cheating: An Insider’s Report on the Use of Race in Admissions at UCLA.” While a professor at UCLA, Groseclose accused senior staff of “cheating” and “lying” in using race as a criteria in admissions. He resigned from the university shortly thereafter, claiming, “Academia needs a major shakeup.” Groseclose can be reached at tgrosecl@gmu.edu or (703) 993-1218.

Jonathan M. Karpoff—Karpoff is the Washington Mutual Endowed Chair in Innovation and Professor of Finance at the University of Washington Foster School of Business. He is a member of the board of trustees for The Financial Management Association International and an International Research Fellow at Oxford’s Centre for Corporate Reputation. He can be reached at (206) 685-4954 or karpoff@uw.edu. The dean of the Foster School of Business, James Jiambalvo, can be reached at (206) 221-5749.

Joyce Lee Malcolm—Malcolm is the Patrick Henry Professor of Constitutional Law and the Second Amendment at George Mason University Law School, a position created by a$1 million endowment from the National Rifle Association:{.She has spent the majority of her career advocating for a }broader interpretation of the Second Amendment:{. She can be reached at }:jmalcolm@gmu.edu:{ or (703) 993-9150.}:

Scott E. Masten—Masten is a Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy in the University of Michigan Stephen M. Ross School of Business, where he has been a faculty member since 1984. His focus is transaction cost economics. He can be reached at (734) 764-1389 or semasten@umich.edu. The dean of the Stephen M. Ross School of Business, Alison Davis-Blake, can be reached at (734) 615-5002.

Carl Moody—Moody is the Professor of Economics at William & Mary. He teaches mathematical economics and econometrics. Moody has also written about guns and has been a vigorous defender of Lott’s”more guns, less crime” hypothesis. He can be reached at cemood@wm.edu or (757) 221-2373. The William & Mary dean, Kate Conley, can be reached at (757) 221-2470 or kconley@wm.edu.

J. Mark Ramseyer—Ramseyer is the Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies at Harvard University Law School. He is an expert on the Japanese legal system, including criminal law. Ramseyer has said the following about Lott: “Dispassionate, careful, empirical work is key to disentangling any social science problem, and it is the key to understanding patterns of criminal behavior. Time and again, Dr. Lott and the Crime Prevention Research Center have shown the willingness to undertake that careful work, no matter how politically unpopular it may be.” He can be reached at ramseyer@law.harvard.edu or (617) 496-4878. The dean of Harvard University Law School, Martha Minow, can be reached at minow@law.harvard.edu or (617) 495-4601.

Paul H. Rubin—Rubin is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Economics at Emory University. Rubin has been Senior Staff Economist at President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, Chief Economist at the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, Director of Advertising Economics at the Federal Trade Commission, and vice-president of Glassman-Oliver Economic Consultants, Inc., a litigation consulting firm in Washington. His chief area of interest is law and economics. He has published on the topic of “Shall-Issue” concealed handgun permitting laws and found that the beneficial results of such laws “are much smaller than suggested by Lott.” Rubin can be contacted at prubin@emory.edu. The dean of Emory College, Robin Forman, can be reached at robin.forman@emory.edu or (404) 727-6062.

Fellows

Charles Bret Jessee—Jessee is a senior fellow with the CPRC and a research director at TEI Biosciences Inc. in Boson, working in the areas of trauma and reconstructive surgery.  He can be reached at Bret.Jessee@crimeresearch.org or (617) 268-1616.

Kesten C. Green—Green is a senior fellow with the CPRC and a researcher at the University of South Australia Business School. Along with fellow CPRC leader J. Scott Armstrong, he is co-director and co-owner of the Forecasting Principles website (ForPrin.com). Like Armstrong, Green is a climate change denier who has stated, “Forecasts of dangerous global warming and of the extinction of polar bears are not derived from scientific forecasting methods and lack credibility.”Also like Armstrong, Green is listed as an “**expert**” on climate change by the industry-funded climate denier group the Heartland Institute. He has co-authored op-eds with Lott arguing that permissive concealed handgun permitting laws are “the safest course of action” for countries looking to reduce murder and suicide rates. Green and Lott have also criticized Australia’s tough gun laws, which have eliminated mass shootings altogether. He can be reached at Kesten.Green@unisa.edu.au.

Jack McCauley—McCauley is a a retired captain from the Maryland State Police with 23 years of service. Jack spent the majority of his career as a criminal investigator and was the commander of the State Police Firearms Licensing Division for a time. McCauley says he decided to retire when he found out “how badly we were trampling people’s [Second Amendment] rights.” Since his retirement, McCauley has testified against Maryland’s gun laws, directing much of his criticism at the Firearms Safety Act of 2013, which the state enacted in the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary school.

What is striking about this collection of individuals is not only the extremists like Nugent and Clarke, but also that there is not a criminologist to be found among CPRC’s academic advisers. Many of these advisers have produced no research on gun violence whatsoever. Others have published in this area only as co-authors with Lott.

Why has Lott found it so hard to recruit peers to his latest pro-gun initiative? A recent survey from a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, David Hemenway, provides the answer. Hemenway surveyed 300 academics who had conducted research on gun violence and found that an overwhelming majority believed that strong gun laws reduce such violence. For example, 64% stated they believe a gun in the home makes it a more dangerous place, compared to only 5% who said a safer place.

Of course, Lott is also followed by his reputation, which continues to take hits. And now that his latest “pseudonym” has been exposed, it will be interesting to see how many of his current friends want to continue to put their name behind his latest enterprise.

ref  12/14

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

Evan DeFilippis and Devin Hughes

All of these claims are staples of the gun lobby, and all of them rely on the research and advocacy of Dr. John R. Lott.

John Lott is, without exception, the most prolific and influential writer on the topic of gun violence and gun control.He has credentials that would make most academics envious—with various stints at Stanford, Rice, UCLA, Wharton, Cornell, the University of Chicago and Yale.

According to LexisNexis queries, his op-ed pieces have appeared in newspapers at least 161 times. He has been referred to in more than 1,100 newspaper columns. Lott’s most famous book, More Guns, Less Crime, has been referenced by major news publications at least 727 times. The lobbying arm of the National Rifle Association, the Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA), has spotlighted Lott’s scholarship at least 140 times on their website. After every mass shooting or national gun violence tragedy, Lott is the de facto talking head for the pro-gun community on news programs such as Fox News. He has also testified numerous times in front of Congress and state legislatures, having been a critical voice in the expansion of Right-to-Carry (RTC) laws.

Yet his daunting resume fails to tell the entire story. While his initial research was groundbreaking, further examination revealed numerous flaws. Today the “more guns, less crime” hypothesis has been thoroughly repudiated. On closer inspection his impressive credentials reveal an academic nomad, never able to secure a place in academia. His ethical transgressions range from accusations of fabricating an entire survey, to presenting faulty regressions, to creating elaborate online personas to defend his work and bash critics, to trying to revise his online history to deflect arguments. And this doesn’t even begin to cover the whole host of false claims and statistics he has peddled repeatedly in articles and TV appearances.

His descent into dishonesty began ironically with a groundbreaking study.

The Birth of More Guns, Less Crime

On August 2nd, 1996, USA Today published the results from a new comprehensive study on the effect of “shall-issue” concealed carry laws (also known as RTC laws), and homicide, rape, and aggravated assaults incidence. The headline read, “Fewer Rapes, Killings Found Where Concealed Guns Legal.”

The study, conducted by John Lott and David Mustard from the University of Chicago analyzed crime statistics in 3,054 counties from 1977 to 1992. The study made the remarkable claim that, if all states had adopted “shall issue” laws by 1992, 1,500 murders, 4,000 rapes, 11,000 robberies, and 60,000 aggravated assaults would be avoided annually. Lott subsequently published and expanded upon this research in a book entitled More Guns, Less Crime.

Lott’s research relied heavily on advanced econometrics, a highly specialized sub-field of economics. Using an econometric model with a blistering array of controls, including 36 independent demographic variables, John Lott analyzed a total of 54,000 observations for 3,056 counties over an 18 year period. Such a massive dataset would ostensibly permit Lott, for the first time, to identify the specific effect of concealed carry laws on crime with great precision.

The book was extremely well-received by the pro-gun community, being described as the bible of the gun lobby, and has since sold 100,000 copies. His book inaugurated a new era in the pro-gun movement: for the first time ever, organizations like the National Rifle Association could articulate their advocacy in the language of public health, rather than in constitutional terms. To this day, legislators continue to cite John Lott’s work as the basis for votes against gun control.

The only problem? Nearly nothing in the book is correct.

Lott’s Swift Fall from Grace

Tim Lambert,[delta?]  a Computer Scientist at the University of New South Wales, wrote a massive, 47-page critique of Lott’s book. His paper revealed that the book title More Guns, Less Crime already gets everything about the gun debate wrong: there weren’t significantly more guns, there wasn’t less crime, and guns wouldn’t have causedthe decrease in crime anyway.

The paper deserves a complete reading, but we’ll summarize just a few of Lott’s many missteps here:

In an audacious display of cherry-picking, Lott argues that there were “more guns” between 1977 to 1992 by choosing to examine two seemingly arbitrary surveys on gun ownership, and then sloppily applying a formula he devised to correct for survey limitations. Since 1959, however, there have been at least 86 surveys examining gun ownership, and none of them show any clear trend establishing a rise in gun ownership. Differences between surveys appear to be dependent almost entirely on sampling errors, question wordings, and people’s willingness to answer questions honestly.

Lott replied to this accusation by arguing that, even if there weren’t more households owning guns, there were still more people carrying guns in publicafter the passage of shall-issue laws.However, we know this assertion is factually untenable, based on surveys showing that 5-11% of US adults already carried guns for self-protectionbeforethe implementation of concealed carry laws. It’s extremely unlikely, therefore, for the 1% of the population identified by Lott who obtained concealed carry permits after the passage of “shall-issue” laws to be responsible for all the crime decrease.Lambert also argues that many of the people who obtained concealed carry permits after the passage of shall-issue laws, were already illegally carrying firearms in the first place. This means, of course, that “shall-issue” laws would produce almost no material changes in the reality of gun ownership.

Lott replied with an ever-weakening series of explanations, suggesting that the 1% of people who obtained permits likely had a higher risk of being involved in crime, and thus disproportionately accounted for the crime decrease. Except, yet again, this statement does not comport with reality. One study by Hood and Neeley analyzed permit data in Dallas and showed the opposite of Lott’s predictions: zip codes with the highest violent crime before Texas passed its concealed carry law had the smallest number of new permits issued per capita.

Empirical data from Dade county police records, which cataloged arrest and non-arrests incidents for permit holders in a five-year period, also disproves Lott’s point. This data showed unequivocally that defensive gun use by permit holders is extremely rare. In Dade county, for example, there were only 12 incidents of a concealed carry permit owner encountering a criminal, compared with 100,000 violent crimes occurring in that period. That means, at most, getting a permit increases the risk of an armed civilian meeting a criminal by .012 percentage points. This is essentially a round-off error. What’s particularly revealing about this episode is that Lott had to have known about Dade county police records because he cited the exact same study in his book when the records supported a separate position of his. In other words, Lott simply cherry-picked the evidence that supported his conclusion and disregarded the rest. Even academics on Lott’s side of the argument strongly doubt that concealed carry laws could have such profound effects on crime. Gary Kleck, a criminologist at Florida State University, for example, writes:

Lott and Mustard argued that their results indicated that the laws caused substantial reductions in violence rates by deterring prospective criminals afraid of encountering an armed victim. This conclusion could be challenged, in light of how modest the intervention was. The 1.3% of the population in places like Florida who obtained permits would represent at best only a slight increase in the share of potential crime victims who carry guns in public places. And if those who got permits were merely legitimating what they were already doing before the new laws, it would mean there was no increase at all in carrying or in actual risks to criminals. One can always speculate that criminals’ perceptions of risk outran reality, but that is all this is–a speculation. More likely, the declines in crime coinciding with relaxation of carry laws were largely attributable to other factors not controlled in the Lott and Mustard analysis.

David Hemenway from the Harvard School of Public Health, writes a similarly devastating review of “More Guns, Less Crime” in his book,Private Guns, Public Health.He argues that there are five main ways to determine the appropriateness of a statistical model: “(1) Does it pass the statistical tests designed to determine its accuracy? (2) Are the results robust (or do small changes in the modeling lead to very different results)? (3) Do the disaggregate results make sense? (4) Do results for the control variables make sense? and (5) Does the model make accurate predictions about the future?” John Lott’s model appears to fail every one of these tests.

A Lott of Suspicious methodology

As Albert Alschuler explains in “Two Guns, Four Guns, Six Guns, More Guns: Does Arming the Public Reduce Crime,” Lott’s work is filled with bizarre results that are inconsistent with established facts in criminology.

According to Lott’s data, for example, rural areas are more dangerous than cities. FBI data clearly shows this is not the case. Lott’s model finds that both increasingunemployment and decreasingthe number of middle-aged and elderly black women would produce substantial decreases in the homicide rate, conclusions that are so bizarre that they should cast doubt on the entire study. Indeed, as Hemenway explains, while middle-aged black women are rarely either victims or perpetrators of homicide, “according to the results, a decrease of 1 percentage point in the percentage of the population that is black, female, and aged forty to forty-nine is associated with a 59% decrease in homicide (and a 74% increase in rape).”

Lott also finds that there is only a weak deterrent effect on robberies, the most common street crime. As gun violence researcher Dennis Hennigan writes, “the absence of an effect on robbery does much to destroy the theory that more law-abiding citizens carrying concealed guns in public deter crime.”

Strangely, Lott’s data also shows that, while concealed-carry laws decrease the incidence of murder and rape, it increases the rate of property crimes. Lott explained that this result meant that the criminals were encouraged to switch from predatory crimes to property crimes in order to avoid contact with potentially armed civilians. But as one researcher skeptically commented, “Does anyone really believe that auto theft is a substitute for rape and murder?”

Another problem with Lott’s model is that it does not account for the fact that crime moves in waves. In order to even begin to account for the cyclical nature of crime, one would need to include variables on gangs, drug consumption, community policing, illegal gun carrying, and so on, which are needed to track the peaks and troughs of crime waves. Instead, when John Lott tries to correct for the absence of these variables through time trends, he uses a linear time trend,which is inappropriate because it incorrectly predicts that increases in crime at one point in time will increase forever.

Along with this host of weird results permeating Lott’s work, other researchers found other damaging flaws. Minute changes in Lott’s model and specifications resulted in drastically different results and several key crime controls were excluded.

Debunking More Guns, Less Crime

Despite these glaring methodological concerns, bizarre results, and fundamental empirical problems, Lott’s hypothesis remained relatively popular. While studies did come out in the following years supporting the claim that RTC laws reduce crime, more studies began to shoot holes in the more guns, less crime hypothesis.

Ted Goertzel, a retired professor of Sociology at Rutgers University, published a paper in The Skeptical Inquirerin 2002, cataloging the most egregious abuses of econometrics in criminology. Unsurprising, John R. Lott’s most significant work, More Guns, Less Crime,was at the top of the list.

Goertzel argues that Lott’s studies consistently rely on extremely complicated econometric models, often requiring the computational data-crunching power exceeding that of an ordinary desktop computer.   Lott then assumes the rather convenient position of insisting that his critics use the same dataand the same methodshe used to rebuke his claims, even after both his data and methods are repudiated.

John Lott’s strategy, then, is the academic equivalent of “security through obscurity.” In response to criticism, Lott simply papers over his mistakes with even more perilously complex models and tendentious data analysis. This technique allows Lott to preordain a certain conclusion as truth (e.g. “More Guns, Less Crime”), and simply pick the model that produces this result.

Two respected criminal justice researchers, Frank Zimring and Gordon Hawkins, wrote an article in 1997 in response to this strategy, explaining: “just as Messrs. Lott and Mustard can, with one model of the determinants of homicide, produce statistical residuals suggesting that ‘shall issue’ laws reduce homicide, we expect that a determined econometrician can produce a treatment of the same historical periods with different models and opposite effects. Econometric modeling is a double-edged sword in its capacity to facilitate statistical findings to warm the hearts of true believers of any stripe.”

Within a year, two econometricians, Dan Black and Daniel Nagin validated this concern. By altering Lott’s statistical models with a couple of superficial modeling changes, or by re-running Lott’s own methods on a different grouping of the data, they were able to produce entirely different results.

Black and Nagin noticed that there were large variations in state-specific estimates for the effect of “shall-issue” laws on crime. For example, Lott’s findings indicated that right-to-carry laws caused “murders to decline in Florida, but increase in West Virginia. Assaults fall in Maine but increase in Pennsylvania.” In addition, “the magnitudes of the estimates are often implausibly large. The parameter estimates that RTC laws increased murders by 105 percent in West Virginia but reduced aggravated assaults by 67 percent in Maine. While one could ascribe the effects to the RTC laws themselves, we doubt that any model of criminal behavior could account for the variation we observe in the signs and magnitudes of these parameters.”

From this, Black and Nagin understood that a single state, for which the data was poorly fitted, must be driving the bizarre variations and magnitude in state-specific estimates. They determined Florida was the culprit due to its volatile crime rates in the period under analysis, and regularly changing gun laws.

Indeed, Black and Nagin discovered that when Florida was removed from the results there was “no detectable impact of the right-to-carry laws on the rate of murder and rape.” They concluded that “inference based on the Lott and Mustard model is inappropriate, and their results cannot be used responsibly to formulate public policy.”

John Lott’s response to this, in his most recent edition of More Guns, Less Crimehas been to explain that Black and Nagin’s argumentative technique is deceptive, that it was a form of “data mining,” in which the researchers intentionally selected parameters that would break Lott’s model. With no apparent irony, Lott moralized that “traditional statistical tests of significance are based on the assumption that the researcher is not deliberately choosing which results to present.” It should be abundantly clear by now that Lott does not deserve the benefit of this assumption. To be clear: excluding Florida is a legitimate and obvious test of a model’s robustness. The fact that Lott’s results completely depend on the inclusion of a single state means that the model reflects nothing about the actual effect of concealed carry laws on crime.

After the release of the Black and Nagin paper, Goertzel had a conversation with Lott concerning a fundamental problem in his study, namely: “America’s counties vary tremendously in size and social characteristics. A few large ones, containing major cities, account for a very large percentage of the murders in the United States,” and that, as it would turn out, “none of these very large counties have “shall-issue” gun control laws.”

This means that Lott’s dataset is powerless to answer the very questions for which it was designed. Statistical tests require that there be substantial variation in the causal variable of interest, in this case, there needs to be “shall-issue” laws in places where the most murders occurred. This type of variation is simply absent.

Lott’s response to Goertzel was to shrug him off, insisting that he had enough controls to account for the problem. Fortunately, Zimring and Hawkins identified the same problem, noting that “shall-issue” laws materialized predominantly in the South, the West, and rural regions, areas in which the National Rifle Association was dominant. These states alreadyhad lax restrictions on guns—it’s not as if the implementation of “shall-issue” laws in these areas radically changed the social landscape. This pre-existing legislative history means that comparing across legislative categories merely confuses regional and demographic differences with the social impact of some legislative intervention. Zimring and Hawking conclude their damning criticism by explaining that, “[Lott’s] models are the ultimate in statistical home cooking in that they are created for this data set by these authors and only tested on the data that will be used in the evaluation of the right-to-carry impacts.”

What criminologists actually believed happened is that the crack epidemic spiked the homicide rate of major eastern cities in the 1980s and early 1990s. Lott’s argument, then, is that “shall-issue laws” somehow spared rural and western states from the crack epidemic, while eastern states were not as fortunate. As Goertzel writes, “this would never have been taken seriously if it had not been obscured by a maze of equations.”

University of Arkansas Law Professor Andrew J. McClurg, in a critical review of Lott entitled, “‘Lotts’ More Guns and Other Fallacies: Infecting the Gun Control Debate,” concludes that Lott’s entire project is one large example of fallacious post-hoc reasoning. Although Lott concedes that there is danger in inferring causality from specious correlations, he defends himself by insisting: “this study uses the most comprehensive set of control variables yet used in a study of crime.” Lott further explains that the correct method of argumentation is to “state what variables were not included in the analysis.” As McClurg notes, however, Lott manages to control for a dizzying array of irrelevant or redundant demographic variables, while ignoring a nearly endless list of important factors that could influence crime.

Perhaps the most glaring weakness with Lott’s paper is its lack of predictive power. It simply does not matter how complex a model is, if it lacks predictive power, it’s simply useless. Any model that is fully capable of expressing the true impact of concealed carry laws on crime, all things equal, will also have predictive potential outside of the scope of a single study. Fortunately, Lott’s initial* data set ended in 1992, permitting researchers to test Lott’s own model with new data. Researchers Ian Ayres, from Yale Law School, and John Donohue, from Stanford Law School, did just this, and examined 14 additional jurisdictions between 1992 and 1996 that adopted concealed carry laws. Using Lott’s own model, they found that these jurisdictions were associated with more crime in all crime categories. In other words, “More Guns, More Crime.” Ayres and Donohue conclude with the rather damning paragraph, “Those who were swayed by the statistical evidence previously offered by Lott and Mustard to believe the more guns, less crime hypothesis should now be more strongly inclined to accept the even stronger statistical evidence suggesting the crime inducing effect of shall issue laws.”

John Lott, along with two other young researchers, Florenz Plassmann and John Whitely, wrote a reply to Ayres and Donohue attempting to confirm the “more guns, less crime” hypothesis. However, when Ayres and Donohue examined Lott’s reply, they discovered numerous coding errors and empty cells that, when corrected, showed that RTC laws did not reduce crime and in some categories even increased it. In a latter email exchange with Tim Lambert, Plassmann even admitted that correcting the coding errors caused his paper’s conclusions to evaporate. Eventually, Lott removed his name from the final paper, citing disagreements over edits (which turned out to be a conflict over a single word) that had been made to Ayres and Donohue’s paper.

The Curious Case of the Changing Table

In the wake of the 2003 Stanford Law Review series addressing the more guns, less crime hypothesis, there was a large debate over whether coding errors found by Ayres and Donohue in Plassmann and Whitley’s response changed their conclusion that RTC laws are beneficial. At the heart of the discussion was a critical data table provided by Ayres and Donohue clearly showing that the results do indeed change significantly. Lott disagreed.

To prove that the coding errors didn’t alter the conclusion, Lott posted a “corrected” table on his site showing mistake-free values that were still statistically significant. This clearly contradicted Ayres and Donohue’s stark claim. How was this possible? As Chris Mooney eloquently describes in his article “Double Barreled Double Standards,” Lott changed the rules his side had created in the middle of the game. In Ayres and Donohue’s data table, all the values assumed clustered standard errors, the same assumption Plassmann and Whitley made. To sway the results in his favor, Lott removed the clustering to make the results look statistically significant once again.

When Mooney confronted Lott with this fact, Lott fired back with a bewildering barrage of often contradictory claims. First he asserted that the table must simply be incorrectly labeled, but emailed Mooney the same exact table the next day, asserting the table was properly labeled. A week or so later, Lott’s story metamorphosed yet again. Lott asserted that the table was back to how it should have been all along, yet now the table contained the original faulty data which Lott had previously admitted was incorrect. Throughout all of these changes occurring in August and early September, the table still stated it had been last corrected on “April 18, 2003” (except for one telling moment when Lott botched his attempted backdating and posted a last modified date that was several months in the future).

When the story broke Lott tried to deny any attempt at backdating and accused his critics of engaging in a “conspiracy theory.” When this claim fell flat Lott changed tactics. Rather than admit any error on his part, Lott instead had his webmaster fall on his sword and claim the entire blame should fall on him, not Lott. The webmaster’s explanation of events though didn’t pass close scrutiny. In a latter email exchange with Tim Lambert, the webmaster even admitted his timeline of events wasn’t accurate, though he still tried desperately to find a scenario where he was still the one to blame, not Lott. An unfortunate series of coincidental mistakes must have occurred. Yet this chain of errors theory is contradicted by an earlier strong statement made by Lott about the contents of the table. Even months after the incident, neither Mooney nor Lambert received an adequate explanation of what actually transpired.

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.

After conclusively demonstrating that these corrections eliminate any shred of evidence that RTC laws are beneficial, Donohue and his colleagues sought to further refine their model with additional data, superior specifications, and a far more reasonable set of controls. After testing several models, time periods, and sets of controls, their results still show increases in many crime categories (especially aggravated assault), though these results are not consistently significant. There is no trace of crime decreases.

The conclusion of the best and most sophisticated RTC study to date: these laws have no beneficial impact and may actually increase crime. Lott is wrong. It is no longer a question of whether RTC laws are beneficial, but rather if they are impotent or harmful.

After an article citing Donohue’s work appeared in the Washington Post on November 14th, Lott, in response, sought to discredit the study to little avail. Lott begins by trying to paint Donohue as a hypocrite for using a dummy model, a frequently used model in statistical analysis. This claim not only ignores that Donohue never actually said that using the dummy model was misleading, but also that Donohue uses multiple models and displays all of them. Lott further attempts to portray Donohue as a liar for saying Lott’s models don’t control for the crack epidemic.

However, this completely overlooks Donohue’s detailed discussion in the study of why Lott’s control for the epidemic, a non-randomized sample of cocaine prices from a collection of 21 cities, fails at almost every level. Pricing data is highly unlikely to map the actual demand for cocaine or its influence on crime. Also, the data from 1989 and 1990, two of the most critical years of the epidemic, is missing. Lott’s “control” then doesn’t work and its inclusion is likely detrimental to finding the true relationship between RTC laws and crime. Lott finally attempts to paint Donohue’s study as being filled with errors, despite the fact that most of the errors he cites have been corrected in the most recent version, while other purported errors clearly aren’t.

Lott also cites a 2014 study by Moody et al. as supporting his claims. However, the authors misreport their own results, which actually find significant evidence that RTC laws increase aggravated assault (for statistics geeks: the t-stats in Table 3 for Assault, post-law trend are statistically significant, despite not being bolded, oops), significantly altering the study’s conclusion.

Lott and the NRA seek solace in that more studies support the conclusion that RTC laws reduce crime than don’t. And on paper they appear to be correct. Lott tallies 21 academic works in favor of his hypothesis, and only 14 against. Yet even in this simple counting exercise Lott displays a significant amount of deceit.

To begin with, he excludes at least two studies and, depending on the criteria, potentially more than seven that disagree with him. He then proceeds to pad his side of the ledger with studies that have been thoroughly repudiated. Lott lists a study by Olsen & Maltz as supporting his hypothesis. Yet in a latter study Maltz rejects the finding of his old study as flawed and urges other academics not to use it. Lott also cites Plassmann and Whitley’s paper as confirming evidence, yet, as we described earlier, their data set had numerous flaws which, once corrected, eliminated their findings. Plassmann has even admitted this fact.

This flawed data set was also used in Lott’s book, The Bias Against Guns, which he lists as a supporting study. Further, Lott lists the lone dissent from the National Research Council panel that agreed with him on only one crime category, and gives it equal weight to the 15 member majority that found the evidence could not support Lott’s claim. Lott cites Moody and Marvell’s 2008 paper as support. Yet this paper’s conclusion that RTC laws are generally beneficial rests solely on data from Florida (if Florida is excluded they find RTC laws may actually increase crime). Yet a different study by none other than Marvell analyzed Florida and found that there was no statistical evidence of crime decreases resulting from the RTC law, which completely undermines the 2008 paper. These dubious citations are further compounded by the inclusion of many studies with data sets ending in 1992, which is especially problematic as they fail to capture the dramatic crime reversal at the end of the crack epidemic.

Lott’s daunting list of studies then relies heavily on old studies and ones that have been conclusively shown to have fatal errors, as well as undercounting the number of studies that disagree with him. It is telling that Lott has to resort to such tactics to preserve the tatters of his once proud theory.

Lott’s Return to Prominence

After the National Research Council released its findings in 2004, Lott’s fall from grace seemed complete. His research was discredited and an ethics maelstrom caused even some pro-gun advocates to distance themselves. Despite his fall though, Lott has remained a prolific author and has largely restored his once shattered reputation. Since 2004, Lott has written Freedomnomics, Straight Shooting, At the Brink, Dumbing Down the Courts, and continued to update More Guns, Less Crime.

Along with these books, Lott has continued to maintain his blog and written numerous columns for Fox News, the National Review, and other publications. He is a frequent guest on several national news programs (especially Fox) and is once again touted as a firearms policy expert. Further, he has even created the Crime Prevention Research Center, which despite fundraising difficulties regularly churns out pro-gun research.

In his more recent work Lott has become a perpetual misinformation machine. In one of Lott’s booksThe Bias Against Guns, for example, Hemenway details a litany of errors. In one instance, Lott claims “that the few existing studies that test for the impact of gun control laws on total suicide… find no significant relationship.” As Hemenway points out though, this statement completely ignores at least seven academic studies and two review articles, all of which find a significant effect of gun control laws on suicide rates.

However, the most egregious falsehoods Lott promulgates are strewn throughout his numerous op-ed columns. Here are but a few:

This is blatantly false. In fact, the best evidence indicates that since January 2009 there have been 16 mass shootings (where 4 or more people are killed by a firearm) that took place either in part or wholly in areas where guns were not banned, and 2 others where armed guards or police were there at the time of the shooting. 

In contrast, 15 mass shootings occurred in “gun-free zones.” Lott’s repeated falsehoods are not born out of ignorance though. Lott penned a sloppy critique of an earlier report on mass shootings, in which he tacitly admitted that of the 8 incidents he took issue with, 4 did not occur in areas that banned guns. He has since turned his critique into an even more error-ridden report.

Lott provides no citation for this remark and it appears to be a complete fabrication. There is no academic study that comes to this conclusion, and raw data from the National Violent Death Reporting System (compiled for us by Harvard Injury Control Research Center) directly refutes Lott’s claim. Examining fatal accidental shootings from 2003-2006, two thirds of the time children between the ages of 0-14 were shot by another child aged 0-14. Including self-inflicted accidental deaths, this figure rises to 74%. Lott’s claim is clearly wrong. Further, Lott cannot take refuge in the fact that accidental shootings involving children are sometimes misclassified as homicides, because the National Violent Death Reporting System largely avoids that error. And as a New York Times report found, the vast majority of such shootings are either self-inflicted or involved another child. Children’s access to firearms is the problem, not criminals.

Lott’s dual accusation that Webster’s study shows that Missouri’s gun law increased crime and that Webster cherry-picked his data is wrong on both counts. When we contacted Daniel Webster about Lott’s remarks, he replied that “I have no idea why Lott says that getting rid of the law slowed the growth rate in murders.” We saw little basis for Lott’s claim as well, as the only way Lott can actually make his claim that Missouri’s homicide rate was increasing more before the law’s repeal than after is to cherry-pick 2002 as the beginning of his analysis. While Webster chose to start the study period at 1999 to avoid the significant fluctuations in nationwide homicide rates between 1985 and 1998, Lott clearly picks 2002 in order to fabricate an upward pre-repeal homicide trend.

Further, Lott conflates Missouri’s permit-to-purchase (PTP) handgun law with other potentially less effective forms of universal background check laws to insinuate there were a sea of states for Webster to choose from. In fact, the only other state that had recently changed its PTP law was Connecticut in 1995, a state Webster is currently studying. Further, Webster’s focus on homicide is driven by superior data, the greater importance of lethal crimes, and is standard in gun policy research despite what Lott implies.

Lott’s dishonesty doesn’t stop at promulgating false claims on various op-ed columns. Indeed, he has continued his unfortunate habit of revising history in an attempt to cast doubt on his opponents. In 2011 Media Matters published a typical critique of one of Lott’s numerous articles. This time though, Lott accused them of misquoting him, and looking at the article he appeared to be correct. However, it turns out that Lott had edited his article after Media Matters’ critique, and then slammed them for “misquoting” the edited section.Screenshots prove the change. Rather than admit to being caught red-handed, Lott instead lashed out, wildly accusing Media Matters of doctoring the screenshots that so clearly showed Lott had changed his quote after the fact.

His evidence of such nefarious activity on the part of Media Matters? A particularly unflattering edited photo of Lott that they used. That’s it. However, to believe his suggestion that Media Matters had in fact misquoted him and subsequently tried to cover it up, the conspiracy has to extend far beyond doctored screenshots. For Lott to be right, not only would Media Matters have had to doctor multiple screenshots, but they would have also had to hack several websites and surreptitiously changed Lott’s original quote in each of them. Or maybe these sites were in on the doctoring scheme.

Media Matters is not an isolated incident. Even in low-stakes confrontations, Lott tries to modify history in an attempt to embarrass his opponent. In one case, Chad R. MacDonald, a relatively obscure writer who has written on Lott’s dubious history, challenged Lott in the comment section of a National Review column. While Lott could have easily ignored the criticism, he instead pounced, following his usual pattern of never letting any criticism escape unscathed.Then after a further reply, Lott went back and revised his comment, making MacDonald’s response look inadequate and out of context. Apparently Lott forgot screenshots are a thing.While in isolation this case could be chalked up as merely a lapse of internet etiquette, when seen in context with the rest of Lott’s sordid history it further highlights a continuing pattern of dishonesty.

A Lott of Ethical Missteps

Concurrently with the collapse of the “More Guns, Less Crime” hypothesis, troubling ethical allegations concerning Lott began to surface.

The Vanishing Survey

John R. Lott has claimed, over and over again, that98% of defensive gun uses require only the mere brandishing the gun with no shots fired. The first recorded instance of this claim appeared on February 6, 1997 when Lott attributed the statistic to more than 15 “national survey organizations” including the L.A. Times,Roper, and Peter Hart. Since then, Lott has referred to this statistic more than *four dozen* times in publicly available sources.

In the 1998 edition of Lott’s book, More Guns, Less Crime,this 98 percent figure was attributed broadly to “national surveys.” In 2000, Lott changed this attribution from “national surveys” to “a national survey that I conducted.”

Tim Lambert aggregated every publically available reference to the 98% figure and tabulated it. He discovered that, “before May 1999, Lott consistently implied that the 98% came from Kleck, after May 1999 he consistently implied that it came from his own survey.” For two entire years then, John Lott said the 98 percent figure came from other people’s surveys, and then, out of nowhere, suddenly remembered that the statistic came from his own survey.One wonders how Lott could forget about his own enormous undertaking, and accidentally attribute his hard work to someone else.

In a 2000 article written for The Criminologist,Lott elaborates on his new position, explaining that the 98 percent figure derives from a study he conducted in the first 3 months of 1997, surveying a representative sample of 2,424 people. To support this claim, in an email written to Northwestern Law Professor Lingdren, Lott explains: “I am willing to bet that I don’t start mentioning this [98%] figure until the spring of 1997. If I use it before I said that I did the survey, I will say that they nailed me. But if I only started using it about the time that I said that I did the survey, I think that it would be strong evidence the other way.”

Embarrassingly, Lott doubled down and it backfired. Otis Duncan discovered a reference to the statistic on February 6th, two months before Lott could have even completed the survey:

“There are surveys that have been done by the Los Angeles Times, Gallup, Roper, Peter Hart, about 15 national survey organizations in total that range from anything from 760,000 times a year to 3.6 million times a year people use guns defensively. About 98 percent of those simply involve people brandishing a gun and not using them.“

Page 41, State of Nebraska, Committee on Judiciary LB465, February 6, 1997, statement of John Lott, Transcript prepared by the Clerk of the Legislature, Transcriber’s Office

This means one of two things: Either Lott successfully surveyed 2,424 people in one month with unpaid full-time undergraduates, which would have required calling at least 10,000 people with a minimum of five full-time interviewers, performing comprehensive statistical analysis (without the assistance of colleagues), and reporting on that analysis in one month, or Lott is simply lying.

The evidence, however, overwhelmingly points to the second possibility. When pressed for evidence of the survey, Lott has claimed all of the following:

  1. His hard drive crashed in June of 1997, erasing all evidence of the survey. There is therefore no hard evidence of the survey’s existence.
  2. He paid for the entire project out of his own pocket, and no expense information is available to substantiate the fact that any survey was ever administered.
  3. The survey was done by unpaid fulltime undergraduates at the University of Chicago in their junior and senior years. Therefore, there are no employee records.
  4. He instructed each of the students to use their own telephones, and would subsequently reimburse them out of his own pocket. Thus, there are no telephone records.
  5. He does not remember the names, contact details, or faces of a single student volunteer. Thus, there is no way to corroborate the fact that students were involved in survey administration.
  6. He does not remember the questions asked on the survey.
  7. He had no discussions with anybody about sampling design.
  8. He did not retain any of the tally sheets because they were lost in an office move in 1997.

After investigating the controversy, Lingdren wrote that “all evidence of a study with 2,400 respondents does not just disappear when a computer crashes.” He goes on to explain that to lose every conceivable form of hard evidence—phone records, funding, tally sheets, potential communication with consultants, records of employees, ad infinitum—is essentially impossible:

Having done one large survey (about half the size of John Lott’s) and several smaller surveys, I can attest that it is an enormous undertaking. Typically, there is funding, employees who did the survey, financial records on the employees, financial records on the mailing or telephoning, the survey instrument, completed surveys or tally sheets, a list of everyone in the sample, records on who responded and who declined to participate, and so on. While all of these things might not be preserved in every study, some of them would almost always be retained or recoverable.

Lingdren pressed further, and asked Lott how he drew the sample for the survey. Lott explained that he used a CD-ROM, but that he can’t remember where the CD is, and doesn’t remember how he obtained it. Bending over backwards to give Lott a way out, Lingdren suggested he email all the students at the University of Chicago from 1997 to 1998, to see if anybody replies. Lott resisted, however, saying that he had “serious questions about how complete the University’s alumni records are.” For such serious accusations, Lott seemed rather disinterested in exonerating himself.

Of course, Lott’s response to this has been to assemble a veritable zoo of anecdotal claims from various tangentially related colleagues who vaguelyremember him sort-of talking about some-kind-of-survey that probably happened sometime. Duncan and Lambert investigated Lott’s nightmarish hodgepodge of “evidence,” and discovered that they contain deceptively written statements that don’t constitute real evidence. For example, one of Lott’s colleagues claimed that, “John told me that he had conducted a survey in 1997.” Notice, however, this is very different from “John told me in 1997 that he was conducting a survey.”

Lott did, however, find a person who claims to have been interviewed in 1997 as part of the survey. His name—David M. Gross—a former board member of the National Rifle Association and founding director of the Minnesota Gun Owners Civil Rights Association. As Jon Wiener, writing in Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud, and Politics in the Ivory Tower, puts it: “It seems unlikely, to put it charitably, that [David Gross] would turn up in a random sample of a few thousand people out of the 300 million Americans.”

Lott has also gone to heroic lengths to remind readers that the statistic is such a small portion of the book: “The reference to the original survey involves one number in one sentence in my book,” and “there have been many claims that I didn’t conduct a survey in 1997 that was reported in one sentence on page 3 of my book, More Guns, Less Crime.”

One wonders why someone who ostensibly went through such a herculean effort to conduct a huge survey with his own money in three months time would then turn around and diminish his own work by insisting that it’s only “one number in one sentence” in one book. That’s a lot of work and a lot of excuses for one sentence. Or, as Donald Kennedy, current editor-in-chief of Science Magazine, put it, Lott’s cavalcade of excuses “does not restore life to the data—which, ‘far from being one number in one sentence’, were at the center of controversy between Lott and his critics.”

In the Bias Against Guns, Lott returns to this point and reports on a new survey he conducted in November 2002 which was presumably intended to validate the original 98 percent figure. Lott writes: “…the survey I conducted during the fall of 2002 indicates that simply brandishing a gun stops crime 95% of the time, and other surveys have also found high rates.” He claims that 1,015 people were interviewed, but the book ends before the results can be reported on. Online reports describe the results further, showing that, contrary to Lott’s claims, one of the 7 respondents out of 1,015 who claimed self-defense gun use (13 total uses) said he fired the gun, which is far below the claim that 98% or 95% or users merely brandish the gun. Indeed, none of the many studies of defensive gun use has found anything close to a 98% brandishing rate.

If this doesn’t seem like a big deal to the reader, consider that John Lott is considered the de factogun violence expert for conservative outlets, consistently returning to Fox News after every mass shooting and gun violence episode, and is regularly cited by The National Rifle Association and gun acolytes. As Dr. David Hemenway explains, “Lott virtually always uses complicated econometrics. For readers to accept the results requires complete faith in Lott’s integrity, that he will always conduct careful and competent research. Lott does not merit such faith.”

This whole debacle was so controversial and plainly dishonest that it earned Lott a spot in the book, :{A Human Enterprise: Controversies in the Social Sciences:(style="box-sizing:border-box;max-width:100%"):}:, under the header: “Outright Lies.” In his concluding analysis, Jon Wiener writes, “The conclusion seemed obvious: Lott had never done the national survey. He was lying.”

Mary Had a Little Secret

Of course, John Lott isn’t the only person who defends John Lott. Incessant criticism from internet sleuths left Lott without many supporters until one passionate blogger, Mary Rosh, assumed the unenviable position of defending Lott’s character.

Mary identified herself as a former student of Lott at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. She gushed profusely for her former professor, describing Lott as “the best professor I ever had.” She admiringly recalled that, “Lott taught me more about analysis than any other professor that I had and I was not alone. There were a group of us students who would try to take any class that he taught. Lott finally had to tell us that it was best for us to try and take classes from other professors more to be exposed to other ways of teaching graduate material.”

A rave Amazon review authored by Mary contained the subject line, “SAVE YOUR LIFE, READ THIS BOOK — GREAT BUY!!!!” She explained that “Unlike other studies, Lott used all the data that was available. He did not pick certain cities to include and others to exclude. No previous study had accounted for even a small fraction of the variables that he accounted for.”

Mary had clearly invested a great deal of time in the gun debate, defending Lott at every turn with extremely precise citations, often mentioning exact page numbers and table references in Lott’s work. Over time, Mary appeared almost pathologically obsessed with bolstering the reputation of Lott, insisting, for example, that various online communities artificially inflate the popularity of Lott’s work by downloading his publication: “If you want to read the research paper upon which this research is based, go to: http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?ABSTRACT_ID=228534. The papers that get downloaded the most get noticed the most by other academics. It is very important that people download this paper has frequently as possible.”

Mary also seemed to have a deep emotional attachment to Lott, often taking attacks personally that were directed towards him. She would defend Lott with fiery passion, “This posting is filled with lies. Lott is not a ‘shill’ for anyone. Prove your claim…” A few members online thought this behavior was a bit bizarre, consoling Mary: “I’m sorry if you’re taking this personally, but you are not John Lott.”

Except, funny thing, she totally was. Mary Rosh was exposed as an internet sockpuppet of John Lott in 2003 by Julian Sanchez, one of Lott’s colleagues at the CATO institute. Sanchez compared the IP addresses from Mary Rosh’s forum posts with the IP address in an email that John Lott had sent Julian. On January 22, 2003, Mary Rush uttered her final words, confessing that John Lott and Mary Rosh were one in the same. Lott wrote in a confession email, “I shouldn’t have used it, but I didn’t want to get directly involved with my real name because I could not commit large blocks of time to discussions.” “I shouldn’t have used it,” will go down as perhaps the largest understatement in Lott’s storied career of academic dishonesty.

In a letter to *Science Magazine*,Lott explained that he “used a pseudonym” because “earlier postings under my name elicited threatening and obnoxious telephone calls.” In response to Lott’s letter, Donald Kennedy, the editor of Science, wrote, “Lott cannot dismiss his use of a fictitious ally as a ‘pseudonym.’ What he did was to construct a false identity for a scholar, whom he then deployed in repeated support of his positions and in repeated attacks on his opponents. In most circles, this goes down as fraud.” Let’s be clear: Lott wasn’t just defending the content of his work, or fielding unresolved questions, he was deliberately buttressing a delusion, one in which John Lott was the hero of some young woman, a champion of just causes, and a balanced and deliberate scholar.

As journalist Michelle Malkin put it, “Lott’s invention of Mary Rosh to praise his own research and blast other scholars is beyond creepy. And it shows his extensive willingness to deceive to protect and promote his work.” Indeed, if Lott is willing to go to such extraordinary lengths to deceive, just what else is he lying about? And what does it say about Lott that his defenders in academia are so few and far between that he has to invent his own imaginary friends to high-five?

In any case, the whole incident earned Lott a spot in the recent book: :{The Encyclopedia of Liars and Deceivers:(style="box-sizing:border-box;max-width:100%"):}:.

Lott’s Lasting Legacy

Why does all this matter? After all, if Lott was just another pundit, his egregious dishonesty would be of little consequence. However, Lott isn’t merely just another pundit. He is the intellectual backbone of the gun lobby and is still considered an expert on gun policy.

Lott’s most significant legacy can be seen in the explosion of RTC laws from a few gun friendly states to the entire country. Lott has testified for the expansion of RTC laws in numerous states, including Nebraska, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin soon after he published his original paper on RTC laws. In the intense Missouri vote over its license to carry law in 2003, Lott’s research played an especially decisive role. A pro-gun organization lobbying for the bill sent a copy of Lott’s The Bias Against Guns to every State Senator. This**effort**was enough to sway key votes to override the governor’s veto, securing the bill’s passage. Without Lott’s research, it would be unlikely that Missouri and other states since would have adopted RTC laws.

His research has even had a significant influence on Congress. For example, the “Personal Safety and Community Protection Act of 1997” cited Lott’s research in glowing terms, as did the much more recent “National Right-to-Carry Reciprocity Act of 2011.” Further, Lott has also testified as an expert in front of Congress on multiple occasions, most recently this past year on Stand Your Ground laws. That Lott still has the prestige necessary to potentially sway national policy is troubling given his ethically dubious past.

Given Lott’s national influence, it is unsurprising that the gun lobby relies heavily on his research. The NRA and other pro-gun organizations also frequently cite his work on their “fact sheets.”Recently, the NRA even leapt to Lott’s defense after a column questioning the “More Guns, Less Crime” hypothesis appeared in the Washington Post.

The gun lobbies’ ties with Lott extend much beyond merely citing his research and occasionally defending his work. The NRA frequently promotes Lott’s events and he is often a distinguished guest at the NRA’s annual conventions. Ted Nugent, a NRA board member who has called Lott “…my academic hero,” has helped Lott with fundraising efforts for his research center.

Removing Lott from the Debate

One last thing: At one point, John Lott, writing as Mary Rosh, insisted that Michael Bellesiles, a former professor of history at Emory University whose work has been thoroughly discredited, be completely dismissed as a fraud, explaining that “…among the amazing things is that Belleslies has lost his data so that no one can replicate his results, ” and “Bellesiles changes his stories multiple times on where he got the California data and it turns out after each new story that the data was not at the place that he claimed.” Lott also berated him for his inconsistent story and dubious results: “as people have said, he may have accidentally misphrased something a couple of times, but not more than 50 times” and, “The numbers that others have found looking at this data is several time[s] what Belleslies claims to have found.”

Yet if you were to replace the name Bellesiles with “John Lott” the stories would be almost identical. The difference, however, is that Bellesiles was barred from academia, retroactively stripped of his most prestigious award, and was last spotted in 2012, teaching and working as a bartender. John Lott, meanwhile, is regularly invited to appear on national television as a gun policy expert and carries enormous influence over gun control legislation to this day.

Time and time again Lott has abused his academic credentials to peddle falsehoods. Instead of soberly presenting evidence, and letting the research speak for itself, Lott instead authored his own fan-base, fabricated evidence, manipulated models, mischaracterized data, and then attempted to bulldoze anybody that dared question the authenticity of his research. This is not the behavior of someone who is interested in truth-seeking; it is the behavior of an ideologue who is concerned only with making his opinions as loud and virulent as possible.

12/1/15: Earlier this year, John Lott posted a rebuttal to our article (here is an archived copy: https://archive.is/j9otM).On social media, Lott has been touting his rebuttal as a decisive debunking of our points. Nothing could be further from the truth. His lengthy article managed to find only one small error in our work, which we have since corrected by adding the word “initial” to a single sentence, with a star next to it to highlight the change. We also discovered that we repeatedly misspelled Ted Goertzel’s name, which we have also corrected. Those are the only corrections we have made. Meanwhile, Lott’s “rebuttal” is filled with half-truths, errors, and outright lies, which we extensively detail in our own comprehensive counter-rebuttal: http://www.armedwithreason.com/john-lott-and-the-war-on-truth-a-response-to-lotts-continued-lies/

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 John Lott, John Lott debunked, John Lott NRA, Less Crime, Lott of Lies, Mary Rosh, More Guns, More Guns Less Crime debunked

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armed with reason

Given Lott’s national influence, it is unsurprising that the gun lobby relies heavily on his research. The NRA and other pro-gun organizations also frequently cite his work on their “fact sheets.”Recently, the NRA even leapt to Lott’s defense after a column questioning the “More Guns, Less Crime” hypothesis appeared in the Washington Post.

The gun lobbies’ ties with Lott extend much beyond merely citing his research and occasionally defending his work. The NRA frequently promotes Lott’s events and he is often a distinguished guest at the NRA’s annual conventions. Ted Nugent, a NRA board member who has called Lott “…my academic hero,” has helped Lott with fundraising efforts for his research center.

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indie

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Ted Nugent Signed book

$100 USD

If you donate $100 or more, you will receive a signed copy of one of Ted Nugent's book "Ted, White and Blue: The Nugent Manifesto."  5k$ backstage pass [or students for conceal carry?!]

with major funding and Obama’s support, flawed studies supporting gun control will soon reach Americans everywhere. The Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) needs your support to conduct academic quality research to find the truth and accurately measure the extent to which guns protect citizens, reduce crime, and save lives. 

Gun Control advocates are pouring money into research that will be skewed to show that guns are dangerous and should be restricted. Mayor Michael Bloomberg donated $250 million to Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health to hire new professors, many whose primary objective is to do expanding research on gun violence. President Obama has also been directing federal government funds towards gun control projects. Still other funds are being set up, such as the Fund for a Safer Future, which has$16 million to fund gun control research and is one of the many gun control projects being partially funded George Soros’Open Society Foundation. Recently, the MacArthur foundation has also been given a large million dollar grant.  This public health research being funded is very flawed as are studies funded by Bloomberg.

CPRC President, Dr. John Lott Jr., has already exposed the flaws in many of these studies including a report on the Analysis of School shootings funded by Bloomberg which claimed that 44 shootings occurred in schools and colleges nationwide since the Newtown, Conn. massacre on Dec. 14, 2012 and Feb. 10 of this year. Out of the 44 shootings, a total of 28 died. To dramatize their numbers, Bloomberg’s groups emphasized that one of these attacks occurred every 10 days.

But their statistics are not what they seem. Included in the numbers are suicides. Also included are late night shootings taking place in school parking lots, on their grounds or even off school property, often involving gangs. As “shootings,” they also include any incident where shots were fired, even when nobody was injured.

Look at some of the cases included in their misleading statistics:

•:{A student at Eastern Florida State College:(style="box-sizing:border-box;-webkit-font-smoothing:antialiased"):}: retrieved his gun from his car when two men attacked him. One of the men was striking the student with a pool cue, and the student fired his gun wounding him. The gun was legally stored in the student’s car and the police found that he had acted in self-defense.

•:{A 19-year-old was killed at 9pm:(style="box-sizing:border-box;-webkit-font-smoothing:antialiased"):}: in a field near the Hillside Elementary School in San Leandro, California.

•:{A professor at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology:(style="box-sizing:border-box;-webkit-font-smoothing:antialiased"):}: committed suicide in an empty classroom.

•:{A 23-year-old man committed suicide late at night:(style="box-sizing:border-box;-webkit-font-smoothing:antialiased"):}: on school grounds when no one was around the Algona High/Middle School in Iowa.

•:{A 38-year-old man was shot to death at 2am:(style="box-sizing:border-box;-webkit-font-smoothing:antialiased"):}: on the grounds of the Clarksville, Tennessee High School.

•:{A 19-year-old man committed suicide:(style="box-sizing:border-box;-webkit-font-smoothing:antialiased"):}: in the parking lot of a Portland, Maine high school. No one at the school was threatened.

CPRC doesn’t have millions from Bloomberg and Soros but we believe we have the support of the American people. That is why we are asking for your help to fund research to counter these studies and expose their flaws.

Dr. John Lott Jr., economist and author of More Guns, Less Crime decided to launch the CPRC since it is the only organization of its kind that will provide honest, accurate academic quality analysis of these issues. It is a 501(C)(3) research and education organization dedicated to conducting academic quality research on the relationship between laws regulating the ownership or use of guns, crime, and public safety. CPRC will also strive to educate the public on the results of such research and will support similar organizations, projects, and initiatives.

Donations will be used to hire additional research associates, acquire data, and do research on a variety of topics that are central to the debate over gun ownership.  If we could reach $500,000 it would cover costs for a year.

Receive Founding Member Status by donating $50 or more today, CLICK HERE TO DONATE and choose a perk! For every dollar you give, we get a matching dollar from a generous donor up to $200,000.

If you do not wish to contribute through IndieGoGo, you can send a check or donate on our website.  See information below:

You can send checks to:

:{Crime Prevention Research Center

212 Lafayette Ave

Swarthmore, PA 19081}:

Or Donate on the Website:  :{http://crimepreventionresearchcenter.org/donate/:(style="box-sizing:border-box;-webkit-font-smoothing:antialiased"):}:

If you would like a perk from the IndieGoGo site, please email your preference and we will make sure you get it and that our matching funds donor will match your funds.

Jennifer Pinnell jpinnell@crimeresearch.org

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recent Posts

aug 2015

ref mojo  https://crimeresearch.org/2015/08/a-response-to-mother-jones-mistake-filled-effort-to-discredit-john-lott/

The altered image above is from a new Mother Jones’ article, which was written to try discrediting John Lott and the Crime Prevention Research Center.

Mother Jones is willing to do anything to push for gun control.  The magazine is very left-leaning and is funded by individuals such as George Soros.  Even academics such as James Alan Fox, who supports gun control, have taken Mother Jones to task for its misleading use of data on guns.

For several years, Mother Jones and John Lott have been having a running feud (e.g., also here and here).  Unable to win the battle of facts, Mother Jones this week tried hitting back in a more personal way.

Julia Lurie, the reporter Mother Jones assigned to do a story on Lott, somehow managed to ask him about 50 specific questions and still write on many issues that she had not asked him about, and when she did ask about points she wrote on she ignored Lott’s responses.  Her piece was filled with simple factual errors. Even a brief look in Lott’s book More Guns, Less Crime or in his original research paper with David Mustard would have prevented them.

Lurie somehow couldn’t manage to talk to any researchers who have found results similar to Lott’s, and she couldn’t even mention what most of the peer reviewed studies have found.

Mother Jones claims that the Crime Prevention Research Center’s work isn’t “academic quality.”  According to the article, Professor Gary Kleck said that he doesn’t know of any “credible criminologist” who believes that “with more guns there are less crimes.”  “Garbage in and garbage out” is how Kleck reportedly described Lott’s work.  Lurie also cites The National Research Council, claiming that the organization declared there to be “no credible evidence” that right-to-carry laws affect violent crime.  The attacks are misleading and out of context.

Take Lurie’s points in order.

1) “The National Research Council, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, assembled a panel to look into the impact of concealed-carry laws; 15 of 16 panel members concluded that the existing research, including Lott’s, provided “no credible evidence” that right-to-carry laws had any effect on violent crime.”

The National Research Council report actually concluded as follows: “The committee concludes that with the current evidence it is not possible to determine that there is a causal link between the passage of right-to-carry laws and crime rates.” Lurie somehow manages not to mention that despite evaluating every possible gun law, the Council found no evidence that **any** law had any impact.  The Council was noncommittal about every policy.  The panel standard response was simply advocating that more money be available to academics to fund additional research.

In fact, right-to-carry laws were actually the only type of law where there was dissent. James Q. Wilson, who at the time was possibly “:{the most influential criminal justice scholar of the 20th century:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;text-size-adjust:100%;vertical-align:baseline;background:transparent"):}:,” concluded: “:{I find that the evidence presented by Lott and his supporters suggests that [right-to-carry] laws do in fact help drive down the murder rate.:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;text-size-adjust:100%;vertical-align:baseline;background:transparent"):}:” 

The National Research Council panel was put together by the Clinton administration.  As Wilson notes, the panel used a much tougher standard in evaluating the research showing that concealed handgun reduce violent crime than they used in looking at the critics: “To do the latter would require the committee to analyze carefully not only the studies by John Lott but those done by both his supporters and his critics. Here, only the work by Lott and his coauthors is subject to close analysis.”

In any case, a survey of the published peer-reviewed research shows strong support for the benefit from right-to-carry laws.  The debate is between most researchers saying that there is a benefit and the rest of the published work saying that there is no effect.  More recent research continues to show a benefit.

2) “that Lott had drawn inaccurate correlations: Cities had experienced a spike in crime in the 80’s and 90’s in part because of the crack epidemic, not because of strict gun laws.”

But from the very start, Lott’s research has addressed the crack cocaine issue.   As Florenz Plassmann and John Whitley (Stanford Law Review, 2003) summarize the research at that point:

“One of Ayres and Donohue’s greatest concerns is the apparent failure of previous research to account for the differential geographic impact of cocaine on crime. Lott’s book (and the Lott and Mustard paper) reported that including price data for cocaine did not alter the results. Using yearly county-level pricing data (as opposed to short-run changes in prices) has the advantage of picking up cost but not demand differences between counties, thus measuring the differences in availability across counties. Research conducted by Steve Bronars and John Lott examined the crime rates for neighboring counties . . . on either side of a state border. When the counties adopting the law experienced a drop in violent crime, neighboring counties directly on the other side of the border without right-to-carry laws experienced an increase. . . . Ayres and Donohue argue that different parts of the country may have experienced differential impacts from the crack epidemic. Yet, if there are two urban counties next to each other, how can the crack cocaine hypothesis explain why one urban county faces a crime increase from drugs, when the neighbor- ing urban county is experiencing a drop? Such isolation would be particularly surprising as criminals can easily move between these counties. . . . Even though Lott gave Ayres and Donohue the cocaine price data from 1977 to 1992, they have never reported using it.”

In his third edition of More Guns, Less Crime (2010) Lott uses new data from Fryer et al to attempt to measure the impact of crack cocaine from 1980 to 2000.

Critics such as Ayres and Donohue claim that the results can be explained away by the impact of crack cocaine, but they haven’t done any concrete analysis to show this.

While Ms. Lurie didn’t ask Lott directly about this issues, even a quick look in the appendix of More Guns, Less crime would have show this claim that crack cocaine was ignored was false.

3) “When [Ayres and Donohue] extended their survey by five years, they found that more guns were linked to more crime, with right-to-carry states showing an eight percent increase in aggravated assault.”

This is a simple counting error.  Ayres and Donohue made the false claim, and Lurie never bothered to confirm it.  The Second edition of More Guns, Less Crime (2000) uses data from 1977 to 1996.  The 2003 paper by Ayres and Donohue uses data from 1977 to 1997.  John Lott provided Ayres and Donohue with his data from 1977 to 1996.  Adding the data for one year, 1997, did not make a notable difference.  Ayres and Donohue obtained somewhat different results because they used a different specification and ended up misinterpreting their results.

Even the first edition of More Guns, Less Crime (1998) had some estimates with data up through 1994, and thus even compared to that edition, Ayres and Donohue only added three years of data.

Again, either a fast look at either the first, second, or third editions of More Guns, Less Crime would have let Lurie realize that this claim was incorrect.

4) Claim by Gary Kleck that John Lott hadn’t “accounted for missing data,” and that “It was garbage in and garbage out,”  The problem is simple: in some counties not all the cities in those counties are reporting crime rate data every year.  This causes some randomness in the number of crimes reported for those counties.  The problem used to be particularly prevalent in low-population counties, but it has improved considerably over time.

Take Georgia, a state whose data was singled out as particularly flawed due to this problem..  From 1980 to 1993, 16 of Georgia’s least-populous counties (out of 159 total counties) received crime reports from only 65% of police departments.  By contrast, the 127 most populous counties (with 97.2% of the total population) averaged an non-reporting rate of 5.6%.  In his regressions, Lott weighted county data according to population.  Therefore, the counties with the most significant problems had little effect on the results.

All data contain some errors.  The question is whether those errors are random or whether they systematically bias the results.   This data error has been accounted for in many different ways.

— In their original paper, Lott and Mustard first looked at all counties.  They then narrowed their scope – first to counties with more than 50,000 people, and then to those with more than 100,000 people.  The results stayed much the same, showing that the low-population counties with these errors were not creating a bias in favor of right-to-carry laws.

— The Second edition of More Guns, Less Crime studied city, county and state level data.  Even if that particular error existed for county level data, it did not exist for city or state level data.  And, again, the results were similar.

— A 2002 paper with John Whitley explicitly examines errors in the county level data and finds no evidence of any systematic biases.  This was published in 2003 in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology.

All of this information was provided to Lurie.

5) “Kleck, who conducted a controversial, yet often-cited survey on defensive gun use, observes, “Do I know anybody who specifically believes with more guns there are less crimes and they’re a credible criminologist? No.”

So, does Gary Kleck not believe that James Q. Wilson was a credible criminologist?  Gary Mauser and I did a survey of criminologists who have published on firearms issues in refereed criminology journals between 2000 and 2014. We found that 31% of these criminologists thought that right-to-carry laws lowered murder rates.  Fifteen percent said that these laws increased murder rates, 46% said that the laws had no effect, and 5.1% said that they didn’t know.  Clearly, a very significant proportion of criminologists believe the more guns, less crime hypothesis.

6) What John Lott actually claimed about the views of economists and criminologists was that the vast majority of published peer-reviewed papers looking at the impact that right-to-carry laws had on US crime rate found that they reduced violent crime rates and the rest of the papers claimed that there was no effect for murder, rape and robbery (see also here).

7) “The organization . . . proceeds and publishes ‘academic quality’ reports that have yet to be published in peer-reviewed journals.”

To put things in perspective, John Lott has published over 100 peer-reviewed academic journal articles.  The CPRC was only started in October 2013, and it takes time to produce research.  It takes even more time for the peer-review process to conclude.  Nevertheless, we supported research published last year in the paper “The Impact of Right-to-carry laws on Crime: an Exercise in Replication” (Review of Economics and Finance, Carlisle Moody, Thomas Marvell, Paul Zimmerman, and Fasil Alemante).  The CPRC co-authored a paper that was published in the peer-reviewed *Public Choice*.  In addition, as Lurie was informed, one paper by the CPRC has been revised and resubmitted to a journal.  Another paper, showing errors in a recent FBI report on active shooters, was published in *Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Today*.

The CPRC’s academic advisory board members are at the top of their fields and are affiliated with the University of Chicago, Harvard, and the Wharton Business School.

8) “one of the small number of very pro-gun researchers like Gary Kleck or John Lott”

This statement makes two mistakes.  First, most economists who have published research on firearms in peer-reviewed journals believe that there is a net safety benefit from people carrying guns.  For example, worldwide 83% of economists who have published on this topic believe that guns are more likely to be used in self-defense than to be used in crime and 74% believe that concealed handgun laws lower the murder rate.  As noted earlier, those who publish in criminology journals are more divided on the issue, and they are thus do not take monolithic position that the article describes for researchers.

It is strange that Kleck is labeled “pro-gun” in the same article where he is quoted as saying: “Do I know anybody who specifically believes with more guns there are less crimes and they’re a credible criminologist? No.” Kleck believes guns have no net effect on crime rates, and thus he doesn’t thinks that it matters whether guns are banned or licensed or regulated in some other way.  Gary Kleck and John Lott clearly have very different views on guns, and it is surprising that the articles lumps the two of us together.

UPDATE: For a recent debate between Gary Kleck and John Lott see this page by Ari Armstrong.

9) “Lott claimed that it was based on a data from a survey he had conducted—but that the data had been lost in a computer crash.”

The hard disk crash was widely documented by people at the time it occurred on July 3, 1997.  The crash destroyed data for all the papers that Lott was working on up to that point.  A number of co-authors who he was working with also lost data for papers that they had been working on together (Larry Kenny at Florida State, Richard Manning who was then at BYU, Jonathan Karpoff at the University of Washington, David Mustard at University of Georgia) and others who had contemporaneous knowledge of the crash (including Geoffrey Huck, an editor at the University of Chicago Press; Dan Kahan at Yale; and John Whitley who was at the time at the University of Adelaide in Australia).

10)  Mother Jones botched the timeline and seems unable to accurately report the numbers of a 2002 follow-up survey that confirmed the results of the 1997 survey.  The 2002 survey sought to determine if there had been any changes in the rate of defensive gun use since 1997.  When controversy erupted and the earlier results were questioned, the follow-up survey served as a way showing that the 1997 results had been replicated.  The survey was designed differently than other surveys.  It asked people only about crimes in the past year rather than about events that had occurred over the past decade or more.  The survey had started being prepared in June 2002 by  research assistant James Knowles. This is well before controversy arose over the first survey at the very end of 2002.

11)  “Rosh and Lott shared an internet address.”  This is simply false.   Lott had a dynamic IP address.  In a blog post, Julian Sanchez noted that “maryrosh” had an IP address in southeastern Pennsylvania  He asked for help from anyone who might know who the person was or how to track down dynamic IP addresses.  After seeing the blog post, Lott emailed Sanchez and told hm that he was using his kids’ email address in putting posts up on an internet chatroom.  Lott had originally used his own email address in the chatroom postings.  Unfortunately, some individuals continued the discussions outside the chatroom in unpleasant ways, and Lott found it more convenient to use the family email address as a pseudonym.  Since the vast majority of chatroom participants were using pseudonyms, it seemed appropriate to follow that example.

12)  The Mother Jones story originally made fun of the fact that Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke is on the Crime Prevention Research Center’s Board of Directors (the article has since been modified).  We are very proud of our relationship with David Clarke and believe that he brings an important real-work perspective to the Center.  They also fail to note that Professor Edgar Browning, who is also on our board, has been one of the top public finance economists in the world.

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This article by Mother Jones is part of pattern of similar attacks.  For a decade Media Matters attacked John Lott in over a 110 posts, and they were so unwilling to discuss the claims that they made that they would systematically remove any responses that were attempted to be posted in their comment section.  More recently a new group named “Armed with Reason,” which has connections to Bloomberg’s gun control groups, rehashed old comments, but completely ignored the academic responses that Lott had already published.   A more productive approach would have been to explain why Lott’s responses were wrong.

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[next pitts trib]

https://www.mediamatters.org/dana-loesch/pro-gun-media-falsely-claim-oklahoma-walmart-shooting-was-stopped-armed-bystander

NO LNX PIX TWT

Pro-gun media falsely claim Oklahoma Walmart shooting was stopped by an armed bystander

Claim was based on one poorly sourced local news report

WRITTEN BY TIMOTHY JOHNSON

PUBLISHED 11/20/19

Oklahoma Walmart shooting

Following a domestic violence shooting in the parking lot of an Oklahoma Walmart, some pro-gun media figures ran with an unsubtantiated report to claim that the shooting was stopped by a person carrying a firearm who confronted the gunman. That initial report was incorrect, according to local law enforcement. Pro-gun media often distort high-profile shooting incidents to support the false claims that gun ownership improves personal safety and that people with concealed carry permits are often effective deterents to mass shootings.

On November 18, a man fatally shot his estranged wife and her boyfriend in the parking lot of a Walmart in Duncan, Oklahoma, before killing himself with his weapon. Relying on the account of a witness to the shooting,a local news station reported that the gunman was confronted by someone with their own firearm, and that report was picked up by the Daily Mail and USA Today, whose accounts right-wing media then promoted.

In fact, when local police gave a press conference following the shooting, Duncan Police Chief Danny Ford said of the initial report about intervention by an armed bystander, “We can’t confirm any of that.” ABC7 News reported that during a follow-up press conference on November 19, local law enforcement said “a man seen by witnesses nearby with a gun approached the scene after the shooting had ended but did not confront” the gunman. Duncan Police also indicated that they were “initially distracted” by the person who drew their weapon after the shooting took place. 

But the initial erroneous report, which had never been confirmed by law enforcement, had already been promoted by prominent members of pro-gun conservative media. Former National Rifle Association spokesperson and currentconservative radio host Dana Loesch wrote on Twitter that the gunman was “confronted by an armed citizen,” citing the Daily Mail.

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Loesch had run with a similar false report in March to claim that the mass shootings carried out at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, were stopped by an armed citizen.

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Discredited pro-gun researcher and FoxNews.com columnist John Lott also claimed that the Oklahoma shooting was “Stopped by Armed Citizen,”citing a pro-gun news site:

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His organization, Crime Prevention Research Center, falsely claimed that the bystander with a firearm, who did not actually approach the scene until the shooting was over, had stopped a mass shooting:

An article at the far-right website Breitbart.com claimed that the shooting was “cut short by an armed citizen who confronted the gunman.” Pro-gun blog The Truth About Guns similarly claimed that an “armed citizen confronted Walmart shooter, ending the attack.” Pro-gun group Gun Owners of Americaalso pushed the initial inaccurate report.

article at the far-right website Breitbart.com claimed that the shooting was “cut short by an armed citizen who confronted the gunman.” Pro-gun blog The Truth About Guns similarly claimed that an “armed citizen confronted Walmart shooter, ending the attack.” Pro-gun group Gun Owners of America also pushed the initial inaccurate report.

Related

NRA and conservative media run with inaccurate report to try to make pro-gun point about the New Zealand mosque shootings

03/15/19

Right-wing media falsely claim Biden plans to ban 9 mm handguns

06/03/22

Fox host says Democrats are rooting for “the big natural disaster” so they can push “the climate change agenda”

05/02/22

REF NO LNX

Report: Armed Citizen Stopped Oklahoma Walmart Shooter

19,831

A police officer maintains a security line after a shooting in a Walmart parking lot on November 18, 2019 in Duncan, Oklahoma. A gunman killed two people in a car in the parking lot outside an Oklahoma Walmart before fatally shooting himself. (Photo by J Pat Carter/Getty Images)J Pat Carter/Getty Images

AWR HAWKINS 18 Nov 2019  2,357

1:37

A report by the Daily Mail indicates that Monday’s shooting outside a Duncan, Oklahoma, Walmart was cut short by an armed citizen who confronted the gunman.

Breitbart News reported that three deaths resulted from a shooting outside the Walmart around 10 a.m. Two individuals were fatally shot while sitting in a car, and a third person died outside the vehicle when police arrived.

The Daily Mail reported that the deceased individual outside the car was the gunman, and that he allegedly took his life after being confronted by an armed citizen.

The gunman was wearing all black when he allegedly shot multiple rounds into a car where his estranged wife was sitting with her boyfriend, killing both. He was then “confronted by an armed citizen…[and] turned the gun on himself.”

The Daily Beast reported that witnesses indicated “the suspect shot the two people inside the car before an armed shopper approached with a gun—prompting him to shoot himself.”

[:{Family members told:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{ :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[Fox 25 the shooting was the result of a domestic dispute between a husband and wife. Witnesses told several local television stations the suspect shot the two people inside the car before an armed shopper approached with a gun—prompting him to shoot himself.

While authorities did not go into specifics about the incident, Ford told reporters Monday that “at some point the shooter did walk up to the car,” and added that while an armed civilian was at the scene, he cannot confirm if he intervened before the shooter killed himself.]]

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets with AWR Hawkins, and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.

2nd Amendment Politics Armed Citizen gun control Second Amendment Walmart

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/07/27/fact-check-gun-owners-america-spokeswoman-claims-94-percent-mass-shootings-occur-gun-free-zones/

fACT CHECK: Gun Owners of America Spokeswoman Claims ’94 Percent of Mass Shootings Occur in Gun-Free Zones’

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gun-free-school-zoneWWJ/AP

AWR HAWKINS27 Jul 2022429

3:17

CLAIM: During Wednesday’s congressional testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, Gun Owners of America’s (GOA) Antonia Okafor said, “94 percent of mass shootings occur in gun-free zones.”

VERDICT: True, when “gun-free zones” are defined as “places where where general citizens couldn’t carry guns.”

Okafor’s testimony is part of the Committee on Oversight and Reform hearing “examining the practices and profits of gun manufacturers.”

The hearing centered on AR-15 rifles, which Okafor said she was proud to defend. She listed numerous instances in which law-abiding citizens have used AR-15s for self-defense, then noted that mass public attacks with ARs largely occur in gun-free zones.

Okafor intimated that the attackers enjoy the gun-free zones because they know they will not face armed retaliation.

She said, “It’s not surprising that 94 percent of mass shootings occur in gun-free zones.”

[lnx]

https://crimeresearch.org/2018/06/more-misleading-information-from-bloombergs-everytown-for-gun-safety-on-guns-analysis-of-recent-mass-shootings/  lott BS

In a 2014 study, updated in 2018 then again on July 6, 2019, the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) showed that 94 percent of mass public shootings between 1950 and the date(s) of the study occurred in gun-free zones.

Mass shootings which occurred in gun-free zones during the study’s time frame include the Virginia Tech University attack, which killed 32 (April 16, 2007); the Fort Hood attack, which killed 13 (November 5, 2009); the Aurora movie theater attack, which killed 12 (July 20, 2012); the Sandy Hook Elementary School attack, which killed 26 (December 12, 2014); the D.C. Navy Yard attack, which killed 13 (September 16, 2013); the Chattanooga military base attack, which killed 5 (July 16, 2015); the Umpqua Community College attack, which killed 9 (October 1, 2015); the San Bernardino attack, which killed 14 (December 2, 2015); the Orlando Pulse attack, which killed 49 (June 12, 2016); the Parkland high school attack, which killed 17 (February 14, 2018); and the Santa Fe High School attack, which killed 10 (May 18, 2018).

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and a Turning Point USA Ambassador. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins. Reach him at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.

2nd Amendment Politics Antonia Okafor AR-15 Gun Free Zones Gun Owners of America

https://www.:{mediamatters.:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:org/john-lott/who-gun-advocate-john-lott

2012

Gun researcher John Lott has made numerous media appearances in the wake of the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn. to argue against the enactment of gun violence prevention measures. While Lott uses his media platform to push a multitude of statistics -- often from his own research -- he has been thoroughly discredited as a serious academic researcher.

Media Turned To Lott To Discuss Gun Violence Following Newtown Attack

Lott Has Made Several TV Appearances To Argue Against New Gun Laws.Following Friday's mass shooting in Connecticut, FoxNews.com columnist and gun “researcher” John Lott has made at least three appearances on CNN, during which he repeatedly argued against the need for new gun violence prevention laws. CNN hosts have challenged Lott during his appearances, underscoring the need for media to be prepared when hosting dishonest pundits like John Lott. CNN, *Piers Morgan Tonight*, [12/14/12; CNN, Special Coverage of Sandy Hook Shooting, 12/16/12; CNN, Starting Point, 12/17/12]

Lott Routinely Appears In Media To Downplay The Gun Violence Epidemic In The US

After Mass Shooting In Aurora, Lott Denied The Fact That America Has The Highest Rate Of Gun Deaths In The Civilized World.Appearing on CNN in the wake of the mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, CO, Lott rejected host Piers Morgan's assertion that “America has the worst incidents of gun murders of any of what they call the civilized world.” Lott told Morgan that “factually, it's not true.” In reality, a 2003 Harvard School of Public Health study revealed that the firearm homicide rate in the United States is 19.5 times higher than the average rate found in other high-income nations. CNN, *Piers Morgan Tonight*, [7/24/12, via Media Matters]

On FoxNews.com, Lott Defended Gun Ownership After NFL Murder-Suicide Shooting. After NFL linebacker Jovan Belcher reportedly shot his girlfriend and himself in a murder-suicide, Lott posted a FoxNews.com column attacking NBC sportscaster Bob Costas for quoting a column on-air that argued, “If Jovan Belcher didn't possess a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today.” Lott disputed that the presence of a firearm had anything to do with the murder-suicide, and posited various methods he believed Belcher could have used to kill himself without a firearm. FoxNews.com, [12/3/12, via Media Matters]

But Lott Is Not A Credible Source For Information On Gun Violence

Lott's “More Guns, Less Crime” Hypothesis Has Been Widely Discredited

Lott's “More Guns, Less Crime” Hypothesis Maintains That Gun Ownership Helps Curtail Crime.In his book More Guns, Less Crime and in other media, Lott repeatedly pushes the myth that increased gun ownership, especially increased concealed weapons permits, results in a decreased incidents of violence crime.  University of Chicago Press, accessed [12/17/12]

Stanford Law Review: Lott's Central Hypothesis Is “Without Credible Statistical Support.” In a Stanford Law Review report titled “The Latest Misfires in Support of the 'More Guns, Less Crime' Hypothesis,” Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue III studied how coding errors in data undermine Lott's “More Guns, Less Crime” hypothesis. The authors explain:

PW [Lott's co-authors Florenz Plassmann and John Whitley] seriously miscoded their new county dataset in ways that irretrievably undermine every original regression result that they present in their response. As a result, the new PW regressions must simply be disregarded. Correcting PW's empirical mistakes once again shows that the more guns, less crime hypothesis is without credible statistical support. *Stanford Law Review*, accessed 12/3/12 via [Deltoid]

Computer Scientist Tim Lambert On Lott's Data Errors: “If Anything, Concealed Carry Laws Lead To More Crime.” In an April 2003 blog post on ScienceBlogs.com, computer scientist Tim Lambert discussed Ayres and Donohue's Stanford Law Review findings, noting “Ian Ayres and John Donohue wrote a paper that found that, if anything, concealed carry laws lead to more crime.” Noting that “Lott, (along with Florenz Plassmann and John Whitley) wrote a reply where they argued that using data up to 2000 confirmed the ”more guns, less crime" hypothesis," Lambert summarized Ayres' and Donohue's response to Lott's defense of the data:

In Ayres and Donohue's response to that paper, they found that Lott's data contained numerous coding errors that, when corrected, reversed the results. Furthermore, this was the second time these sorts of errors had been found in Lott's data. Lott had presented to the NAS [National Academy of Science] panel figures showing sharp declines in crime following carry laws. Declines which disappeared when the coding errors were corrected. Finally, when Lott saw Ayres and Donohue's response he had his name removed from the final paper. Deltoid, [4/25/03]

Economist Mark Duggan: Rate Of Gun Ownership “Significantly Positively” Correlated With Incidence Of Homicide. A study by economist Mark Duggan found that “changes in homicide and gun ownership are significantly positively related,” as he reported in “More Guns, More Crime” in the Journal of Political Economy in 2001. Duggan wrote:

My findings reveal that changes in homicide and gun ownership are significantly positively related. This relationship is almost entirely driven by the relationship between lagged changes in gun ownership and current changes in homicide, suggesting that the relationship is not driven simply by individuals' purchase of guns in response to increases in criminal activity.

[...]

These findings contradict the results from recent work suggesting that legislation allowing individuals to carry concealed weapons (CCW) caused a significant decline in violent crime (Lott and Mustard 1997). Journal of Political Economy, [2001]

Lott Relies On Unscientific Research And Factual Distortions To Promote His Views On Guns

Lott Pushed Discredited Claim That Gun Laws Disarm Law-Abiding Citizens. In The Wall Street Journal,Lott cited dubious survey research to claim that members of law enforcement generally believe that “too often the laws disarm law-abiding citizens, not criminals, and thus make it easier for criminals to commit crime.”  In fact, academic research indicates broad support for some gun violence prevention measures within the law enforcement community. *Media Matters,* [8/3/12]

Lott Used Distorted Anecdotes To Advocate For Dangerous National Right-To-Carry Reciprocity Act. In a FoxNews.com column, Lott inaccurately described legal proceedings against individuals who ran afoul of New York's gun laws to push the passage of the gun-lobby favored National Right-To-Carry Reciprocity Act, which would allow for weakened restrictions on carrying concealed guns. Several law enforcement associations have spoken out against the National Right-To-Carry Reciprocity Act, suggesting that it would “endanger” police officers and “compromise public safety.” *Media Matters,*[1/20/12]

Lott Offered Phony Criticisms Of Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey's Opposition To National Right-To-Carry Reciprocity Act.In a FoxNews.com column, Lott falsely claimed that Ramsey's complaint about a dangerous Pennsylvania resident who obtained an out-of-state permit to carry a firearm was moot because the individual could have obtained a Pennsylvania permit to carry a weapon. In fact the individual in question, who was indicted for murder after shooting a car burglar 13 times, had previously been stripped of his Pennsylvania permit and was unsuccessful in an appeal to have it restored. *Media Matters*, [11/16/11]

Lott Has Faced Convincing Allegations That He Fabricated Research On Defensive Gun Uses

Lott Became Subject Of Ethics Inquiry After Failing To Produce Evidence That He Actually Conducted A 1997 Survey. A January 17, 2003 letter written by Northwestern University Professor of Law James Lindgren, raised concerns that Lott fabricated a survey that found 98 percent of defensive gun uses involved only brandishing a weapon. Lott has failed to produce the data from the study, claiming to have lost it in a computer crash. From Lindgren's letter:

In September 2002 I offered to look into a question raised about John Lott's work. I thought that offering such help to Lott and to the profession was the responsible thing to do when serious questions were raised, and I thought it would be exceedingly simple to establish that a survey of 2,424 people had been done. While I recognized that it is extremely easy to lose data in a computer crash, I had not anticipated that Lott would claim to have done a large national survey without discussing the sampling design with anyone, leaving any financial or other records of the study, or remembering anyone who had worked on it.  I had never heard of a professor doing anything of that size with no funding, paid support, paid staff, phone reimbursements, or records (though there are probably precedents for such an unusual method).  As it stands now, unless someone comes forward to verify working on the study--as I still hope occurs--we may never know with any certainty whether the 1997 study was done.  Although I strongly favor emailing 1997-98 University of Chicago college graduates to see if any remember any classmates working on the study, John Lott now raises serious questions about how complete the University's alumni records are, rendering that approach a less reliable route to an answer than I had anticipated.

[...]

I find recent developments in this affair personally troubling.  I carefully recorded what John Lott told me and now Lott has changed the story he told me in several specific ways--most of them minor.  They are discussed in my revisions to this report.   I have no research interests in this subfield and no ideas for further efforts to get to the bottom of this inquiry beyond surveying graduates and Lott's looking at picture books of former students. This project detracts from my other scholarly efforts.  Accordingly, my part in this affair is essentially done, at least if John Lott will stop changing his stories about our conversation.  If not, then I suspect that I will have to stay in it a little longer, at least to respond to comments on this report. James Lindgren, [1/17/03]

Computer Scientist Tim Lampert And Sociologist Otis Dudley Duncan Summarized A Number Of Suspicious Circumstances Surrounding Lott's Defensive Gun Use Survey.Among other points, Lampert -- a critic of Lott's research methods -- noted that Lott regularly cited the 98 percent defensive gun use statistic prior to when he says he conducted his research that reached that conclusion:

Was there fabrication and falsification in regard to the findings of the survey that Dr Lott has stated that he conducted? Even conclusive proof that he conducted a survey in 1997 would not, of itself, resolve this issue. The findings of that survey could have been fabricated even if a survey was actually carried out. The main reasons for suspecting that this happened are:

  1. Dr Lott claimed his survey was conducted over a three month period in 1997. He also claimed that survey data shows that 98% of defensive gun uses involve merely brandishing weapon as early as Feb. 6, 1997, in his testimony to the Nebraska legislature.
  1. Long before Dr Lott ever mentioned that the 98% figure came from his survey, he had (erroneously) attributed it to various other surveys.
  1. The statistics concerning incidence of defensive gun use, frequency of firing or brandishing, and firing target (warning shots vs. shooting at the offender) are such that it is hardly conceivable they could have been legitimately produced by a sample of the size Dr Lott has mentioned.
  1. Dr Lott has been unable to supply any documentation whatever of the particulars of his survey such as the exact wording of the questions asked, the sampling plan, calculations of statistics, and so on. Any text on survey research will make explicit the details of what is normally expected by way of documenting a survey. A formal listing can be found at the American Association for Public Opinion Research. And it should be borne in mind that loss of data because of a computer crash or any other reason does not relieve the investigator of the responsibility to provide such documentation. It is a clear breach of the ethics of science to promulgate a finding in the absence of data (see the Duan case, above). Deltoid, [2/9/03]

Otis Dudley Duncan: Lott's Usage Of Defensive Gun Use Statistic “A Clear Breach Of The Ethics Of Scientific Inquiry.”In an April 2003 article, Duncan also pointed out serious methodological flaws in how Lott says he conducted his survey, leading Duncan to call Lott's conclusions “junk science.” From the article:

That statistic appears, apparently for the first time, on p. 3 of the 2000 edition of More Guns, Less Crime and reads as follows: “If a national survey that I conducted is correct, 98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack.” There is no mention of the DGU [Defensive Gun Use] frequency, nor is there any other material to explain this rather cryptic statement.

Such piecemeal announcement of results from a major piece of research is, shall we say, unusual in scientific circles. (No, we shall not resort to such a euphemism. It is a clear breach of the ethics of scientific inquiry, one that comes up over and over again in regard to premature announcements of new medical “discoveries,” and so on.) But it is possible that I have missed some earlier and more detailed report on the survey, and I would be happy to make any needed correction.

[...]

Notwithstanding that arguments about the trustworthiness of Lott's research threaten to go on forever, the only honorable thing for him to do at this point is to withdraw his claims about the 1997 survey at the same time as he disavows his erroneous statements about the research of others, making appropriate apologies to all who have innocently facilitated the dissemination of his junk science. Deltoid, [4/10/03]

Lott Has Been Caught Modifying His Research And Writings When His Claims Are Called Into Dispute

Lott Attempted To Cover Up Debunking Of “More Guns, Less Crime” Thesis By Changing His Statistical Model.From an October 12, 2003 Mother Jones article describing how Lott reacted to Yale Law School professor Ian Ayres and Stanford Law School professor John Donohue's revelation that fixing coding errors in his research caused Lott's conclusions to be undermined:

In an interview conducted on August 18 (transcript), Lott told me that he had posted “corrected” tables on his website for all to see. But when I downloaded Lott's “corrected” version of the contested table, it showed the same numerical values as that of Donohue and Ayres -- that is, the coding errors were gone -- but bizarrely claimed the properly coded data still indicated statistically significant drops in murder, rape, and robbery. That's because Lott had introduced a new twist: Rather than simply fixing the incorrectly coded data, he omitted a key calculation regarding statistical significance used in the Plassmann-Whitley paper. (For statistics geeks, it's called “clustering at the state level.”) Faced with no other way to save his thesis, you could say that Lott changed the rules -- rules his own team had laid down -- in the middle of the game. *Mother Jones*, [**10/12/03**]

Lott Falsely Accused Media MattersOf Misquoting Him After He Changed Language In His Own Article.Media Matters quoted John Lott as writing that the Obama administration has “also imposedmuch more extensive reporting requirements on sales of long guns” in an article for BigGovernment.com. He later changed this language to say that the Obama administration has "tried imposing much more extensive reporting requirements on sales of long guns" and accused Media Mattersof misquoting him for repeating what he originally wrote. *Media Matters*, [3/24/11, emphasis added]

Lott Created A Fake Internet Persona To Defend His Research

Washington Post: Lott Posted Online Under The Pseudonym “Mary Rosh,” Who Called Lott “The Best Professor I Ever Had.”For three years, Lott repeatedly posed as an imaginary former student named “Mary Rosh.” Rosh “tirelessly defended Lott against his harshest critics” in numerous online debates. From a February 1, 2003 article:

Mary Rosh thinks the world of John R. Lott Jr., the controversial American Enterprise Institute scholar whose book “More Guns, Less Crime” caused such a stir a few years ago.

In postings on Web sites in this country and abroad, Rosh has tirelessly defended Lott against his harshest critics. He is a meticulous researcher, she's repeatedly told those who say otherwise. He's not driven by the ideology of the left or the right. Rosh has even summoned memories of the classes she took from Lott a decade ago to illustrate Lott's probity and academic gifts.

“I have to say that he was the best professor I ever had,” Rosh gushed in one Internet posting.

Indeed, Mary Rosh and John Lott agree about nearly everything.

Well they should, because Mary Rosh is John Lott -- or at least that's the pseudonym he's used for three years to defend himself against his critics in online debates, Lott acknowledged this week.

[...]

Lott said that he frequently has used the name “Mary Rosh” to defend himself in online debates. The name is an amalgam of the first two letters of his four sons' first names. In a posting to the Web site maintained by Tim Lambert, an Australian professor who has relentlessly attacked Lott's guns studies, “Mary Rosh” claims to be a former student of Lott at the University of Pennsylvania, where the economist taught between 1991 and 1995.

“I had him for a PhD level empirical methods class when he taught at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania back in the early 1990s, well before he gained national attention, and I have to say that he was the best professor that I ever had. You wouldn't know that he was a 'right-wing' ideologue from the class. . . . There were a group of us students who would try to take any class that he taught. Lott finally had to tell us that it was best for us to try and take classes from other professors more to be exposed to other ways of teaching graduate material.” [The Washington Post, 2/1/03, retrieved via Nexis]

Lott Is An Outspoken Proponent Of The “Kill At Will” Law Connected To Trayvon Martin's Death

Lott Suggested That “Kill At Will” Law Had Nothing To Do With Martin Controversy.During a May 1 appearance on MSNBC's The Daily Rundown,Lott claimed that Florida's “Kill At Will” law -- called “Stand Your Ground” by its proponents -- had nothing to do with the controversy surrounding Trayvon Martin's death.

LOTT: What I will say is that no matter whose story is right, the Stand Your Ground law isn't relevant to the George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin case. If George Zimmerman is right and the wounds on the back of his head that he was on the ground, Trayvon Martin was on top of him beating him, there was no place for him to retreat. And so the old defense, even if you had the rule that you have to retreat as far as possible, he still would have been able to act in self-defense there. And if the other side is right that somehow George Zimmerman provoked the attack, attacked Martin to begin with, then he wouldn't be able to rely on the Stand Your Ground law to protect him in that case either. *Media Matters,* [5/1/12]

Lott Advocated For Controversial “Kill At Will” Law.Following the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, Lott made broad claims about how self-defense in public places worked before the widespread enactment of “Stand Your Ground.” In The New York Post,he wrote, “Earlier statutes affirmatively required potential victims to retreat as much as possible before using deadly force to protect themselves, sometimes putting their lives in jeopardy.” Actually, states that did require duty to retreat largely did so only under the narrow circumstance where the victim could do so safely. If it was unsafe to retreat from a conflict, a victim was fully entitled to use deadly force to protect him or herself from death or serious injury. *Media Matters,* [4/26/12]

Lott Overlooked “Kill At Will” Cases In Order To Come To Its Defense.Also during the May 1 Daily Rundown, Lott claimed that “the Stand Your Ground law doesn't allow you to provoke an attack, doesn't allow you to throw the first punch, it doesn't allow you to go and shoot someone in the back. You have to pass this reasonable person test that you're in direct threat, serious injury or death was going to occur.” By suggesting that all shooters claiming immunity under “Stand Your Ground” face a thorough review into their actions, Lott is ignoring the fact that some of these shootings, even those that occur under dubious circumstances, are resolved without the shooter ever having to face a jury of his peers. *Media Matters,* [5/1/12]

For more information on past “Kill At Will” cases, click here.

Discredited pro-gun researcher John Lott Jr. hired at Department of Justice

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https://www.mediamatters.org/john-lott/discredited-pro-gun-researcher-john-lott-jr-hired-department-justice-0

no lnx

Discredited pro-gun researcher John Lott Jr. hired at Department of Justice

Special PROGRAMS

GUNS & PUBLIC SAFETY

WRITTEN BY CYDNEY HARGIS

PUBLISHED11/24/20

Discredited pro-gun researcher and right-wing media favorite John Lott Jr. has been hired at the Justice Department despite a career of manipulating statistics about gun violence, presenting allegedly fraudulent data, and suffering repeated ethics scandals

On November 24, Politico reported Lott -- who founded the nonprofit Crime Prevention Research Center-- had left his position to “take a job as a senior adviser for research and statistics at the Office of Justice Programs—a DOJ division that doles out $5 billion in grants each year.” According to the article, Lott confirmed to Politico that he was hired at the DOJ but claimed that he’s “really not supposed to say more than that.”

Lott was previously a frequent guest on the National Rifle Association’s now-defunct broadcast outlet, NRATV, as well as a columnist for Fox News. He was also invited to testify before a joint congressional committee on gun violence in 2019, where he immediately fell apart when questioned about his past ethics scandals. Lott has also dabbled in the promotion of conspiracy theories, tweeting that perhaps Democrats were actually behind a series of bombs that were sent to the homes of prominent Democratic leaders and media figures in 2018.

Though Lott has made many attempts to position himself as a leading researcher on gun violence and crime, his studies and books have been repeatedly debunked. In his book More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws, Lott makes the false argument that increased gun ownership lowers the rate of violent crime. The theory was widely criticized for errors in its data and the Stanford Law Review wrote that Lott made his argument “without credible statistical support.” It was later shown in a 2017 Stanford study that states with right-to-carry laws, also known as constitutional carry, actually experience more violent crime than states without concealed carry laws.

In 2003, Lott was involved in an ethics inquiry after he claimed in the second edition of More Guns, Less Crime that he conducted a survey which showed 98% of defensive gun usage involved people brandishing their weapon but not firing it. Lott could not provide any evidence of the study and later said he lost all his data because his computer crashed, leading to allegations that he invented the data.

That same year, Lott admitted to creating a fake persona called Mary Rosh who claimed to be a previous student of his and defended him online for three years in response to criticism of his publications.

In 2014, Lott ghostwrote an op-ed for a female college student who was the victim of stalking and became an ardent supporter of campus carry. She later told BuzzFeed that Lott had pressured her into letting him submit the pro-gun piece under her name.

Lott has spent his career arguing that gun violence is not a public health issue and every country that restricts gun ownership sees an increase in violent crime. Following the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas that left at least 58 dead and hundreds wounded, for example, Lott authored an opinion piece on FoxNews.com in which he falsely claimed that despite Europe’s tight gun safety laws, those countries have “actually suffered more bloodshed” from mass shooting attacks than the U.S. has.

This comparison, however, is based only on the number of attacks that occurred with fully automatic machine guns and purposefully ignores all the massacres that have taken place in the United States with semiautomatic rifles. In reality, countries which ban or restrict semiautomatic rifles have much lower homicide rates than the U.S.

Lott’s career has been marked by multiple academics repeatedly pointing out flaws in his data and zero attempts to correct his own pro-gun misinformation.

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IN THIS ARTICLE

John Lott

John Lott

166 COMMENTS

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ref even conservative

https://ariarmstrong.com/2015/12/gary-kleck-and-john-lott-offer-closing-thoughts-in-dispute-over-gun-research/

recently I conducted interviews with two prominent researchers, criminologist Gary Kleck and economist John Lott, each of whose work routinely is cited by people who advocate the right of civilians to own guns for self-defense.

Both scholars discuss a wide range of topics related to gun ownership and crime, and I found both interviews to be enormously insightful.

In part, the interviews evolved into a debate between Kleck and Lott regarding Lott’s work on the concealed carry of handguns. In brief, Lott argues that state laws liberalizing concealed carry increased that practice and decreased violent crime. The logic behind this claim is straightforward: When would-be criminals fear that their potential victims might be armed, they commit fewer crimes. But Kleck is not convinced that the laws resulted in more concealed carry or in less crime. Lott and Kleck also disagree about a number of other issues.

I did not initially envision these interviews as a debate, so I did not plan for how to wind the debate down. I asked Kleck for an interview as a follow-up to an article I wrote in reply to some of Michael Shermer’s claims in which I cite some of Kleck’s work, and my query about Lott’s work was only one question out of eleven. But then, having asked Kleck about Lott’s work, I figured I owed it to Lott to see if he wanted to reply. While I was at it, I asked Lott to comment on a number of other issues as well.

Wanting to bring the conversation to a close, I asked Kleck for his final remarks. Because those remarks are somewhat detailed, I asked Lott to issue his final reply. Both sets of remarks are presented below.

Readers should bear in mind two points: First, the two scholars agree on much more than may be immediately obvious by reading their remarks here, I think; and, second, the claims presented last should not be presumed to be true or beyond rebuttal elsewhere.

The discussion has shed light on a wide variety of issues surrounding guns and crime, it has helped frame the terms of the debate insofar as Kleck and Lott disagree, and it has offered many leads for those who wish to further explore possible effects of gun laws and gun possession on crime. I deeply appreciate the time that Kleck and Lott have given to help make their views and research more accessible to the general reader. —Ari Armstrong

Gary Kleck

John Lott can’t refute the evidence that right-to-carry laws did not increase either gun ownership or frequency of carrying, so he instead invents a distorted straw man version of my arguments.

He presents a fantasy version of the supposed contrast between sociologists or criminologists and economists, claiming that the former do not think criminals respond to increasing the costs of crimes, whereas economists wisely do.

In fact, criminologists subscribe to a more sophisticated version of Lott’s simple idea: They believe that criminals respond to their perceptions of the costs of crime, including the risks of legal punishment and the risks of confronting armed victims.

The idea that I deny the possibility of criminals being deterred from crime due to the fear of victims having guns is especially absurd in light of the fact that I introduced this possibility to the scholarly world in a series of articles in the 1980s, most prominently in Social Problems in 1988 (volume 35, number 1)—long before Lott had published a word on the topic. He has merely followed a well-grooved path laid down by me.

Lott’s version of economic theory is one that has been dead for decades, superceded by behavioral economics. This version of economics states that increases in the cost of a behavior, such as criminal behavior, does not have a simple easily predicted effect on that behavior, and that it is perceived costs that affect behavior, not necessarily actual costs.

One of Lott’s many errors is to blindly assume that higher actual costs of crime invariably result in higher perceived costs of crime—something we know is not true (Kleck et al., Criminology (2005) vol. 43, no. 3). Lott has never presented a single scrap of evidence that criminals’ perceived risks of confronting armed victims increased after right-to-carry laws were enacted—he simply assumed that it had happened.

In his efforts to distort my positions, Lott goes so far as to state a blatant falsehood: “Gary claims that while the number of concealed handgun permits has soared from 4.6 to 13 million over the period from 2007 to 2015, no more people are legally carrying guns than they did previously.”

This is pure invention—I never said or even implied any such thing. The number of people legally carrying obviously did increase, but that is irrelevant to how much risk criminals faced from armed victims. A victim with a gun and a carry permit is no more of a threat to a criminal that a victim with a gun and no permit. The number of prospective victims with permits simply has no bearing on the issue of deterrence; it is the number of prospective victims who carry guns, with or without permits, that could affect criminals.

Again, Lott’s error was in simplistically assuming that if more carry permits were issued, the total number of prospective crime victims who were carrying guns must have likewise increased. Lott has never presented a scrap of empirical evidence that the total frequency of gun carrying (with or without permits) among prospective crime victims increased after right-to-carry laws were enacted. Instead, he merely assumed that total carrying frequency (with or without permits) must have increased. Survey evidence on carry permit holders, however, indicates that they did not, on net, increase their frequency of carrying after getting permits. The carry permits merely legitimated the carrying they were already doing before getting permits. Lott ignores the empirical evidence and substitutes his preferred assumption about carry permit holders: “I have to believe that when they can’t legally carry they don’t carry.” The key word is “believe.” I prefer hard empirical evidence to beliefs and assumptions.

Lott tells another especially bizarre whopper about me: “Gary feels very strongly that gun ownership doesn’t make people safer.” This one is especially weird because I am usually attacked by pro-control people for my research showing the defensive gun use is both frequent and effective; i.e., having a gun does make crime victims safer (see the aforementioned Social Problems article; Kleck and DeLone1993, Journal of Quantitative Criminology vol. 9, no. 1; and Kleck and Tark 2004, Criminology vol. 42 no. 4). In contrast, Lott himself has contributed nothing to the empirical literature on whether defensive gun by crime victims affects their risk of injury. (Research on the impact of right-to-carry laws has no bearing on this topic.)

The rest of Lott’s comments are filled with misinformation that betrays an extraordinary ignorance of the research literature. He claims that “countries with the lowest gun ownership rates do tend to have higher homicide rates.” There is no empirical evidence whatsoever to support this claim, and Lott does not cite any. He tries to head off critics who would cite cross-sectional evidence that indicates he is wrong by assuming it is likely to be “misleading,” but withholds from readers the facts that (1) this is the only kind of evidence we have on the relationship between national gun ownership rates and national homicide rates, and (2) all of the evidence indicates either that national gun ownership rates have no net effect on national homicide rates (the position I endorse) or that they increase homicide rates (only poor quality studies support this position). None of the studies that actually measure gun ownership levels support Lott’s claims. His views are supported only by anecdotes about supposed increases in national gun levels that were assumed rather than empirically documented.

Finally, Lott claims that “the vast majority of” studies of the impact of right-to-carry laws indicate that they reduce crime. Unlike Lott, I do not believe that truth is determined by majority vote. It is not the most popular conclusion that is most likely to be correct; it is the one supported by the methodologically strongest research, no matter how numerous or rare the technically stronger studies may be. Lott’s primary research, and that of others who drew the same conclusions, relied on county crime data that were essentially worthless for tracking crime trends before and after right-to-carry laws were passed, because they did not correct for widespread failures of law enforcement agencies to report their crime data to the Uniform Crime Reporting program. The technically soundest studies that were not afflicted by this problem have found that right-to-carry laws have no net effect one way or the other on crime rates.

John Lott

Material from Gary Kleck is provided in block quotes.

John Lott can’t refute the evidence that right-to-carry laws did not increase either gun ownership or frequency of carrying, so he instead invents a distorted straw man version of my arguments. . . .

This is pure invention—I never said or even implied any such thing. The number of people legally carrying obviously did increase, but that is irrelevant to how much risk criminals faced from armed victims. A victim with a gun and a carry permit is no more of a threat to a criminal that a victim with a gun and no permit. The number of prospective victims with permits simply has no bearing on the issue of deterrence; it is the number of prospective victims who carry guns, with or without permits, that could affect criminals. . . .

Survey evidence on carry permit holders, however, indicates that they did not, on net, increase their frequency of carrying after getting permits. The carry permits merely legitimated the carrying they were already doing before getting permits. . . .

Relying on survey data always has its risks. There are good reasons to believe that surveys on general gun ownership by law-abiding citizens have problems. But the problem is particularly true if one is asking people to reveal information about unlawful activity, in this case carrying a gun without a concealed handgun permit.

Hard data doesn’t just consist of the soaring number of concealed handgun permits and that these permits holders are extremely law-abiding, indicating that they were unlikely to be carrying when they didn’t have a permit.

Take the number of firearms found in carry-on bags at airport checkpoints. At an annual rate, this year the US is on track to have 2,624 firearms found in carry-on bags at airport checkpoints, an 18.6 percent increase over the previous year. This is fairly close to the 15 percent increase in the number of concealed handgun permits, and that this doesn’t count that there are three more states that no longer require permits to carry concealed in their states.

From 2007 to 2015, the number of firearms in carry-on bags increased from 803 to about 2,624—a 227 percent increase. Meanwhile the number of concealed handgun permits increased from 4.6 to 12.8 million over that same time period—a 180% increase. But this increase ignores the fact that the number of states where you can carry a permitted concealed handgun any place in the state rose from three to eight. Again the change in firearms found in carry-on bags is very similar to the increase in concealed handgun permits.

In addition, while Gary doesn’t seem to believe that the changes in the percent of adults who are legally carrying deters criminals, there is considerable evidence that criminal behavior changes, with violent crime rates falling as the percentage of people with permits increases.

Finally, with the huge percentage increase in concealed handgun permits, it is hard to understand why all or even most of those individuals were previously carrying illegally. Concealed carry permit licenses clearly increased when Obama became president and when there are terrorist and mass public shooting attacks. But the question is why does Gary believe that people stop carrying illegally and get a permit just because Obama became president or there has been an attack.

Lott tells another especially bizarre whopper about me: “Gary feels very strongly that gun ownership doesn’t make people safer.” This one is especially weird because I am usually attacked by pro-control people for my research showing the defensive gun use is both frequent and effective. . . .

Take this quote from Gary’s initial interview with Ari: “across areas, there is no effect of gun ownership rates on crime rates, including homicide rates.” And in his last posting he makes the claim: “national gun ownership rates have no net effect on national homicide rates (the position I [Kleck] endorse).” But Gary has been making this claim even more broadly for some time.

Similarly, this past summer, Gary told :{Mother Jones:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: magazine: “Do I know of anybody who specifically believe with more guns there are less crimes and they’re a credible criminologist? No.” Gary is saying clearly the debate isn’t just about whether guns are increasing. He is claiming that even if gun ownership is increasing, there won’t be reduced crime.

Everyone knows of Gary’s work on guns being used defensively, but there is a contradiction here. While Gary points to guns being used defensively and those defensive uses exceed the number of times guns are used in the commission of crime, he repeatedly says that increased gun ownership doesn’t reduce crime.

I don’t understand why Gary claims that more gun ownership doesn’t mean less crime, and I have asked him about this in multiple conversations, but whenever I have asked him to explain how these different claims could be reconciled he has declined to do so.

One of Lott’s many errors is to blindly assume that higher actual costs of crime invariably result in higher perceived costs of crime—something we know is not true. . . .. Lott has never presented a single scrap of evidence that criminals’ perceived risks of confronting armed victims increased after right-to-carry laws were enacted—he simply assumed that it had happened.

There is a large economics literature showing that higher arrest and conviction rates as well as punishment, such as the death penalty, deter criminals (a survey is provided in Chapter 4 in my book :{Freedomnomics:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:).

As to evidence that armed victims deter criminals, there is a wide variety of evidence:

If Gary is correct that passage of right-to-carry laws have no impact on the number of people who carry, how can he explain all these different changes in crime rates? Why would crime rates change in these adjacent counties so differently? Why would violent crimes go down relative to property crimes? Or mass public shootings go down relative to other types of murders?

[Lott] claims that “countries with the lowest gun ownership rates do tend to have higher homicide rates.” There is no empirical evidence whatsoever to support this claim, and Lott does not cite any.

Well, if Gary wants some evidence on that score, he can look at some evidence available here.

[Lott] tries to head off critics who would cite cross-sectional evidence that indicates he is wrong by assuming it is likely to be “misleading,” but withholds from readers the facts that (1) this is the only kind of evidence we have on the relationship between national gun ownership rates and national homicide rates, and (2) all of the evidence indicates either that national gun ownership rates have no net effect on national homicide rates (the position I endorse) or that they increase homicide rates (only poor quality studies support this position).

Cross-sectional evidence is not particularly useful in accurately determining relationships, simply because purely cross-sectional doesn’t allow one to account for all the differences in crime rates across places. A detailed discussion is available here.  [HE CITES HIMSELF: https://crimeresearch.org/2014/03/comparing-murder-rates-across-countries/

Take a simple example, many point out that compared to the US the UK has relatively low murder rates and very restrictive gun control. They then attribute the lower homicide rate in the UK due to its gun control regulations. But the problem is that the UK’s homicide rates went up by 50 percent for eight years after the handgun ban was imposed in January 1997, and it only stopped going up and started going down after a large 18 percent increase in police.

That said, despite Gary’s claim, cross-sectional data isn’t the only data that we have “on the relationship between national gun ownership rates and national homicide rates.” One very simple example is that every single place in the world that has banned guns has seen an increase in murder rates. It isn’t just places such as Washington, DC and Chicago that banned handguns and saw increases in murder rates. Gun control advocates claim that bans can’t work in those cities because criminals can still get guns in neighboring areas or states. While this explanation might explain why crime rates don’t fall as much as gun controllers predicted, this can’t explain why the murder rates soared. In addition, even when island nations have adopted gun bans, you see large increases in murder rates.

Thus Gary is incorrect on all these counts.

Related:

https://www.mediamatters.org/john-lott/wsj-gives-discredited-researcher-john-lott-platform-falsely-blame-gun-regulation-mexican

==

an 919

For the past 20 years, Dr. John Lott, Jr. has been the go-to person from the educated elite class who the GOP has used to fight gun legislation. On Sept. 18, Americans were again subjected to this man as he testified at the Joint Economic Committee Hearing on Gun Violence in America. Lott has written multiple books with oh-so-scholarly titles such as “Obama’s War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do Now to Regain Our Future,” and “At the Brink: Will Obama Push Us Over the Edge?” Most of his books, however, are about guns: “Straight Shooting,” “The Bias Against Guns,” and simply, “War on Guns.”

What Lott is best known for, though, is a 1990s book entitled “More Guns, Less Crime,” which is also pretty much the synopsis of the whole thing. He claimed that states with ”shall issue” concealed carry laws have low crime rates, based on his statistical analysis of crime data. When Steven Levitt, the best-selling co-author of the slightly more popular book “Freakonomics” complained that other scholars could not replicate his findings, Lott responded by suing him.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has never been impressed when he is invited to spew rightwing talking points, and in a 1996 letter to the Wall Street Journal editors, he offered one pretty good reason not to be a fan of Lott:

The Associated Press reports that Prof. Lott’s fellowship at the University of Chicago is funded by the Olin Foundation, which is “associated with the Olin Corporation,” one of the nation’s largest gun manufacturers. Maybe that’s a coincidence, too. But it’s also a fact.

Lott’s pro-gun conclusions fly in the face of the body of respected research, which is exactly why he still gets invited to make the Republican Party’s arguments against common sense legislation to help fight the nation’s rampaging gun epidemic. By now, you’d think they’d find someone else. After the exchange below, it looks like they’ll finally have to.

Lott’s pro-gun conclusions fly in the face of the body of respected research, which is exactly why he still gets invited to make the Republican Party’s arguments against common sense legislation to help fight the nation’s rampaging gun epidemic. By now, you’d think they’d find someone else. After the exchange below, it looks like they’ll finally have to.....

off bs

https://crimeresearch.org/about/

the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) is a research and education organization dedicated to conducting academic quality research on the relationship between laws regulating the ownership or use of guns, crime, and public safety; educating the public on the results of such research; and supporting other organizations, projects, and initiatives that are organized and operated for similar purposes. It has 501(C)(3) status, and does not accept donations from gun or ammunition makers or organizations such as the NRA or any other organizations involved in the gun control debate on either side of the issue.  Nor do we accept donations from organizations involved in the debate over illegal immigration.

Our goal is to provide an objective and accurate scientific evaluation of both the costs and benefits of gun ownership as well as policing activities.

Goals

Core Activities

CPRC accomplishes these goals through a core set of activities that include:

President

CPRC was founded by Dr. John R. Lott, Jr., an economist and a world-recognized expert on guns and crime.  During the Trump administration, he served as the Senior Advisor for Research and Statistics in the Office of Justice Programs and then the Office of Legal Policy in the U.S. Department of Justice. Lott has held research or teaching positions at various academic institutions including the University of Chicago, Yale University, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, UCLA, and Rice University, and was the chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission during 1988-1989. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from UCLA.

Nobel laureate Milton Friedman noted: “John Lott has few equals as a perceptive analyst of controversial public policy issues.”

Lott is a prolific author for both academic and popular publications. He has published over 100 articles in peer-reviewed academic journals and written ten books, including “More Guns, Less Crime,” “The Bias Against Guns,” and “Freedomnomics.” His most recent books are “Dumbing Down the Courts: How politics keeps the smartest judges off the bench” and “Gun Control Myths.”

He has been one of the most productive and cited economists in the world (from 1969 to 2000 he ranked 26th worldwide in terms of quality-adjusted total academic journal output, 4th in terms of total research output, and 86th in terms of citations). Among economics, business, and law professors his research is currently the 15th most downloaded in the world. He is also a frequent writer of op-eds.

Lott can be reached at johnrlott@crimeresearch.org.

Research Director

Carl Moody is a Professor of Economics at William & Mary and he also has a joint appointment with the college’s Applied Statistics faculty. He has published extensively on the relationships between guns, crime and imprisonment in such academic journals as Criminology, Homicide Studies, the Journal of Law and Economics, the Journal of Legal Studies, and the Journal of Quantitative Criminology. He has published papers on both sides of the gun control debate. Moody has co-authored research with the CPRC on policing and empirical work on right-to-carry laws here and here. He teaches mathematical economics and econometrics.

Moody can be reached at cemood@wm.edu.

Executive Director

Nikki Goeser is the Executive Director of the Crime Prevention Research Center and author of “:{Stalked And Defenseless: How Gun Control Helped My Stalker Murder My Husband in Front of Me:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;text-size-adjust:100%;vertical-align:baseline;background:transparent;font-weight:700"):}:.” Nikki was previously the Executive Director of the Congressional Second Amendment Caucus in D.C.

Goeser can be reached at nikki@crimeresearch.org.

Director of Data Collections & Translations

Margarita Masiukova-Robl is a Moscow State University graduate. She speaks English, Russian, German, Thai and Cambodian. She has worked as a translator in international conventions from Bangkok, Thailand to Cologne, Germany to Cannes, France to Las Vegas.

Margarita can be reached at Margarita@crimeresearch.

Academic Advisory Board

:{William M. Landes:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;text-size-adjust:100%;vertical-align:baseline;background:transparent;font-weight:700"):}: is the Clifton R. Musser Professor Emeritus of Law and Economics, and Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. Mr. Landes has written widely on the application of economics and quantitative methods to law and legal institutions, including multiple victim public shootings, hijacking of airplanes, and the bail system. Landes has been an editor of the Journal of Law and Economics (1975–1991) and the Journal of Legal Studies (1991–2000), is past president of the American Law and Economics Association, and is a member of the American Economic Association, the Mont Pelerin Society, and the Council of Economic Advisers of the American Enterprise Institute. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

J. Scott Armstrong is a professor at the Wharton Business School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is internationally known for his pioneering work on forecasting methods. Most recently, his research activities have involved forecasting for terrorism and conflicts. He is author of Long-Range Forecasting, the most frequently cited book on forecasting methods. He is a co-founder of the Journal of Forecasting, the International Journal of Forecasting, the International Symposium on Forecasting, and forecastingprinciples.com. He is a co-developer of new methods including rule-based forecasting, causal forces for extrapolation, simulated interaction, structured analogies, and the “index method.” In addition to forecasting, Professor Armstrong has published papers on survey research, educational methods, applied statistics, social responsibility, strategic planning, and scientific peer review.

Timothy Craig Allen, M.D., J.D. is Professor of Pathology and Chair of the Department of Pathology at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, and is Director of the Center for Pulmonary Pathology. He is certified by the American Board of Pathology in Anatomic and Clinical Pathology, with added qualification in Cytopathology. Dr. Allen holds the degree of Doctor of Law With Honors from the University of Chicago Law School, and has practiced health care law and litigation. He is a former Deputy Medical Examiner for Galveston County, Texas. Dr. Allen is a former member of the University of Texas Medical Branch’s Institute of Medical Humanities. He serves on the Board of Governors of the College of American Pathologists; and is past-president of the Texas Society of Pathologists and the Pulmonary Pathology Society, and past-chair of the University of Texas System Faculty Advisory Council. He has authored and coauthored numerous articles and book chapters on pulmonary pathology and medicolegal issues and has coauthored and co-edited several books on pulmonary pathology. Dr. Allen is an associate editor of the Archives of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, and series co-editor of the Advances in Surgical Pathology series. Dr. Allen serves on several medical industry advisory boards.

Arthur Z. Berg, M.D. is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and former member of the APA Violence Task Force. He was founding Psychiatrist-in-Chief at Beverly Hospital (emeritus) and former Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. A recent article that Dr. Berg had in the Wall Street Journal on multiple victim public shootings is available here.  In 2014, he also wrote an op-ed in the New York Post with John Lott available here.

Edgar Browning — Professor Browning is one of the top public finance economists in the world and he is a professor at Texas A&M University.  He is the author of the book, Stealing from Each Other: How the Welfare State Robs Americans of Money and Spirit (Praeger, 2008). He received his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University.  His articles have appeared in numerous scholarly journals, including the Journal of Public Economics, National Tax Journal, Public Finance Quarterly, American Economic Review, and Journal of Political Economy. His other books include Microeconomic Theory and Applications (with Mark Zupan) and Public Finance and the Price System (with Jacquelene M. Browning).

Tim Groseclose is the Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics at UCLA. He holds appointments in the political science and economics departments at the university. In 1987, he received his B.S. in Mathematical Sciences from Stanford University. In 1992, he received his PhD from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. He is the author of over two dozen scholarly articles as well as the book Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind. Given the extensive media bias on guns, Professor Groseclose’s expertise on identifying media bias will be important. He contributes to the blog, www.Ricochet.com, and is an active tweeter at @Tim_Groseclose (https://twitter.com/Tim_Groseclose). You can learn more about him and his writings at www.timgroseclose.com.

:{Jonathan M. Karpoff:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;text-size-adjust:100%;vertical-align:baseline;background:transparent;font-weight:700"):}: is the Washington Mutual Endowed Chair in Innovation Professor of Finance at the University of Washington Foster School of Business. Karpoff has published pathbreaking research on the topics of corporate crime and punishment as well as corporate governance. He is the associate editor for the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Management Science, Managerial and Decision Sciences, and The North American Journal of Economics and Finance. He has received a long list of academic awards.

Joyce Lee Malcolm is the Patrick Henry Professor of Constitutional Law and the Second Amendment at George Mason University Law School.She has a Ph.D. in history and is internationally known for her books Guns and Violence: The English Experience, Harvard University Press (November 24, 2004), and To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right, Harvard University Press (March 2, 1996). Guns and Violence provides a comprehensive history and examination of changes in murder rates in England from the middle ages to the current day. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and she has held positions at Princeton University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Cambridge University. Malcolm also served as the Director, Division of Research Programs for the National Endowment for the Humanities during 2005-2006.

Scott E. Masten is Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy in the University of Michigan Stephen M. Ross School of Business, where he has been a faculty member since 1984. A leading scholar in the area of transaction cost economics, Professor Masten’s research focuses on issues at the intersection of law, economics, and organization. In addition to his primary appointment, he has held appointments as the Louis and Myrtle Moskowitz Research Professor in Business and Law at Michigan, John M. Olin Faculty Research Fellow at Yale Law School, John M. Olin Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Virginia Law School, and Visiting Professor in the University of Michigan Law School. He was President of the International Society for New Institutional Economics in 2008-09, is a co-editor of the Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Law, Economics & Organization and Managerial and Decision Economics

Carl Moody, Professor of Economics, William & Mary. Professor Moody has published extensively on the relationships between guns, crime and imprisonment in such academic journals as Criminology, Homicide Studies, the Journal of Law and Economics, the Journal of Legal Studies, and the Journal of Quantitative Criminology. Moody has co-authored research with the CPRC on policing and empirical work on right-to-carry laws here and here. He teaches mathematical economics and econometrics.

Paul H. Rubin is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Economics at Emory University, and Editor in Chief of Managerial and Decision Economics. He has been president of the Southern Economic Association. His research interests have included crime, the death penalty, and gun control. He received his B.A. from the University of Cincinnati in 1963 and his Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1970. He is a Fellow of the Public Choice Society, a Senior Fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation, an Adjunct Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, and former Vice President of the Southern Economics Association. Dr. Rubin has been Senior Staff Economist at President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, Chief Economist at the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, Director of Advertising Economics at the Federal Trade Commission, and vice-president of Glassman-Oliver Economic Consultants, Inc., a litigation consulting firm in Washington.

Adjunct Fellows

C. Bret Jessee, a senior fellow with the CPRC, is also a research director in the biomedical industry, working in the areas of trauma and reconstructive surgery. He received his PhD in Molecular Biology from Princeton University in 1986 and did post-doctoral research at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and The University of Rochester. Bret’s recent industry research projects include quantitative studies of conflict of interest in the surgical products medical literature and bias in the peer review process attributable to medical research funding. Bret can be reached at Bret.Jessee@crimeresearch.org.

:{Dr. Kesten C Green:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;text-size-adjust:100%;vertical-align:baseline;background:transparent;font-weight:700"):}:, a senior fellow with the CPRC, is a researcher at the University of South Australia Business School. Kesten has developed forecasting methods that have led to improvements in predicting decisions people in conflicts. He conducts research on forecasting for business and for public policy. His research has been covered in the Australian Financial Review, the London Financial Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Times, and the Wall Street Journal. He has advised the Alaska Department of Natural Resources, the U.S. Department of Defense, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the National Security Agency (NSA), FBI, CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), and more than 50 other business and government clients. With Scott Armstrong, Kesten is co-director and co-owner of the Forecasting Principles public service Internet site (ForPrin.com), the leading online resource for scientific forecasting. Kesten’s CV with links to copies of his research papers is available from kestencgreen.com.  He has co-authored op-eds with John Lott available here.  Kesten can be researched at Kesten.Green@unisa.edu.au.

Jack McCauley is a senior fellow with the CPRC and a private consultant on Public Safety and Crime Enforcement Strategies.Jack is a retired Captain from the Maryland State Police with 23 years of service.  Jack spent the majority of his career as a criminal investigator and manager of several elite investigative units.  Jack managed hundreds of death investigations as a Homicide Investigator and later commanded the Gang Enforcement Unit and the Firearms Enforcement Unit.  Prior to leaving the Maryland State Police in 2013, Jack was the Commander of the State Police Firearms Licensing Division.  Since his retirement, Jack McCauley has worked to share his experiences as the manager of several investigative units whose sole mission was to develop and implement enforcement strategies to combat violent crime.  He is currently working to help educate Maryland lawmakers and various citizen groups on the true causes of violence.

General Information

General requests for information can be obtained at info@crimeresearch.org.

Board of Directors

Edgar Browning — Professor Browning is one of the top public finance economists in the world and he is a professor at Texas A&M University.

Timothy Craig Allen, M.D., J.D. — Dr Allen serves on the Board of Governors of the College of American Pathologists; and is past-president of the Texas Society of Pathologists and the Pulmonary Pathology Society, and past-chair of the University of Texas System Faculty Advisory Council. Professor of Pathology and Chair of the Department of Pathology at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, and is Director of the Center for Pulmonary Pathology.

Joseph E. Olson, J.D. — has been a Professor of Law (now Emeritus) at Mitchell Hamline School of Law in Saint Paul, Minnesota since 1974.  He attended Duke Law School graduating with Honors and was selected for the Order of the Coif. He has an extensive academic publication record on firearms law.

Brad Thor — the author of numerous New York Times bestsellers

sino phobe clancy wannabe?

https://bradthor.com/brad-thor-blog/resources-rising-tiger/#.YubCRXbMK3A

Tracey Wyatt, Treasurer — a graduate of the Tuck Business School

Lars Larson — radio talk show host

Sheriff David Clarke — Former Sheriff for Milwaukee County, Wisconsin

Research Associates

Rujun Wang at rujun.wang@crimeresearch.org

Organization

CPRC is a Colorado non-profit corporation.  CPRC has 501(C)(3) status with the IRS.  In keeping with 501(c)3 status, CPRC will focus on research and education.

Address: Crime Prevention Research Center

1100 W Kent Ave (P.O. Box 2293)

Missoula, MT 59801

Past Presidents

Andrew Pollack spent his career as a small businessman in scrap metal and real estate, but after his daughter Meadow was murdered in the Parkland school shooting he dedicated his life to finding answers and preventing future tragedies. Contrary to the national media narrative, Pollack learned that gun control laws had nothing to do with why that mass shooting happened. It was, rather, systemic failures in public institutions caused by misguided liberal policies. “The people who blame the gun before they learn the facts,” Pollack says, “are a big part of what people call the ‘root cause’ of mass shootings and violent crime. At the Crime Prevention Research Center, I will focus on finding and disseminating the facts. On saving lives, not on partisan talking points.”

Dr. Robert F. Turner holds both professional (JD) and academic (SJD) doctorates from the University of Virginia School of Law, where in 1981 he cofounded the Center for National Security Law—the world’s first think tank specifically focused on issues of national security law.  He is a former three-term chair of the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on Law and National Security and for many years edited the ABA National Security Law Report.  Turner also chaired the National Security Law Subcommittee of the Federalist Society for many years and currently serves as a non-resident Senior Fellow at the National Security Institute at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia School of Law.

As a University of Virginia professor for more than three decades, Turner taught in both the Department of Politics and the School of Law. His 1700-page doctoral dissertation was on “National Security and the Constitution.” At the time of his retirement from the Law School earlier this year, Professor Turner was a Distinguished Fellow at the Center.

==

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UPDATED: Errors in Associated Press, the Washington Post, and the New York Times articles on how rarely concealed carry permit holders stop active shooters

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UPDATED: Errors in Associated Press, the Washington Post, and the New York Times articles on how rarely concealed carry permit holders stop active shooters

UPDATED: Errors in Associated Press, the Washington Post, and the New York Times articles on how rarely concealed carry permit holders stop active shooters

by johnrlott | Jul 30, 2022 | Media Bias, Original Research

UPDATED (original post on July 19th): Errors in Associated Press article titled "Rare in US for an active shooter to be stopped by bystander." It isn't common for mass shootings to be stopped in such fashion. From 2000 to 2021, fewer than 3% of 433 active attacks in...

Was Trump correct that the Democrats controlled the most Dangerous Cities?

Was Trump correct that the Democrats controlled the most Dangerous Cities?

by johnrlott | Jun 30, 2020 | Fact Check

“You hear about certain places like Chicago and you hear about what’s going on in Detroit and other — other cities, all Democrat run. Every one of them is Democrat run. Twenty out of twenty. The 20 worst, the 20 most dangerous are Democrat run.”Donald Trump, "Remarks...

UPDATED: Correcting Gun Control false claims about “America’s unique gun violence problem” and “How to Reduce Shootings”

UPDATED: Correcting Gun Control false claims about “America’s unique gun violence problem” and “How to Reduce Shootings”

by johnrlott | Jan 13, 2019 | Gun Control Myths, Original Research

UPDATED, originally Posted April 3, 2018: An article at Vox has gained attention for illustrating America's "unique gun violence problem" in 17 maps and charts.  A similar New York Times opinion piece by Nicolas Kristof on "How to Reduce Shootings" and another at the...

At Fox News: Ahead of NRA speeches by Trump, Pence hypocritical media get it wrong on gun ban

At Fox News: Ahead of NRA speeches by Trump, Pence hypocritical media get it wrong on gun ban

by johnrlott | May 4, 2018 | Featured

Dr. John Lott has a new piece up at Fox News about the media attacks on the NRA and the Trump administration regarding their supposed hypocrisy over gun-free zones.  The piece starts here: The news media love to criticize hypocrisy – at least by conservatives – even...

At The Hill: “The media is out of control in its push for gun control”

At The Hill: “The media is out of control in its push for gun control”

by johnrlott | Mar 16, 2018 | Featured

Dr. John Lott has a new op-ed at The Hill newspaper on the bias of fact checkers and the impact that they have on the gun control debate. Fact checkers are out of control, and on the issue of guns they no longer even try to pretend impartiality. Especially on social...

In the Washington Times: The facts about guns at school

In the Washington Times: The facts about guns at school

by johnrlott | Mar 12, 2018 | Featured

Dr. John Lott has a new piece at the Washington Times that directly responds to false claims being made by Fact Checkers: President Trump thinks arming school staff and teachers deter threats. Surprise, media fact checkers from The New York Times to FactCheck.org...

At Real Clear Politics: Media Ignores Facts to Claim a Trump Gotcha

At Real Clear Politics: Media Ignores Facts to Claim a Trump Gotcha

by johnrlott | Jul 1, 2020 | Fact Check

Dr. John Lott has another piece at Real Clear Politics on media bias regarding crime rates and Trump. The media keeps going out of its way to fact check President Trump’s claims as false. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump is one of many journalists who can’t be...

UPDATE: Regarding Media Bias Fact Checks reference to John Lott’s research receiving money from the NRA

UPDATE: Regarding Media Bias Fact Checks reference to John Lott’s research receiving money from the NRA

by johnrlott | Feb 20, 2019 | Featured

New: Media Bias Fact Check has updated their post on the CPRC, though it really just repackages "claims made that John Lott & the CPRC are funded by the NRA" No evidence is provided. The video of the claim by Alan Dershowitz is provided above. People can judge for...

At National Review: Trump’s NRA Speech: A Response to the Fact-Checkers

At National Review: Trump’s NRA Speech: A Response to the Fact-Checkers

by johnrlott | May 12, 2018 | Featured

Dr. John Lott has a piece at National Reviewthat responds to some of the "Fact Checkers" who went after President Trump's talk at the NRA Annual meeting.  The piece starts this way: On Sunday, Jake Tapper told Kellyanne Conway, “I would like [Trump] to stop lying.”...

Robert Reich’s false claims about Guns

Robert Reich’s false claims about Guns

by johnrlott | Apr 14, 2018 | Featured

Robert Reich's"5 Points to Counter the NRA" received over 2 million views just on one Facebook page (video is available here).  So it isn't too surprising that a large number of Americans are being convinced that stricter gun control is the answer for reducing...

Politifact’s continued biased and flawed evaluations about gun control: France had a higher casualty rate in one year than the entire 8 years of Barack Obama

Politifact’s continued biased and flawed evaluations about gun control: France had a higher casualty rate in one year than the entire 8 years of Barack Obama

by johnrlott | Mar 12, 2018 | Featured

Politifact's Jon Greenberg claims: "NRA's Loesch cherry-picks terrorism deaths in France to argue against assault weapon ban."    They rate the claim as "mostly false."  On ABC News’ This Week Dana Loesch had this to say: Loesch: "France had a higher casualty rate in...

Politifact’s continued biased and flawed evaluations of gun control: Questioning the claim that police are convicted at higher rates than permit holders

Politifact’s continued biased and flawed evaluations of gun control: Questioning the claim that police are convicted at higher rates than permit holders

by johnrlott | Mar 12, 2018 | Featured

Politifact's Jon Greenberg claims: "Florida lawmaker repeats dodgy claim about crimes by cops vs. concealed permit holders."  They rate the claim as "false." This is in response to our research "comparing conviction rates of police and permit holders."  The Florida...

« Older Entries

ref 2/19

new: Media Bias Fact Check has updated their post on the CPRC, though it really just repackages

“claims made that John Lott & the CPRC are funded by the NRA”

No evidence is provided. The video of the claim by Alan Dershowitz is provided above. People can judge for themselves as Dershowitz isn’t even clear what he believes.

“junk science”

Media Bias Fact Check points to one report written by Ted Goertzel, a sociologist at Rutgers who has never published a single refereed paper on crime. A list of academic research that has confirmed Lott’s research is :{available here:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;text-size-adjust:100%;vertical-align:baseline;background:transparent;font-weight:700"):}:.

“website features an Op-Ed section that curates news from other right leaning outlets such as Fox News…”

Amazingly, Media Bias Fact Check ignores that we have featured pieces on our website from left leaning outlets such as the New York Times, many in the :{New York Daily News:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;text-size-adjust:100%;vertical-align:baseline;background:transparent;font-weight:700"):}:, and lots in the Washington Post (e.g., :{here:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;text-size-adjust:100%;vertical-align:baseline;background:transparent;font-weight:700"):}:, here, here, here, here, and :{here:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;text-size-adjust:100%;vertical-align:baseline;background:transparent;font-weight:700"):}:).

Regarding the three reviews by Politifact (note that the Media Bias Fact Check completely ignores the cases where Politifact relies on the CPRC for accurate information (e.g., here and :{here:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;text-size-adjust:100%;vertical-align:baseline;background:transparent;font-weight:700"):}:)), and they also ignore that Politifact is left leaning.

This is not a very honest discussion. To see the information that we have :{available here:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;text-size-adjust:100%;vertical-align:baseline;background:transparent;font-weight:700"):}:.

See our discussion :{available here:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;text-size-adjust:100%;vertical-align:baseline;background:transparent;font-weight:700"):}:. Politifact ignores how the FBI defines these cases.

The :{vast majority of peer reviewed research supports:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;text-size-adjust:100%;vertical-align:baseline;background:transparent;font-weight:700"):}: what Patrick says, but Politifact only interviews left wing academics.

ORIGINAL: Given that Media Bias Fact Check (MBFC) is often pointed to as a useful source to evaluate bias in think tanks we have put this post together. MBFC references Alan Dershowitz’s claim 2012 claim on CNN to report that John Lott “has been accused of accepting funding from the National Rifle Association. Lott denies this claim,” we have put up this video to show Dershowitz twice saying that he was hardly making a clear claim and that no evidence was provided.

It would be nice if Media Bias Fact Check would correct the record.

Their other claim that one person has claimed Lott’s research is “junk science” is equally absurd. They point to one report that was written by Ted Goertzel, a sociologist at Rutgers who has never published a single refereed paper on crime. A list of academic research that has confirmed Lott’s research is :{available here:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;text-size-adjust:100%;vertical-align:baseline;background:transparent;font-weight:700"):}:.

Media Bias Fact Check is also not able to do simple math. While their scale indicates that the CPRC is located between someplace between the “right” and the “extreme right,” if you use the votes that they have collected, the CPRC is located between “right-center” and “right,” with it actually being slightly closer to the “right-center.” [If you take the votes on a 1 to 7 scale, with 7 being “extreme right,” the CPRC is at 5.44.) Of course, given the very biased write up by MBFC, it would be surprising that we were viewed as anything other than biased to the right.

UPDATE: May 24, 2020

Although there have been claims made that John Lott and the CPRC are funded by the NRA, there is not evidence to support that claim. Unfortunately, the website lacks transparency and does not disclose funding. It appears funding is derived through donations

Donors up through June 2016 :{available here:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;text-size-adjust:100%;vertical-align:baseline;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-attachment:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;font-weight:700"):}:.

We stopped posting donors after that date because gun control groups have been contacting and harrassing donors. You can see what they have done to our academic board members (:{see here:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;text-size-adjust:100%;vertical-align:baseline;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-attachment:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;font-weight:700"):}:).

As to the claim that we are funded by the NRA, please note that the NRA makes its grants for researchers public and neither the CPRC or anyone associated with the CPRC has ever gotten $1 for our research.

As to the link for Alan Dershowitz claim that you link to at Mediaite. They no longer have the video but we have put it up at the top of this post.

In the video, Dershowitz was hardly making a clear claim about funding and no evidence was provided. If you think that Dershowitz’s claim was clear, please explain why you think that is the case.

This research was conducted by John Lott. In viewing the research present on their page, all of the research is favorable toward gun ownership and minimizes gun dangers.

The research is done by multiple people associated with the CPRC, not just John Lott, including Arthur Berg (Harvard) (e.g., see here and here), Carl Moody (William & Mary and the CPRC research director) (e.g., see here, here, here, and many more places), Gary Mauser (Simon Fraser University) (here, here, here, here, and here), and others.

The website features an Op-Ed section that curates news from other right leaning outlets such as Fox News, Townhall, Washington Times and the Daily Caller.

This is an extremely biased selection of all the op-ed pieces featured on the website.

Is the New York Times a right wing outlet? List of pieces :{published there:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;text-size-adjust:100%;vertical-align:baseline;background:transparent;font-weight:700"):}:.

Is the Washington Post a right wing outlet? List of pieces :{published there:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;text-size-adjust:100%;vertical-align:baseline;background:transparent;font-weight:700"):}:.

Is the New York Daily News a right wing outlet? List of pieces :{published there:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;text-size-adjust:100%;vertical-align:baseline;background:transparent;font-weight:700"):}:.

Is The Hill a right wing outlet? List of pieces published there.

John Lott’s work has been called “Junk Science“

Ted Goertzel’s claim was discussed above.

A factual search reveals a few failed fact checks by IFCN fact checkers.

Again MBFC has been extremely selective in what examples it references. Cases where politicians have quoted John Lott or the Crime Prevention Research Center (or at least tried to quote us) and we got higher ratings. Pieces by Politifact are available :{here:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;text-size-adjust:100%;vertical-align:baseline;background:transparent;font-weight:700"):}:, here, here, and here.

Just some of the cases where fact checkers have called on us for figuring out what is true. See examples here, :{here:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;text-size-adjust:100%;vertical-align:baseline;background:transparent;font-weight:700"):}:, and :{here:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;text-size-adjust:100%;vertical-align:baseline;background:transparent;font-weight:700"):}:.

Overall, we rate the Crime Prevention Research Center Right Biased based on strongly advocating for guns and the conservative agenda. We also rate them Mixed for factual reporting based on a few failed fact checks. (9/2/2016) Updated (D. Van Zandt 5/24/2019)

We have professors on BOTH sides of the gun control debate (:{see here:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;text-size-adjust:100%;vertical-align:baseline;background:transparent;font-weight:700"):}:).

Indeed, our research director, Professor Carl Moody at the College of William & Mary (economics and statistics), has published peer-reviewed research on both sides of the gun control debate.

For example, one academic advisor, Professor Paul Rubin at Emory University, has published peer reviewed research that is critical of our research.

Others on the pro-gun control side include Jonathan Karpoff at the University of Washington.

We take a lot of pride in having researchers on BOTH sides of the gun control debate. Name me one other organization who can make that claim. We believe that it is important to have people on both sides so that we can produce high quality research.

Here are MBFC’s numbers as of February 24, 2019.[grafx]

https://www.thetrace.org**/2021/01**/john-lott-trump-appointee-leave-justice-department-gun-data/

j m

Lott, a controversial pro-gun researcher who was hired last fall as a senior advisor for research and statistics at the Justice Department’s Office of Justice Programs, left the position this week.

Lott’s departure was revealed in a January 16 email sent by the Crime Prevention Research Center, a nonprofit he founded that publishes research papers and articles with a pro-gun bent. The email, from Nikki Goeser, CPRC’s executive director, claims that Lott’s hiring “generated more opposition than almost any other Trump appointment,” and that “gun control activists also launched a fierce email and telephone campaign demanding Lott’s firing.” Lott will return to the CPRC as its president. 

As The Trace reported in December, gun violence researchers were alarmed by Lott’s appointment to the DOJ, and the possibility that he could influence the release of firearms data. A trained economist, Lott rose to prominence after the 1998 publication of his book More Guns, Less Crime, which argued that the proliferation of civilian-owned firearms deters violence.Respected academics have repeatedly discredited Lott’s work.

Lott’s work during his short stint at the DOJ still remains something of a mystery. But documents provided in response to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by The Trace provide a glimpse. In October, Lott was slated to attend a meeting about the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) — a system he’s derided in the past. In 2018 he pushed the false narrative that NICS improperly blocked gun sales to “millions of law-abiding citizens” simply because they have names and birthdates that are the same as or similar to someone disqualified from possessing firearms.

Lott also had a meeting in late October about JustGrants, the DOJ’s grant payment management system, the documents show. The Office of Justice Programs, where Lott was an advisor, conducts research into violent crime and provides billions in grants to local, state, and federal authorities to implement crime-prevention strategies, and also funds research on firearm violence and prevention.

The documents also provide more clarity on the nature of Lott’s appointment at the DOJ. He was a Schedule C employee, a designation for political appointees. According to the Office of Personnel Management (OJP), which signs off on Schedule C employees, “incumbents of most of these positions customarily resign at the request of the new incoming administration or before a new agency head takes office.” His annual salary was listed as $116,353.

In the CPRC email, Goeser wrote that Lott’s “political appointee position ends with the end of the Trump administration.” Tannyr Watkins, a spokesperson at the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a division of OJP, did not reply to a query about the exact date and circumstances of Lott’s departure.

The possibility that Lott may have been in a position to disrupt research that informs grantmaking had alarmed gun violence researchers, who feared he could manipulate or withhold federal data in order to support his agenda. “I’ve seen him in different venues literally start making stuff up,” Daniel Webster, the director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at Johns Hopkins University, told me last month.

Lott has argued that mass shooters seek out gun-free zones, despite evidence to the contrary.And research has consistently demonstrated that states with less restrictive concealed carry laws actually have higher rates of violent crime than states with no such laws. Even conservative researchers have detailed issues with Lott’s work, and questioned why some media organizations continue to repeat his findings. 

Lott’s hiring also concerned lawmakers. In a letter to then-Attorney General William Barr in December, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee said his hiring “raises concerns about the continued integrity of the nonpartisan career civil service.”

During his time at DOJ, Lott also aided in former President Trump’s effort to overturn the electionwith unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud, producing a report in December that said 289,000 “excess votes” had been found across six decisive swing states due to “dead people voting, ineligible people voting, or even payments to legally registered people for their votes.” Trump White House adviser Peter Navarro used the findings to call for postponing the U.S. Senate runoffs in Georgia.

the trace

Lott, a controversial pro-gun researcher, is working in an advisory capacity at the Justice Department’s Office of Justice Programs. The appointment has alarmed gun violence researchers, who fear Lott may manipulate or withhold federal data in order to support his agenda.

A trained economist, Lott rose to prominence after the 1998 publication of his book More Guns, Less Crime, which argued that the proliferation of civilian-owned firearms deters violence. Gun-rights groups, including the National Rifle Association, were quick to embrace his argument. Lott then founded the Crime Prevention Research Center, a nonprofit organization that publishes research papers and articles with a pro-gun bent. He remains a fixture at conservative conventions, and is often called to testify before state legislatures in support of bills expanding access to guns.

But respected academics have repeatedly discredited Lott’s work. “This is someone who’s body of research has been studied, critiqued, and most people would say thoroughly debunked by a large number of respected scholars in the field,” Dr. Garen Wintemute, the director of the Firearm Violence Research Center at the University of California, Davis, told The Trace. “What concerns me as an individual who works in this field is: We don’t know, and we’re being prevented from knowing, what his scope of action and authority is, and he’s been hired by an administration in its last days that is investing in making it difficult to govern the country.”

Lott did not respond to emails we sent him starting on November 12, but we reached him through the DOJ switchboard on November 30. He refused to answer any questions about his hiring, which was first confirmed by Politico, and instead criticized The Trace. According to his LinkedIn page, Lott left the Crime Prevention Research Center in October.

The Office of Justice Programs conducts research into violent crime and provides billions in grants to local, state, and federal authorities to implement crime-prevention strategies, and also funds research on firearm violence and prevention. “Lott could have been hired, in part, to disrupt that research, in whatever ways the federal agency can do,” Wintemute said. He said he fears that Lott may block the release of gun violence data to researchers and academics, including FBI crime data. In the months after Trump took office, thousands of web pages containing information about climate change from federal websites, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Energy, were removed or buried. “There’s no reason to think the administration wouldn’t do the same here,” Wintemute said.

“I think it’s a fairly safe assumption at this stage in the Trump administration that [Lott] was brought in for ideological purposes,” said Daniel Webster, the director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at Johns Hopkins University. That prospect concerns him. “I’ve seen him in different venues literally start making stuff up,” Webster said. “What can he do in this lame-duck phase that could be harmful?”

Tannyr Watkins, a spokesperson at the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a division of OJP, told The Trace that Lott “has been appointed Senior Advisor for Research and Statistics at the Office of Justice Programs” but did not respond to follow-up questions, including some regarding who appointed him or what the nature of his work is. Advisor roles are typically appointed, and do not usually come with civil service protections. A researcher at the OJP, who asked not to be named, told us that Lott almost certainly has extensive access to crime and firearms statistics, and would probably be able to influence any possible suppression of such data.

John Donohue, a gun researcher at Stanford Law School who has scrutinized Lott’s good-guy-with-a-gun assertions, said that simply giving Lott access to a trove of federal crime data may be problematic, as it “may allow him to spin more tales. Anyone who runs a crime institute whereTed Nugentis a member of the board, you get a sense that this is not an organization that is really interested in true science, but is rather trying to tell a story to match a political agenda.” (Nugent, a longtime NRA board member known for inflammatory statements directed toward Latinos and Jewish people, served on the Crime Prevention Research Center’s board of directors until 2018.) “So in that sense, any power that John has to steer funds and data in a certain direction is likely to be harmful to the public interest.”

Research has consistently demonstrated that states with less restrictive concealed carry laws actually have higher rates of violent crime than states with no such laws, refuting one of Lott’s central tenets. He’s argued that mass shooters seek out gun-free zones, despite evidence to the contrary. He also claims that the National Instant Criminal Justice Background Check System (NICS), the federal background check system, doesn’t work, pointing to cases of criminals who have circumvented it to obtain weapons — without mentioning how deliberate loopholes built into the system hamper regulation.

Lott’s ethics have also come into question. In 2003, he admitted to *The Washington Post* that he created a false persona by the name of Mary Rosh, an amalgam of the names of his four children, to respond to critics of his work. But last year, Lott testified before a joint congressional committee on gun violence that someone in his family had authored the comments.

Even conservative researchers have detailed issues with Lott’s work, and questioned why some media organizations continue to repeat his findings. He’s a frequent contributor to conservative outlets such as Fox News, The Daily Caller, and The Federalist, as well as legacy media outlets including *The Washington Post*, *The Wall Street Journal*, and *The New York Times*.

Webster noted that Lott’s appointment couldn’t have come at a worse time. “When it’s all said and done, 2020 is going to see one of the sharpest increases in gun violence in a generation or more,” he said. “We need good reliable data now more than ever to understand what’s going on and what to do about it. And putting someone like Lott in that role can’t be helpful.”

Additional reporting by Kevin T. Dugan.

ref no lnx

More Good Guys with Concealed Guns = More Violent Crime

Analyzing 37 years of data, a Stanford team finds no basis for a theory at the heart of the modern gun-rights movement.

By Alex Yablon Jun 29, 2017

The Trace

In the four decades that the modern, militant gun rights movement has been around, one of its most significant victories occurred not at the ballot box, on a president’s special signing desk, or in the courtroom. Rather, one of the biggest battles pro-gun partisans have ever won took place in the minds of millions of Americans.

Since the late 1970’s, the National Rifle Association and other firearm advocates have successfully fought to make armed self defense increasingly acceptable in everyday life. A wealth of survey data — the most recent of which came via a major Pew poll released last week — shows that Americans have grown more comfortable with the toting of concealed guns in public. Self defense is now the most common reason cited for owning a firearm, leading handguns to become the most popular kind of weapon in the American arsenal. Those attitudes and behaviors mark major shifts: In the mid 1990s, Americans primarily owned guns for recreation, and as recently as 2005, a strong plurality thought only police officers should carry guns in public.

At the heart of this campaign for the hearts, minds, and holsters of America has been an article of faith that the NRA and its allies have preached since at least the 1990s: that people enhance public safety by carrying guns to defend themselves. Economist John Lott first developed this “More Guns, Less Crime” theory in his 1998 book of the same title, and has since popularized it via frequent legislative testimony and op-eds. The NRA has deployed Lott’s work to beat back calls for new curbs on guns and their use. In the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, when NRA leader Wayne LaPierre made his infamous assertion that the “only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” he was tapping into the already well-seeded notion that hidden guns at arm’s reach of their private owners increase public safety.

It’s a powerful, seductive idea, particularly to Americans who favor personal liberty over communitarian ideals. It’s also completely wrong, according to a new analysis of nearly 40 years’ worth of crime data.

“For years, the question has been, is there any public safety benefit to right to carry laws? That is now settled. The answer is no.”

John Donohue, Stanford Law School

In a new working paper published on June 21 by the National Bureau of Economic Research, academics at Stanford Law School ran that data through four different statistical models — including one developed by Lott for More Guns, Less Crime — and came back with an unambiguous conclusion: states that made it easier for their citizens to go armed in public had higher levels of non-fatal violent crime than those states that restricted the right to carry. The exception was the narrower category of murder; there, the researchers determined that any effect on homicide rates by expanded gun-carry policies is statistically insignificant.

While other studies conducted since 1994 have undermined Lott’s thesis, the new paper is the most comprehensive and assertive debunking of the more-guns-less-crime formula.

“For years, the question has been, is there any public safety benefit to right to carry laws? That is now settled,” said paper’s lead author, John Donohue. “The answer is no.”

More guns, more crime

Donohue and his co-authors looked at crime data from 1977 to 2014, both nationally and in 33 states that implemented “Shall Issue” concealed-carry laws during that period. The statutes are the handiwork of the NRA, which has by now successfully lobbied politicians in all but a sliver of state capitols to relax their standards for issuing permits to carry concealed guns. “Shall Issue” states, which Donohue refers to as right to carry (RTC), require that concealed-carry licenses be granted to anyone who meets basic criteria. Unsurprisingly, they accept permit applications at a higher rate than “May Issue” states, where authorities have greater discretion to decide who is fit to go about the world armed.

Since lowering the bar for concealed-carry licenses gradually leads more people to get those licenses (Florida alone has nearly 1.8 million people permitted to carry concealed guns, and Pennsylvania and Texas each have around one million), and because more guns in public is supposed to reduce crimes, then we should expect states to see less crime as “Shall Issue” laws kick in.

The Stanford team found precisely the opposite: “Ten years after the adoption of RTC laws,” they write, “violent crime is estimated to be 13-15 percent higher than it would have been without the RTC law.”

Prior assessments of right-to-carry statutes came earlier in the waves of “Shall Issue” laws that first swept states in the 1980s and mid-1990s. One of those was a well-known 2004 report from the National Research Council that also poked holes in Lott’s conclusion — but could not say definitively which way right to carry tilted crime rates, because there weren’t yet enough years of data to sift. Because the Stanford team was able to look at what was happening in states where expanded carry had been in place for a decade or more, it reached much stronger estimates of the effect of “Shall Issue” laws on crime.

The Stanford team suggested that the increased carrying of guns could have contributed to rising crime through several means.As more law-abiding residents arm themselves, so might the criminals in the same communities — rather than the other way around. Lawful gun-permit holders, the researchers theorize, could contribute to a street-level arms race by bringing more weapons into public, where they are more likely to be lost or stolen, making their way to the black market. The more that people become aware that their environs are filling with guns, their perceptions of society could become colored by fear and anger, thus leading them to more readily become violent.

“I wasn’t surprised to find violent crime went up,” Donohue said. “You’d expect guns to contribute to violent crime.”

Higher crime — no matter where you look

The Stanford findings fly in the face of not just the NRA’s message, but common understandings of crime trends over the last two decades. By national measures, violent crime has fallen dramatically after peaking in the early 1990s, and that drop has largely coincided with the expansion of the freedom to carry concealed guns. Lott and others are eager to point to declining national crime numbers as evidence for their theory, or at least to blunt concerns that more guns in public would lead to widespread bloodshed.

The problem with drawing a connection between the rise of concealed carry and the drop in the national crime rate, as Donohue and his co-authors point out, is that crime has not fallen equally in all parts of the country. Instead, the decline in violent crime has been most pronounced in states that maintained strict control over the right to carry guns, like New York and California. When other states decided to make it easier for residents to pack firearms, they appear to have missed out on reductions in crime of the same magnitude. Yes, in raw terms, crime declined in those right-to-carry states as well — but not nearly as much as it could have.

Examining statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau and the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting data, the authors estimate that states with stricter concealed-carry laws saw crime fall by 42 percent from 1977 to 2014. That drop is more than four times greater than the 9 percent decrease seen in right-to-carry states.

In conducting their analysis, the Stanford researchers wanted to make sure that it was differences in concealed-gun laws, and not some other factor — diverging economic fortunes or police staffing, for example — that sent crime plunging in some places but not others.

To find out, the team projected what would have happened in right-to-carry states had they not relaxed concealed-carry standards, accounting for differences in demographics, policing, and economic growth.

Here, too, the team was able to run calculations that were not possible in the 90’s and mid-2000’s, when the academics who first subjected Lott’s theory to scrutiny had significantly fewer years’ worth of data to crunch.

The Stanford findings rest on two statistical methods with obscure-sounding technical names: panel data analysis and synthetic controls analysis. Panel data essentially tries to break down complex social phenomena — crime being very much one of those — by studying their smaller, more easily measurable components, like incarceration rates, police staffing levels, poverty, income, and population density.

Synthetic control analysis allows researchers to compare data recorded after the introduction of a change — like a right-to-carry law — with projections based on what might have happened had the change never occurred. The synthetic controls projection is based on demographic data and outcomes in demographically similar places.

Different researchers make different judgments about which factors have the most power to drive crime up or down. Rather than rest their analysis on a single set of variables, the Stanford team ran their 37 years of crime data through four different panels: their favorite, called DAW; one developed by the nonpartisan Brennan Center; the panel John Lott used in “More Guns, Less Crime,” and a fourth favored by a pair of pro-gun researchers named Carlisle Moody and Thomas Marvell.

Projections made with all four panels showed that states with right-to-carry laws would have had even greater decreases in violent crime had those places not loosened their gun laws.

“The panel data gave no hint that anything good was coming from the right to carry,” Donohue said.

Take Texas, for example. Donohue’s projections found that 10 years after the Lone Star State put right to carry into effect, violent crime was more than 16 percent higher than it would have been without that law, as laid out in the graph below The dotted line, labeled “synthetic control unit,” is a projection of what might have happened to Texas’ violent crime rate had it not loosened its concealed-carry statute, based on a composite of demographically similar states.

The only difference between projections using the pro-gun scholars’ preferred variables and the other two panels came when singling out murder. The highest purpose of the armed citizen, in the rationale of the NRA and gun sellers, is to subdue or incapacitate marauding psychopaths before the killers can take innocent lives. But when the Stanford team ran the pro-gun researchers’ formulas, the graphs showed that right-to-carry laws actually propped up homicide rates.

The DAW and Brennan Center panels, on the other hand, showed only that non-fatal violent crime would be lower if states had never opted for the “Shall Issue” route. And they showed that in all 33 states where they ran the simulation, with no exceptions.

Better research, same real-world outcome?

For that question, Donohue relies not on sophisticated math, but his years of experience studying the gun issue. “Many people have such strongly fixed ideas about guns,” he conceded. “It’s hard to influence their thinking.”

Donohue may be understating the challenge that he and other scholars confront. Sociological and anthropological research suggests that Americans’ feelings about firearms and whether to carry them for self defense are driven by elemental notions like identity and masculinity, rather than empirical measures of safety gained or lost.

The NRA has gone to great lengths to foment the idea that the right to carry guns is the bedrock of American citizenship, and the option of lethal self defense is “the first freedom.” Gun companies market firearms to appeal to consumers’ need to see themselves as powerful and, often, hyper-masculine protectors. It’s hard for an academic paper to break through those kinds of beliefs.

But policymakers and judges are a different kind of audience than gun buyers or voters. Donohue hopes his findings make it in front of those influential eyes.

“The Supreme Court is eventually going to have to decide if there’s a right to carry,” he said, speaking the day after the justices declined to hear a challenge to California’s restrictive right-to-carry law. “What will they make of this evidence?”

Alex Yablon was a reporter at The Trace.

ref 2

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3756988

simple tests for the extent of vote fraud with absentee and provisional ballots in the 2020 US presidential election

Public Choice, forthcoming

39 Pages Posted: 12 May 2022

John R. Lott

Crime Prevention Research Center

Date Written: December 21, 2020

Abstract

This study reports three tests measuring vote fraud in the 2020 US presidential election, although they provide inconsistent evidence. To isolate the impact of a county’s vote-counting process and potential fraud on candidates’ vote margins, I first compare voting precincts in a county with alleged fraud to adjacent precincts in neighboring counties with no allegations of fraud. I compute the differences in President Trump’s vote shares on absentee ballots in those adjacent precincts, controlling for the differences in his vote shares on ballots cast in person. I also control for registered voters’ demographics and compare data for the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. When I examine Georgia and Pennsylvania separately, weak evidence of vote fraud on absentee ballots is found. I then apply the same method to provisional ballots in Allegheny County, where, contrary to state law, voters were allowed to correct alleged defects in absentee ballots by submitting provisional ballots on Election Day. My analysis finds that such permission contributed to a statistically significant additional 5,320 to 7,200 votes for Biden. Finally, vote fraud can show up as artificially larger voter turnouts, higher rates of filling out absentee ballots for people who hadn’t voted, dead people voting, ineligible people voting, or payments for votes. The estimates for Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin combined indicate between 146,000 and 334,000 excess votes for Biden.

Public Choice, Forthcoming

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THE CRIME PREVENTION RESEARCH CENTER (CPRC) IS A RESEARCH AND EDUCATION ORGANIZATION DEDICATED TO CONDUCTING ACADEMIC QUALITY RESEARCH ON THE RELATIONSHIP ...

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Findings from the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) show that 97.8 percent of mass shootings over a 68-year period occurred in “GUN-FREE ZONES.

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John Lott, Discredited Gun Researcher, Leaves DOJ - The Trace

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Jan 21, 2021 — Lott's departure was revealed in a January 16 email sent by the Crime Prevention Research Center, a nonprofit he founded that publishes ...

Who's Backing The Last Pro-Gun "Academic," John Lott?

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How Right-Wing Billionaires Infiltrated Higher Education

By Jane Mayer

FEBRUARY 12, 2016

https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-right-wing-billionaires-infiltrated-higher-education/

IF THERE WAS A SINGLE EVENT that galvanized conservative donors to try to wrest control of higher education in America, it might have been the uprising at Cornell University on April 20, 1969. That afternoon, during parents' weekend at the Ithaca, N.Y., campus, some 80 black students marched in formation out of the student union, which they had seized, with their clenched fists held high in black-power salutes. To the shock of the genteel Ivy League community, several were brandishing guns. At the head of the formation was a student who called himself the "Minister of Defense" for Cornell's Afro-American Society. Strapped across his chest, Pancho Villa-style, was a sashlike bandolier studded with bullet cartridges. Gripped nonchalantly in his right hand, with its butt resting on his hip, was a glistening rifle. Chin held high and sporting an Afro, goatee, and eyeglasses reminiscent of Malcolm X, he was the face of a drama so infamous it was regarded for years by conservatives such as David Horowitz as "the most disgraceful occurrence in the history of American higher education."

John M. Olin, a multimillionaire industrialist, wasn't there at Cornell, which was his alma mater, that weekend. He was traveling abroad. But as a former Cornell trustee, he could not have gone long without seeing the iconic photograph of the armed protesters. What came to be known as "the Picture" quickly ricocheted around the world, eventually going on to win that year's Pulitzer Prize.

Traveling almost as fast was the news that Cornell's administrators had quickly capitulated to the demands of the black militants, rather than risk a bloody confrontation. Under duress, the university's president had promised to accelerate plans to establish an independent black-studies program at Cornell, as well as to investigate the burning of a cross outside a building in which several black female students lived. And to the deep consternation of many conservative faculty members and students on campus, the president also agreed to grant full amnesty to the protesters, some of whom were facing previous disciplinary proceedings following an earlier uprising in which they had reportedly flung books from the shelves of Cornell's library, denouncing the works as "not relevant" to the black experience.

By all accounts, the confrontation was especially distressing to Olin. Cornell's library was one of four buildings on the Cornell campus bearing his family's name. Both he and his father had graduated from the university and had been proud and generous donors. Almost worse than the behavior of the protesters, from his standpoint, was the behavior of Cornell's president, James A. Perkins, a committed liberal who had gone out of his way to open the university's doors to inner-city minority students and now seemed to be bending the curriculum and lowering disciplinary standards to placate them.

"The catastrophe at Cornell inspired Olin to take his philanthropy in a bold, new direction," according to John J. Miller, whose authorized biography, A Gift of Freedom, provides a treasure trove of original research on Olin's life and legacy. Olin "saw very clearly that students at Cornell, like those at most major universities, were hostile to businessmen and to business enterprise, and indeed had begun to question the ideals of the nation itself," a memo from his foundation recounts.

As a result, according to Miller, instead of continuing to direct the bulk of his charitable contributions to hospitals, museums, and other standard patrician causes, as he had in the early years after he set up the John M. Olin Foundation in 1953, Olin embarked on a radical new course. He began to fund an ambitious offensive to reorient the political slant of American higher education to the right.

His foundation aimed at the country's most elite universities, the Ivy League and its peers, cognizant that these institutions were the incubators of those who would hold future power. If these young cadres could be trained to think more like him, then he and other donors could help secure the country's political future. It was an attempted takeover, but instead of waging it with bandoliers and rifles, he chose money as his weapon.

By the time the John M. Olin Foundation spent itself out of existence in 2005, as called for in its founder's will, it had spent about half of its total assets of $370 million bankrolling the promotion of free-market ideology and other conservative ideas on the country's campuses. In doing so, it molded and credentialed a whole new generation of conservative graduates and professors. "These efforts have been instrumental in challenging the campus left--or more specifically, the problem of radical activists' gaining control of America's colleges and universities," Miller concluded in a 2003 pamphlet published by the Philanthropy Roundtable, an organization run for conservative philanthropists.

"These guys, individually and collectively, created a new philanthropic form, which was movement philanthropy," said Rob Stein, a progressive political strategist, speaking of the Olin foundation and a handful of other private foundations that funded the creation of a conservative counter-intelligentsia during this period. "What they started is the most potent machinery ever assembled in a democracy to promote a set of beliefs and to control the reins of government."

Stein was so impressed that he went on to try to build a liberal version of the model. Each side would argue that the other had more money and more influence, depending on how broadly they defined the rival camp. But beginning in the 1970s, the left felt hard-pressed to match the far-ranging propagation of ideology pioneered by a few enterprising donors on the right.

There is little doubt that the Cornell uprising radicalized Olin's philanthropy, but the official account citing this as the key to his thinking is incomplete. The protest took place in 1969, and Olin didn't begin to transform his foundation into an ideological instrument aimed at "saving the free enterprise system," as his lawyer put it, until four years later, in the spring of 1973. On closer inspection, it appears that there were additional factors involved that shed less flattering light on his motivations.

Founded by Olin's father, Franklin, in 1892, the Olin Corporation had begun in East Alton, 111., as a manufacturer of blasting powder for coal miners but expanded into making small arms and ammunition. By 1973, the Olin Corporation was embroiled in multiple serious controversies over its environmental practices, undermining its reputation, threatening its revenues, and ensnarling the company in expensive litigation. It was against this backdrop of serious clashes with the increasingly robust regulatory state that John Olin directed his lawyer to enlist his fortune in the battle to defend corporate America. As he put it, "My greatest ambition now is to see free enterprise reestablished in this country. Business and the public must be awakened to the creeping stranglehold that socialism has gained here since World War II."

At first, the foundation funneled money into the same conservative think tanks that Richard Mellon Scaife and Joseph Coors, a scion of the archconservative Colorado-based Coors brewery family, were supporting: the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Hoover Institution, the think tank located on Stanford University's campus.

But soon John Olin's focus diverged. Perhaps because of his upset over Cornell, his foundation became uniquely centered on transforming academe. As he wrote in a private letter to the president of Cornell, he regarded the campus as overrun by scholars "with definite left-wing attitudes and convictions." Olin noted, "It matters little to me whether the economic development is classified as Marxism, Keynesianism, or whatnot." He said he regarded "liberalism" and "socialism" as "synonymous." All of these academic trends, he asserted, needed "very serious study and correction."

To get his bearings, Olin's labor lawyer, Frank O'Connell, contacted a handful of other private conservative foundations. He sought advice from colleagues at the Koch and Scaife foundations, as well as a few others on the right such as the Earhart Foundation and the Smith Richardson Foundation, which was funded by the Vicks VapoRub fortune. George Pearson, who was running the Charles G. Koch Foundation at that point, guided O'Connell, assigning him a free-market reading list that included Hayek's essay "The Intellectuals and Socialism." Hayek's point was emphatic: To conquer politics, one must first conquer the intellectuals. O'Connell recalled, "It was like a home-study course."

The fledgling right-wing foundations were also studying their establishment counterparts during this period, particularly the giant Ford Foundation. By the late 1960s, Ford was pioneering what its head, McGeorge Bundy, a former dean at Harvard and national security adviser to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, called "advocacy philanthropy." Ford was, for instance, pouring money into the environmental movement, funding the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council. By supporting public-interest litigation, it showed conservatives how philanthropy could achieve large-scale change through the courts while bypassing the democratic electoral process, just as the early critics of private foundations had feared.

In 1977, Olin raised his foundation's stature by choosing William Simon as its president.Simon was a social acquaintance of Olin's from East Hampton, where they both had beach houses, and Olin described Simon's thinking as "almost identical with mine." While Olin kept a low profile, however, Simon loved the spotlight, the hotter the better. As William Voegeli, who was program officer at the Olin foundation from 1988 to 2003, recalled, Simon was like Alice Longworth's description of her father, Theodore Roosevelt. "He wanted to be the bride at every wedding, and the corpse at every funeral."

Simon had been energy czar and later Treasury secretary under Presidents Nixon and Ford and was a famously intemperate critic of those he considered "stupid." This large category included liberals, radicals, and moderate members of his own Republican Party. Like Olin, he was incensed by the expansion of the regulatory state. He especially detested environmentalists and other self-appointed guardians of the public interest, describing them as the "New Despots." In his 1978 manifesto, A Time for Truth, he wrote, "Since the 60s, the vast bulk of regulatory legislation passed by congress ... [has] been largely initiated by a powerful new lobby that goes by the name of the Public Interest movement."

Simon disparaged these "college-educated idealists" who claimed to be working for "the well being of 'consumers,' the 'environment,' 'minorities,'" and other nonmaterial causes, accusing them of wanting to "expand the police powers of the state over American producers." He challenged their purity. Noting that they claimed to care little for money, he accused them of being driven by another kind of self-interest. Quoting his colleague Irving Kristol, the neoconservative intellectual, he charged that these usurpers wanted "the power to shape our civilization." That power, he argued, should belong exclusively to "the free market."

Simon's hatred and suspicion of the liberal elite approached Nixonian levels in his 1980 sequel manifesto, A Time for Action. He claimed that a "secret system" of academics, media figures, bureaucrats, and public-interest advocates ran the country. Simon warned that unless businessmen fought back, "Our freedom is in dire peril."

Simon's foreboding, like that of Olin, is somewhat hard to fathom given that both men had reached pinnacles of American power and wealth. They were both millionaires many times over, with more properties, possessions, titles, honors, and accomplishments than they could easily count. Both men were born into privilege. Simon was chauffeured to grade school, and his family was so wealthy he likened his parents to the carefree and careless characters in F. Scott Fitzgerald's fiction.

Nonetheless, he regarded himself proudly as self-made. His father evidently lost his mother's fortune, motivating Simon to make his own. On Wall Street, he became a hugely successful partner at Salomon Brothers, where he was an early leader in the lucrative new craze for leveraged buyouts. But what neither Olin nor Simon had was influence over the next generation. "We are careening with frightening speed toward collectivism," Simon warned.

Only an ideological battle could save the country, in Simon's view. "What we need is a counter-intelligentsia. ... [It] can be organized to challenge our ruling 'new class'--opinion makers," Simon wrote. "Ideas are weapons--indeed the only weapons with which other ideas can be fought." He argued, "Capitalism has no duty to subsidize its enemies." Private and corporate foundations, he said, must cease "the mindless subsidizing of colleges and universities whose departments of politics, economics and history are hostile to capitalism." Instead, they "must take pains to funnel desperately needed funds to scholars, social scientists and writers who understand the relationship between political and economic liberty," as he put it. "They must be given grants, grants, and more grants in exchange for books, books, and more books."

Under Simon's guidance, the Olin foundation tried to fund the new "counter-intelligentsia." At first, it tried supporting little-known colleges where conservative ideas--and money--were welcome. But Simon and his associates soon realized that this was a losing strategy. If the Olin foundation wanted impact, it needed to infiltrate prestigious universities, especially the Ivy League.

The man who put his mark on the Olin foundation more than its namesake, or even Simon, was its executive director, Michael Joyce, a fierce former liberal who had become an acolyte of Kristol's.A friend of Joyce's said that he believed philanthropy was about power and that those with great fortunes needed political capos like him to tell them how to wield it. Joyce was a brawler who wanted to take on America's liberal establishment, not just supplement it in some milquetoast way. In the words of Ralph Benko, a libertarian blogger for Forbes, "Joyce was a true radical. He was inspired byAntonio Gramsci. He wanted to effect radical transformation."

In Miller's view, Joyce was "an intellectual among activists, and an activist among intellectuals. He understood how the world of ideas influenced the real world." Joyce was characteristically more blunt. "My style," he said, "was the style of the toddler and the adolescent: fight, fight, fight, rest, get up, fight, fight, fight. No one ever accused me of being pleasant. I made a difference. It was acknowledged by friend and foe."

Joining Joyce wasJames Piereson, a thoughtful, soft-spoken neoconservative whose path to the Olin foundation had also run through Irving Kristol. Piereson had befriended the Kristol family at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught government and political theory alongside Irving's son, Bill. Both had felt marginalized by their more liberal peers. Having closely observed America's academic intelligentsia, Piereson concluded that the foundation needed to "penetrate" the most elite institutions "because they were emulated by other colleges and universities of lesser stature." As Hillel Fradkin, who also worked at the Olin foundation, put it, "The only way you're going to change the debate in this country is by looking to those schools. Giving money to conservative outposts won't get much done."

What emerged was a strategy they called the "beachhead" theory. The aim, as Piereson later described it in an essay offering advice to fellow conservative philanthropists, was to establish conservative cells, or "beachheads," at "the most influential schools in order to gain the greatest leverage." The formula required subtlety, indirection, and perhaps even some misdirection.

The key, Piereson explained, was to fund the conservative intelligentsia in such a way that it would not "raise questions about academic integrity." Instead of trying to earmark a chair or dictate a faculty appointment, both of which he noted were bound to "generate fierce controversy," he suggested that conservative donors look for like-minded faculty members whose influence could be enlarged by outside funding. In time, such a professor could administer an expanded program. But Piereson warned that it was "essential for the integrity and reputation of the programs that they be defined not by ideological points of view."

To overtly acknowledge "pre-ordained conclusions" would doom a program. Instead of saying the program was designed to "demonstrate the falsity of Marxism" or to promote "free enterprise," he advised that it was better to "define programs in terms of fields of study, [like the] John M. Olin Fellowships in Military History." He wrote, "Often a program can be given a philosophical or principled identity by giving it the name of an important historical figure, such as the James Madison Program on American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University." (Indeed, after years of trial and error, the Olin foundation funded Princeton's Madison Program with $525,000 in start-up grants in 2000. Run by Robert George, an outspoken social and religious conservative, the program serves as the beau ideal of the "beachhead" theory. As a friend of George's described him to The Nation in 2006, he is "a savvy right-wing operative, boring from within the liberal infrastructure.")

Piereson warned conservative philanthropists that taking the liberal out of liberal-arts education would require patience and cunning. As a former academic himself, he knew how politically charged a frontal assault would be. Rather than openly trying to overhaul academe over night, he suggested, "perhaps we should think instead about challenging it by adding new voices." As he put it, "This may well be the best means of changing the college culture, for a few powerful voices of criticism may at some point bring the entire ideological house of cards crashing down upon itself."

IF THE OLIN FOUNDATION was less than transparent about its mission, it was not for the first time. Between 1958 and 1966, it secretly served as a bank for the Central Intelligence Agency. During these eight years, the CIA laundered $1.95 million through the foundation. Olin, according to Miller, regarded his undercover role as part of his patriotic duty. Many of the government funds went to anti-Communist intellectuals and publications. But in 1967, the press exposed the covert propaganda operation, triggering a political furor and causing the CIA to fold the program. The CIA money at the Olin foundation, which was not publicized at the time, disappeared as quietly as it had arrived. The idea of using the private foundation to fund ideologically aligned intellectuals, however, persisted.

The Olin foundation invested in William F. Buckley Jr., whose television show, Firing Line, the foundation supported. It also funded Allan Bloom, author of the best-selling slam from the right at American higher education, The Closing of the American Mind (in which Bloom also lashed out at rock music as a "nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbation fantasy"). The foundation also supported Dinesh D'Souza, author of Illiberal Education, which blasted "political correctness," castigating rules requiring sensitivity to women and minorities as the overreaching of liberal thought police.

In addition, the Olin foundation funded professors at leading universities all over the country, including Harvard's Harvey C. Mansfield and Samuel P. Huntington. It donated $3.3 million to Mansfield's Program on Constitutional Government at Harvard, which emphasized a conservative interpretation of American government, and the foundation donated $8.4 million to Huntington's John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, which inculcated a hawkish approach to foreign policy and national security.

Through these carefully curated programs, the foundation trained the next generation of conservatives, whom Joyce likened to "a wine collection" that would grow more valuable as its members aged, increasing in stature and power. The foundation kept track of those who passed through Huntington's Olin program, proudly noting that many went into public service and academe. Between 1990 and 2001, 56 of the 88 Olin fellows at the Harvard program continued on to teach at the University of Chicago, Cornell, Dartmouth, Georgetown, Harvard, MIT, Penn, and Yale. Many others became public figures in government, think tanks, and the media.

In all, by the time it closed its doors in 2005, the Olin foundation had supported 11 separate programs at Harvard,burnishing the foundation's name and ideas and proving that even the best-endowed American university would allow an outside ideological group to build "beachheads," so long as the project was properly packaged and funded.

On top of these programs, the foundation doled out $8 million to more than a hundred John M. Olin faculty fellows. These funds enabled scores of young academics to take the time needed to do research and write in order to further their careers. The roster of recipients includes John Yoo, the legal scholar who went on to become the author of the George W. Bush administration's controversial "torture memo" legalizing the American government's brutalization of terror suspects.

Without the rigorous peer-review standards required by prestigious academic publications, the Olin foundation was able to inject into the mainstream a number of works whose scholarship was debatable at best. For example, Olin-foundation funds enabled John R. Lott Jr., then an Olin fellow at the University of Chicago, to write his influential book More Guns, Less Crime. In the work, Lott argued that more guns actually reduce crime and that the legalization of concealed weapons would make citizens safer.

Politicians advocating weaker gun-control laws frequently cited Lott's findings. But according to Adam Winkler, the author of Gunfight, Lott's scholarship was suspect. Winkler wrote that "Lott's claimed source for this information was 'national surveys,"' which under questioning he revised to just one survey that he and research assistants had conducted. When asked to provide the data, Winkler recounts, Lott said he had lost it in a computer crash. Asked for any evidence of the survey, writes Winkler, "Lott said he had no such evidence." (Proving that the recipients of Olin funds weren't ideologically monolithic, Winkler, too, had received funds from the foundation.)

Another Olin-funded book that made headlines and ended in accusations of intellectual dishonesty was David Brock's The Real Anita Hill, to which the foundation gave a small research stipend. In the book, Brock defended the Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas by accusing Hill of fabricating her sworn testimony against him during his Senate confirmation hearings. Later, though, Brock recanted, admitting that he had been wrong. He apologized for the book and said that he had been deceived by conservative sources who had misled him.

Still, the combined impact of the Olin grantees was "a triumph," according to Miller. Writing in 2003, he enthused that "a small handful of foundations have essentially provided the conservative movement with its venture capital." He noted that in contrast to the days when Lionel Trilling had declared conservatism over, "conservative ideas are in broad circulation, and many believe they are now ascendant." He added, "If the conservative intellectual movement were a Nascar race, and if the scholars and organizations who compose it were drivers zipping around a race track, virtually all of their vehicles would sport an Olin bumper sticker." In time, the Olin foundation's success in minting right-leaning thinkers drew the envy of the left. "On the right, they understood that books matter," says Steve Wasserman, executive editor at large for Yale University Press, who formerly tried but failed to get wealthy liberal donors to match the intellectual investments being made by conservatives. "I remember meeting at a restaurant in California with some of the major Democratic operatives and funders, Margery Tabankin, Stanley Sheinbaum and Gary David Goldberg. I was telling them that they needed to figure out a way to fund books on the left. But books aren't sexy. They weren't interested. They didn't think that in the political culture it mattered. The Democrats were hostage to star personalities and electoral politics."

THE OLIN FOUNDATION'S most significant beachheads, however, were established in America's law schools, where it bankrolled a new approach to jurisprudence known as Law and Economics. Lewis Powell, in an influential 1971 memo, had argued that "the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change." The Olin foundation agreed. As the courts expanded consumer, labor, and environmental rights and demanded racial and sexual equality and greater workplace safety, conservatives in business were desperate to find more legal leverage. Law and Economics became their tool.

As a discipline, Law and Economics was seen at first as a fringe theory embraced largely by libertarian mavericks until the Olin foundation spent $68 million underwriting its growth. Like an academic Johnny Appleseed, the Olin foundation underwrote 83 percent of the costs for all Law and Economics programs in American law schools between the years of 1985 and 1989. Over all, it scattered more than $10 million to Harvard, $7 million to Yale and Chicago, and over $2 million to Columbia, Cornell, Georgetown, and the University of Virginia. Miller writes, "John Olin, in fact, was prouder of Law and Economics than any other program he supported."

Following Piereson's cautious playbook, the program's title conveyed no ideology. Law and Economics stresses the need to analyze laws, including government regulations, not just for their fairness but also for their economic impact. Its proponents describe it in apolitical terms as bringing "efficiency" and "clarity" to the law, rather than relying on fuzzy, hard-to-quantify concepts like social justice.

Piereson, however, admitted that the beauty of the program was that it was a stealth political attack and that the country's best law schools didn't grasp this and therefore didn't block the ideological punch it packed. "I saw it as a way into the law schools--I probably shouldn't confess that," he told The New York Times in 2005. "Economic analysis tends to have conservatizing effects."

In a later interview with the Johns Hopkins University political scientist Steven M. Teles, Piereson added that he would have preferred to fund a conservative constitutional-law program, but had the foundation tried such a direct political challenge, it probably would have been barred entry to America's best law schools. "If you said to a dean that you wanted to fund conservative constitutional law, he would reject the idea out of hand. But if you said you wanted to support Law and Economics, he would be much more open to the idea," he confided. "Law and Economics is neutral, but it has a philosophical thrust in the direction of free markets and limited government. That is, like many disciplines, it seems neutral, but it isn't in fact."

The Olin foundation's route into the country's best law schools was circuitous. The foundation began by financially supporting an early leading figure in Law and Economics, the libertarian Henry Manne, an acolyte of the Chicago school of free-market economics. Brilliant, impolitic, and an ideological purist, Manne "was considered a marginal, even eccentric character in the legal academy," according to Teles, when the Olin foundation first started funding him in the early 1970s. To the frustration of the foundation, he didn't teach at high-prestige schools.

In 1985, however, the foundation seized a golden opportunity to establish a beachhead at the pinnacle of legal prestige. That year, Harvard Law School was riven by controversy. Leftist professors were urging students to "sabotage" corporate law firms from within. Conservative professors and alumni were scandalized. The ruckus attracted national press coverage in The New Yorker and elsewhere. Among the many outraged Harvard Law School alumni was one of the Olin foundation's trustees, George Gillespie. Sensing an opening, he contacted a conservative Harvard Law School professor, Phillip Areeda, whom he had been in school with, and offered the foundation's help.

The Olin foundation took the initiative, and Harvard took the cash. Out of this ideological pact came the John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Business at Harvard Law School, on which the foundation ultimately spent $18 million. The donation was the biggest in Olin's history. Harvard's president at the time, Derek Bok, was reportedly delighted at the new source of funding and the opportunity to soothe the disgruntled alumni.

After Harvard approved Law and Economics, other schools soon followed. By 1990, nearly 80 law schools taught the subject. Olin fellows in Law and Economics, meanwhile, began to beat a path to the top of the legal profession, winning Supreme Court clerkships at a rate of approximately one each year, starting in 1985. Many of the adherents were outstanding lawyers and not all were conservative, but they were changing the prevailing legal culture.

By 1986, Bruce Ackerman, then a professor at Columbia Law School, called Law and Economics "the most important thing in legal education since the birth of Harvard Law School." Teles, in his 2008 book, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, described Law and Economics as "the most successful intellectual movement in the law of the past 30 years, having rapidly moved from insurgency to hegemony."

As Law and Economics spread, underwritten at each step by the Olin foundation and other conservative backers including the Kochs and Scaife, liberal critics grew alarmed. The Alliance for Justice, a liberal nonprofit in Washington, published a critical report in 1993 warning that "a small wealthy group" was trying to "fundamentally alter the way that justice is dispensed in our society." It revealed that the Olin foundation was paying students thousands of dollars to take classes in Law and Economics at Georgetown Law School and to attend workshops on the subject at Columbia Law School.

Despite this ethically dubious situation, only one law school, at the University of California at Los Angeles, turned the Olin funds away, arguing that by plying students with grant money, the foundation was "taking advantage of students' financial need to indoctrinate them with a particular ideology."

More controversial still were Law and Economics seminars that the Olin foundation funded for judges. The seminars were initiated by Henry Manne, who had become dean of the George Mason University School of Law, which he was trying to transform into a hub of libertarian jurisprudence. The seminars treated judges to two-week-long, all-expenses-paid immersion training in Law and Economics, usually in luxurious settings like the Ocean Reef Club in Key Largo, Fla. They soon became popular free vacations for the judges, a cross between Maoist cultural re-education camps and Club Med. After a few hours of learning why environmental and labor laws were anathema, or why, as Manne argued, insider-trading laws did more harm than good, the judges broke for golf, swimming, and delightful dinners with their hosts. Within a few years, 660 judges had gone on these junkets, some, like the U.S. Court of Appeals judge and unconfirmed Supreme Court nominee Douglas Ginsburg, many times. By one count, 40 percent of the federal judiciary had participated, including the future Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Clarence Thomas.

A variety of major corporations eagerly joined Olin and other conservative foundations in footing the bills. A study by the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity found that between 2008 and 2012 close to 185 federal judges attended judicial seminars sponsored by conservative interests, several of which had cases before the courts. The lead underwriters were the Charles Koch Foundation, the Searle Freedom Trust, ExxonMobil, Shell Oil, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, and State Farm, the insurance company. Topics ranged from "The Moral Foundations of Capitalism" to "Terrorism, Climate, and Central Planning: Challenges to Liberty and the Rule of Law."

Simultaneously, the Olin foundation provided crucial start-up funds for the Federalist Society, an organization for conservative law students founded in 1982. With $5.5 million from the Olin foundation, as well as large donations from foundations tied to Scaife, the Kochs, and other conservative legacies, the Federalist Society grew from a pipe dream shared by three ragtag law students into a powerful professional network of 42,000 right-leaning lawyers, with 150 law-school campus chapters and about 75 lawyers' groups nationally. All of the conservative justices on the Supreme Court are members, as are former vice president Dick Cheney, the former attorneys general Edwin Meese and John Ashcroft, and numerous members of the federal bench. Its president, Eugene B. Meyer, son of a founding editor of National Review, acknowledged that without Olin funding "it possibly wouldn't exist at all." Looking back, the Olin foundation's staff described it as "one of the best investments" the foundation ever made.

The Olin foundation also backed what came to be known as the Collegiate Network, privately financing a string of right-wing newspapers on America's college campuses. Among them was The Dartmouth Review, which infamously published an editorial in Ebonics proclaiming, "Now we be cornin' to Dartmut' and be up over our 'fros in studies, but we still be not graduatin' Phi Beta Kappa." The paper hosted a feast of lobster and champagne to mock a student fast against global hunger, sledge-hammered shantytowns erected by students protesting apartheid in South Africa, and published a transcript of a secretly taped meeting of students belonging to Dartmouth's gay student association. The Dartmouth Review became an incubator for right-wing media figures like D'Souza and the future conservative radio host Laura Ingraham. Its counterpart at Vassar, meanwhile, gave starts in journalism to the ABC correspondent Jonathan Karl and Marc Thiessen, an online columnist at The Washington Post best known for his defense of the Bush administration's use of torture.

JOHN M. Olin died in 1982 at the age of 89, but after his death his foundation became even more robust. He left it about $50 million in his estate and another $50 million in a trust for his widow, which came to the foundation in 1993 after she died. The funds were well invested, growing to some $370 million in all before the foundation spent it down and closed its doors in 2005. Olin had directed his foundation to shut down during the lifetime of the trustees for fear that it would fall into the hands of liberals, as he believed the Ford Foundation had tragically done.

As the Olin foundation spent itself out of existence, Michael Joyce jumped to a new and far more powerful private foundation, started by another conservative family. In 1985, a corporate merger in Milwaukee created a spectacular windfall, boosting a previously sleepy local charity, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, overnight into a nonprofit juggernaut. Its assets rocketed from $14 million to over $290 million, making it one of the 20 largest foundations in the country. Swimming in cash, the foundation's small, unpaid staff, which had mostly focused on conventional local do-gooding until then, sought out Joyce, telling him,

"We've got money, and we want to do what you did at Olin. We want to become Olin West."

Almost on the spot, Joyce moved to Milwaukee to run the Bradley foundation himself. At the Bradley foundation, Joyce had a freer hand. "He basically invented the field of modern conservative philanthropy," according to Piereson. During the next 15 years, the Bradley foundation would give away $280 million to his favorite conservative causes. It was small in comparison with older research foundations like the Ford Foundation, but unlike Ford, under Joyce's direction Bradley regarded itself as a righteous combatant in an ideological war, giving it a single-minded focus.

At least two-thirds of its grants, according to one analysis, financed conservative intellectual activity. It paid for some 600 graduate and postgraduate fellowships, right-wing think tanks, conservative journals, activists fighting Communism abroad, and its own publishing house, Encounter Books.

When Joyce took over the Bradley foundation, he funded many of the same academic organizations he had at Olin, including half of the same colleges and universities. (The Bradley foundation gave both Harvard and Yale $5.5 million during its first decade under Joyce's management.) "Typically, it was not just the same university but the same department, and in some cases, the same scholar," Bruce Murphy wrote in Milwaukee Magazine, charging that this led to a kind of "intellectual cronyism."

The anointed scholars were good ideological warriors but "rarely great scholars,"he wrote. For instance, Joyce stuck with Charles Murray in the face of growing controversy over his 1994 book, The Bell Curve, which correlated race and low IQ scores to argue that blacks were less likely than whites to join the "cognitive elite," and was loudly and convincingly discredited. The Manhattan Institute fired Murray over the controversial project. "They didn't want the grief," says Murray.But Joyce reportedly kept an estimated $1 million in grants flowing to Murray, who decamped to the American Enterprise Institute. "I knew from Mike Joyce my fellowship was portable," Murray says. But the controversy stirred by the book clouded the Bradley foundation's reputation. Joyce, who was accused of racism, said he had received death threats. He felt so threatened he demanded enhanced security. The book, he acknowledged, left "an indelible imprint on us."

When Joyce stepped down from Bradley in 2001 amid rumors of alcoholism and erratic and self-destructive behavior, his achievements transcended his personal problems. He was showered with accolades from the right. National Review described him as "the chief operating officer of the conservative movement." It added, "Wherever you looked in the battle of ideas, a light dusting would have turned up his fingerprints." The tribute concluded, "Over the period of his Bradley service, it's difficult to recall a single, serious thrust against incumbent liberalism that did not begin or end with Mike Joyce."

By 2012, the Bradley foundation's assets had reached more than $630 million, enabling it to dole out more than $32 million in grants during that year alone. The funds continued to finance welfare-reform initiatives that required the poor to find jobs, as well as attacks on public schools. The foundation also continued to support conservative beachheads in 35 different elite colleges and universities including Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford.

The foundation's annual Bradley Prizes had by then become the glittering Academy Awards ceremony for conservatives, a night at Washington's Kennedy Center on the banks of the Potomac filled with evening gowns, tuxedos, overlong acceptance speeches, live musical fanfares, and up to four annual $250,000 prizes given to a Who's Who of the movement.

Over the years, winners have included the columnist George Will, who subsequently became a trustee of the foundation. Also honored with the award were the founders of the Federalist Society as well as Princeton's Robert George; Bill Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard; the Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield; the Fox News president, Roger Ailes; and the Heritage Foundation's stalwarts Ed Meese and Ed Feulner. Almost all of the recipients had played major roles in tugging the American political debate to the right. And almost all had also been supported over the years by a tiny constellation of private foundations filled with tax-deductible gifts from a handful of wealthy reactionaries whose identities and stories very few Americans knew but whose "overarching purpose," as Joyce said, "was to use philanthropy to support a war of ideas."

Jane Mayer is a staff writer at The New Yorker. This article is adapted from her new book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, just out from Doubleday.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Chronicle of Higher Education, Inc.

http://chronicle.com.oca.ucsc.edu/section/About-the-Chronicle/83

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https://theintercept.com/2020/01/12/cancer-trump-administration-epa-carcinogens-regulations/

the war on the war on cancer

no pix no lnx many no graf

Sharon Lerner

January 12 2020,

WHEN ANGELA RAMIREZ was 38, she felt a slight pain in her chest. At first she thought she had pulled a muscle, but when it didn’t go away, Ramirez went to her doctor, who diagnosed her with stage 2 breast cancer. A mother of three and a parent educator in a local public school in Lake County, Illinois, Ramirez had to undergo a double mastectomy, chemotherapy, radiation, and five follow-up surgeries.

Eight years since the diagnosis, her family is still recovering. Because of complications, Ramirez is awaiting several more reconstructive surgeries. Her daughter Ada, now 15, was recently diagnosed with PTSD, in part, Ramirez thinks, because she spent much of her childhood worrying that her mother wouldn’t survive. And her husband is working 80 hours a week to cover medical expenses and lost income. “Cancer changes your whole life,” she said recently.

Ramirez used to think of her ordeal as random bad luck — an inexplicable series of genetic mutations that just happened to derail her life. But that changed in 2018, after she learned that she both lived and worked near two facilities that were emitting a cancer-causing chemical called ethylene oxide.

Two years earlier, the Environmental Protection Agency released an assessment of ethylene oxide performed by a small division of the agency known as IRIS, which crunched numbers showing that exposure to ethylene oxide caused elevated rates of tumors in the brain, lungs, uterus, and lymph systems. The technical report from IRIS, which stands for the Integrated Risk Information System, changed the classification of ethylene oxide, an odorless gas used to make other chemicals and sterilize medical equipment, from probably carcinogenic to plainly carcinogenic to humans. Based in part on several studies showing that female workers exposed to ethylene oxide had higher breast cancer rates, the report calculated a safety threshold that was 30 times more sensitive than previous estimates. Combined with agency data about local emissions, the new threshold allowed the EPA Office of Air and Radiation to identify the census tracts where residents were at increased risk of cancer from breathing ethylene oxide.

As Ramirez could plainly see on the EPA’s interactive map, the cancer risk was elevated both where she lived and, even more extremely, at the office where she worked for several years before her diagnosis, which was less than a mile from one factory that emitted the carcinogenic gas and less than three miles from another. The news was like a missing puzzle piece. “I had always found it kind of strange that I was the only one in my family who ever had cancer,” said Ramirez, who had moved to the suburbs from Chicago in 2005 in part because she wanted to be closer to nature.

Ramirez still suffers from chronic back pain and weakness. But the realization that her cancer may have resulted from emissions from the local factories has caused a different kind of suffering. “Every time I open the windows I think about it now,” she said. “I’m so angry. My kids at 2nd and 3rd grade shouldn’t have had to wonder whether their mother was going to die.”

Angela Ramirez's neighborhood is seen in this photo. The neighborhood in Waukegan, Ill., is located in a census tract that is at high risk for cancer. Jan. 2, 2020. Pat Nabong for The Intercept.Construction at Medline's facility in Waukegan, Ill. is underway on Jan. 2, 2020. In May 2019, Medline submitted a proposal to build new equipment that would control air pollution, after they came under fire for emitting ethylene oxide, a gas linked to cancer. Pat Nabong for The Intercept.]

Left/Top: The Ramirez's neighborhood in Waukegan, Ill., is part of a census tract that is at high risk for cancer. Right/Bottom: Construction at Medline's facility in Waukegan, Ill. is underway on Jan. 2, 2020. In May 2019, Medline submitted a proposal to build new equipment that would control air pollution, after they came under fire for emitting ethylene oxide.Photos: Pat Nabong for The Intercept]

The chemical industry also reacted strongly to the reports on ethylene oxide. In September 2018, after the National Air Toxics Assessment pinpointed the areas affected by the chemical, the American Chemistry Council, or ACC, a trade group that represents U.S. chemical manufacturers, asked IRIS to change its assessment of ethylene oxide. Dow Chemical, the biggest producer of ethylene oxide in the country and the second biggest in the world, also disputed the EPA’s assessment.

Now, political appointees at the EPA are engaged in what appears to be an end-run around the agency’s own science. While IRIS, which is staffed by career scientists, hasn’t officially backed away from its 2016 report, theTrump EPA recently announced that it would not be calling for the level of pollution reductions IRIS laid out during the previous administration, leaving people around the country more vulnerable to the known carcinogen. And that’s only one of the changes made under the Trump administration that promise to weaken protections for Americans’ health, many of which were intended specifically to stave off cancers.

Virtually no sector of the EPA’s work has escaped reversals that will cause disease and death among the U.S. population. The agency scrapped the Clean Power Plan and a rule to improve fuel efficiency standards for cars, depriving the public of not just the climate benefits but also the improvements to air quality and health both would have brought. The EPA rejected its own science in deciding not to ban chlorpyrifos, a pesticide linked to autism and other neurodevelopmental problems in children. Dozens of other EPA rollbacks — including the gutting of the Clean Water Act, the undermining of guidelines on emissions of methane from landfills, the loosening of restrictions on toxic air pollution from industrial facilities, the disbanding of a panel on air pollution — will have dire health consequences, as will the dramatic reduction in the enforcement of environmental laws.

The erosion of these protections may leave Americans at greater risk of all kinds of health effects, including fertility issues, birth defects, and neurodevelopmental problems — all of which have been linked to chemical exposure. But among the most devastating of Trump’s legacies will be an increase in cancers.

Trump’s Cancer Gang

With the election of Donald Trump, a small and previously marginalized group of toxics apologists suddenly and unexpectedly took control over health and environmental regulations in the United States. Considered too fringe, too craven, and too fact-averse for mainstream politics, this closely connected group had long been dismissed for taking the idea of environmental deregulation well past the point of absurdity. Under Trump, the EPA has begun executing some of these extremists’ schemes to undercut the federal government’s ability to protect the public from life-threatening toxic chemicals.

Way back in 1996, a lawyer named Christopher Horner working for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company came up with an ambitious plan to fight back against scientific studies linking cancer to secondhand smoke. Such studies, he realized, were based on the private health data of thousands of individuals. And without that data, scientists would be unable to prove a connection between cigarette smoke and cancer. Imagine if the government required that the data used for regulations be public. If that were the case, none of the crucial private health information used by scientists would be usable. Problem solved!

Horner, who worked at the firm then called Bracewell & Giuliani, recognized that the approach had “global applicability to industry” beyond tobacco and could make it nearly impossible to regulate a wide variety of cancer-causing chemicals and pollution.Within a few years, a group funded by the Koch brothers tried to use the strategy to undermine the Clean Air Act, demanding that researchers produce their data so a pivotal study could be repeated.

That attempt to destroy air pollution protections ultimately failed, and the idea hovered on the sidelines until 2014, when a few Republican House members introduced the “Secret Science Act.” Because most members of Congress recognized the gambit as a bald attempt to subvert science — then-Sen. Barbara Boxer called it “insane,” Sen. Bernie Sanders dismissed it as “laughable” — the bill didn’t come close to becoming law that year or the next, when it was introduced again. Even in mid-2016, the only support for the idea came from the fringe.

But with the election of Donald Trump later that year, the prospects of the “secret science” scheme — and others hatched over the years to help free industry of what it saw as profit-hampering regulations — suddenly became deadly serious. Trump, who had already been dismissive of science, named Horner and others interested in undermining environmental protections to his EPA transition team and then staffed the agency with political appointees who used to work for the industries they would be regulating.In April 2018, then-EPA administrator Scott Pruitt proposed a rule based on the “secret science” plan, and Horner’s wildest dreams of dismantling environmental and health regulations were set to become reality.

[Andrew Wheeler, administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), speaks to members of the media after signing the Affordable Clean Energy Rule at EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, June 19, 2019. President Donald Trump is scaling back sweeping Obama-era curbs on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants burning coal, his biggest step yet to fulfill his campaign promise to stop a "war" on the fossil fuel. Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesEPA administrator Andrew Wheeler, center, speaks to members of the media at EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C., on June 19, 2019. Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images]

The war on cancer was meant to help banish a disease that by 1970 had become the second-leading cause of death in the United States. The Environmental Protection Agency, created that year, was part of the government’s assault on the rising tide of cancer cases. For some contaminants, such as asbestos and chemicals used in dye-making, the link to cancer was already clear. Scientists were beginning to understand that even tiny amounts of certain chemicals could alter cells, setting off a series of mutations that grow into cancerous tumors. The hope was that the agency could counter increasing cancer rates by limiting environmental exposures.

Yet 50 years after the federal government took up arms against cancer, the disease is still the second-leading cause of death. Even though cigarette smoking, the leading cause of cancer in the 1970s, has declined sharply, the American cancer rate has actually gone up over the past 40 years. Among children, who are particularly vulnerable to environmental exposures, the cancer rate has risen dramatically, increasing nearly 50 percent since 1975.

During that time, environmental exposures have been mounting. More than 140,000 chemicals and pesticides have been introduced since 1950. Even though the vast majority have not been evaluated for safety, 5,000 of them are made in such great quantities practically everyone is exposed to them. Yet most of the government spending on cancer has remained focused on treating the disease rather than preventing cancer by limiting exposure to carcinogens, such as pesticides and other environmental contaminants.

graf:

Left/Top: Federal political contributions by members of the American Chemistry Council,including parent companies and individual employees, 2008 - 2019. Compiled for The Intercept by MapLight. Right/Bottom: Federal political lobbying expenditures by members of the American Chemistry Council, including parent companies and individual employees, 2008 - 2019. Compiled for The Intercept by MapLight.Graphics: Soohee Cho/The Intercept

Since the first major law that attempted to regulate toxic chemicals passed in 1976, chemical companies have spent billions of dollars on lobbying. The member companies of the American Chemistry Council have spent more than $1.4 billion on lobbying and $77.8 million on political contributions since 2008, according to an analysis by MapLight for this story. The ACC by itself has spent $103 million on lobbying. Though staggering, these numbers are a small fraction of the trillions generated by chemical sales over that same period.

Throughout its 50-year existence, the EPA has faced the daunting task of regulating industries that are far better resourced than the agency. But the effort to rein in powerful companies, which has been met with varying degrees of success under previous administrations, has been largely abandoned under Trump. The EPA, now headed by a former coal lobbyist and run by other former lobbyists, executives, and lawyers from polluting industries, has set about undoing health protections, some of which were specifically designed to prevent cancer.

Trump, who recently tried to take credit for a 2017 dip in cancer mortality rates and announced that he would be “curing childhood cancer very shortly,” at a rally in Cincinnati last August, presumably isn’t interested in actively causing disease and death. But his eagerness to please the polluting chemical and fossil fuel industries that support him comes at the expense of American lives.

A Mess in Texas

For ethylene oxide, the chemical that Ramirez was exposed to, the road to deregulation passes through Texas. It was there, in the summer of 2018, that regulators led by state toxicologist Michael Honeycutt began working with the producers of ethylene oxide on their own standard for the chemical.

Honeycutt, who has overseen chemical assessment for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality since 1996, is known for his extremely industry-friendly approach to chemicals. Until this administration, Honeycutt made his name fighting the EPA, challenging the limits the agency tried to place on emissions of chemicals, particularly those released by the oil and gas industry. He has argued that particulate air pollution, which causes lung cancer and other diseases, can help people live longer. And working with his longtime colleague and fellow toxicologist Michael Dourson, Honeycutt loosened state protections on dozens of chemicals — rollbacks that were encouraged and welcomed by chemical manufacturers. Now, under Trump, Honeycutt’s Texas agency has essentially become a shadow EPA and he has assumed a national role in cancer policy.

The assessment of ethylene oxide that Honeycutt oversaw and the TCEQ released last year no doubt pleased the companies that make the chemical — not least because it appears to have been written by them. In June 2018, before issuing a new safety limit for ethylene oxide, Honeycutt and members of the TCEQ’s toxicology staff met in Austin with Joanna Klapacz, a toxicologist from Dow; Bill Gulledge, a senior director at the American Chemistry Council; and three scientists from Exponent, a consulting company paid by the ACC to help fend off regulation of the chemical, among them two toxicologists named Abby Li and M. Jane Teta. Representatives of Shell, BASF, and Balchem, which together with Dow released more than 200,000 pounds of ethylene oxide over the previous six years, joined the conversation by phone, according to emails of TCEQ staff released in response to a FOIA from the Sierra Club.

Dr. Mike Honeycutt is an Air Toxicologist for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the world's second largest environmental agency. RALPH BARRERA/ AMERICAN-STATESMANTexas state toxicologist Michael Honeycutt. Photo: Ralph Barrera/Austin American-Statesman]

At the meeting, a presentation from the American Chemistry Council recommended adopting estimates of safety thresholds from a paper written by Ciriaco Valdez-Flores, a Texas-based consultant who received funding from both the ACC and the Ethylene Oxide Sterilization Association. The TCEQ had considered — and rejected — the paper in an assessment of ethylene oxide it released less than two years earlier because, it said, Valdez-Flores hadn’t captured all the cancer risk from ethylene oxide. Although an EPA summary of the 2016 IRIS report on ethylene oxide characterized its confidence in the breast cancer data as “particularly high,” and noted that the breast cancer component “is based on over 200 incident cases for which the investigators also had information on other potential breast cancer risk factors,” the Valdez-Flores paper didn’t include the breast cancer studies in its evaluation. And in a presentation to the group, Teta also argued against the inclusion of the breast cancer data.

Gulledge, who manages the ACC’s panel on ethylene oxide, emailed TCEQ toxicologist Jessica Myers after the meeting and offered to draft the assessment of the chemical for the state agency. “Thank you for hosting us this week,” Gulledge wrote. “We are working on several ‘white papers’ on the risk assessment modeling and our alternative approach that should be ready in the next month or so with the goal to have a draft risk assessment manuscript ready shortly thereafter.”

Asked about the email, Tom Flanagin, director of product communications for the American Chemistry Council, denied that the group drafted the risk assessment for the TCEQ. “Mr. Gulledge is referring to a separate, independent effort … for publication in a peer reviewed journal. TCEQ acted independently in preparing their risk assessment.” Flanagin did not explain why Gulledge would be communicating with TCEQ about a purportedly separate, independent effort. Ryan Vise, director of external relations for the TCEQ, also denied that the ACC drafted or edited the state agency’s assessment. Exponent did not respond to requests for comment.

Yet the proposed ethylene oxide standard that TCEQ released this summer included many of the elements that the ACC and its scientific consultants recommended at the Texas meeting. The state agency omitted the breast cancer studies and adopted the paper by Valdez-Flores as its key study, just as the industry scientists had recommended.

And minutes from a meeting of the Ethylene Oxide Sterilization Association held the next month also indicate that the chemical industry, led by Teta and Li, who were both at the Texas meeting, drafted the state’s assessment of the chemical. According to the minutes, first reported by the Chicago Tribune, the assessment, which would provide an alternative to the IRIS ethylene oxide value, was funded and led by the industry groups. “Jane Teta and Abby Li (Exponent) will be leading” the recasting of the assessment to the industry’s liking, the minutes explained, and “TCEQ has indicated its receptiveness to considering an alternative to the IRIS value.”

The result of this collaboration between the ethylene oxide industry and Texas was a proposed standard that was 3,500 times weaker than the IRIS threshold. The Texas number was also 50 times less protective than the standard the state had released only two years earlier. While Texas offered no scientific reason for weakening its 2017 standard, regulatory developments can help explain the oddly timed reassessment: the EPA’s recognition of ethylene oxide as a carcinogen in 2018 had led to public pressure on companies that emit the gas, which had in turn led to the industry group to ask the TCEQ to issue an alternate standard.

Just as the ACC has done, the Texas agency also attempted to justify its new number by arguing that IRIS’s calculations couldn’t be correct because the body produces some ethylene oxide on its own — an idea dismissed by scientists who are not supported by the ethylene oxide industry.

“They make a big deal of endogenous exposure and say that’s why EPA numbers can’t be meaningful,” said Jennifer Jinot, a toxicologist who worked for EPA for 26 years, 12 of which she spent working on the IRIS assessment of ethylene oxide. Jinot described the TCEQ’s focus on purportedly natural levels of the chemical as “disingenuous” and said it was just one of several tricks the state agency used to make the chemical appear safer than it actually is.

“Texas has done something completely unreasonable,” said Jinot. “They’re just low-balling the whole thing.”

In an emailed response to questions, Dow spokesperson Ashley Mendoza acknowledged that Joanna Klapacz attended the 2018 meeting at TCEQ, but noted that “she was not part of the technical presentation.” The email also said that “Dow has continued to improve our [ethylene oxide] emission reduction as part of our own sustainability goals. As science advances, our ongoing collaboration with other manufacturers and multiple agencies continues to ensure maximum human safety while delivering products consumers want and need.”

The TCEQ responded to questions for this piece with an email saying that its assessment of ethylene oxide was “on the side of the best available science.” The email also said that the more protective ethylene oxide standard, which the state agency issued in March 2017, was never intended to be permanent, but instead was “to be used until a thorough multi-year systematic review and dose-response assessment could be conducted under the extensive TCEQ toxicity factor guidelines.”

The proposed safety level could have a dramatic effect on people in Texas, where at least 27 facilities emit more than 48 tons of ethylene oxide every year. At one of these facilities, a Huntsman Petrochemical Plant in Conroe Texas, the EPA estimated the cancer risk due to the release of ethylene oxide and other chemicals to be 3,000 in a million, according to a risk assessment report the agency released in December. Nationwide, the average risk of cancer from air pollution is 32 in a million.

The Texas standard could also weaken protections for people far beyond Texas, since states often consider one another’s regulations when issuing their own. “It could mess with the legal landscape globally,” said Tracey Woodruff, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, San Francisco school of medicine who studies how chemical exposures affect health. “Even if other states don’t adopt Texas’ levels, they tend to average them.”

Scenes from Freeport, Texas on Wednesday, December 18th, 2019. Todd Spoth for The Intercept.Dow Chemical’s plant can be seen just beyond homes in Freeport, Texas, on Dec. 18, 2019. Photo: Todd Spoth for The Intercept]

While Honeycutt was once one of EPA’s main opponents, the Trump administration is now relying on his agency’s industry-biased assessment of ethylene oxide to guide the federal government’s approach to the carcinogen.IRIS spent years calculating its safety threshold for ethylene oxide and noted in its 2016 report that scientists have been studying the chemical’s “DNA-damaging properties” since the 1940s. Yet in early November, the EPA indicated it would not be calling for the reduction of emissions as much as the IRIS report would suggest is necessary. Instead, the EPA’s proposed rule, which it is required to finalize by March, calculated risk levels that were six to nine times weaker than those issued in 2016. An explanatory document released by EPA cited the Texas estimate as well as the request for correction from the American Chemistry Council and attributed its decision to change its safety level to “uncertainties” in the science.

The people who will be affected by the weakening of ethylene oxide protections are disproportionately poor and nonwhite, as the EPA’s own analysis shows. While the U.S. population overall is 12 percent African American, the areas with elevated cancer risks due to ethylene oxide are 21 percent African American, according to the document the agency released in November. Latinos are also at greater risk of exposure, making up 18 percent of the U.S. population and 31 percent of those living in areas with elevated cancer risk due to the chemical.

Those demographics aren’t unusual. While black and Latino people produce less pollution, people of color have a higher burden of pollution and are more likely to live near industrial facilities. Penny Dryden, who grew up near several polluting plants in the Rosegate section of Wilmington, Delaware, was for years unaware of the disparity. Dryden, 62, has had cancer three times. The first, breast cancer, was diagnosed when she was just 19. But this seemed to be a fact of life in her mostly African American neighborhood. Many of her friends and relatives as well as both of her parents had cancer.

In 2018, a facility near Dryden’s home that makes chemicals used in antifreeze and some processed foods released so much ethylene oxide into the air that the nearby Delaware Bridge had to be temporarily shut down. That was a temporary inconvenience to commuters, but for people who live within a three-mile radius of the plant — 52 percent of whom are people of color, and 31 percent of whom are below the poverty level — the chemical poses an ongoing health threat.

Although the cancers have taken a toll, Dryden still considers herself lucky. “Lots of people here have died of it, whole families, so many of my friends,” said Dryden, who has come to recognize and fight against the extra burden of both pollution and disease that are clustered in several communities of color in Delaware. And while she has no experience living in a pollution-free area, she feels certain the people making decisions that affect pollution levels around the country have no idea how it feels to live with polluted air. “The people in D.C. don’t go into communities like ours,” said Dryden. “They probably have never heard of Rosegate.”

For people like Dryden and Ramirez, who live near the facilities around the country — more than 100 — that emit the carcinogenic gas, the weakening of the ethylene oxide standard will result in even greater risks of cancer. “By undermining the way risk assessments are done, Texas has allowed these plants to put out more pollution because it’ll look like it’s safe when it’s not,” said Woodruff, the reproductive health professor. “They’re resetting the bar to allow more pollution going out into the world.”

Children will also disproportionately bear the burden of this additional pollution. As the EPA has pointed out, children may also be especially vulnerable to the mutagenic effects of ethylene oxide — as they are for other carcinogens. Simon Strong came to recognize kids’ particular vulnerability after his son, Oliver, died suddenly in June 2015. An exuberant 12-year-old who played saxophone and tended goal for his soccer team, Oliver was diagnosed with leukemia a week after he complained of his first symptom: a headache. He died just 36 hours later, leaving his parents bereft and filled with questions.

Oliver-1578521871Oliver Strong. Photo: Courtesy of Simon Strong]

“We were there with his oncologist in floods of tears, and I said, ‘What caused this?’ and she just burst out, ‘It’s the environment,’” Strong remembered recently. He had no idea what she meant and had never thought much about cancer before Oliver’s illness. But after his son’s death, Strong, a reporter turned investigator, began researching the causes of pediatric cancer. He read with dismay about the alarming numbers of soccer players, particularly goalies, who have developed cancer; about the connection between cancer and Roundup, a weed killer he had used liberally in the family’s backyard in Florida; and about several pediatric cancer clusters in his home state.

The problem, as he learned, was also worsening. While pediatric cancer rates were increasing overall, there had been a particularly large jump in the number of cases in infants and children under 5. Yet the government seemed to be doing little to understand what was causing these cancers or to prevent them.

So Strong launched a project along with the Baylor College of Medicine to collect information about the environmental exposures of children with cancer from their families. It’s work he wishes the federal government was doing. But as Strong’s urgency about the problem was growing, the Trump administration was going in the opposite direction, unraveling the little work that was being done on the issue.

Indeed, in May, the EPA decided to pull its funding for a network of centers that had researched the effects of various substances, including chemicals, on children. One of those research hubs, the Center for Integrative Research on Childhood Leukemia and the Environment at Berkeley, had found that exposure to pesticides, traffic emissions, tobacco smoke, and solvents are associated with childhood leukemia, the most common children’s cancer. Staff there were continuing to research the environmental causes of the disease and to educate parents and physicians, according to the physician and epidemiologist who directs the center, Catherine Metayer. “There is still so much work to do,” said Metayer. But the center lost the $1.5 million per year it had been receiving from the EPA and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Barring intervention from Congress, the last of its federal money will be spent by this summer. “After that, our work will have to stop,” she said.

Known Killers

The closure of the pediatric environmental health centers is only one of many backward steps we’ve taken in our decades-long battle against cancer and cancer-causing exposures. The first major one came after the EPA attempted to use the Toxic Substances Control Act to ban asbestos in 1989. The ban was exactly what the EPA and the chemicals law were created to do: protect Americans from a substance that had been known for decades to cause cancer. But after the agency began the process, asbestos mining and manufacturing companies sued. A court struck down most of the government’s ban in 1991 and, since then, the agency has been wary of taking on regulatory battles it might not win. As a result, the EPA has not regulated a single chemical under the law in the almost 30 years after the 1991 ruling.

So, while 67 countries have already banned asbestos, we’re still importing it. And last year, the Trump EPA decided — against the advice of its own scientists — to continue to allow its use.

In a statement, an EPA spokesperson wrote that the agency “along with our state partners, is covering ALL bases under our legal authority to protect people’s health from asbestos exposure.” The spokesperson went on to explain an April 2019 rule that allows the agency to restrict or prohibit the use of products containing asbestos. But she declined to say why the EPA had chosen not to ban the substance altogether, as its own scientists and attorneys had recommended.

While the continued use of asbestos has deadly consequences, causing an estimated 39,000 deaths in the U.S. each year, it is just one of the chemicals the Trump administration is now in a position to greenlight. In 2016, Congress tried to improve our abysmal record on chemicals by fixing the broken Toxic Substances Control Act. The update of the law aimed to bring about greater protections by requiring the EPA to identify and restrict the most dangerous substances.But under Trump, the opposite is happening— and the opportunity to fix chemical regulation, 40 years in the making, has instead turned into another massive step backward. The assessment process, begun in the Obama era, is being carried out by an administration that is friendlier to the chemical industry than any other administration in history.

“There is no daylight between this EPA and what the big chemical companies want,” said Daniel Rosenberg, director of the federal toxics program for the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC. “Whatever the term is for government by corporation, that’s what we’ve been living under for three years.” Lots of small decisions are involved in implementing the new law, including the choice of which chemicals to assess, what sources of information about them to use, and how to quantify the risks they pose. “And these details are all essentially being worked out by companies like Dow and DuPont and Chemours,” said Rosenberg. “It’s the worst-case scenario.”

Asbestos is now one of 10 compounds the EPA began assessing in 2016 under the new law. In August, the EPA announced that it was considering assessing an additional 20 chemicals and added another five in September. How these chemicals are assessed will affect Americans’ exposure levels and ultimately their risks for a range of health outcomes.

Scenes from Freeport, Texas on Wednesday, December 18th, 2019.Todd Spoth for The Intercept.Dow Chemical’s Freeport plant is the largest chemical production facility in the western hemisphere. Photo: Todd Spoth for The Intercept]

Having the Trump administration at the helm during a once-in-a-generation reassessment of toxic pollutants is especially disastrous for the effort to protect Americans from cancer. Of the 35 chemicals the EPA is now scrutinizing under the updated TSCA, 19 are widely considered by researchers to be carcinogenic. While only a tiny exposure can set off disease, more than 135 million pounds of these carcinogens were released in this country between 2014 and 2018, according to the most recent data from the EPA. And how dangerous they are found to be may ultimately impact federal and state limits on their use.

Obama administration officials were scrupulous when they began the assessment process back in 2016. “They clearly said we have to look at all the ways people are exposed because if we ignore even a single pathway, that can result in the difference between acceptable and unacceptable risk,” said Eve Gartner, an attorney who directs the toxics program at Earthjustice. But when Trump appointees came in to replace them at the EPA, that changed. Nancy Beck, who had been trying to convince the EPA to narrow the range of exposures it considered in chemical assessments when she was director of regulatory policy for the American Chemistry Council, joined the EPA in April 2017 and remade the rule exactly as industry wanted it.

Just as the environmental advocates feared, the first of the assessments under Beck’s rule, which were released over the past several months and will likely be finalized within the coming year, have minimized the risks posed by chemicals. “We’re seeing massive exclusions of known pathways for exposure,” said Gartner. “EPA is finding that chemicals that are universally understood to present massive risk are fine.”

Environmental groups, including Earthjustice, NRDC, and the Environmental Defense Fund, sued the EPA, arguing that the agency was wrong to rule out certain pathways of chemical exposures. In November, a federal appeals court agreed with them. If the ruling stands, EPA will be forced to consider exposures to chemicals through uses that have been phased out, which will affect the assessment of asbestos, for example, andPFOA, an industrial contaminant found in drinking water, even though the chemical is no longer used in the U.S.

Excluding consideration of certain exposures is just one of the ways industry insiders at the EPA appear to be underestimating the harms of toxic substances. “The specifics vary from one chemical to another, but by ignoring certain evidence, EPA uses the risk assessment process to put its thumb on the scales and come out with a result that is weaker and less health protective than it would otherwise be,” said Richard Denison, lead senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund. “Each time we see one of these assessments, there are ways in which the science has been played with.”

Denison pointed to the EPA’s recent handling of a likely carcinogen called 1,4-dioxane, which is used to make other chemicals and forms spontaneously in some shampoos, cosmetics, and cleaning products. In 2013, IRIS set a safety threshold for the chemical based, in part, on studies showing that female mice exposed to it developed cancerous tumors in their livers. Yet when the EPA released its draft risk assessment of 1,4-dioxane under the new TSCA law in June, “they conveniently omitted those tumors,” said Denison. “They removed the most sensitive endpoint and as a result came up with five-fold less protective risk value.”

Another dishonest technique the EPA has used to deem chemicals safe is to change safety thresholds when chemicals don’t meet them. Although the 1963 Clean Air Act mandated that the lifetime cancer risk to an average individual should be no greater than 1 in a million, since 2008 the agency has used a much less protective risk standard for carcinogens in the air: 1 in 10,000. NRDC sued in an effort to get the EPA under George W. Bush to stick with the more protective number, but a three-judge panel that included Brett Kavanaugh ruled against the environmental group in 2008. “They gutted the law and set the course for the next two decades,” said John Walke, the NRDC attorney who argued the case. When testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2018, Kavanaugh lied about the case, describing it as one in which he’d ruled for environmentalists.

Although previous administrations have used the 1-in-a-million standard when evaluating the safety of toxic chemicals, the Trump administration recently began using the 1-in-10,000 standard, Denison said. In several recent reports issued under the updated chemicals law, including a draft assessment of the deadly paint stripper methylene chloride, the EPA inexplicably used this lower bar for determining when a cancer rate for workers is unacceptable. “It looks to me like some scientists were doing the number-crunching, and somebody came up and said, ‘Yikes, look at all this risk. How do we make it go away?’” said Denison.

The EPA insists that it “is following the legal process in TSCA, which ensures that our risk evaluations are transparent and include a robust review of the available science,” according to an emailed statement from an EPA spokesperson. The statement also said, “The draft risk evaluations released so far represent the agency’s preliminary conclusions on these chemicals. EPA goes beyond what TSCA requires by peer reviewing the risk evaluations it releases in order to increase public transparency in the risk evaluation process and receive expert feedback on the science that underlies the risk determinations. If EPA’s final risk evaluations find there are unreasonable risks associated with these chemicals, the agency will propose actions to address those risks within the timeframe required by TSCA.”

Scenes from Freeport, Texas on Wednesday, December 18th, 2019.Todd Spoth for The Intercept.Dow’s Freeport facility released more than 200 air pollutants in 2017 and has violated its permits in every quarter of the past three years, making it a high-priority violator of the Clean Air Act. Photo: Todd Spoth for The Intercept]

A Polluter’s Paradise

There may be no better place to see the consequences of the unraveling of chemical regulation than in Texas.Home to roughly two-thirds of the nation’s petrochemical industry and a fast-growing number of factories that make plastic and its feedstocks, Texas is a hub for the production of carcinogenic compounds as well as a leader in the movement to weaken regulations of them. For years, Texas has been a polluter’s paradise. As the oil, gas, and petrochemical industries have exploded throughout the state, the TCEQ’s Honeycutt has presided over an easing of restrictions on their emissions even as his staff has been reduced.

With 1.7 million new cases estimated for 2019 in the United States, cancer is a particular problem in Freeport, Texas.Rates of Hodgkin lymphoma are elevated in this small town on the Gulf Coast, as are cancers of the liver and bile duct, lung, stomach, and nasal cavity and middle ear, according to a report that the Texas Department of State Health Services quietly released in 2018.

The report makes no mention of pollution as a possible cause of the elevated number of cancer cases, yet Freeport is home to the largest chemical production facility in the western hemisphere: 12,800 acres of holding tanks, machinery, canals, deep-water ports, and pipelines, owned by Dow. Alongside it are chemical production facilities owned by other companies, including BASF, Shintech, Huntsman, and the Olin Corporation, the largest chlor-alkali producer in the world, which bought part of its Freeport manufacturing site from Dow in 2015.

Dow’s Freeport plant produces more than 40 billion pounds of chemicals and other products, including the components of much of the world’s plastics. In the process, the plant emits hundreds of toxic chemicals. The facility released more than 200 air pollutants in 2017 and has violated its permits in every quarter of the past three years, making it a high-priority violator of the Clean Air Act. Between 2015 and 2018, the complex emitted more than 3 million pounds of unpermitted air pollution on top of what it was allowed to release, according to a report by the Environmental Integrity Project.

Cancer-2-08-1578686568On-site manufacturing releases of 18 of the 19 carcinogens currently being reviewed by the EPA under the revised 2016 Toxic Substances Control Act. All data drawn from the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory, 2014 – 2018, as reported by manufacturers. Locations include facilities within 50 miles. Data does not include releases at waste disposal/recycling facilities or on-site underground injection wells. Graphic: Soohee Cho/The Intercept]

Among the pollutants being released by Dow in Freeport are 11 carcinogens that are now being assessed or considered for assessment by the EPA under the new toxic chemicals law, according to EPA data. Of those chemicals, five have been shown to increase levels of the very cancers that are elevated in Freeport. Over the past five years, the Dow plant released more than 221,000 pounds of these five chemicals, including 1,2-dichloropropane, which causes bile duct cancer and is a probable cause of cancer of the nasal cavity and inner ear; 1,3-butadiene, which has been shown to increase rates of stomach cancers (and was recently released in an explosion at another chemical plant on the Texas coast); 1,1,2-trichloroethane and 1,1-dichloroethane, both of which have been linked to liver cancer in mice; and 1,2-dichloroethane, a probable carcinogen that has been linked to stomach, liver, and lung cancers.

But initial reports that the EPA recently released on the chemicals it’s investigating omit information that the agency has in its own databases about where and in what quantities these chemicals are produced, which companies make them, and how they’re used. As a result, most people in Freeport — and other polluted communities — do not realize that the industrial facilities near them are releasing dangerous amounts of these carcinogens. Also, because they omit this critical information, the assessments themselves may not reflect the true dangers posed by these substances.

Dow has done little to address the prevalence of cancer in the area, though the company did sponsor a “Sparkles and Spurs” fundraiser in 2018 to help buy a CT scanner for the CHI St. Luke’s Health cancer center in Brazosport, Texas, which is just a 15-minute drive from the Dow Chemical plant. Some residents call it the “Dow Cancer Center” because it was built on land donated by the giant chemical company. The evening of food, fun, and “foot stompin’” country music helped the center purchase the CT scanner, which the hospital is still using to diagnose new cancer cases.

Although they are more likely to get certain cancers, residents of Freeport — where the median household income is less than $37,000 a year — may have a difficult time getting care at the local hospital. “The Dow cancer center won’t take indigent patients,” said Melanie Oldham, a Freeport resident and physical therapist who said that she has worked with hundreds of clients in the area who have had cancer. “People who don’t have good insurance end up having to drive back and forth to either Galveston or to MD Anderson, which is an hour away.” Many of them are workers at the Dow plant, according to Oldham. “These are great jobs until you’re 50 or so,” she said. “That’s when a lot of my patients develop cancer.”

Physical therapist, Melanie Oldham, in her Freeport, Texas home, Wednesday, December 18th, 2019.Todd Spoth for The Intercept.Physical therapist Melanie Oldham at her home in Freeport, Texas, on Dec. 18, 2019. Photo: Todd Spoth for The Intercept]

Oldham pushed for years to get the state to conduct the cancer incidence study it released in 2018. The results confirmed her hunch that cancer rates in Freeport continued to exceed state and national rates. But the vindication brought no relief. “Dow could prevent a lot of these cancers,” said Oldham, “but instead it’s ‘Let’s put money into the local cancer center.’ It’s all about PR for them.”

The CHI St. Luke’s Health-Brazosport Hospital emailed a statement in response to inquiries from The Intercept saying, “CHI St. Luke’s Health is committed to serving all in our community including the poor and vulnerable. We have a consistent stewardship policy across our division that outlines our process for caring for underserved and vulnerable patients who can’t afford healthcare services.”

The Texas Department of State Health Services said it has not investigated the environmental causes of the increased number of cancer cases in Freeport. “Our protocol is to continue to monitor the situation and re-evaluate as more data becomes available,” department spokesperson Chris Van Deusen wrote in an email to The Intercept. In a separate email, Van Deusen wrote that the health department could not provide any earlier reports on cancer rates in Freeport because it doesn’t retain them after four years.

For Clarence Thompson, cancer came as no surprise. Many of the people he worked with at the Dow plant in Freeport have already died of the disease. Thompson, who was employed by a company that contracted with Dow, did pipe-fitting, welding, and machine operation at the Texas plant for more than 25 years and worked there when a cluster of brain cancer cases was identified among workers. Back then Thompson was in near constant motion, according to Eve Thompson, his wife of 43 years. “Even when he’d come in from work, he’d keep working, mow the yard, or tinker with something,” she recently recalled. “I did not marry a lazy man.”

Clarence Thompson stands outside of his Brazoria, Texas home assisted by a walking stick, on Wednesday, December 18th, 2019.Todd Spoth for The Intercept.Clarence Thompson stands outside of his home in Brazoria, Texas, assisted by a walking stick, on Dec. 18, 2019. Photo: Todd Spoth for The Intercept]

The front yard of Clarence Thompson’s home in Brazoria, Texas, Wednesday, December 18th, 2019.Todd Spoth for The Intercept.Willie Leona Willow applies lotion to her father, Clarence Thompson’s face prior to going outside, at Clarence’s home in Brazoria, Texas, Wednesday, December 18th, 2019.Todd Spoth for The Intercept.

Left/Top: The front yard of the Thompson’s home in Brazoria. Right/Bottom: Thompson's daughter, Willie Leona Willow, applies lotion to her father's face prior to going outside.Photos: Todd Spoth for The Intercept]

At 68, Thompson still wants to work, but these days he can barely walk. He has trouble remembering things and difficulty eating, and suffers from near constant pain in his lower back. At first Thompson thought his symptoms were just part of growing older. But Eve suspected that something was wrong. And when she took him to a doctor in June, he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a cancer of the white blood cells. In the months since, Thompson, who is almost 6 feet tall, has lost 50 pounds and has been hospitalized with several life-threatening infections. Thompson said he was exposed to several carcinogens while working at the Dow plant, including ethylene oxide and asbestos, both of which have been linked to multiple myeloma.

Yet even as his vitality is draining away, Thompson worries about the dangers that chemicals from the plant may pose both to other workers and neighbors.

Residents of Freeport are not the only people living dangerously near facilities that emit the carcinogenic chemicals now under scrutiny from the EPA. An analysis performed for this story by Material Research, an environmental data analysis company, shows that the chemicals are being released in particularly large quantities in eight hubs for the production and disposal of plastic. Among the most polluted hotspots are industrial areas in Lake Charles and Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Port Arthur and Houston, Texas; El Dorado, Arkansas; and Louisville and Calvert City, Kentucky.

Many people living in these highly polluted communities don’t know what chemicals they’re breathing, let alone the dangers they present, according to Wilma Subra, an environmental consultant who has worked in all of these hotspots. “But when you go there and say these are the chemicals and these are their known human health impacts, people start saying Oh, I have that, I have that, and I have that,” said Subra. “Most of those facilities have been there two or three generations and people are able to tell you not just what cancers they have but what cancers their parents and aunts and uncles had.”

More Leukemia, Please

While some carcinogenic chemicals that have already gone through the IRIS process are getting a more forgiving assessment through TSCA, the EPA is also refusing to release one IRIS report — on formaldehyde — even as it performs a new assessment of the chemical. Formaldehyde, used in building materials, glue insulation, and fabric, has been widely recognized as a cause of leukemia. In 2018, IRIS’s assessment of the chemical, which was expected to confirm the link to the blood cancer, was ready for “imminent release,” as then-EPA administrator Scott Pruitt told the Senate.

Formaldehyde already accounts for more than half the nationwide cancer risk from air pollution. Because it’s so widespread — more than 93 million pounds have been released in the U.S. since 2014 — and because its safety threshold is now 30 years old and evidence of its carcinogenicity has mounted during that time, updating the number IRIS calculated would likely increase the official cancer risk in many places around the country and drive up the number of census tracts where the cancer rate is officially problematic. But in April, EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler announced that the agency would not be releasing the IRIS report on the chemical, which had been in the works for more than a decade.

The IRIS assessment was one of 11 the agency withheld from publication, according to a March report from the Government Accountability Office. (In its statement, the EPA described these reports as “reduced from the IRIS workflow.”) Wheeler said that the EPA would instead assess formaldehyde through the new toxic chemicals law, thus indefinitely delaying the bad news about formaldehyde and cancer.

It’s worth noting that the Trump appointee who now heads the EPA’s Office of Research Development where IRIS assessments are produced, David Dunlap, used to work for Koch Industries. Georgia-Pacific Chemicals, a subsidiary of Koch, is one of the country’s largest producers of formaldehyde. Before working for Koch, Dunlap handled regulation for the Chlorine Institute, a trade group to which Dow and Olin belong. Dunlap also served on the ACC’s formaldehyde panel, which has disputed the link between the chemical and leukemia. Nancy Beck, the political appointee at the EPA who rewrote the rule determining how the agency would assess chemicals, also worked for the ACC. And David Fischer, the person who replaced her at the agency after she left this summer, is an ACC alum as well, having spent a decade working there on the TSCA.

Honeycutt, who gave the keynote address at the ACC’s “premier” regulatory conference in 2018, also has strong ties to the trade group. Even though he remains in Texas, Honeycutt has had an outsized impact on chemical policy beyond the state and is in close touch with EPA staff. Before the TCEQ publicly released its ethylene oxide assessment, Honeycuttsent it to Anne Idsal, a former TCEQ employee who is now running the EPA’s Air Office, which is steering the agency’s policy on ethylene oxide. A Texan with close ties to the oil and gas industry, Idsal’s father owned the ranch where Dick Cheney shot a Texas attorney while hunting quail.

Honeycutt also emailed an explanation of the assessment to Erin Chancellor, another former TCEQ employee who now heads the EPA’s regional office in Texas, telling her to “hold it close.” Texas’s top toxicologist may have written about ethylene oxide to other EPA staff and industry representatives, but the Texas agency has refused to provide some documents in response to a Sierra Club public records request specifically asking for communications between TCEQ staff and a long list of interested parties, including the American Petroleum Institute, the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, Chevron Phillips, Exxon Mobil, Formosa, Georgia-Pacific, and Dow/DuPont. In September, after the Sierra Club pushed to get the documents the TCEQ had withheld, the attorney general of Texas ruled in its favor. In response, the TCEQ took the unusual step of suing the attorney general rather than complying with the decision. That case is now pending.

Asked about Honeycutt’s emails to Idsal and Chancellor, the TCEQ’s spokesperson wrote in an email that “TCEQ routinely interacts and share information with EPA.” His email also said that the state attorney general didn’t rule on whether certain documents “fall within exceptions to disclosure under the Texas Public Information Act” and that the only way to get him to address the question was to sue.

Meanwhile, Honeycutt is also making changes that will affect how all cancer-causing chemicals are treated throughout the country. In 2017, then-EPA administrator Scott Pruitt named Honeycutt chair of the agency’s influential Science Advisory Board. The group is supposed to provide scientific advice to the administrator, but under Trump it has been stacked with industry apologists. This summer, Honeycutt, along with fellow advisory board members from Dow Chemical, Exxon Mobil, and the American Chemistry Council, quietly began proposing profound and lasting changes to the EPA’s cancer guidelines.

Throughout the EPA’s almost 50-year history, the agency has held that there is no safe level of a carcinogen. But Honeycutt and his colleagues on the advisory board have proposed reversing that assumption. “They want to flip it so there can be safe levels of cancer-causing chemicals,” said Jen Sass, a senior scientist at NRDC, who sees the move as a ruse for allowing companies to freely release pollutants. “Their presumption is that low levels of carcinogens aren’t harmful and might even be good for you. And industry wants to define low level as whatever level you’re exposed to.”

In an emailed response to questions about the cancer guidelines, a spokesperson for the agency wrote, “The EPA is currently considering the SAB member’s individual comments as well as those provided by the public as they consider next steps for this project.”

Because the nation’s cancer guidelines are rewritten very infrequently — the most recent version was published in 2005 — Sass fears that the new ones will have an enduring impact. “Guidances like this last for decades,” she said. “I don’t know how this could be undone later.”

[A white substance resembling steam billows out of Vantage's factory in Gurnee, Ill. on Jan. 2, 2020. Vantage is one of the factories in Lake County that emits ethylene oxide, a gas known to cause cancer. Pat Nabong for The Intercept.Steam billows out of Vantage’s factory in Gurnee, Ill., on Jan. 2, 2020. Vantage is one of the factories in Lake County that emits ethylene oxide. Photo: Pat Nabong for The Intercept]

Making America Sick Again

Other hard-to-reverse plans that could result in increased cancers rates throughout the country are also quietly moving ahead. On December 31, the deregulatory dream of tobacco industry attorney Christopher Horner took another step closer to becoming national policy. While Trump was preparing to ring in the new year at Mar-a-Lago with Rudy Giuliani, Honeycutt released an analysis of the proposed secret science rule — now rebranded “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science” — on behalf of the EPA’s science advisory board.The EPA now has to answer several questions the board posed in that document. Once it is finalized, the rule will have to undergo a 60-day comment period. But after that, the once pie-in-the-sky scheme is likely to become the law of the land.

If and when it does get finalized and survives the legal challenges it will certainly face, the secret science rule will be even more crippling to health-based regulations than Horner first envisioned. His original idea was to require that studies used to make regulatory decisions be reproducible — which sounds fine in theory until you understand that they are often based on confidential private health data of thousands of individuals. And an earlier version of the EPA’s proposed rule called for placing these restrictions only on certain studies. But the EPA amended the proposal last year to require that all raw data and models underlying regulatory decisions be made available for reanalysis, with exceptions possible only on the administrator’s whim.

The requirement would mean that even science that was used to guide past regulations may be up for grabs. The EPA’s 2016 ethylene oxide assessment was partially based on breast cancer incidence data that contained confidential personal information, so under the proposed secret science rule that data could be ruled illegitimate. The rule could also undercut the utility of all the data that Simon Strong is collecting in honor of his son. Because that information will be collected in accordance with standard privacy protocols, it wouldn’t be considered in regulatory decision-making.

And the EPA could be prevented from basing any regulation on studies of cancer clusters like the one near the Dow plant in Freeport, Texas. “The way you show a cluster is to go to a community and enter their confidential health information and compare that to other areas,” said Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, one of dozens of groups that oppose the proposed rule. “But you wouldn’t be able to release that raw data because it’s confidential.”

The rule could render other groundbreaking science useless for protecting public health, too, such as studies showing the link between air pollution and lung cancer, between smoking and various cancers, or between the industrial contaminant PFOA and testicular and kidney cancer. The change would mark a profound shift both for the U.S. government and for the American people. “It’s saying what’s important is no longer the public interest but the industrial interest,” said Rosenberg. “Cancer is the most obvious and feared sign of ignoring public interest. And this will lead to more cancer.”

https://www.**urban.org**/sites/default/files/**2019**/06/27/conservative_philanthropy_in_higher_education.pdf

...The importance of the Walgreen Foundation’s support raises a counterfactual: would these scholars have enjoyed prominent careers without that financial assistance? Like all counterfactuals, the conclusion must be speculative. Certainly, many of the scholars at the University of Chicago who received funding from the Walgreen Foundation (such as Posner and Becker) may well have had brilliant academic careers even if the Walgreen Foundation and the Graduate School of Business had never existed. However, this misses the point: the success of George Stigler’s Walgreen-funded project created a scholarly network and a financial infrastructure with which to promote their pro–free market ideas. Without Walgreen’s support, that may well have been more difficult.

CASE STUDY II: HENRY MANNE AND LAW AND ECONOMICS

The success of Stigler’s project can be understood within the context of a broader conservative philanthropic movement that built upon past victories. Before Stigler constructed an antistatist economics and business program at the University of Chicago, Keynesians (who supported muscular state interventions in the economy) tended to dominate economic thought in the United States. The most prominent economists and economics programs in America (e.g., Paul Samuelson, who served as an economic advisor to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and built MIT’s economics department into a powerhouse) predominantly belonged to the Keynesian tradition.11 Stigler’s antistatist economics program not only allowed for the transformation of economics programs throughout American higher education, but provided academic support for the conservative transformation of the law. Steven Teles’s (2008) book on the development of the conservative legal establishment, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law, strongly emphasizes the Chicago school’s importance in the creation of the field of “law and economics” in the 1970s. “Law and economics” is, essentially, the application of economic analysis—specifically economic analysis rooted in the Austrian school’s free market philosophy—to public policy and legal questions.12 Not every early attempt to institutionalize conservative legal and economics programs was as successful as Stigler’s. Henry Manne, whom Teles calls one the great organizational entrepreneurs of law and economics, attempted to build a dedicated conservative law program at the University of Rochester in the late 1960s by cultivating conservative alumni and foundation support.

...

CASE III: THE OLIN FOUNDATION AND THE BEACHHEAD THEORY

Although a dense network of conservative philanthropic foundations—including the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Scaife Foundations, and the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation—became prominent funders of right-wing causes in the 1970s and early 1980s, the John M. Olin Foundation has received the most scholarly attention for the following three reasons:

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(1) it was one of the first conservative foundations to focus on giving in higher education to achieve its political aims, 

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(2) its peer institutions considered it an innovative leader in right-wing philanthropic giving, and

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 (3) it has actively supported studies that highlight its history and mission.

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 Such studies include John J. Miller’s official history of the foundation, A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America, and Steven Teles’s more neutral The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, both of which received support from Olin Foundation grants. 17 Scholars and philanthropic officials have centered these points (particularly its reputation for innovation) in criticisms of the Olin Foundation’s politics (Sally Covington’s Moving a Public Policy Agenda, for example, devotes one of its major case studies to the foundation because of its reputation for innovation and impact).

Given the success of the Olin Foundation’s projects and of its broader vision of promarket social change rooted in college and university campuses, this reputation is well deserved.18 John M. Olin, whose Winchester Repeating Arms Company made a fortune during World War II manufacturing arms and ammunition for the US Army, was not the first right-wing billionaire to establish a dedicated philanthropic foundation in their name (Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and even the comparatively less wealthy Charles Walgreen preceded him). But Olin was concerned that “mission creep” had set in at the major establishment philanthropic organizations, leading them to betray their founders’ promarket ideals. He was determined to avoid the same fate, and to ensure his money was tied to meaningful institution-building and political change. The Olin Foundation was therefore designed to have a limited lifespan: Olin died in 1982, and the foundation folded in 2005 after having disbursed nearly $300 million to conservative causes.19

...

CASE IV: THE KOCHS AND GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY

excerpt from below:

In 1979, Michael Joyce entered the world of large-scale philanthropy with assistance from his mentor Irving Kristol,when he assumed the reins of the John M. Olin Foundation from the retiring president, William Simon.At Olin, one of Joyce’s first projects was to organize support for the launching of the Federalist Society. [11]

Joyce’s work in creating and fostering the development of the Federalist Society is instructive and foreshadows the role that he has played in current efforts by neoconservatives to restructure American higher education. The Federalist Society, with Joyce’s ongoing support, not only fostered the development of ultra-conservative legal scholars and politicians such as Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Robert Bork, Samuel Alito, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales and Kenneth Starr (all of whom are members) but organized them into a powerful force for reshaping American jurisprudence in support of a larger neoconservative agenda.

rww:

The John M. Olin Foundation, once one of the country's premier conservative foundations, closed down in 2005 after a half century of operations. Among its more notable grantees were the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and the Hoover Institution. In discussing the closing, Olin director James Piereson said: "I guess I would say, looking back on this period, that it's worked out a lot better than we had any right to expect when we started. I'm sure some stuff failed or didn't go anywhere, but not a lot of it."[[1]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/John_M_Olin_Foundation/#_edn1)

The foundation grew out of the Olin Corporation—an ammunition and chemical business—in 1953, when John Merrill Olin began his philanthropic efforts, supporting his alma mater, Cornell University, and a few other causes. However, by 1973, Olin had adopted a specific strategic vision, stating at the time: “I would like to use this fortune to help to preserve the system which made its accumulation possible in only two lifetimes, my father’s and mine.” From then on, the foundation was explicitly geared towards defending “America’s tradition of free enterprise and individual liberty.”[[2]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/John_M_Olin_Foundation/#_edn2)

The foundation provided financial support to efforts to promote capitalism and fend off what John Olin saw as encroaching socialism. It became a major backer of right-wing think tanks, policy institutes, colleges, and academics.[[3]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/John_M_Olin_Foundation/#_edn3) Observers have noted that over the course of several decades, the foundation’s “savvy underwriting shaped the direction and aided the growth of the modern conservative movement that first sprang into visibility in the 1980s.”[[4]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/John_M_Olin_Foundation/#_edn4)

John Olin envisioned the foundation to last no more than 25 years after his death. As such, in 2005, the foundation had its last board meeting, made its final round of grant-making decisions for subsequent years, and shut down.[[5]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/John_M_Olin_Foundation/#_edn5)

A staunch supporter of the anti-communist right in the United States, the foundation was a key booster of neoconservatism beginning in the 1970s, especially at the American Enterprise Institute, considered the premier neocon think tank in the United States. Irving Kristol, a key intellectual architect of neoconservatism, writes that AEI's efforts to recruit neoconservatives in the 1970s and 1980s was "facilitated by the appearance on the scene of a rejuventated Bradley Foundation and John M. Olin Foundation."[[6]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/John_M_Olin_Foundation/#_edn6)

The foundation was also a prominent booster of militarist policies in the post-Cold War period. According to scholars Jean Stefanic and Richard Delgado, in the early 1990s, Olin "withdrew support from the Cato institute following its position on foreign policy specifically its opposition to all foreign military engagements, including the Persian Gulf War."[[7]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/John_M_Olin_Foundation/#_edn7) Along with AEI, many of whose scholars helped shape the "war on terror" policies of the President George W. Bush, Olin was also a key supporter of other neocon-aligned groups like the Hudson Institute.

The foundation was also a supporter of numerous hawkish organizations, like the neoconservative Project for the New American Century and the Center for Security Policy, to which it gave in total $46,000 and $1.2 million respectively up until 2005. It also contributed large sums to the David Horowitz Freedom Center, giving the organization over $2.2 million from 1989 to 2005, and the Foreign Policy Research Institute, which received more than $1.2 million during 1985-2005.[[8]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/John_M_Olin_Foundation/#_edn8)

Leadership

John Olin ran the Foundation until 1977, when he chose former treasury secretary William E. Simon to succeed him as president. Olin said at the time that he created the foundation in an effort "to see free enterprise re-established in this country. Business and the public must be awakened to the creeping stranglehold that socialism has gained here since World War II.''[[9]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/John_M_Olin_Foundation/#_edn9)

Olin's successor, Simon, was an aggressive Wall Street investor and effective fundraiser. He served under Presidents Nixon and Ford and later became president of the United States Olympic Committee, where he helped lead the boycott of the 1980 games in Moscow. In his 1979 book, Time for Truth, Simon wrote: "Funds generated by business … must rush by the multimillions to the aid of liberty … to funnel desperately needed funds to scholars, social scientists, writers, and journalists who understand the relationship between political and economic liberty. [Business must] cease the mindless subsidizing of colleges and universities whose departments of economy, government, politics, and history are hostile to capitalism."[[10]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/John_M_Olin_Foundation/#_edn10)

Michael Joyce, a guiding light of right-wing philanthropy in the United States until his death in 2006, succeeded Simon as Olin's president and remained in that post until 1985, when he was tapped to run the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Joyce served as chairman of the Philanthropy Roundtable, a position he held while at Bradley. Irving Kristol once dubbed him the "godfather of modern philanthropy."

James Piereson served as Olin's last executive director. He also served as secretary of the foundation's board of trustees at the time of its closing. Those serving with him at the time included Eugene F. Williams Jr., Chairman; George J. Gillespie III, President and Treasurer; and Peter M. Flanigan, Richard M. Furlaud, and Charles F. Knight.[[11]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/John_M_Olin_Foundation/#_edn11)

Looking back at Olin's role, Piereson once opined: "The basic instincts of the American people were conservative, but the intellectuals are moving in an opposite direction. Our job was to show the American people why they were right."[[12]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/John_M_Olin_Foundation/#_edn12)

After leaving the Olin Foundation, Piereson joined the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank that received substantial contributions from Olin over the years.[[13]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/John_M_Olin_Foundation/#_edn13)[[14]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/John_M_Olin_Foundation/#_edn14)

Impact

Together with a host of like-minded foundations, Olin is credited with having played an integral role in establishing the organizational foundation for the emergence of the New Right.[[15]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/John_M_Olin_Foundation/#_edn15) In a 1997 report for the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, Sally Covington wrote: "By the early 1980s, journalistic reports in the Washington Post, Esquire magazine, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and the Columbia Journalism Review were highlighting the important role that the Koch, Olin, Smith Richardson, Sarah Scaife, and other foundations were playing in building the organizational base of the right."[[16]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/John_M_Olin_Foundation/#_edn16)

In the 1980s, the foundation began providing funding to law and economics programs in schools across the nation, and to legal organizations such as the Federalist Society. Over a six-year period between 1987 and 1993, Olin awarded $13 million to university law and economics programs. Former executive director Piereson once stated that he "saw [law and economics programs] as a way into the law schools—I probably shouldn't confess that. … Economic analysis tends to have conservatizing effects."[[17]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/John_M_Olin_Foundation/#_edn17)

According to journalist Jason DeParle, the Federalist Society might not exist if not for Olin.[[18]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/John_M_Olin_Foundation/#_edn18)Many members of the Federalist Society held important roles in the Bush administrations, like Michael Chertoff, Spencer Abraham, Gale Norton, John Ashcroft, Theodore Olson, and John Bolton.

In its efforts to turn back what it saw as the rampant liberalism and socialism at U.S. universities, the foundation supported the work of some of the country's most notorious right-wing academics, including Roger Kimball, Charles Murray, and Dinesh D'Souza.[[19]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/John_M_Olin_Foundation/#_edn19) The foundation also backed a passel of rightist campaigns on college campuses—including the movement to end affirmative action—through its support of Linda Chavez's Center for Equal Opportunity, the Independent Women's Forum, and the American Civil Rights Institute. Over the years, they received a combined total of $3.3 million from Olin ($1.6 million, $776,000, and $900,000, respectively).[[20]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/John_M_Olin_Foundation/#_edn20)

Despite its apparent antagonism to higher learning (former director Pierson once said that liberal academics "don't like American capitalism, American culture, and they don't like American history—they see it as a history of oppression"[[21]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/John_M_Olin_Foundation/#_edn21)) the foundation was a major donor to elite universities, which were by far the largest recipients of Olin money during its final two decades in operation. The top six Olin grantees during 1985-2005 were Harvard University, the University of Chicago, Washington University, Yale University, the University of Rochester and Stanford University, which received a combined total of about $100 million during the period, much of which was in the form of general support grants.[[22]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/John_M_Olin_Foundation/#_edn22)

Olin also worked to keep think tanks in line with its policy views. Covington writes that AEI once lost Olin funding in the 1980s. "Judging from AEI's own statements, the institution … moved to assume a more aggressive and conservative public policy role, perhaps owing to conservative efforts to 'defund' the think tank during the mid-1980s when some judged its research orientation to be too centrist. In 1986, the Olin and Smith Richardson foundations withdrew their support from AEI because of substantive disagreement with certain of its policies, causing [then-President William] Baroody to resign in the ensuing financial crisis."[[23]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/John_M_Olin_Foundation/#_edn23)

==

inside higher ed

https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/06/16/jones

Connecting the Dots

Submitted by Alan Jones on June 16, 2006 -

By all objective measures, the dawning of the 21st century should be a golden era for American higher education. A recent issue of The Economist described America’s system of higher education as “the best in the world” and provided convincing documentation for its claim. A recent review article [1] by Jonathan Cole, provost at Columbia University, meticulously documents the preeminence of U.S. higher education in the world today as an established fact.

Perhaps sensing the current domestic political climate, however, Cole uses his analysis as the basis for sounding a strong cautionary note. “The United States paid a heavy price when the leaders of its research universities in the 1950’s failed to defend the leader of the Manhattan Project J. Robert Oppenheimer; the double Nobel Prize chemist Linus Pauling; and the China expert Owen Lattimore. But a wave of repression in American universities today is apt to have even more dramatic consequences for the nation than the repression of the Cold War.”

This broad-based and even global acclaim for higher education in the United States is strangely at odds with the concentrated political attacks that Cole warns us about and that the academy is currently experiencing. It is particularly out of step with the dark and dysfunctional picture of the academy painted by David Horowitz and his Center for the Study of Popular Culture. [2] If Horowitz were simply a disaffected political crank, as many have hitherto regarded him, then his views on the academy could be easily dismissed. Such dismissal would seem to be all the more in order following his disastrous testimony before the legislative subcommittee in Pennsylvania in which he was forced to recant as unsubstantiated [3] several of the cases that he had been widely circulating as documentation of alleged malfeasance in the academy.

Oddly, however, his campaign goes on. Horowitz, with assistance from Karl Rove and the former House majority whip, Tom DeLay, has briefed Republican members of Congress on his Academic Bill of Rights campaign and DeLay has even distributed copies [4] of Horowitz’s political primer The Art of Political Warfare: How Republicans Can Fight to Win to all Republican members of Congress. Rove refers to Horowitz’s pamphlet as “a perfect pocket guide to winning on the political battlefield."

In a more recent development, last fall, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings appointed a Commission on Higher Education. Spellings, described as a protégé of Rove, [5] gained considerable attention as the principal architect of President Bush’s controversial “No Child Left Behind” initiative. Among the proposals being discussed by Spellings’s new commission is one that calls for scrapping the current system of accreditation, [6] which is done by independent regional bodies, in favor of a National Accreditation Foundation that would be created by Congress and the president.

The current system of institutional review through independent accreditation boards is one of the hallmarks of American higher education and is one of the most important structural safeguards of the academy’s ability to ensure academic quality and intellectual excellence. The introduction of oversight by an inherently partisan political body in lieu of the currently independent accreditation process is a peculiar remedy if the perceived ailment in the academy is political bias. Carol Geary Schneider, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, has said [7] that “the commission is sending out firebolts, one after another." To chair this extraordinary committee Secretary Spellingschose Charles Miller, a former chairman of the University of Texas Board of Regents and, historically, a large contributor to the President’s election campaigns.

The question of why the academy is under such focused and persistent attack by individuals like David Horowitz and his political supporters despite the fact that it appears to be an extraordinarily successful enterprise and an unrivaled resource for the nation is a question that many Americans are asking. In understanding the origins, scope and staying power of this attack it is crucial to understand not only the political relationships that Horowitz enjoys, but the sources of funding that created and sustain his Center for the Study of Popular Culture and its Academic Bill of Rights campaign. It is also critical to understand that the same funding sources that brought Horowitz’s organization into being, also created and sustain a large and integrated network of ideologically defined think tanks and centers both outside of and within the higher education establishment.

When Michael S. Joyce died in February 24, his death received scant attention in the mainstream press. Although very few people in academic circles are familiar with his name, he was, nonetheless, one of the foundational pillars of the current ideological attacks on the academy. A tribute to him [8] by Peter Collier was published in FrontPage, Horowitz’s Web site. Joyce and his intellectual muse -- the late University of Chicago political philosopher Leo Strauss [9] -- would have been pleased by the level of anonymity that he maintained during his lifetime. Joyce's ability to maintain such anonymity despite the enormous influence that he wielded in shaping and developing the infrastructure of the neoconservative movement in this country is quite remarkable.

Although The Atlantic Monthly, as early as 1986, was describing Joyce as "one of the three individuals most responsible for the triumph of the conservative political movement," he nevertheless adhered rigorously to the secretive and profoundly antidemocratic principles advocated by the enigmatic Strauss. As characterized by Jeet Heer in The Boston Globe, [10] Strauss held that "the best regime is one in which the leaders govern moderately and prudently, curbing the passions of the mob while allowing a small philosophical elite to pursue the contemplative life of the mind. Such a philosophical elite may discover truths that are not fit for public consumption.... For Strauss the art of concealment and secrecy was among the greatest legacies of antiquity."

In 1979, Michael Joyce entered the world of large-scale philanthropy with assistance from his mentor Irving Kristol,when he assumed the reins of the John M. Olin Foundation from the retiring president, William Simon. At Olin, one of Joyce’s first projects was to organize support for the launching of the Federalist Society. [11]Joyce’s work in creating and fostering the development of the Federalist Society is instructive and foreshadows the role that he has played in current efforts by neoconservatives to restructure American higher education. The Federalist Society, with Joyce’s ongoing support, not only fostered the development of ultra-conservative legal scholars and politicians such as Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Robert Bork, Samuel Alito, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales and Kenneth Starr (all of whom are members) but organized them into a powerful force for reshaping American jurisprudence in support of a larger neoconservative agenda.

Also significant in this regard is a report by Jerome Shestack, [12] former president of the American Bar Association, that the Federalist Society is being increasingly being used as a platform from which to launch ideological attacks on the mainstream legal community. Through the device of the Federalist Society publication, ABA Watch, the society has launched a vicious attack on the ABA. In a special edition of the Watch, U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), co-chair of the society, announced that he would no longer invite the ABA to participate on a pro forma basis in the Senate judicial confirmation process. Employing rhetoric eerily parallel to that being used in the current attacks on the academy, Justice Clarence Thomas openly denounced the ABA, declaring “I am doubtful that the ABA can ever reform itself.”

In her testimony [13] before Pennsylvania's Select Committee on Academic Freedom in Higher Education, which convened in Philadelphia, Anne Neal,president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, expressed a similar sentiment as to the ability of the academy to reform itself. “Faced with growing legislative pressure on this issue, the higher education establishment issued the American Council on Education statement, figured it would pretend to have a quick conversion, endorse intellectual diversity, get those yahoo legislators off their backs and go back to business as usual. DO NOT LET THEM GET AWAY WITH THIS CHARADE.”

In 1985, Michael Joyce left the Olin Foundation to assume the presidency of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, in Milwaukee. During this time, he not only built the Bradley Foundation into the largest and most influential right-wing foundation in the country,he also forged a  formidable alliance among a small group of the nation’s largest, far right-wing foundations so that their resources could be more strategically deployed in support of the developing neoconservative agenda. Included in this alliance are theKoch Foundation (either directly or through its subsidiary the Claude Lambe Foundation), theCastle Rock Foundation (Coors) and the Sarah Scaife Foundations(either directly or through its subsidiaries the Carthage Foundation and the Alleghany Foundation) which, together with Olin and Bradley, have collectively financed the rise of the neoconservative movement in this country and have done so with an impressive display tactical precision.

It is a telling marker of the ideological cohesiveness and extremism of this core group of philanthropies that three of the five founding members, Joseph Coors, David Koch and Harry Bradley, were**members and financial supporters** [14]of the John Birch Society. The Scaife foundations, headed by Richard Mellon Scaife,**are also involved,** [15]albeit in less direct ways.

In the past 20 years this core group of funders has, by many reports, built and strategically linked an impressive array of almost 500 think tanks, centers, institutes and "concerned citizens groups" both within and outside of the academy. It is particularly telling to observe the funding sources of these organizations during the first 10-15 years of their existence, when their ideological identities were being established.

A small sampling of these entities include the Cato Institute, [16] the Heritage Foundation, [17] the American Enterprise Institute, [18] the Manhattan Institute, [19] the Hoover Institution,[20] the Claremont Institute, [21] the American Council of Trustees and Alumni,[22] Middle East Forum,[23]Accuracy in Media, [24] and the :{National Association of Scholars,:(style="background-color:#fff200;"):}: [25] as well as Horowitz's :{Center of the Study of Popular Culture.:(style="background-color:#fff200;"):}: [26]

The absence of formal organizational linkages between the entities within these networks creates an illusion of independent analytical voices reaching similar conclusions about strategic policy issues, a technique known in the public relations industry as “astroturfing.” This network has developed an enormous capacity to generate “data” consistent with the targeted political agenda and world views of its core group of funders to quickly and redundantly represent these issues in the mainstream press by what appear to be the voices of independent analysts and to translate these viewpoints into public policy that serves the focused ideological agenda of this core group of funders. The Bradley Foundation under Michael Joyce's leadership has even established a publishing house, :{Encounter Books,:(style="background-color:#fff200;"):}: [27] to ensure that grantees like Horowitz have a quasi-academic outlet for their viewpoints.

The degree of interconnectedness within this network of organizations is considerable but almost invisible to the casual observer. For example, when ACTA’s president, Anne Neal, introduced herself to the Select Committee on Academic Freedom in Higher Education in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, she presented ACTA as “a bipartisan network of college and university trustees and alumni across the country dedicated to academic freedom.”

Full disclosure should have required some mention of the fact that ACTA (see funding sources above), which changed its name from the National Alumni Forum [28] in 1998, was established by theIntercollegiate Studies Institute [29] in 1994. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute in turn evolved from William Bennett’s Madison Center for Educational Affairs [30] and the Institute for Educational Affairs founded by Irving Kristol, Michael Joyce’s mentor, and William Simon, the first president of the John M. Olin Foundation. Bennett and Kristol also sit on ACTA’s Board of Directors. The remarkably consistent record of funding across all of the incarnations of this organization and the high degree of redundancy with Horowitz’s own, highly partisan Center for the Study of Popular Culture is not consistent with Neal’s definition of ACTA as an independent, non-partisan organization.

Another example illustrative of the quietly incestuous nature of this network is presented by an article by the Boston Globe columnist Cathy Young. The article is entitled “Liberal bias in the ivory tower” [31]and by all appearances is an independent opinion piece written by a regular Globe columnist. At the end of the article Young identifies herself as “a contributing editor at Reason Magazine.” What is undisclosed in the article is that Reason Magazine is the publication of the Reason Foundation, whosefunding sources [32] are virtually the same as those funding Horowitz’s "Academic Bill of Rights" project and Neal’s ACTA.

Young’s premise for the article is stated in her opening sentence: “Yet another study has come out documenting what most conservatives consider to be blindingly obvious: the leftwing tilt of the American professoriate.” The study that she references [33] was conducted by Stanley Rothman, now emeritus professor at Smith College; S. Robert Lichter, emeritus professor at George Mason University; and Neil Nevitte of the University of Toronto, and was published in the online journal Forum. This study was also cited by Neal in her testimony in Pennsylvania. Young does not inform her readers that Rothman is director of the Center for the Study of Social and Political Change, [34] a center with funding sources that are remarkably redundant with Horowitz’s Center for the Study of Popular Culture. Lichter is also president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, [35] which again has funding sources that are redundant with those referenced earlier.

In addition, a recent article in Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting [36] is highly critical of Lichter’s research methodology. Another example of such conflicted interests is provided by Professor Thomas Reeves. When Reeves writes in strong support of Horowitz’s proposals on the History News Network,[37] he fails to note that he is a spokesman for the California Association of Scholars, a branch of the National Association of Scholars (see funding sources above) and that he is director of the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, [38] which was, again, brought into being by the Olin and Bradley Foundations.

This manufactured drumbeat against “academic bias” is amplified by Stanley Kurtz [39] of the Hoover Institution (see funding sources above), Heather MacDonald, [40] a John M. Olin fellow at the Manhattan Institute (see funding sources above), and Brian C. Anderson, [41] editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and a former research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (see funding sources above).

The relentlessness with which columnists and experts with direct funding relationships with Olin, Scaife, Bradley, Koch and Coors level charges of academic bias and assert the need for legislative reform of higher education is remarkable. The goal of this narrowly focused and ideologically driven public relations campaign can only be understood in terms of its fostering of a political climate in which federal regulatory “reform” of what is universally recognized as the finest system of higher education in the world, will be tolerated.

Indeed, as has been discussed, such regulatory oversight may already be in the offing. The academy stands today as one of the last spaces in America where the democratic ideas that shape the social, economic and political fabric of the nation can be openly and independently debated on the basis of their merits and without coercion or distortion from vested economic and political interests. It is certainly in the national interest that it remain such.

Author/s:

Alan Jones

Author's email:

info@insidehighered.com

Alan Jones is dean of the faculty and professor of psychology and neuroscience at Pitzer College.

Source URL: https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/06/16/jones?width=775&height=500&iframe=true

Links:

[1] http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3671/is_200504/ai_n13641838

[2] http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21302

[3] http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/01/11/retract

[4] http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0106-30.htm

[5] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/25/AR2006012501891.html

[6] http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/03/31/accredit

[7] http://insidehighered.com/news/2005/09/20/spellings

[8] http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21456

[9] http://www.alternet.org/story/15935/

[10] http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2003/05/11/the_philosopher/

[11] http://www.nationalreview.com/miller/miller200602270759.asp

[12] http://www.institutefordemocracy.org/pub3.html

[13] http://www.goacta.org/whats_new/IDTestimony1-10-06.pdf

[14] http://www.commonwealinstitute.org/reports/tort/Section1.html

[15] http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=1385

[16] http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=51

[17] http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=153

[18] http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=19

[19] http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=198

[20] http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=311

[21] http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=72

[22] http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=16

[23] http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=207

[24] http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=1374

[25] http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=242

[26] http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=63

[27] http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=98

[28] http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=434

[29] http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=177

[30] http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=525

[31] http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/04/11/liberal_bias_in_the_ivory_tower?mode=PF

[32] http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=286

[33] http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/03/30/politics

[34] http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=1012

[35] http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=573

[36] http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2515

[37] http://hnn.us/articles/1731.html

[38] http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=368

[39] http://www.nationalreview.com/kurtz/kurtz200310140905.asp

[40] http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_3_college_follies.html

[41] http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110006149

big backer of legal front: FREE and FedSoc

Vol. 18 No. 7 (July, 2008) pp.632-636

THE RISE OF THE CONSERVATIVE LEGAL MOVEMENT: THE BATTLE FOR CONTROL OF THE LAW, by Steven M. Teles. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. 385pp.  Cloth. $35.00/£19.95.  ISBN: 9780691122083.

Reviewed by Roy B. Flemming, Department of Political Science, Texas A&M University.  Email: roy [at] politics.tamu.edu.

Sure, it was a coincidence but the timing could not have been better.  The morning before I sat down to write this review, I received a solicitation letter from the Federalist Society asking me for a donation.  The letter signed by Eugene B. Meyer, the organization's president, pointedly quoted Steven Teles' comment from his book that the “Federalist Society represents, without a doubt, the most vigorous, durable, and well-ordered organization to emerge from . . . modern conservatism's political strategy.”

When Teles set out to document the stumbles, turning points, and successes of the conservative counter-mobilization against legal liberalism, his “first real breakthrough” came after Meyer let him loose to rummage through the Society’s internal documents. Other entrepreneurs in the conservative legal movement like Henry Manne, William “Chip” Mellor, and Clint Bolick fully cooperated with Teles, answering his questions and providing him with background documents.  Equally important, pivotal financial patrons of the movement, like the Olin Foundation, followed suit.  Finally, Teles decided to organize his research around the themes of strategy and entrepreneurship which he credits to conversations with Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation. No published study about the conservative legal movement of which I am aware can compete with the information, detail, perspectives, and stories that Teles has packed into his book.

Teles’ major stories pivot around the formation and evolution of the Federalist Society, the emergence and institutionalization of law and economics as part of law school curriculums, the Center for Individual Rights, and the Institute for Justice.  Nested within these narratives are vignettes of other players and organizations that illustrate how patrons and entrepreneurs learned from their mistakes and redirected their strategies.  Teles quickly alerts his readers that he not concerned with organizations like the American Center for Law and Justice that have been involved in religious or social conservative litigation.  Nor is he interested in the thicket of conservative think tanks that sprouted up during the past three decades or in the proliferation of litigating groups with traditional pro-business agendas or interests in tort reform.  The price of Teles’ tight focus, however, is easily off-set by the many benefits generated by his in-depth discussions.

The idea for a conservative legal counter-mobilization first surfaced in Lewis Powell’s  confidential memorandum to the US Chamber of Commerce in 1971 shortly before Nixon nominated him to the Supreme Court.  (Powell’s memo can be found at [*633] www.pbs.org/wnet/supremecourt/personality/print/sources_document13.html).  Entitled “Attack of [sic] the American Free Enterprise System,” Powell argued America’s economic system was under “broad attack.”  The “most disquieting” attacks were not those made by the usual left-wing or socialist suspects but those from “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.”   Powell urged the Chamber to confront the criticism especially in universities and colleges (including a “balancing of faculties”) and redirect the public agenda by creating incentives for “independent scholars who believe in the system” to publish more often and more widely.  In a very real sense, Powell’s ideas foreshadowed Manne’s campaign to create law and economics centers in law schools and the Olin Foundation’s initiatives aimed at the elite schoolsas well as the network of conservative faculty and students created by the Federalist Society.

In a section called a “Neglected Opportunity in the Courts,” Powell cautioned that liberal and far left groups had been "far more astute” in recognizing the “judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic, and political change.”  This could be a “vast area of opportunity” for the Chamber and the soon-to-be associate justice recommended that it hire “highly competent” staff attorneys to file amicus briefs in the Supreme Court or under special circumstances retain “lawyers of national standing and reputation” to participate in Chamber-sponsored law suits.  The American Civil Liberties Union, civil rights groups, and liberal public interest law outfits like those created by Ralph Nader, offered off-the-shelf templates that conservatives could use to organize their counter-mobilization. As Teles explains, Powell implied that the fundamental problem was an imbalance in the interests appearing in courtrooms and that it could be righted by recruiting pro-business if not conservative “repeat players” and by a revival of “judicial restraint" on the bench.

Things did not play out as simply as Powell intimated.  Following the formation of the Pacific Legal Foundation in 1973 with the support from the California Chamber of Commerce, several other regional foundations were soon created under the auspices of the National Legal Center for the Public Interest (NLCPI).  This network was organized geographically, not functionally, and held together by interlocking directorships.  The result was “organizational turmoil” because as one insider told Teles “NLCPI had all the structural flaws of the Articles of Confederation” (p.63).  Equally telling, the emphasis on filing amicus briefs displaced coherent litigation strategies and put the foundations on fund-raising treadmills. Most damning of all for Powell’s business-led strategy were unexpected tensions between business interests and conservative ideology.  As Adam Smith cautioned long ago, business interests are not synonymous with the public interest however it is defined.

Teles’ cameo study of the Mountain States Legal Foundation illustrates the point.  With reliable funding from Joseph Coors, a long-time patron of right-wing causes, effective leadership in the early years by James Watts who later became President Reagan’s Interior [*634] Secretary, and a shared sense of grievance arising from the “Sagebrush Rebellion” in the Western states over the control of federal lands, the Mountain States Legal Foundation had several built-in advantages.  Nevertheless it faltered because its business allies expected returns on their “investments” and the foundation often filed amicus briefs in response to particular contributions or to encourage new ones. Matters came to a head when the foundation challenged on First Amendment grounds Denver’s grant of an exclusive cable television franchise to a local businessman, a grant widely supported by the Mile High City’s business community.  As an insider explained to Teles, the foundation’s suit “gored very powerful interests there, well connected to the Republican Party . . . Joe Coors resigned from our board [saying] . . . ’I founded MSLF . . . to take on the Sierra Club, not to do this sort of thing” (p.65).

Soul-searching about the strategy behind the first generation of public interest firms began in the late 1970s when Michael Horowitz (subsequently chief counsel of the Office of Management and Budget during the first Reagan administration) submitted a highly critical report to the Scaife Foundation.  The Horowitz Report redefined the goals of the legal counter-mobilization. Litigation alone could not dislodge legal liberalism.  Ties to business interests tethered conservative public interest firms and held them back from taking the moral high ground. Amicus briefs were “pufferies intended for naïve audiences of donors and not truly doing meaningful work” (p.71).  The aversion to basing organizations in Washington, D.C. had to be jettisoned in order to confront liberalism on its own turf.  Most important of all, the movement needed to redefine itself along clear, consistent libertarian lines with long-term strategies that would appeal to underdogs caught up in unresponsive legal institutions like black beauticians struggling under state regulations or lower middle class whites whose houses were threatened by eminent domain.  Conservatives had to become idealistic “good guys” limiting government and empowering civil society. 

The Horowitz Report doused cold water on patron enthusiasm for funding conservative public interest law firms but in time the foundations used the report to restructure how these firms operated  Two of these second generation firms are the subject of a separate chapter in which Teles compares the Center for Individual Rights (CIR), best known for its battles against affirmative action policies at the University of Texas and University of Michigan, and the Institute for Justice (IJ) whose fame soared after it turned defeat in KELO v. CITY OF NEW LONDON into a public policy success.  While the two firms differ significantly in many ways, they share important similarities.  For one thing, judicial activism no longer is a dirty word.  Instead both firms see judicial activism as a means of reviving old rights to protect the conservative goal of limited government; property rights and eminent domain offer just one example.  Clint Bolick (2007), co-founder of the Institute for Justice, recently argued in favor of judicial activism in a new book published by the libertarian Cato Institute.  The firms, seeing the value in an activist bench, are accordingly more strategic in the cases they select and [*635] keep a steady eye on whether a case has the potential to change the public policy agenda or the law.

Horowitz, like Powell, stressed that a “key site” to contest legal liberalism was the university.  In three chapters, Teles traces the winding, upward path of the law and economics movement and the seemingly inexorable growth of the Federalist Society.  The law and economics story has two parts.  The first deals with constructing the “mother ship” at the University of Chicago and the travails of Henry Manne to build law and economic centers at other universities and his final success at George Mason University.

excerpt: One of the group's funders was the John M. Olin Foundation, which invested millions of dollars in the law and economic movement – endowing university chairs, funding think-tanks and providing early support for the Federalist Society, which was founded in 1982 by former attorney general Ed Meese, controversial Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork and Ted Olsen—who years later would win the infamous Bush v. Gorecase before the Supreme Court in 2000 and then go on to serve as Bush’s solicitor general. The foundation said in a 2003 report to its trustees, “All in all, the Federalist Society has been one of the best investments the foundation ever made.”

...

Another way the wealthiest Americans have rigged the rules so more of the national income flows upward may be just as consequential, but less well understood. A 30-year campaign to push America's courts sharply to the right has borne abundant fruit for those in the top 1 percent.

We see it reflected in today's Supreme Court, which, having unleashed a flood of super-PAC cash into our political campaigns in a decision that was one of the most brazen examples of judicial activism in the court's history, now stands poised to overturn not only the Democrats' healthcare bill, but much of the jurisprudence that supported the welfare state developed since the New Deal.

A study by the Constitutional Accountability Center found that the Chamber of Commerce had won 65 percent of its cases heard by the court under Chief Justice John Roberts, compared to 56 percent under former Chief Justice William Rehnquist (1986-2005) and just 43 percent of the cases that came during the Burger court (1969-1986).

But that's only the beginning. “The Roberts Court," wrote Slate's Dahlia Lithwick, is “slowly but surely... giving corporate America a handbook on how to engage in misconduct. In case after case, it seems big companies are being given the playbook on how to win even bigger the next time.”

Many of the court's rulings have overturned long-standing precedents. While conservatives constantly rail against judges "legislating from the bench," it is far more common for right-leaning jurists to engage in “judicial activism” than those of a liberal bent. That's what several studies have concluded. Media Matters offered a run-down of a couple of prominent ones:

A 2005 study by Yale University law professor Paul Gewirtz and Yale Law School graduate Chad Golder showed that among Supreme Court justices at that time, those most frequently labeled "conservative" were among the most frequent practitioners of at least one brand of judicial activism -- the tendency to strike down statutes passed by Congress. Those most frequently labeled "liberal" were the least likely to strike down statutes passed by Congress.

A 2007 study published by University of Chicago law professor Thomas J. Miles and Cass R. Sunstein... used a different measurement of judicial activism: the tendency of judges to strike down decisions by federal regulatory agencies. Sunstein and Miles found that by this definition, the Supreme Court's "conservative" justices were the most likely to engage in "judicial activism" while the "liberal" justices were most likely to exercise "judicial restraint."

In a recent opinion, two federal appeals court judges suggested that all efforts to protect workers, consumers or the environment were unconstitutional, including regulatory efforts by the states. It's a radical view, but one that has gotten increasing traction in conservative legal circles. It is also the culmination of years of institutional investments by the corporate Right to advance what's come to be known as the “law and economics” movement, which analyzes legal rulings “costs” – essentially applying neoliberal economic logic to the field. Its advocates eschew the notion that human rights or economic fairness are inherently valuable factors for the law to consider.

The model has gained increasing influence in American courts, and that's no accident. In his book, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law, Johns Hopkins scholar Steven Teles writes that conservatives, reacting to what they viewed as liberal hegemony in the legal community of the 1960s, fought hard to shift the legal terrain rightward.

Spurred by their overlapping grievances, informed by an increasingly sophisticated of how to produce legal change, and coordinated by strategically shrewd group of patrons, conservatives began investing in a broad range activities designed to reverse their �� organizational weaknesses. While similar kinds of organizational development were happening in other domains … in no other area was the process of strategic investment as prolonged, ambitious, complicated and successful as in the law.

In 1998, the Washington Post reported that “Federal judges are attending expenses-paid, five-day seminars on property rights and the environment at resorts in Montana, sessions underwritten by conservative foundations that are also funding a wave of litigation on those issues in the federal courts.”

Funding for the seminars, run by a group called theFoundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE), also comes from foundations run by companies with a significant interest in property rights and environmental law issues.

One of the group's funders was the John M. Olin Foundation, which invested millions of dollars in the law and economic movement – endowing university chairs, funding think-tanks and providing early support for the Federalist Society, which was founded in 1982 by former attorney general Ed Meese, controversial Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork and Ted Olsen,  who years later would win the infamous Bush v. Gorecase before the Supreme Court in 2000 and then go on to serve as Bush’s solicitor general. The foundation said in a 2003 report to its trustees, “All in all, the Federalist Society has been one of the best investments the foundation ever made.”

In 2005, the Olin Foundation actually declared “mission accomplished” and closed up shop. The New York Times reported that after “three decades financing the intellectual rise of the right,” the foundation’s services were no longer needed. The Times added that the loss of Olin wasn’t terribly troubling for the movement, because whereas “a generation ago just three or four major foundations operated on the Right, today’s conservatism has no shortage of institutions, donors or brio.”

If the economics and law movement were to become the standard in our legal culture, it would represent a massive upward redistribution of wealth. Not only would “transfer payments” – unemployment benefits, assistance for needy families and the like – be deemed unconstitutional, but so would minimum wages, job training programs, subsidized student loans and most of our already threadbare social safety net. And that environment will have been purchased for a princely sum by those who have profited so handsomely from America's spiraling income inequality.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy: And Everything else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America.

sport ammo

http://mediamattersaction.org/transparency/organization/John_M_Olin_Foundation/connections

http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/John_M._Olin_Foundation

OLIN

Olin Wm simon, leveraged buyouts must fund

"non-egalitartian scholars" w/ grants; on hertiage bd. 2x $ 72

blinded

connected James Piereson http://mediamattersaction.org/transparency/people/James_Piereson

http://politicalfriendster.com/rateConnection.php?id1=554&id2=4037  Manhatt Inst tobacco

Milloy

dustup led to shift to right?

John M founder Olin Chemical

Olin purchased Winchester and business boomed in WWI. John Olin was a master inventor and

his name appeared on more than 20 patents, several of which dealt with Super-X which Olin

said, "You can get a thousand pounds of meat with one shell." 

In 1892, John's father Franklin formed Equitable Powder to manufacture black powder sold

chiefly to the mines in the area.

Olin's purchased Winchester to provide a market for powder that could be produced by The

Equitable Powder Company in the off season. "gun that won the west" WWi &II BAR

Founded on December 29, 1953, the Olin Foundation made its first contribution to Cornell

(Olin?s alma mater) in 1954 in the amount of $18,000. Twenty-three years after John Olin?s

death, theOlin Foundation closed on November 29, 2005, honoring Olin?s wish for the

foundation to last no more than a generation after his demise.

http://www.politicalfriendster.com/showPerson.php?id=3272&name=John-Merrill-Olin

Media Res C, newsbusters, GMI, frankenfood tobacco vfluence sic, env lit council

http://www.politicalfriendster.com/showPerson.php?id=7278&name=Environmental-Literacy-Counci

l

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olin_Corporation

In 1893, Mathieson Alkali Works acquired its neighbor, the Holston Salt and Plaster Corp., and Saltville became a quintessential company town. In Saltville it produced chlorine and caustic soda, producing a considerable amount of methyl mercury��by the company's own estimates, up to 100 pounds per day��into the soils and the North fork of the Holston River.[^^3]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olin_Corporation#cite_note-2) This site was declared a Superfund site in 1982.[^^4]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olin_Corporation#cite_note-3) In 1952, the Mathieson Chemical Company, as it was known by then, acquired the pharmaceutical firm of E.R. Squibb & Sons, spun off in 1968 and is now part of Bristol-Myers Squibb.[^^5]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olin_Corporation#cite_note-4)[^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olin_Corporation#cite_note-5)6]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olin_Corporation#cite_note-5)[^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olin_Corporation#cite_note-6)7]

Olin Industries and Mathieson Chemical Company merged in 1954 to form the Olin Mathieson Chemical Corporation, which adopted the name Olin Corporation in 1969. Under the management of Franklin Olin's sons, John M. and Spencer Truman Olin, it diversified into a wide variety of businesses including forest and paper products, cellophane, bauxite mining, and even camping and skiing gear manufacturing and home construction. It sold off most of these businesses in the 1970s and onwards, finally spinning off its specialty chemicals business on February 8, 1999 as Arch Chemicals, Inc.

Superfund

* American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research

* Center for Equal Opportunity

* Center for Individual Rights

* Eagle Forum

* Free Congress Foundation

* Heritage Foundation

* Hoover Institution at Stanford University

* Hudson Institute

* Manhattan Institute for Public Policy Research

* National Association of Scholars

* Palmer R. Chitester Fund

* Philanthropy Roundtable

* Project for the New American Century (PNAC) [citation needed]

SW says

The Foundation also gives large sums of money to promote conservative programs in the

country's most prestigious colleges and universities."[3][4][5] and it provided funding

support, along with the various foundations controlled by Joseph Coors and family, and

Richard Mellon Scaife, to create a chain of anti-environmental, pro-business, legal advocacy

organisations.

The Foundation is financed by profits from the Olin chemical and munitions fortune with

assets estimated at $90 million, $3 million of which goes to conservative advocacy groups.

The Foundation "supported right-wing causes for many years but became more focused on

grantmaking after William E. Simon took over as president in 1977." Simon, who had been

chosen to lead the Foundation by Olin, was followed by Michael Joyce, who left Olin in 1985

to lead the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. He has since returned to be Olin's

president.[6]

* American Enterprise Institute  (AEI),

* Brookings Institution,

* Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS),

* Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy,

* Council on Foreign Relations (CFR),

* Heritage Foundation,

* Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace,

* Hudson Institute,

* Independent Women's Forum,

* Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins

University,

* Manhattan Institute for Public Policy Research,

* Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

M oD

pres Wm Simon, Nixon tres sect

funded russell seitz 165

Olin Inst for Strategic StudiesHarvard

olin and bradley funded Brock hit book on anita hill

Statistics:

Public Company

Incorporated: 1892 as Western Powder Company

Employees: 12,800

Sales: $2.66 billion

Stock Exchanges: New York Pacific Chicago

SICs: 2812 Alkalies & Chlorine; 2842 Polishes & Sanitation Goods; 3351 Copper Rolling & Drawing; 3483 Ammunition except for Small Arms

Company History:

Olin Corporation is a Fortune 200 company whose businesses are concentrated in chemicals, materials and metals, defense, sporting ammunition, and aerospace. Olin Corporation has been a protean organization throughout its history, with a product list ranging from cigarette papers and cellophane to snow skis and home-building material.

Olin Industries was founded in 1892 as the Western Powder Company by a former baseball player named Franklin Olin. The Du Pont family and their Gunpowder Trust acquired 49 percent of Olin's company in 1909, and they nearly replaced Olin, who scrambled for the remaining 51 percent and retained control.

Western's first acquisition after the incident, Winchester Arms, was a defensive move against Du Pont,which might have purchased the company to deprive Western of a customer for its gunpowder. The Winchester plants, famous for "the guns that won the West," acquitted themselves admirably during the two world wars; for example, they put an important new gun, the M1 Carbine, into production in just 13 days. Besides the gunpowder and munitions factories, Western Powder also operated a brass works at that time.

When Franklin Olin retired, he kept most of the Western Powder Company's stock for himself and divided the rest between his two sons, Spencer and John. They consolidated Western's properties and renamed the new enterprise Olin Industries.Soon Olin Industries began to diversify into paper, fuel, petrochemicals, cellophane, and lumber.The company was managed by John and Spencer Olin along with Bill Hanes. All three were in their sixties, and the lack of a suitable candidate to succeed John, who was president, was the major concern of a company that was otherwise in excellent shape.

The lack of a logical successor was an important factor in John Olin's proposal to Tom Nicholls, the 44-year-old president of Mathieson Chemical Company, which manufactured ammonia and caustic soda, to merge their companies. Starting in 1947 Nicholls, with the help of his friend John Leppart, had transformed Mathieson, a small regional chemical company that concentrated on a few commodity chemicals, into a company with $366 million in sales--a 600 percent increase over Mathieson's performance before Nicholls took over. This dramatic turnaround was accomplished by a diversification into less cyclical products and the acquisition of companies with strong marketing organizations.

John Olin and Tom Nicholls were friends; in fact, they often went hunting together. The idea of a merger was first broached in 1951, but discarded because a satisfactory division of power did not seem possible. Nicholls headed a company almost equal to Olin in size, and neither he nor John Olin wanted to be subordinate to the other. Nevertheless, a merger remained tempting because it would further Olin's new expansion into chemicals and bring Mathieson closer to consumers. The companies had previously cooperated on a rocket fuels venture which proved they could work together.

During the initial discussions of a merger between the two corporations, Mathieson purchased Squibb, a well known manufacturer of pharmaceuticals that was only slightly smaller than itself. In 1953, while on a hunting trip, Olin finally convinced Nicholls that a merger was possible. Within a matter of days Bill Hanes had arrived at a satisfactory division of power. The new Olin-Mathieson would be run by a triumvirate of John Olin, Nicholls, and Hanes. Olin would be chairman, Nicholls president, and Hanes head of finance.

The press offered its congratulations in 1953 when the agreement took place. Many analysts remarked on the compatibility of the Olin and Mathieson operations and the apparent dovetailing of their strategic directions. Mathieson was moving from basic chemicals to consumer goods while Olin, a manufacturer of consumer goods, was moving into basic chemicals. The only indication of trouble came from inside the company. Said an Olin-Mathieson executive soon after the merger, "We'll have to keep Tommy (Nicholls) from expanding for the present; this is a time to digest."

However, the desire to diversify triumphed over prudence. Within 18 months of its incorporation the Olin Mathieson Chemical Company had purchased three new businesses: Marquardt Aircraft, Blockson Chemical, and the Brown Paper Mill Company. This last purchase alone cost $90 million. By 1958 Olin Mathieson was producing one of the widest assortments of products of any company in the United States, yet its strategy was not proving successful. Sales for that year were a disappointing $20 million, although Bill Hanes had said in 1956 that sales would soon be hitting $1 billion. The causes of Olin Mathieson's poor performance were manifold.

The August 1958 issue of Fortune magazine accused the company of allowing itself to be constantly sidetracked. Indeed, Olin Mathieson seemed to lack direction. Part of the problem lay in its strategy of diversification and part in the structure of the new company itself.Fortune called the management of Olin Mathieson "a loose confederation of tribal chieftains." This charge was borne out by a 1958 meeting where the 36 research chiefs met for the first time and two of them discovered that they had been doing identical research on a fuel additive.

The lack of communication and poor diversification strategy led to the 1957 purchase of an aluminum plant. The aluminum industry was an expensive one to enter and the purchase of the aluminum works put Olin Mathieson into debt. In addition, the timing of the purchase could not have been worse, as a soft market was imminent. The business community was surprised at the poor planning of the aluminum operation because Olin Mathieson had not secured a source of bauxite, a principal ingredient in aluminum manufacture and one that was frequently in short supply. For the next two decades Olin Mathieson would find its fortunes rising and falling with the profitability of aluminum.

Nicholls was soon promoted to the board, John Olin became chairman of the executive committee, and Stan Osborne became president. Osborne was a feisty but accessible administrator. He was also a Spanish history buff; in fact, he was engaged in writing a book on that very subject when he was promoted. Determined to avoid the corporate equivalent of the sinking of the Spanish Armada, he began to dispose of unprofitable and incompatible product lines and assure a supply of bauxite. Osborne undertook cost control measures, including a $20,000 cut in his own salary. The business press praised his damage control.

After the two bad years of 1957 and 1958 when sales declined, the balance sheet began to improve. In 1959 profits increased 17 percent over the previous year, but that rate of growth did not continue. Although Osborne's cost-cutting measures kept the company from disaster, he was clearly frustrated by the company's slow progress. He resigned in 1963 for a career in banking.

Throughout the 1960s Olin Mathieson continued to be plagued by the same problems that had come to light in 1958. In 1967 the new president, a man named Grand, initiated a program not unlike Osborne's recovery plan. Unprofitable divisions were ordered to show an eight percent yearly increase in profits. This was not an unattainable figure for most of the divisions. Even Squibb, which was responsible for a quarter of the company's sales, was producing a mediocre five percent return on assets. In 1967 Grand planned a program of expansion into recreation, housing, lumber, and chemicals. In 1969 the company adopted the name Olin Corporation.

In what was developing into a disheartening pattern, Olin celebrated the new decade with a decline in profits. A prolonged strike by American autoworkers decreased the market for aluminum. Furthermore, new environmental regulations were expensive. Two plants, one manufacturing DDT and the other soda ash, had to be shut down because they could not meet environmental protection standards. These closings resulted in a $26 million loss. The timing of Olin's new housing venture recalled its venture into aluminum, since the market went into a downslide soon after Olin entered it. Sporting goods, sold through the Winchester division, became one of the company's priorities. Olin ski equipment was marketed and sold successfully.

Grand died suddenly in 1971. In 1974 the next president of Olin, James Towey, was able to boast an 80 percent jump in earnings, largely due to the sale of the aluminum operations and polyester film factories which had been depressing earnings. The aluminum works had earned $19 million over a ten-year period and had lost $32 million. The chemicals division, always a company mainstay, performed well, and the agricultural products division prospered. Brass and paper, steady sources of income, held their ground. In 1975 the company continued to sell unprofitable product lines, such as a parka business it had bought a few years before.

In the late 1970s housing and Winchester Arms took on the role of the ill-fated aluminum works in suppressing profits. Winchester's operating profits plunged 37 percent in one year, despite the quality of its guns and their name recognition.

Forbes once referred to Olin as the world's longest-running garage sale. Indeed, the company had, and still has, a habit of buying unprofitable businesses and then selling them within a few years, often at a loss. In 1985 the profitable but slow-growing paper division was sold, along with the last of the home-building concerns. The company's most recent round of divestment caused shareholders' equity to drop by 25 percent, although its shares went up three points.

To reinvigorate the company, Olin looked to metal and chemical products, especially chemicals used by the electronics industry. This began with the expansion in electronics and aerospace during 1980. In 1985 Olin acquired Rockcor Inc., which produces rockets, gas generators, and data systems for battlefield intelligence, as well as devices to measure the strength of underground nuclear tests. In 1985 Olin lost twice as much money as it made the previous year.

The leaders of the company, John Johnstone, Jr., and chairman John Henske, cut back programs that cost the company a $330 million pretax charge in 1985, including car and boat flares, cellophane, skis, cigarette paper, and photographic chemicals. In 1991 Johnstone announced another round of streamlining, divesting several under-performing chemical lines and its European sporting ammunition business.

Olin vowed to focus on three core businesses: metals, chemicals and defense, and sporting ammunition. In 1992 the company established a new aliphatic diisocyanate (ADI) unit in Lake Charles, Louisiana, which prepared it for a major push into the area of performance urethanes, used in coatings for products on cars and appliances. The investment built on Olin's $450-million per year position in the urethane-based toluene diisocyanate (TDI) market. In order to expand its supply operations to the microelectronics industry, Olin built a new 211,000-square-foot plant in Mesa, Arizona, to produce a chemical used in the production of semiconductors, which was scheduled to open in the fourth quarter of 1995.

Strategic investments made over several years, combined with reductions in salaried personnel and other operating costs, enabled Olin to increase earnings as the economy strengthened. In early 1994 Olin acquired GenCorp's Aerojet medium caliber ammunition business, making Olin one of only two U.S. producers of medium caliber ammunition. Also during that year, the Brass, Electronic Materials, and Winchester divisions earned record operating profits, while Chlor-Alkali Products, biocides, pool chemicals, Ordnance, and Aerospace showed significant improvements. Under the leadership of Johnstone as chairman and CEO and Donald W. Griffin as president and COO, Olin posted record sales of $2.7 billion and earnings of $91 million, an important increase from 1993 sales of $2.4 billion and earnings of $40 million before a $132 million after tax-charge to income, which resulted in a net loss of $92 million that year.

As the company faced the new century, Olin planned to sharpen its cost-effectiveness, capitalize on global growth opportunities, fine-tune its business mix, and take actions needed to build on its strong market positions. For example, Olin Brass planned investments in 1995 and 1996 at its Indianapolis plant to modernize production equipment, improve efficiency, and broaden product capabilities for seamless copper alloy tubes used in specialized applications. Olin also focused on strengthening its position in pool chemical brands, including HTH, Pace, and Sock It brands. In 1994 Olin sold over 40 percent of its dry sanitizer pool chemical outside the United States as demand increased abroad. Olin's zinc Omadine biocide, used in antidandruff shampoos, held a leading position in the market for a long time, and the company exported a significant amount overseas to meet the increased demand for personal care products in the Far East.

Olin's letter to shareholders in its 1994 annual report stated: "While we were gratified by our progress, we're not at all satisfied with it. Our earnings may now be at respectable levels, but we're still a long way from where we want to be." Focusing on its core businesses and refining corporate objectives, the company continued to position itself for its next 100 years of business.

http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/Olin-Corporation-Company-History.html

mayer: In recent decades, members of several industrial dynasties have spent parts of their fortunes on a conservative agenda. In the nineteen-eighties, the Olin family, which owns a chemicals-and-manufacturing conglomerate, became known for funding right-leaning thinking in academia, particularly in law schools.