Joseph Meehan wrote:


2. There are academic papers on the subject. Here's one: "Multiple
Victim Public Shootings, Bombings, and Right-to-Carry Concealed
Handgun Laws: Contrasting Private and Public Law Enforcement "

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c...ract_id=161637

You really have to wonder about this paper when one of the two
sources is:

University of Chicago Law School; National Bureau of Economic Research
(NBER)

Trust me, I am an Economist and while we are really good at
turning out numbers and evaluating them, we are not experts in law
enforcement.
I don't really see where the other writer who's connections appear
to be a law school was much better qualified.


Conversely, people who are good at law enforcement are not necessarily good
at crunching numbers.

As the author of "Freakonomics" pointed out, the science of economics CAN be
used analyze a lot of human interaction. For example, he demonstrated why
most drug dealers lived with their mothers (read the book).

What Lott (and others) did is tabulate crime figures from all 3050 counties
in the U.S. and correlated them against firearm usage and concealed handgun
laws. He used regression analysis to control for some thirty-odd variables
(age, income, education, etc.) in an attempt to discover cause-and-effect.

Now whether he was adding up assaults or family income, gun usage or
percentage of income invested in savings, is immaterial. The math is the
same. The "science" of economics is not confined to wages, production, and
GNP.

One further note, it is not sufficient to discount a finding by questioning
the qualifications of its proponents. This reverse "appeal to authority" is
similar to "if you can't fault the message, condem the messenger."

If there is a flaw in Lott's methodology or conclusion, state it; if someone
using the same data can reach a differing conclusion, we'd all like to see
it. Whether Lott is a criminologist, lawyer, or rodeo clown is irrelevant.