The Latest Media Matters attack: CBS Evening News Allows me To "Falsely Connect Gun Laws To Higher Murder Rates"

Since Media Matters latest attack piece leads off with just referencing their list of all their attacks on me, let me start with this link.

Lott is technically correct that the D.C. murder rate in 1976 -- the year a ban on private ownership or possession of handguns in nearly all circumstances went into effect -- was 26.8 people per 100,000 residents, and was 31.4 in 2008, the last year the ban was in place. But those two data points don't tell the whole story. For example, the murder rate in the last full year in which D.C. did not have a gun ban, 1975, was 32.8  -- higher than the murder rate when the ban ended.

People can judge for themselves what I have written about the crime rates in DC.  DC's murder rate was falling relative to the other largest fifty cities prior to the ban and they rising relative to those cities afterwards.  

Data from Australia also casts doubt on Lott's premise that more restrictions on firearms equal more murders. Following a series of mass shootings that culminated with the 1996 Fort Arthur massacre of 35 people, Australia enacted extremely restrictive gun laws that placed strong limits on firearm ownership -- especially for handguns and semi-automatic rifles -- and confiscated 650,000 privately owned guns. 

My comment was about gun bans.  The Australian gun buyback reduced gun ownership dramatically, but after that people were allowed to go out and buy guns again (though they now had to get licensed in many cases).  The purchases eventually raised the gun ownership rate back to where it was before the buyback.  A full discussion can be seen in my testimony available here.

Media Matters misdirects on FBI report on mass shootings

Media Matters has put out its typical misinformation.  This time on Jason Riley's piece on the now acknowledged errors in the FBI report on public shootings.  As I wrote last October in a post at the Crime Prevention Research Center:

While the FBI report provides graphs illustrating “active shooting incidents,” not mass shootings, given the way that the report was written, the media has understandably interpreted the report as implying that mass public shootings have massively increased over time. . . .

The bottom line here is that neither Media Matters nor some of the authors from a FBI report on public shootings were able to defend the data used in the FBI report so they focus on a red herring, whether the media got confused about the report being on mass public shootings.  Media Matters doesn't even try to defend the 20 missing mass shooting cases that should clearly have been included in the Blair and Martaindale data set.  Nor does Media Matters try to defend the way that the FBI report measured active shooter cases.

Jason Riley explicitly mentions that Blair and Martaindale complain that the media misunderstood their point on the issue of Mass shootings/active shooters (Riley writes: "[Blair and Martaindale] said that the news media “got it wrong” last year when they 'mistakenly reported mass shootings were on the rise'”, Riley provides a directly link to their piece in the ACJS, and John Lott's report explicitly spends a great deal of time discussing the problems with their measure of "active shooters."  Whether one wants to lump together mass public shootings with cases where a shot is fired in public and no one is hit, Lott's point was that Blair and Martaindale's measure of these active shooter cases is biased towards picking up just recent cases and thus tends to make it look as if there were an increase in public shootings over time.  

My newest piece at Fox News: "Media Matters, the facts and me"

My newest Fox News piece starts this way:

With just one telephone call this year, Erik Wemple of the Washington Post was able to convince Media Matters to let me respond to their attacks on me in the comments section of their website — after they ignored my emails, telephone calls, numerous tweets and posts for seven years. 

Media Matters purports to correct misinformation that the “conservative” media puts out, but, ironically, they have systematically hidden comments critical of their work from their readers. They have a blog where it appears that conservatives and others can respond, but they don’t tell their readers that they have regularly removed responses that they couldn’t answer. 

I have been attacked in over 80 posts on Media Matters over the years. They have even criticized reporters from such places as the Washington Post and the New York Times just for interviewing me. They have described me as a “discredited gun researcher.” They have claimed “Gun Advocate John Lott Lashes out at Trayvon Martin’s Mother.” They say I’ve misrepresented Obama’s record on guns, what “assault weapons” are and the views of police on gun control. They have used doctored pictures of me and screen shots of posts. 

Media Matters uses a hit-and-run strategy: Attack, and move on to the next attack. They never acknowledge responses, even those published in major media like the ones I’ve written for Fox News.  

If Media Matters started engaging in debates, their readers would quickly learn that their criticisms of others involve mischaracterizations, carefully edited quotes and outright lies. Their unwillingness to post contrary comments says a lot about their inability to defend themselves. 

A typical example was their March 20 post covering a piece I wrote for FoxNews.com on Vivek Murthy, President Obama's nominee for surgeon general. Media Matters’ headline read: "On Obama's Surgeon General Nominee, It's Medical Experts Vs. Discredited Gun Zealots." With 288 mainly positive comments on their post, Media Matters apparently worried that people might find the ones I posted with a link to the discussion on my website. So Media Matters simply removed my comments. . . . .

The piece continues here.

Media Matters' systematic removal of my responses from their website, also most of my responses to their attacks in one place

I was going to post this in June this year when I thought that the Washington Post's Eric Wemple was going to run a story on what Media Matters' behavior, but I put it off as I waited for him to run something.  In any case, here is the information that I was going to post:

ORIGINAL POST:

Media Matters' practices what I call hit-and-run journalism, where they make an attack and ignore any response that is provided.  I have tried over about seven years to put up comments on their website responding to these claims (often quotes out of context or deliberately misread data).  It appears to me that Media Matters wants to leave their readers with the impression that the other side never provides a response to their claims.  

Media Matters has removed all sorts of comments that I have placed on their website (indeed, I never kept count, but it is a lot), even ones that involve me explaining to people why my eyebrows are deformed because of surgery that I had as a kid.  Here is one case recently where they made the mistake of removing my comments, but not the comments that responded to my original post.

After Erik Wemple from the Washington Post contacted them about their removal of my comments, some recent ones reappeared.  In this screen shot you can see Media Matters putting back the links to my response to one of their attacks (in this case see the second comment from the bottom).

Media Matters apparently told Wemple that my comments were removed because their readers had tagged them as offensive.  But Media Matters only very recently changed their system for putting up comments.  Prior to that they would have to approve someone twelve times before their comments would automatically be posted on their website.  The problem is that their screeners would virtually never let any of my comments through (surely not enough that I ever got close to the magic number of twelve).  This problem over many years had absolutely nothing to do with their readers supposed complaints.  In addition, Media Matters confirmed to Wemple that I had previously complained to them multiple times over the last seven years about them refusing to publish my comments.

More information will be provided soon.  But you can see that I have long complained about Media Matters sanitizing its comment section.  Indeed, I have complained in person several times to people from David Brock on down from at least 2008.  I have also made notes about this attempt to shield their readers from my responses on my website (see links below) as well as on Twitter.  A couple of my many responses to Media Matters posts on Twitter can be seen here.  One from May 2012 (note that I only joined Twitter in March 2012):

Here is one from mid-2013.

Here are numerous other Tweets from 2013 and the beginning of 2014.

I also have copies of emails that I sent them.  Other exchanges about there unwillingness to post my comments were made in person and on the telephone.

When Media Matters has attacked me, I would write up a response and post a link to the comment on their website.  Here are 23 times that I wrote up and posted, though I haven't gone through everything that I have written and I am sure that there were more responses.  Below I first show Media Matters' title and then a link to their claims and then my response.

-- Who Is Gun Advocate John Lott?

My response

-- Watch A Medal Of Honor Recipient Smack Down A Pro-Gun Researcher's "Foolish" Plan To Arm Troops On Bases

My response

-- On Obama's Surgeon General Nominee, It's Medical Experts Vs. Discredited Gun Zealots

My response

-- The NRA Encourages Its Members To Lie To Their Families At Thanksgiving

My response

-- Gun Researcher John Lott Offers False Firearm Statistics Days Before Congressional Appearance

My response

-- Gun Advocate John Lott: Travyon Martin's Mother Used As A Prop To Make Stand Your Ground Seem Racist

My response

-- The Nine Worst Claims About Guns From John Lott's New Book

My response

-- New Report Debunks Right-Wing Falsehood About Public Mass Shootings

My response

-- Why Is NY Times Citing Discredited Gun Researcher John Lott?

My response

-- Gun "Researcher" Pushes Sham Statistics In The Wall Street Journal

My response

-- Discredited Gun Researcher John Lott's Failed Attempt To Correct Obama's Gun Statistic

My response and a Washington Post Fact Checker article available here.

-- John Lott Tries To Substantiate His Debunked Assertions By Repeating Them

My response

-- John Lott Vs. The FBI

My response

-- "Mother Jones and Media Matters bungle study on Mass Public Shootings" 

My response.

--  "Napolitano And John Lott Advocate For Allowing People To Carry Concealed Guns Without Permits" 

My response

-- Coulter: High-Capacity Magazine Put Loughner "At A Disadvantage" During Massacre

My response

-- John Lott Continues Media Tour In Defense Of "Kill At Will"

My response

-- John Lott Tries To Substantiate His Debunked Assertions By Repeating Them

My response

-- Progressive Economists Refute AP, Defend The Buffett Rule

My response

-- Fox Column Shrugs Off Unprecedented Obstruction Of Obama's Judicial Nominees

My response

Other responses to Media Matters by me:
Media Matters, 'Stand Your Ground' and me 
David Brock, Media Matters and gun control hypocrisy
MEDIA MATTERS' POTENTIALLY LETHAL DISTORTIONS ON GUNS

"Media Matter's dishonest attacks on Fox News" -- discussion here.

Media Matters has also done everything from doctoring pictures of me (see here) to .

Here is a response that I didn't post on Media Matters website.

-- Fox's Bolling Inadvertently Advocates For Gun-Free Zones

My response.

Here is a response that I tried posting about seven weeks after I sent Erik Wemple the original story.

-- "Gun Researcher John Lott Relies On Falsehoods To Downplay Gun Violence Threat To Women"

My response

Finally, let me point to a column that Ann Coulter has on this general topic, where she takes on the claims that keep on calling me "Discredited." See Ann's column available here.

Media Matters gets things wrong again: "Gun Researcher John Lott Relies On Falsehoods To Downplay Gun Violence Threat To Women"

Media Matters defense of the recent Moms Demand Action is available here.

On May 24th, Shannon Watts, the president of Moms Demand Action, put out a tweet concerning violence against women in the US compared to other countries.  The impression surely created was that the US is the worst country in the world in terms of violence against women.  On two separate times I tweeted her back to ask her where she got the data for this claim (most recently asking about it two days ago).  In neither case did I get a response.


In a piece that I published today at National Review Online, I pointed out that the "Data from the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) allows you to break down murders either by the sex of the victim or by whether firearms are used, but it doesn’t allow users to identify both these categories simultaneously."  For many years the World Health Organization also hasn't provided such data.  While Moms Demand Action never responded to my questions about their data source, it turns out that they were pointing to homicide data from 1994 to 1999, not recent data.  Just as an aside, the US homicide rate was about 60 percent higher over that period than it was last year.

Now let's get to the main points.
1) "Lott further misled by claiming that the proper comparison between countries would involve examining 'homicide rates'"

The "84% of female firearm homicides in 25 countries are in US" claim compares the total number of homicides for women without adjusting for population.  To be included in their list of countries (p. 1): "We used data from only those high-income countries that had populations over 2 million."  By contrast, in 1995, the US population was about 265 million people.  As I pointed out in my piece: "Moms Demand Action’s claim doesn’t make much sense anyway; they shouldn’t compare the raw number of homicides, since that doesn’t account for differences between countries in population size. Comparing homicide rates makes a lot more sense. Map 1.6 from the UNODC shows that in 2012 the U.S. had one of the world’s lower rates of homicide against females."  As far as I can tell, Media Matters never explains why it is misleading to compare rates than the total number of homicides.

For all the countries in the world the United Nations provides this Figure (click on it to make it larger).  Not only is the US in the lowest of the six grouping of countries provided by the UN, but within this homicide rate of 0 to 3 per 100,000 women, the rate for the US is about 1 per 100,000 women.

Media Matters claims: "Lott's purpose was to distract from violence perpetrated against women."  But as far as I can tell, I was looking at total homicides committed against women.  I am not sure how that distracts from the issue of "violence perpetrated against women."

2) Homicide rates in developed countries.

As to the study in the Journal of the American Medical Women's Association, the normal way to break these comparisons down is by developed versus non developed countries.  In this figure are the female homicide rates for developed countries in 2011 using the UNODC data.  If one cares about total homicides and not how the homicides were committed, you can see the numbers here.  By the way, looking at homicides and not murders biases the numbers somewhat against the US because of the inclusion of justifiable homicides.


(Click on figure to make it bigger.)

3) "The fact is the murder rate in the United States is much higher compared to other high-income nations, with the discrepancy being largely driven by gun murders."

For a discussion on this point please see these two posts here and here.
4) "[m]ore than twice as many women are killed with a gun used by their husbands or intimate acquaintances than are murdered by strangers using guns, knives, or any other means."

What isn't explained here is that intimate acquaintances include crime involving prostitutes and johns or pimps.  On the more general point, the real risk factor is whether the attacker has a violent criminal record, not whether a gun is owned in the home.

UPDATE: Possibly some context is needed here.  One of the points of Moms Demand Action's claim is to make people fearful of guns in the home.  The response that I made is that many of these deaths are not involving events between what most people are thinking about regarding "their husbands or intimate acquaintances."  Being a prostitute is simply a more dangerous occupation than most women engage in, and thus women can reduce their risks by not engaging in this type of work.

5) Further note on the the Journal of the American Medical Women's Association study.

The study uses the percentage of suicides committed with guns as their proxy for gun ownership rates.  Unfortunately, since the method of suicide varies greatly by gender and other social characteristics, the measure is more a proxy for demographics than it is a measure of gun ownership rates.

Since Media Matters regularly rewrites their pieces after I have posted my comments, I have been taking screen shots of their original posts (click on screen shot to enlarge).

Media Matters gets judicial confirmations wrong

In its latest broadside against me, Media Matters attacks my Fox News column this week on judicial confirmations.  

But As Lott himself acknowledges, numerous analyses (including one by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service) have shown that President Obama's "rhetoric" is true -- his nominees have been blocked at unprecedented levels. Lott dismisses these studies by highly reputable sources because supposedly their "numbers are fundamentally flawed,"  a bold claim from a source whose research on gun violence has been repeatedly and seriously discredited. . . .

Ironically, Media Matters attacks my calculations but doesn't explain how my calculations were done, how they compared to the other studies that both I and they cite, and, most importantly,  why the method used in the other studies is preferable.  Unlike, Media Matters' name calling, I tried to explain the different approaches and why my approach was preferable.

But, these numbers are fundamentally flawed.
These studies don't look at what finally happens to nominees, only what happens at some arbitrary cut off date, such as last fall or at the end of a president's first term.
In reality, many of the longest confirmation battles involve nominations made during a president's first term and not finished until some time during his second term.
A president’s decision to make nominations late in a congressional cycle can also strongly influence the results. . . . 

Does Media Matters think that it is wrong to see what the final outcome is for nominees?  Apparently so, but no explanation is offered for why that is the case.  Does Media Matters think that it is wrong to take into account that Obama has been making his nominations relatively lated in the congressional cycle?  Apparently so, but again no explanation is offered.  No discussion is offered for why my arguments are wrong.

Finally, let me know that I have previously responded to the attack that I am "a source whose research on gun violence has been repeatedly and seriously discredited."

For the "repeatedly" claim see the response available here.
For the "seriously discredited" claim see the response available here.

There really isn't much else to respond to here.   I have no expectation that Media Matters will post my comments nor will they respond to what I write here, just at they have ignored my past posts on their "repeatedly" and "seriously discredited" attacks.  Presumably they just want to protect their readers from knowing that there is a response.

Is Gun Research by John Lott Discredited?: Responses to Media Matters' false claims

Note that I have tried to make many of these responses after the posts that Media Matters has made about me, but they do not allow me to put them up in the comment section.  I have tried putting out these points on twitter or in a few Fox News op-eds, but Media Matters never responds to those discussions, presumably because it would draw attention to my responses.  Unfortunately, as I have discovered over the years, Media Matters is uncritically read by many in the media, and possibly that is another reason that they don't allow my responses to be posted.  I also think that by constantly posting discussions about me being "discredited" they hope to influence Google searches (see the screen shot below from this morning showing a total of about 160 posts where they attack me (some of the 172 are not really about me)).  Anyway, here are some of my responses:

"The Nine Worst Claims About Guns From John Lott's New Book." -- response is available here.

"Who Is Gun Advocate John Lott?" -- response is available here.

"Mother Jones and Media Matters bungle study on Mass Public Shootings" -- response is available here.

"Why Is NY Times Citing Discredited Gun Researcher John Lott?" -- response is available here in the section labeled "update".

"Gun "Researcher" Pushes Sham Statistics In The Wall Street Journal" -- response is available here.

"Discredited Gun Researcher John Lott's Failed Attempt To Correct Obama's Gun Statistic" -- all one needs to see is the Washington Post Fact Checker article available here.  Kessler is making a similar argument to the one that I made here.  Will Media Matters attack Kessler in the same way that they attacked me?

"John Lott Tries To Substantiate His Debunked Assertions By Repeating Them" -- response available here.

"Gun Advocate John Lott: Travyon Martin's Mother Used As A Prop To Make Stand Your Ground Seem Racist" -- response available here.

"John Lott Vs. The FBI" -- response available here.

Coulter: High-Capacity Magazine Put Loughner "At A Disadvantage" During Massacre --  response available here.

"Progressive Economists Refute AP, Defend The Buffett Rule" -- response available here.

"Napolitano And John Lott Advocate For Allowing People To Carry Concealed Guns Without Permits" -- response available here.

"John Lott Tries To Substantiate His Debunked Assertions By Repeating Them" -- response available here.

"The NRA Encourages Its Members To Lie To Their Families At Thanksgiving" - response available here.

"John Lott Continues Media Tour In Defense Of "Kill At Will"" -- response available here

"Gun Researcher John Lott Offers False Firearm Statistics Days Before Congressional Appearance" -- response available here

"Fox Column Shrugs Off Unprecedented Obstruction Of Obama's Judicial Nominees" -- response available here

Other responses to Media Matters by me:
Media Matters, 'Stand Your Ground' and me 
David Brock, Media Matters and gun control hypocrisy
MEDIA MATTERS' POTENTIALLY LETHAL DISTORTIONS ON GUNS

"Media Matter's dishonest attacks on Fox News" -- discussion here.

Media Matters doctoring my picture is discussed here.

Often Media Matters and others will point to one single paper or two that criticize my work.  In fact, there is a large academic literature that exists on these topics, and when you look at the whole literature you will see that most academic peer-reviewed studies support my findings (see a list of published research in Table 2 available here).

A list of all my posts regarding Media Matters is available here.

UPDATE: Ann Coulter has a discussion on this attempt to keep on calling me "Discredited." See Ann's column available here.  One should also note the rest of the academic research on this topic.