|link| Posted 2:56 PM by Brian Linse

You Want A Pack of Smokes With That Uzi, Kid?

The New York Times reports in an editorial today that Robert Ricker, former NRA lawyer and former head of the industry trade group American Shooting Sports Council, has testified that the gun industry has known for a long time that some of their dealers are supplying firearms to criminals and underage users.

Looks like we have a new "Whisleblower".

Twelve California cities are charging the gun industry with violating state law by the manner in which they distribute their product. From The Times:

The gun industry has insisted, in this suit and others, that it has no knowledge of how its products fall into the wrong hands. But Mr. Ricker, whose two decades of service to the industry included a stint as a National Rifle Association lawyer, says gun makers have long been aware that distributors and dealers are diverting weapons illegally. The industry has looked the other way, he says, and silenced anyone in its ranks who showed an inclination to stop the practice.

So, who is this Ricker dude? Well, until this recent affidavit he seems to have been a rather strong advocate for the gun industry in general, and for sport shooting in particular. In February of 1999, he was named Gun Rights Defender of the Month by the Citizen's Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, the group that bills itself as "The Common Sense Gun Lobby". John Michael Snyder, CCRKBA Public Affairs Director, said:

"As a major firearms industry representative these days, Bob has a full plate, what with the anti-firearms lawsuits being filed in various jurisdictions throughout the country, as well as with the ongoing anti-gun rights activity in Washington, D. C. "Bob Ricker understands that the various legitimate elements of the gun rights movement in the United States must cooperate for the benefit of all and he’s working towards that goal. He certainly is most deserving of this Award."

Ricker's statements as quoted in the CCRKBA press release make him out to be a rather hard-core gun rights activist. In a chat on CNN's website, also from 1999, Ricker sounds thoughtful but firm in his defense of the industry, but you can detect the underlying assumption that his stance assumes the gun industry is behaving responsibly and legally:

We are here to protect the firearms industry, and basically guarantee that we have a legal and legislative environment that will permit and promote the lawful use of firearms. We work with Congress, with state legislators and others. We provide them information, technical data, and testimony basically on all facets of the industry from manufacturing down through the sale to the general public at licensed firearm dealers, and places of business. We're basically the voice of the firearms industry. [emphasis added]

The confiscators at The Brady Campaign are thrilled, of course, and well they should be with quotes from Ricker like this:

"Instead of requiring dealers to be proactive and properly trained in an effort to stop questionable sales, it has been a common practice of gun manufacturers and distributors to adopt a 'see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil' approach. This type of policy encourages a culture of evasion of firearms laws and regulations."

It does seem that an ASSC split with the NRA hard-line has been developing for some time. According to this report from 1999 in the Seattle PI.com:

For many years, most gun makers had been willing to let the NRA serve as their principal lobbyist and mouthpiece. But in the late 1980s, a number of smaller companies, concerned about legislative efforts to restrict gun sales, formed the American Shooting Sports Council to lobby for them in Washington. By the mid-1990s, most major firearms companies had joined the council, and under its executive director at the time, Richard Feldman, the group began taking increasingly independent stands from the rifle association.

The LA Times also has an article on Ricker's testimony.

This new development should provide an instructive lesson as we watch the various players line up on the two sides of the issue. Who will condemn Ricker and who will express outrage that the gun industry, like the tobacco industry, may have been acting illegally and immorally for all these years?

|link| Posted 7:45 PM by Brian Linse

Kopel Gets TAPped

Tapped has posted a response to Dave Kopel's NRO piece answering Tapped's criticism of Kopel's use of a dodgy BATF statistic. Dave says he ain't gonna play with Tapped no more, so we may not get another response from him. For the full story read Tapped and Kopel's NRO article, and then check out Kevin Drum's brief assessment and see if you agree. I do. Tapped has won this round.

|link| Posted 7:21 PM by Brian Linse

Lock and Load

Well, now it is clearly case closed on Iraq, courtesy of The Poor Man.

|link| Posted 5:44 PM by Brian Linse

Mind If I Dance Wif Yo Date?

I know that I am a little late in arriving to this particular dance party, but I can't let a gun debate pass by without tossing in my two cents worth.

Economist John Lott has found himself embroiled in a Bellesiles-like scandal over some of the data used in his book, More Guns, Less Crime. Slate's Tim Noah is asking if Lott is the Bellesiles of the Right, and Glenn Reynolds is doing his best to support his hero while Kevin Drum is asking if anyone anywhere doing gun policy research is not a shill for either of the extreme sides in the debate. Tapped and Dave Kopel are also going at it over another bit of questionable data.

AintNoBadDude was all over Lott back in July of last year when I posted links to two pieces that raise serious doubts about Lott's entire methodology. Read John Eggers, Jr. in Juris, and Ted Goertzel of Rutgers University, and then consider that Lott has clearly played fast and loose with the ethics of his study, and it will be difficult to conclude that More Guns, Less Crime has anything useful to contribute to the debate on gun policy. Here's a taste from the Goertzel article, Econometric Modeling as Junk Science:

Lott's work is an example of statistical one-upmanship. He has more data and a more complex analysis than anyone else studying the topic. He demands that anyone who wants to challenge his arguments become immersed in a very complex statistical argument, based on a data set that is so large that it cannot even be manipulated with the desktop computers most social scientists use. He is glad to share his data with any researcher who wants to use it, but most social scientists have tired of this game. How much time should researchers spend replicating and criticizing studies using methods that have repeatedly failed? Most gun control researchers simply brushed off Lott and Mustard's claims and went on with their work. Two highly respected criminal justice researchers, Frank Zimring and Gordon Hawkins (1997: 57) wrote an article explaining that:

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.

Zimring and Hawkins were right. Within a year, two determined econometricians, Dan Black and Daniel Nagin (1998) published a study showing that if they changed the statistical model a little bit, or applied it to different segments of the data, Lott and Mustard's findings disappeared. Black and Nagin found that when Florida was removed from the sample 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."

Eggers interviewed Professor Nagin:

Given the fact that his findings contradict Lott's hypothesis, I asked Professor Nagin to comment on whether Lott's research was believable or outlandish. "No, it's not outlandish, Nagin responded, "it is just not nearly as firm as his writings suggest. That is to say, you could not build public policy on it."

Though I believe that the fact that Lott would lie about the data supporting only one sentence of his book is reason enough to question the veracity of the entire book, I'd rather not focus on this point to the exclusion of the criticisms of his entire approach to his study. Is he the Bellesiles of the Right? Who gives a shit? In my opinion they are both useless to the gun policy debate.

But in answer to Kevin Drum's question; yes, there are people doing gun policy work who do not shill for the extremes. Reason Magazine has two of them: Daniel Polsby and Jacob Sullum. I've linked to these two pieces before, but they are so good I'll continue to link 'em up whenever possible. The crux of the biscuit here is that the Second Amendment needs to be treated as an individual liberty, and gun policy and regulation needs to result from a debate focused on that reality. I believe that the current situation benefits the pro-gun lobby by effectively elevating, rhetorically at least, the Second Amendment above all other personal liberties, and that if we were to take an approach to gun regulation similar to that which is applied to regulation of speech we would find it easier to pass effective gun laws. Read the Polsby article in it's entirety before you hit the keys to send me hate mail. It's all there.

Bottom line: Lott's book is bullshit junk science, and a pissing contest over the veracity of one sentence or one data set misses the point. Progress in gun policy will never be made until the US Supreme Court declares the Second Amendment an individual liberty, and the passion and fury of the confiscators and the gun nuts is set aside in favor of rational policy debate. I believe that an individual liberty interpretation of the Second would result in more and better gun regulation. I'd be interested to hear what some of the gun boys think.

UPDATE: Atrios notes that Lott was selling his junk science methods in the wake of the 2000 Florida election debacle.

MO' UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds, to his credit, points us to this Michele Malkin piece which does not favor Mr. Lott. And Dave Kopel is taking his marbles and going home after his little dust up over at Tapped. He leaves the game, I believe, having failed to persuade.

|link| Posted 1:13 PM by Brian Linse

Back In The High Life Again

After more than two months in London, I am finally back in LA where the sun shines and the women want to know what you can do for their careers. I have spent the last week trying to get caught up on all the blog fun that I missed, and will likley take a bit more time to get my bearings before I start to publish again.

My thanks to all of you who have been checking in during my hiatus, and I promise to be back in the groove soon.