Of the 86 countries where we have identified mass public shootings, the US ranks 56th per capita in its rate of attacks and 61st in mass public shooting murder rate. Norway, Finland, Switzerland and Russia all have at least 45 percent higher rates of murder from mass public shootings than the United States.
When Lankford’s data is revised, the relationship between gun ownership rates and mass public shooters disappears.
How could that be? One possibility is that guns don’t just enable mass shooters; gun owners can also deter and prevent such shootings. Another is that culture — not gun ownership — is a bigger factor in shootings.
The media should be wary of any researchers who fail to let others look at their data.
In response to the dispute surrounding the missing survey, Lott created and used “Mary Rosh” as a sock puppet to defend his own works on Usenet and elsewhere. After investigative work by blogger Julian Sanchez, Lott admitted to use of the Mary Rosh persona.[64] Sanchez also pointed out that Lott, posing as Rosh, not only praised his own academic writing, but also called himself “the best professor I ever had”.
Many commentators and academics accused Lott of violating academic integrity, noting that he praised himself while posing as one of his former students[73][74] and that “Rosh” was used to post a favorable review of More Guns, Less Crime on Amazon.com. Lott has claimed that the “Rosh” review was written by his son and wife.[74]
Believe it or not I had always had a problem with Lankford’s methodology. Going back to the old forum…Something just didn’t quite jive with his statistics. I got into an argument on twitter with a classmate of my son’s and she literally lambasted me about his stats being correct, when I couldn’t see how they made sense. How could the revered mathematician be incorrect and what did I know. I went back and found our Tweets. Everything that is article states were the arguments I made almost a year ago. How could Lankford possibly know about mass shootings in places in Africa, Asia and the like when many of these things occurred with no records of them happening. Much of it was correlational data that makes no difference. It is not hard to make correlational data say what ever you want. But this is no surprise to me. I always felt that Lankford fudged his stats to make his case. We shall see how this pans out. Just saying it is not a surprise. Those of us with statistical and data analysis backgrounds have learned to be suspicious of any study.