Our work is very important and you will find the latest information available there. Most of my posts are now at the Crime Prevention Research Center. My commentary on a broad array of economics and crime related issues. You will see a discrete jump in how important this bias is once you ask people about more than just events over the previous year.Ĭook and Ludwig redo should get a top figure of 16%, not 22% that Cook and Ludwig claim.Ībout Me Name: John Lott Location: Virginia, United States If so, people will remember the purchases, but not remember whether there was a background check that went along with it. As to the biases, the buying of a gun is probably a much more memorable event than whether there was a background check. The problem is that sales were massive before the Brady Act went into effect and then plummeted right after the law went into effect. One can't even just assume that purchases are uniformly made over this period. The longer the time period not only places more of the purchases before the FebruBrady Act but it also creates the type of biases that I discussed regarding the Washington Post survey for Maryland. It has disappointed me that Cook and Ludwig keep repeating this false claim.

You might think that this is pedantic, but more than 40 percent of their data is obtained during the November 1991 to November/December 1992 period. Note also that people are asked about purchases over the preceding year so questions asked in November 1994 cover November of each preceding year. If you go through the data, you will see you only get their sample size and numbers that match theirs if you go back for three years. If you look at the data you will see that the survey was from November 1991 to November/December 1994, not 19 as Cook and Ludwig keep claiming. A 1997 NIJ survey claims that they studied purchases of guns in 19.

John lott phil cook