A Clarification on Data Availability

Abstract

John R. Lott Jr. recently responded (“Research fraud, public policy, and gun control,” Letters, 6 June, p. [1505][1]) to an earlier Editorial (“Research fraud and public policy,” D. Kennedy, 18 Apr., p. 393) that stressed the need for integrity in research and alluded to serious allegations of academic misconduct by Lott in his efforts to advance the thesis that more guns will lead to less crime. In the course of his reply, Lott seems to deflect attention from the charges that have been leveled against him by making an untrue allegation that Ian Ayres and I have failed to give him the data related to our work showing that adoptions of concealed carry laws are not associated with drops in crime. As I assume Lott knows (since he responded to our paper), we state in footnote 33 of our paper “Shooting down the more guns, less crime hypothesis” ([1][2]) that the data set and computer programs we used are available on the Web, and indeed they are. In fact, I have always made my data available to any researcher for this work and every other research project I have worked on (and Lott has asked for and received from me data on other research projects of mine). 1. 1.[↵][3]1. I. Ayres, 2. J. J. Donohue , Stanford Law Rev. 55, 1193 (2003). [OpenUrl][4][Web of Science][5] [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.300.5625.1505a [2]: #ref-1 [3]: #xref-ref-1-1 View reference 1. in text [4]: {openurl}?query=rft.jtitle%253DStanford%2BLaw%2BRev.%26rft.volume%253D55%26rft.spage%253D1193%26rft.genre%253Darticle%26rft_val_fmt%253Dinfo%253Aofi%252Ffmt%253Akev%253Amtx%253Ajournal%26ctx_ver%253DZ39.88-2004%26url_ver%253DZ39.88-2004%26url_ctx_fmt%253Dinfo%253Aofi%252Ffmt%253Akev%253Amtx%253Actx [5]: /lookup/external-ref?access_num=000182946200003&link_type=ISI