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A Scholar Under the Gun
February
2001
by Mark Alden Branch '86
At the
Yale Law School, as in most of academia, job titles are examined
as carefully as Supreme Court decisions. So
it riles more than one faculty member there when the media refer
to economist John Lott as a "Yale professor." Lott is in his second
one-year term as a senior research scholar at the Law School, a
position that comes with a salary and an office but not the title
"professor."
But there
may be more to these faculty objections than just concern for academic etiquette. Lott happens to be an advocate of laws permitting citizens
to carry concealed weapons -- a position outlined in his 1998 book More
Guns, Less Crime. Lott, an economist by training, examined
the effect of "concealed-carry" laws on crime; in his book, he offers
statistics demonstrating that such laws reduce crime rates -- and
furthermore, that laws limiting access to guns have no demonstrable
positive effect.
Lott did not start
his gun research expecting such results. He says he merely wanted to do a better
job of compiling and analyzing data. "If I'd known gun ownership offered this
kind of benefit," he says, "I wouldn't have waited until I was 40 to write the
book."
While gun-control
advocates have questioned Lott's methodology and even his integrity, conservatives
have delighted in his research, and Lott has become a frequent contributor to
the right-of-center editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and Washington
Times.
Those credentials
don't always sit well in academia, though. At 42, Lott finds himself
with a stack of publications, teaching experience, and a national
reputation, but without a tenure-track
job, a fact that at least one colleague attributes to his gun research.
"I always assumed that in academia people valued discussion and exchange of ideas," says Lott. "I've been dissuaded from that assumption
over time."
Lott, who received
his PhD from UCLA, has taught at six universities and served as chief economist
for the United States Sentencing Commission. He has had positions in business
schools, law schools, economics departments, and public policy programs, and he
is drawn to research subjects that are part of public-policy debates. In addition
to his work on guns, he has examined the effect of campaign contributions on elected
officials' voting records (negligible, he says) and the consequences of affirmative-action
programs on the effectiveness of police departments (significantly negative).
Lott's record leaves
him open to accusations of conservative bias in his work, but he bristles at the
notion that his preconceptions drive his conclusions. "I rarely hear such charges
against people on the left," he says. "But I get it a lot, and I have to spend
a lot of time describing cases where my research had a more 'liberal' outcome."
Lott says his position
at the Law School -- which requires no teaching -- has been a boon to his research efforts. Asked how friendly his Law School colleagues have been, he smiles, hesitates,
and says, "Plenty of people have been very nice."  |
