--- Jordan Hayes <jmhayes at j-o-r-d-a-n.com> wrote: >
This is a joke, right?
>
> His big breakthrough is that his data is better
> because he uses
> subscription information to Guns & Ammo magazine
> (about 500k
> subscribers) to estimate gun ownership?
>
> /jordan
Heh, I dunno. The section on proving that G&A subscription is a good instrument for gun ownership looks a bit hysterical to be true. But on the other hand, proving that Guns & Ammo readership is correlated with murder rates isn't proving nothing. And it strikes me that G&A subscriptions are likely to be a much better indicator of what's fucked-up about guns in America than actual gun ownership, since as you've regularly and convincingly argued, guns are owned by all sorts of normal people for all sorts of normal reasons. But if the American Guns & Ammo is anything like its UK counterpart, I'd say that reading it is certainly a decent instrument for something or other.
in other news, Duggan's critique of Lott & Mustard is basically the same as Tim Lambert's; that the counties which passed CCW laws didn't actually see higher gun ownership (there weren't "more guns").
In unrelated news, I still dislike the phenomenon of the blurring of the distinction between econometrics and criminology.
dd
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