MORE GUNS, LESS HONESTY?….Via Instapundit, Clayton Cramer prints John Lott’s response to charges that he faked a survey for his book More Guns, Less Crime.
No, I take that back: Lott doesn’t actually respond at all, he just says he has now redone the survey and come up with similar results. This completely evades the point. No one is all that concerned with the precise results of the survey ? which are not especially crucial to his overall thesis ? but with the fact that he apparently lied about conducting a survey in the first place. As Clayton Cramer dryly notes, it would “raise serious credibility questions.”
It would indeed. And don’t you think that we would then be well advised to take everything else Lott says rather skeptically?
POSTSCRIPT: Apparently this mini-tempest has been brewing for about six months, but no one in the blogosphere felt like writing about it during that time. If Lott hasn’t been able to come up with a better excuse than “my dog ate it” after six months, I doubt he’s going to do any better in the future. And, yes, “many will choose to draw unflattering conclusions.”
