JOHN LOTT UPDATE….Tom Spencer reminds me today to go take a look at Tim Lambert’s website, where he chronicles the ongoing adventures of prevaricating gun shill John Lott, something that I haven’t done lately. And whaddaya know, it’s a twofer: John Lott and Glenn Reynolds.
Long story short, here’s what happened: back in 2001 there was an NAS panel charged with doing a gun study. One of its members was a guy named Steve Levitt, and Glenn and Dave Kopel wrote an NRO article complaining that the panel was stacked. In particular, they complained that John Lott was not on the panel and that Levitt, who they said “has been described as ‘rabidly antigun,’” was.
Flash forward to 2003 and Lambert tells us that this line appears in Lott’s latest book:
Another panel member, Steve Levitt, an economist, has been described in media reports as being “rabidly anti-gun.”
And now the $64 question: who exactly was it that called Levitt “rabidly anti-gun” in the first place and then got quoted in Lott’s book? Glenn seem oddly reluctant to say, but if you know anything about Lott you can probably guess. Still, if you want to know for sure you’ll have to click on the link and visit Tim Lambert’s website, where he has all the juicy details. I don’t want to take away all of his fun.
UPDATE: By the way, remind me never to get on Tim’s bad side. If one reporter in a hundred were as tenacious as he is the Enron guys would have been sent to prison years ago and Trent Lott would have been roadkill back in the Reagan administration. Who knew that Australian lecturers in computer graphics were such tough cookies?
