IT’S TIME FOR GUN PARTISANS TO DUMP JOHN LOTT….I have been deeply remiss in not following up on the John Lott saga. Sorry. Luckily, Tim Lambert, as always, has been on the case.
Back in January we were all focused on the question of whether John Lott conducted an actual survey in 1997 (as he says he did) or whether he just made the whole thing up. I thought the fact patterns indicated that Lott was lying, but Tim, the acknowledged expert in Lott stalking, was more cautious. There was, after all, a guy in Minnesota ? David Gross ? who said he remembered being part of the survey.
At the time, Tim thought it unlikely that Lott had conspired with Gross, but a couple of months ago he changed his mind. It turns out that Gross is not just a gun owner, but has been the guiding force behind a bill to allow Minnesotans to carry guns in public:
For Gross, now in private law practice in a St. Louis Park, passage of the law has been somewhat of a crusade. He insists it has little to do with guns and everything to do with the Constitution. “Does my right to defend myself end at my front door? I don?t think so.” The fight has cost Gross financially and professionally. He estimates that his battle has cost him $1 million in lost salary and benefits. He also lost the stature he had in the city attorney?s office.
As Tim says, “It seems way too much of a coincidence, not just that someone with this much of a motive should happen to have been surveyed, but that the only person to have come forward should be such a person.”
The latest entries on Tim’s blog are about Lott’s miscoded data. Apparently Lott has tacitly admitted the coding errors and has corrected them on his website. However, he hasn’t re-run his regressions with the corrected data, which would show that his own data offers no support for the more guns, less crime hypothesis.
It’s one thing that Lott is still revered by the NRA, but why does the mainstream media still give him the time of day? He’s rather plainly a liar, and such an obvious one that it’s hardly a partisan attack to say so.
And why haven’t Eugene Volokh and Glenn Reynolds been following this? The Bellesiles defenders eventually faced up to the mountain of evidence against him and admitted that his book was bogus. When will the gun partisans finally do the same with Lott?
