This post is adapted from a comment I have in a Chronicle reader political blog - Blue Bayou.
John Lott is a lying propagandist for the gun lobby. All of his statistical work is suspect, and not only about guns. He has been so outrageously false in his claims and so twisted in the false identities he establishes to pretend someone is supporting him he has become the subject of extensive ridicule.
Short summary
http://www.whoismaryrosh.com/
Lott attempted to perform a statistical study for the Republican Party on the Florida 2000 vote. This attempt was notable for producing a long response in an official appendix to a Senate Subcommittee report documenting his incompetence - the famous appendix X.
A professor at Rutgers University mentioned him prominently in an analysis of researchers lying with econometrics - pdf.
Here is a long article in Mother Jones reviewing problems with his work and his repeated prevarications and equivocations to explain non-replicable results. Yes, Mother Jones is a left-wing source. John Lott's entire career has been to support right-wing causes and so left-wing sources are more motivated to report on his pattern of behavior.
The popular book Freakonomics discusses Lott's apparently fabricated research and Lott has filed a lawsuit against the authors. Some recent discussion on this here.
His notoriety and the lawsuit have finally caused the mainstream media to pay attention. From a recent LA Times Op-Ed:
If you Google "John Lott" and "research fraud," [here] you get nearly 150 results, starting off with a 2003 article published in Science magazine by Donald Kennedy, the editor in chief, which criticizes Lott's "cooked data." You get an article by Yale Law School professors Ian Ayres and John Donohue, published in the Stanford Law and Economics Working Paper series, who have run the numbers. "In most states," they wrote in 2002, right-to-carry laws "have been associated with more crime," not less. Most important, you get the exhaustive 2004 report from the prestigious National Research Council, which found "no credible evidence" supporting Lott's thesis — pretty much what "Freakonomics" said.
But Lott and his supporters disagree. They say it's not true that other researchers have been unable to validate his results. They point to a 2001 issue of the Journal of Law and Economics that contains several articles by scholars who agree with Lott.
But it turns out that all the papers in that issue were originally presented at a conference organized by Lott, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle reported that Lott not only "arranged for the papers to be published in a special edition" of the journal, which is not unusual, but he also paid for the printing and postage....
Lott's reputation has indeed been "seriously damaged" by critics, but only because they have described many apparent holes in his dubious research and misleading citations. Blocking the sale of a book based on a literal interpretation of a single word would be outrageous.
The U.S. District Court should throw this case out promptly.
Of course, all the other scientists casting serious and extensive doubts on Lott's research studies and his twisted and unbelievable defenses for his errors, missing data and missing surveys has simply made him a hero to the right. Besides, hardly anyone else can do a study and get results that emphatically agree with what conservatives want to hear.
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