The Gun Man

For almost 30 years, [John R. Lott, Jr], who has a doctorate in economics from UCLA, has provided the empirical backbone for the gun-rights movement. Virtually every statistical argument against regulation — made by lobbyists, Republican lawmakers, and National Rifle Association members alike — is based on his research, which reaches two conclusions: guns make Americans safer, and gun restrictions place them in danger. He stands against droves of distinguished academics who have determined that the opposite is true. But, in the scientific debate over firearms, no one has had greater influence.

Lott’s first and most famous book, “More Guns, Less Crime,” was published in 1998 by the University of Chicago Press, one of the country’s most prestigious academic publishers. The book has been republished multiple times, and offers one seemingly irrefutable statistic after another. [...] The text is the basis for arguments blaming “gun-free zones” for mass shootings, and the notion, popularized by the NRA, that only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun.

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[In addition to nine books,] Lott has also produced a steady stream of scholarly articles published in academic periodicals, along with op-eds that appear in regional newspapers and The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. He has had appointments at Ivy League schools, and his work is touted by leading Republican politicians.

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Lott’s findings and methods have generated scathing criticism from prominent academics, who have questioned his veracity and exposed flaws in his work. But the critiques have not diminished his stature.

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In 2013, Lott founded the Crime Prevention Research Center, a nonprofit to support his research. He takes pains to stress his and the organization’s independence.

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In the beginning of 1999, Otis Dudley Duncan, who is regarded as one of history’s most important quantitative sociologists, wrote the first of a number of letters to Lott. He was especially skeptical of a sentence in Lott’s book that stated, “If national surveys are correct, 98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack.” Lott had not specified which surveys, but, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published around the time of the book, he attributed the figure to polls by The Los Angeles Times, Gallup, and Peter Hart Research Associates. The number, he wrote, was a percentage of the “at least 760,000, and possibly as many as 3.6 million, defensive uses of guns per year.”

Duncan determined that Lott’s assertion was simply wrong. In May, Duncan informed Lott that he was writing an article about what he would call the “rogue number,” and later that month sent him a draft. One sentence summarized his assessment: “The ‘98 percent’ is either a figment of Lott’s imagination or an artifact of careless computation or proofreading.”

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After Lott received a draft of Duncan’s article, he sent him a letter. He now said that the brandishing number was based not on the polling data but “upon survey evidence that I have put together involving a large nationwide telephone survey conducted over a three month period during 1997.”

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“The survey that I oversaw interviewed 2,424 people from across the United States,” he said. “I had planned on including a discussion of it in my book, but did not do so because an unfortunate computer crash lost my hard disk right before the final draft of the book had to be turned in.”

  The Trace

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