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{{short description|American economist, political commentator, and gun rights advocate (born 1958)}}
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] where he is a resident scholar.]]
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'''John R. Lott Jr.''' (born ] ]) is currently a resident scholar at the ]. His research interests include ], ], ], ], ], ], and ].
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'''John Richard Lott Jr.''' (born May 8, 1958) is an American economist, political commentator, and ] advocate. Lott was formerly employed at various academic institutions and at the ] ]. He is the former president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, a nonprofit he founded in 2013. He worked in the ] within the ] under the ] from October 2020 to January 2021. Lott holds a Ph.D. in ] from ].

He has written for both academic and popular publications. He has authored books such as '']'', '']'', and '']''. He is best known as a ]<ref name="Frum140114">{{cite news|url=http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/14/with-guns-the-threatened-quickly-become-the-threat.html|title=With Guns, the Threatened Can Quickly Become the Threat|last=Frum|first=David|date=January 14, 2014|access-date=January 16, 2014|website=Daily Beast}}</ref><ref name="Blake121216">{{cite news|url=https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/la-xpm-2012-dec-16-la-et-st-piers-morgan-newtown-shooting-gun-control-20121215-story.html|title=Piers Morgan on gun control: 'How many kids have to die?'|last=Blake|first=Meredith|date=December 16, 2012|newspaper=Los Angeles Times|access-date=January 16, 2014}}</ref><ref name="BovardOnMGLC">{{cite web|url=http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo6686900.html|title=Review quotes|last=Bovard|first=James|website=press.uchicago.edu|publisher=University of Chicago Press|access-date=January 16, 2014|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180919122545/https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo6686900.html|archive-date=September 19, 2018}}</ref> and has argued against restrictions on owning and carrying guns. '']'' and '']'' have said "no one has had greater influence"<ref>{{Cite web |last=Spies |first=Mike |date=2022-11-03 |title=The Right's Favorite Gun Researcher |url=https://www.thetrace.org/2022/11/john-lott-gun-crime-research-criticism/ |access-date=2023-01-24 |website=The Trace |language=en-us}}</ref> in the scientific debate over firearms while '']'' referred to Lott as "The Gun Crowd's Guru."<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.mywire.com/pubs/Newsweek/2001/03/12/314509?extID=10051 |first=Matt |last=Bai |title=The Gun Crowd's Guru: John Lott has a high profile—and a target on his back |work=Newsweek |date=March 12, 2001 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150502153845/http://www.mywire.com/pubs/Newsweek/2001/03/12/314509?extID=10051 |archive-date=May 2, 2015 }}</ref>


==Academic career== ==Academic career==
Lott studied ] at ], receiving his ] in ], ] in ], and ] in ]. He spent several years as a visiting professor and as a fellow at the ].


John Lott studied economics at ], receiving his ] in 1980, ] in 1982, and ] in 1984. Lott has held positions in law and economics at several institutions, including the ], the ], UCLA, the ], ], and ]. Lott was the chief economist at the ]<ref name=":0">{{cite web|url=http://www.foxnews.com/archive/author/john-lott/index.html|title=Dr. John R. Lott Jr.|date=2016-07-27|publisher=Fox News|access-date=2016-07-27}}</ref> (1988–1989). He spent five years at the ], as a visiting professor from 1994 to 1995 and as a ] from 1995 to 1999. Lott was a resident scholar at the ] from 2001 to 2006. He left AEI for ].<ref></ref> From July 2007 to 2010, Lott was a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland Foundation at the ] and lectured on law and economics.<ref></ref><ref></ref>
Lott went on to work at other institutions, including the ] School of Law, ], UCLA, the ], and ], and was the chief economist at the ] (]&ndash;]), before taking a position at the ].


Lott has published over ninety articles in academic journals, as well as ]. Opinion pieces by Lott have appeared in such places as the '']'', '']'', the '']'', '']'', and the '']''. Lott has written op-eds for '']'', '']'', the '']'', '']'', and the '']''. Since 2008, he has been a columnist for ], initially weekly.<ref></ref><ref name=":0" />


== More guns, less crime == == Research on guns ==


===Concealed weapons and crime rate===
Although Lott has published in academic journals regarding education, voting behavior of politicians, industrial organization, labor markets, judicial confirmations, and crime, his research is hard to consistently tag as liberal or conservative. For example, some research argues for environmental penalties on firms. While other research on guns is viewed as quite conservative. He has also published in the popular press on topics such as the validity of the ] results in ], or how low the murder rate in ] is after the US deposed ], he is primarily known outside of academic econometrics for his involvement in arguments regarding the beneficial results of allowing Americans to freely own and carry guns.


In a 1997 article written with David B. Mustard<ref name="LottMust97">John R. Lott Jr. and David B. Mustard, "Crime, Deterrence and Right-To-Carry Concealed Handguns", 26 ''Journal of Legal Studies'' 1 (1997) {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100616105437/http://www.law.uchicago.edu/files/files/41.lott_.final_.pdf |date=2010-06-16 }}; {{subscription required}}.</ref> and Lott's subsequent books '']'' and '']'', Lott argued that allowing adults to carry ]s significantly reduces crime in America. In 2004, the ] (NAS) National Research Council (NRC) conducted a review of current research and data on firearms and violent crime, including Lott's work, and concluded "that with the current evidence it is not possible to determine that there is a causal link between the passage of ] laws and crime rates."<ref> Executive Summary, Major Conclusions, p. 2. Ch. 6 Right-to-Carry Laws, pp. 120–151, reviews research by Lott and others on this issue.</ref> The NAS report wrote of Lott's work, "The initial model specification, when extended to new data, does not show evidence that passage of right-to-carry laws reduces crime. The estimated effects are highly sensitive to seemingly minor changes in the model specification and control variables."<ref name=":3">{{Cite web |last1=Farley |first1=Robert |last2=Robertson |first2=Lori |last3=Kiely |first3=Eugene |date=2012-12-20 |title=Gun Rhetoric vs. Gun Facts |url=https://www.factcheck.org/2012/12/gun-rhetoric-vs-gun-facts/ |access-date=2021-01-02|website=FactCheck.org|language=en-US}}</ref> The criminologist ] was the only member on the 18-member NAS panel who dissented from this conclusion.<ref>{{cite book |url=http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10881&page=269 |title=Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review |pages=269–270 |isbn=0-309-09124-1 |year=2004 |chapter=Appendix A Dissent |first=James Q. |last=Wilson |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121016133952/http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10881&page=269 |archive-date=October 16, 2012 }}</ref><ref name=":3" /> For similar reasons as highlighted by the NAS, as well as "multiple serious problems with data and methodology", a 2020 comprehensive review of existing research on concealed-carry by the ] discounted Lott's studies.<ref>{{Cite web|title=Effects of Concealed-Carry Laws on Violent Crime |url=https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/concealed-carry/violent-crime.html|access-date=2021-01-02 |website=rand.org|language=en}}</ref>
In his books '']'' and '']'', he presents statistical evidence for his claim that allowing adults to carry ]s has significantly reduced crime in America. He supports this position by an exhaustive tabulation of various social and economic ] from ] and other population ]s of individual United States counties in different years, which he fits into a very large multifactorial mathematical model of ]. His published results show a strong reduction in violent crime associated with the adoption by states of laws allowing the general adult population to freely carry concealed weapons. He also provides evidence that gun control laws such as the Brady Act, the Assault weapons ban, one-gun-a-month restrictions, and waiting periods have not reduced crime rates. He claims to be the first person to have studied the impact of the Brady Law. The National Academy of Sciences report on gun control comes to conclusions that seem similar to this research. He challenges anyone who disagrees with him to download his data set and redo his calculations. Many academics who have studied his data.


Other reviews said that there were problems with Lott's model. A replication by Dan A. Black and ] found that minor adjustments to Lott and Mustard's model led to the disappearance of the findings.<ref name="Black">{{Cite journal|last=Black|first=Dan A.|author2=Daniel S. Nagin|date=January 1998|title=Do Right-to-Carry Laws Deter Violent Crime?|journal=Journal of Legal Studies|volume=27|issue=1|page=214|doi=10.1086/468019|s2cid=154626760}}</ref><ref name=":4">, Volume 26, No 1, January/February 2002, pp. 19–23. Expanded as: </ref> In the '']'', ] argued that Lott failed to account for several key variables, including drug consumption.<ref name="Hemenway">{{Cite journal|last=Hemenway |first=David |date=December 31, 1998 |journal=The New England Journal of Medicine |title=More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding crime and gun-control laws / Making A Killing: The business of guns in America |volume=339 |issue=27 |pages=2029–2030 |doi=10.1056/NEJM199812313392719}}</ref> ] and ] said that the model used by Lott contained significant coding errors and ].<ref name="shootdown">{{Cite journal|last=Ayres |first=Ian |author2=John J. Donohue III |date=April 2003 |title=Shooting Down the 'More Guns, Less Crime' Hypothesis |journal=Stanford Law Review |volume=55 |issue=4 |page=1193 |doi= 10.2139/ssrn.343781|s2cid=55757925 |url=http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/1241 }}</ref> In the ''American Journal of Public Health'', ] et al. also raised concerns about flaws in the study, such as misclassification of laws and endogeneity of predictor variables, which they said rendered the study's conclusions "insupportable".<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Webster|first1=D W|last2=Vernick|first2=J S|last3=Ludwig|first3=J|last4=Lester|first4=K J|title=Flawed gun policy research could endanger public safety.|journal=American Journal of Public Health|date=June 1997|volume=87|issue=6|pages=918–921|doi=10.2105/AJPH.87.6.918|pmid=9224169|pmc=1380922}}</ref> Florida State University criminologist ] considered it unlikely that such a large decrease in violent crime could be explained by a relatively modest increase in ].<ref>{{Cite book| last=Kleck| first=Gary| title=Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control| location=New York| publisher=Aldine de Gruyter| year=1997}}</ref> A 1998 study by ] that said it "more effectively control for unobserved variables that may vary over time" than the Lott and Mustard study concluded that "shall-issue laws have resulted, if anything, in an increase in adult homicide rates."<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Ludwig|first1=Jens|title=Concealed-gun-carrying laws and violent crime: evidence from state panel data|journal=International Review of Law and Economics|date=September 1998|volume=18|issue=3|pages=239–254|doi=10.1016/S0144-8188(98)00012-X|url=http://student-www.uchicago.edu/~ludwigj/papers/IJLE-ConcealedGunLaws-1998.pdf |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20221009/http://student-www.uchicago.edu/~ludwigj/papers/IJLE-ConcealedGunLaws-1998.pdf |archive-date=2022-10-09 |url-status=live|citeseerx=10.1.1.487.5452}}</ref> A 2001 study in the '']'' by University of Chicago economist ] did robustness checks of Lott and Mustard's study and found that the findings of the Lott and Mustard study were inaccurate.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Duggan|first=Mark|date=2001-10-01|title=More Guns, More Crime|journal=Journal of Political Economy|volume=109|issue=5|pages=1086–1114|doi=10.1086/322833|s2cid=33899679|issn=0022-3808}}</ref>
== Media bias ==
Lott argues that in both '']'' and '']'' he was trying to explain why media coverage of defensive gun use is rare. In both books he noted that only shootings that end in fatalities are likely to result in news stories. Since Lott was arguing that there is media bias, Lott argues that using this data instead of data that showed lower brandishing rates was biased against his conclusions. He wrote:


Other academics praised Lott's methodology, including ] economist ],<ref name="Benson">{{Cite journal|last=Benson|first=Bruce L.|date=September 1999|title=Review of ''More Guns, Less Crime''|journal=Public Choice|volume=100|issue=3–4|pages=309–313|doi=10.1023/A:1018689310638|s2cid=150500420}}</ref> ] professor ],<ref name="McGinnis">{{Cite journal|last=McGinnis|first=John O.|date=July 20, 1998|title=Trigger Happiness|journal=]|volume=50|issue=13|page=49}}</ref> ] professor ],<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Moody|first1=Carlisle E.|date=October 2001|title=Testing for the Effects of Concealed Weapons Laws: Specification Errors and Robustness|journal=The Journal of Law and Economics|volume=44|issue=s2|pages=799–813|doi=10.1086/323313|s2cid=154918586}}</ref> ] professor William F. Shughart,<ref name="Shughart">{{Cite journal|last1=Shughart|first1=William F.|last2=Lott|first2=John R.|date=April 1, 1999|title=More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws: Review|journal=Southern Economic Journal|volume=65|issue=4|pages=978–981|doi=10.2307/1061296|jstor=1061296}}</ref> and SUNY economist Florenz Plassmann and University of Adelaide economist John Whitley.<ref name="Plassmann and Whitley">"" Confirming More Guns, Less Crime, by Florenz Plassmann and John Whitley, 2003, p. 1361</ref>
<blockquote>"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. Such stories are not hard to find; pizza deliverymen defend themselves against robbers, carjackings are thwarted, robberies at automatic teller machines are prevented, and numerous armed robberies on the streets and in the stores are foiled, though these do not receive the national coverage of other gun crimes. Yet the cases covered by the news media are hardly typical; most of the encounters reported involve a shooting that ends in a fatality.." (''More Guns, Less Crime'' p.3)</blockquote>


Referring to the research done on the topic, '']'' wrote in 2003 that "Mr. Lott's research has convinced his peers of at least one point: No scholars now claim that legalizing concealed weapons causes a major increase in crime."<ref name="CHE">{{Cite journal|last=Glenn |first=David |date=May 9, 2003 |title='More Guns, Less Crime' Thesis Rests on a Flawed Statistical Design, Scholars Argue |journal=] |volume=49 |issue=35 |page=A18 |url= http://chronicle.com/weekly/v49/i35/35a01801.htm |access-date=2007-05-27}}</ref> As Lott critics Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue III pointed out, "Lott and Mustard have made an important scholarly contribution in establishing that these laws have not led to the massive bloodbath of death and injury that some of their opponents feared. On the other hand, we find that the statistical evidence that these laws have reduced crime is limited, sporadic, and extraordinarily fragile."<ref name="shootdown" /> A 2008 article in '']'' surveyed peer-reviewed empirical academic studies, and found that 10 supported the proposition that right-to-carry reduces crime, 8 supported no significant effect and none supported an increase.<ref>, ''Econ Journal Watch'' Vol. 5, Iss. 3 (2008).</ref> The article was rebutted by ] and ] in the same journal in 2009.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://econjwatch.org/articles/yet-another-refutation-of-the-more-guns-less-crime-hypothesis-with-some-help-from-moody-and-marvell|title=Yet Another Refutation of the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis—With Some Help From Moody and Marvell · Econ Journal Watch: Law and economics, criminal justice policy, guns and crime|website=econjwatch.org|language=en|access-date=2017-09-13}}</ref>
<blockquote>"... Even though the survey I conducted during the fall 2002 indicates that simply brandishing a gun successfully stops crimes 95 percent of the time that guns are used defensively and other surveys have also found high rates, it is very rare to see such a story. No conspiracy explanation is really needed to explain why an editor finds a dead body on the ground very newsworthy (particularly if it is a sympathetic person like a victim). By contrast, take a story in where a woman brandishes a gun and a criminal flees, with no shots are fired, no crime is committed, and one isn’tno one is even sure what crime would have been committed had a weapon not been drawn. Nothing bad actually happened. It is not emotionally gripping enough to make the story “newsworthy.” (“Bias Against Guns”)</blockquote>


In 2013, Lott founded the nonprofit organization Crime Prevention Research Center to study the relationship between gun laws and crime. As of July 2015, he was also the organization's president.<ref>{{cite web | url=https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/john-lott-guns-crime-data | title=When the Gun Lobby Tries to Justify Firearms Everywhere, It Turns to This Guy | work=Mother Jones | date=28 July 2015 | access-date=6 February 2016 | author=Lurie, Julia}}</ref> The board of directors for the organization includes guitarist ], conservative talkshow host ] and former sheriff ].<ref name=":2" /> In 2020, Lott left the organization to take a position in the Trump administration.<ref name=":2" />


===Defensive gun use===
Lott claims that selective reporting by U.S. media fails to report instances of people defending themselves (or others) via legal use of guns. In one example, a school shooting at the ] on ] ], Lott cites Tracy Bridges who says he pointed his gun at the killer, who then dropped his weapon and was subsequently tackled. . However, Ted Besen contradicted this viewpoint on the ] ] edition of ''The Early Show'', saying that the killer put his (empty) gun down before Bridges intervened. The true sequence of events remains unresolved.
{{Main|Defensive gun use}}
Lott argues in both ''More Guns, Less Crime'' and ''The Bias Against Guns'' that defensive gun use (DGU) is underreported, noting that in general, only shootings ending in fatalities are discussed in news stories. In ''More Guns, Less Crime'', Lott writes that "ince in many defensive cases a handgun is simply brandished, and no one is harmed, many defensive uses are never even reported to the police." In May 1998, Lott wrote that "national surveys" suggested that "98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack." Lott cited similar figures in op-eds in '']''<ref name="Lott98WSJ">{{cite news|first=John R. |last=Lott Jr. |title=Keep Guns out of Lawyers' Hands |newspaper=Wall Street Journal |page=1 |date=1998-06-23}}</ref> and the '']''.<ref name="Lott98LAT">{{cite news|first=John R. |last=Lott Jr. |title=Cities Target Gun Makers in Bogus Lawsuits |newspaper=] |page=7 |date=1998-12-01}}</ref>


In 2002, he said that brandishing a weapon was sufficient to stop an attack 95% of the time. Other researchers criticized his methodology. A study in ''Public Opinion Quarterly'' said that his sample size of 1,015 respondents was too small for the study to be accurate and that the majority of similar studies suggest a value between 70 and 80 percent.<ref name="2002studycriticism">{{Cite journal|last=McDowall |first=David |date=Summer 2005 |journal=] |title=John R. Lott Jr.'s Defensive Gun Brandishing Estimates |volume=69 |issue=2 |pages=246–263 |doi=10.1093/poq/nfi015}}</ref> According to Lott, Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz's 1994 estimate rises to 92 percent when brandishing and warning shots are added together.<ref>{{cite web | url=http://crimeresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/General-Disc-9702-Surveys.pdf |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20221009/http://crimeresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/General-Disc-9702-Surveys.pdf |archive-date=2022-10-09 |url-status=live | title=What Surveys Can Help Us Understand About Guns? | access-date=22 June 2016 | author=Lott, John|page=8}}</ref> Lott said that the lower rates found by others was at least in part due to the different questions that were asked.<ref>Discussion of different surveys on defensive gun use </ref>
218 different news stories about the incident. Only three actually mentioned that the guns were used by the students to stop the attack. Lott interviewed both the students who used their guns to stop the attack, including Mikael Gross. Of the reporters who did not mention Bridge's story, ] of the '']'' cited "space constraints" for not including it. (''The Bias Against Guns'', p.26).
Mikael Gross was one of the two students who claimed to have used a gun to stop the Appalachian Law School attack. After the preliminary hearing where the prosecutor put Gross on the stand and Odighizuwa had to made a public statement for his plea bargain a Washington Post news story noted: “Odighizuwa was subdued without incident by armed students”? Gross was also interviewed by Lott and provided a discussion of how he claimed the attack was stopped. He also explains why Ted Besen did not see what Bridges and Gross were doing.


=== Defamation suit ===
==Criticism==
On April 10, 2006, John Lott filed suit<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://www.overlawyered.com/lott_complaint.pdf/Lott%20v%20Levitt.pdf |title=PDF of Lott's complaint v. Levitt |access-date=August 27, 2007 |archive-date=September 27, 2007 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070927213215/http://www.overlawyered.com/lott_complaint.pdf/Lott%20v%20Levitt.pdf }}</ref> for ] against ] and ] over the book '']'' and against Levitt over a series of emails to John McCall. In the book ''Freakonomics'', Levitt and coauthor ] claimed that the results of Lott's research in ''More Guns, Less Crime'' had not been replicated by other academics. In the emails to economist John McCall, who had pointed to a number of papers in different academic publications that had replicated Lott's work, Levitt wrote that the work by several authors supporting Lott in a special 2001 issue of the ''Journal of Law and Economics'' had not been peer-reviewed, Lott had paid the University of Chicago Press to publish the papers, and that papers with results opposite of Lott's had been blocked from publication in that issue.<ref>{{cite news|last=Higgins|first=Michael|date=2006-04-11|title=Best-seller leads scholar to file lawsuit; Defamation allegation targets U. of C. author|page=3|newspaper=Chicago Tribune}}</ref> A federal judge found that Levitt's replication claim in ''Freakonomics'' was not defamation but found merit in Lott's complaint over the email claims.<ref>"" on John Lott's website</ref> The dismissal was affirmed by a three-judge panel of The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on February 11, 2009.<ref>" {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090216142918/http://www.ca7.uscourts.gov/fdocs/docs.fwx?submit=rss_sho&shofile=07-3095_022.pdf|date=2009-02-16}}"</ref><ref>{{Cite web|last=Staff|first=Courthouse News|date=2009-02-13|title=Professor Wasn't Defamed by 'Freakonomics' Author|url=https://www.courthousenews.com/professor-wasnt-defamed-by-freakonomics-author/|access-date=2021-01-02|language=en-US}}</ref>
Lott's work is criticized by ] groups as well as some ]s within the gun rights movement. He has been accused of identifying only those interpretations of his data which promote a pro-gun agenda, and ignoring alternative interpretations. He has been accused of fabricating a survey in support of his position and other unethical conduct. Some aspects of his model of the causes of violent crime appear ] to some; for instance, his model shows a large dependency of the crime rate on the number of middle-aged ]women, and very little dependency on the number of young African-American men, which goes against well-defined reliable statistics on both ]s and ]s of ]. (Lott's book, More Guns, Less Crime, explains why this interpretation confuses who commits crimes with who are victims and other general characteristics of victims. He also makes several other responses.) Similarly, his model requires that the percentage of crimes in which the criminal is convicted remains constant, no matter what the crime rate, which is not actually the case. If this number is allowed to vary, then the deterrent effect of deregulated concealed carry of weapons does not disappear, but instead becomes unbelievably huge. Most tellingly, when the scale of the deterrent effect is allowed to vary from place to place instead of being a single overall factor, the model shows that deregulation of concealed weapons carrying in Florida was followed by a very large drop in violent crime, but in other locations was followed by only small changes in the crime rate, sometimes an increase and sometimes a decrease. (Lott's book looks at lots of differences across different types of places such as by county population density.) Therefore his critics argue that he has merely shown that the data can be interpreted as suggesting 'More guns, less crime', but that this is by no means the best interpretation, and that some other factors are probably at work specific to Florida in the time period covered.


A settlement was reached over the claims made by Levitt in the emails to McCall whereby Levitt did not have to issue a formal apology but rather send a letter of clarification to John McCall that the issue of the ''Journal of Law and Economics'' was peer-reviewed, and that Lott had not improperly influenced the editors.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Gajda|first=Amy|title=The Trials of Academe|year=2010|publisher=Harvard University Press|isbn=978-0-674-05386-1|location=Harvard University Press|pages=166–170|doi=10.2307/j.ctvjghvr3|s2cid=198001655 }}</ref><ref name="settlement">{{Cite journal|last=Glenn|first=David|date=2007-08-10|title=Dueling Economists Reach Settlement in Defamation Lawsuit|url=http://chronicle.com/article/Dueling-Economists-Reach/6720|journal=Chronicle of Higher Education|volume=53|issue=49|page=10}}</ref><ref>""</ref> The ''Chronicle of Higher Education'' characterized Levitt's letter as offering "a doozy of a concession."<ref></ref>
The ] conducted a review of current research and data on firearms and violent crime, including Lott's work, and found:
:''There is no credible evidence that "right-to-carry" laws, which allow qualified adults to carry concealed handguns, either decrease or increase violent crime.''
at least in part because data collection limitations obscure anything more than the largest effects, positive or negative, from being observable. The report calls for the development of a ''National Violent Death Reporting System'' and a ''National Incident-Based Reporting System'' in order to start collecting accurate and reliable information that describes basic facts about violent injuries and deaths.


===Disputed survey===
However, there is a dissent by James Q. Wilson who states, regarding Lott's work:
In the course of a dispute with ] in 1999–2000,<ref name="DuncanNumbers"> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120525025619/http://www.asc41.com/Criminologist/2000/January-February%202000.htm|date=2012-05-25}}, '']'', Vol. 25, No. 1, Jan/Feb 2000, pp. 1, 3–7.</ref><ref name="reply"> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120525030504/http://www.asc41.com/Criminologist/2000/September-October%202000.htm |date=May 25, 2012 }}, ''The Criminologist'', Vol. 25, No. 5, Sep/Oct 2000, pp. 1, 6.</ref> Lott claimed to have undertaken a national survey of 2,424 respondents in 1997, the results of which were the source for claims he had made beginning in 1997.<ref name="reply" /> However, in 2000 Lott was unable to produce the data or any records showing that the survey had been undertaken. He said the 1997 hard drive crash that had affected several projects with co-authors had destroyed his survey data set,<ref>{{cite web|last=Sanchez|first=Julian|author-link=Julian Sanchez (writer)|date=February 13, 2003|title=Red Herrings|url=http://www.juliansanchez.com/2003/02/13/red-herrings/|access-date=July 28, 2016|work=Julian Sanchez – blog}} (Julian Sanchez noted that the 1997 hard drive crash is widely accepted as a fact; the dispute is over the lack of solid evidence that Lott lost a survey data set in that crash)</ref> the original tally sheets had been abandoned with other personal property in his move from Chicago to Yale, and he could not recall the names of any of the students who he said had worked on it. Critics questioned whether the survey had ever taken place,<ref name="reason">{{cite web|last=Sanchez|first=Julian|date=May 2003|title=The Mystery of Mary Rosh|url=http://www.reason.com/news/show/28771.html|access-date=2007-06-15|work=]}}</ref> but Lott defends the survey's existence and accuracy.<ref name="surveysupport">{{cite web|title=Evidence of Survey|url=http://johnrlott.tripod.com/surveysupport.html}}, {{cite web|title=2002 Survey|url=http://www.johnlott.org/files/GeneralDisc97_02Surveys.zip}}</ref>
:''In view of the confirmation of the findings that shall-issue laws drive down the murder rate, it is hard for me to understand why these claims are called “fragile.”''
but ends his dissent by noting that Lott's evidence only confirms the effect on the '''murder rate''', not on violent crime as a whole:
:''In sum, I find that the evidence presented by Lott and his supporters suggests that RTC laws do in fact help drive down the murder rate, though their effect on other crimes is ].''
and the comittee's response to Wilson states:
:''Except for the effects of right-to-carry laws on homicide, the entire committee is in agreement on the material in Chapter 6 and the report overall. In particular, the committee, including Wilson, found that “it is impossible to draw strong conclusions from the existing literature on the causal impact” of right-to-carry laws on violent and property crime in general and rape, aggravated assault, auto theft, burglary, and larceny in particular.''
and goes on to describe in more detail why they differ with Wilson in also remaining skeptical about the probative value of Lott's findings regarding murder.


=== Mary Rosh persona ===
Despite this controversy over the positive effects of gun ownership on reducing crime, the body of work reviewed by the NAS demonstrates that deregulation of concealed carry does not lead to an increase in violent crime. As Wilson wrote:
In response to the dispute surrounding the missing survey, Lott used a ] by the name of "Mary Rosh" to defend his own works on ] and elsewhere. After investigative work by ] blogger ], Lott admitted to using the Mary Rosh persona.<ref name="reason" />
:''In addition, with only a few exceptions, the studies cited in Chapter 6, including those by Lott’s critics, do not show that the passage of RTC laws drives the crime rates up (as might be the case if one supposed that newly armed people went about looking for someone to shoot). The direct evidence that such shooting sprees occur is nonexistent.''
Lott supporters assert that this in itself represents a significant contribution by Lott to our understanding of the causes of crime, while his detractors allege that overall his data and his analysis are too biased to clarify what was already a cloudy picture.


Further accusations claimed that Lott praised himself while posing as one of his former students<ref name="mj">] in ]: ''.'' October 13, 2003</ref><ref name="wifeandson">{{cite news |url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2003/02/01/scholar-invents-fan-to-answer-his-critics/f3ae3f46-68d6-4eee-a65e-1775d45e2133/ |title=Scholar Invents Fan to Answer His Critics |first=Richard |last=Morin |newspaper=] |date=February 1, 2003 |page=C01}}</ref> and that "Rosh" was used to post a favorable review of ''More Guns, Less Crime'' on ]. Lott has claimed that the review was written by his son and wife.<ref name="wifeandson" /> "I probably shouldn't have done it—I know I shouldn't have done it—but it's hard to think of any big advantage I got except to be able to comment fictitiously," Lott told '']'' in 2003.<ref name="wifeandson" />
One of his critics alleges that Lott has also . Lott’s webmaster attributes this to a one day error that was quickly fixed rather than malicious intent.


===The 2% problem=== ===Safe storage gun laws===
Lott's critics have also focused on Lott's claims to have conducted a survey in which he found that in only 2% of defensive gun uses was it necessary for the defender to fire the gun at all, either at the perpetrator or as a warning. Although this finding represents only a minor side-issue from Lott's main work and gets only part of a single sentence in his first book, Lott has referred to this study result other times in print, in public, and even in sworn testimony before legislative bodies attempting to formulate optimal gun laws, even long after the controversy over this survey had been made public.


In a 2001 study, Lott and John E. Whitley reported that safe-storage gun laws not only did not reduce juvenile suicides or accidental gun deaths, but that they also increased rates of violent and property crime.<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Lott Jr.|first1=John R.|last2=Whitley|first2=John E.|title=Safe-Storage Gun Laws: Accidental Deaths, Suicides, and Crime|url=http://crimeresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Lott-Whitley-Safe-Storage-Laws.pdf |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20221009/http://crimeresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Lott-Whitley-Safe-Storage-Laws.pdf |archive-date=2022-10-09 |url-status=live|journal=]|date=October 2001|volume=44|issue=S2|pages=659–689|doi=10.1086/338346|citeseerx=10.1.1.180.3066|s2cid=154446568}}</ref> The study was criticized by Webster et al. in the '']'' for using ] despite the fact that the data used in the study on youth suicides was "highly skewed and ]", and because the vast majority of crimes that Lott and Whitley claimed increased due to safe-storage laws occurred outside the home.<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Webster|first1=Daniel W.|title=Association Between Youth-Focused Firearm Laws and Youth Suicides|journal=]|date=4 August 2004|volume=292|issue=5|pages=594–601|doi=10.1001/jama.292.5.594|pmid=15292085|doi-access=free}}</ref> Webster and Carroll also wrote in ''Guns in American Society: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, Culture, and the Law'' that the Lott and Whitley study's findings with respect to crime were inconsistent with prior research.<ref>{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=oD46JBOhMU0C | title=Guns in American Society | publisher=ABC-CLIO | author=Carter, Gregg Lee | year=2002 | page=151| isbn=978-0-313-38670-1 }}</ref>
In the first edition of '']'' (May 1998) he wrote:
:"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."
But in the second edition "If national surveys are correct" was replaced by "If a survey I conducted is correct", with no explanation. Lott originally referred to the 98%/2% breakdown as being the result of "national surveys", in person and in his book. When he was asked which particular surveys contained this result, rather than identify them there followed a period where he attributed it to a variety of different sources, until finally with the publication of the second edition of his book, 'national surveys' was changed to 'a national survey that I conducted', without any explanation, then or since. To add to the confusion, his initial references to the 2% figure were made before the date on which Lott says the survey was completed.


==Other research and events==
In fact, Lott's 98%/2% figure contradicts the other two surveys over the last twenty years that estimated this rate. However, “Kleck and Gertz’s estimates rise to 92 percent when brandishing and warning shots are added together.”
In a study published in 2000, Lott concluded that most of the large recent increases in campaign spending for state and federal offices can be explained by higher government spending.<ref>{{cite journal |doi=10.2139/ssrn.245336 |url=https://ssrn.com/abstract=245336 |title=A Simple Explanation for Why Campaign Expenditures are Increasing: The Government is Getting Bigger |first=John R. Jr. |last=Lott |journal=Journal of Law and Economics |date=October 2000 | s2cid=153298336 }}</ref> Lott also supports the conclusion that higher quality judges, measured by their output once they are on the court (e.g., number of citations to their opinions or number of published opinions), take longer to get confirmed.<ref>{{Cite journal|url=http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1740-1461.2005.00056.x/full|doi = 10.1111/j.1740-1461.2005.00056.x|title = The Judicial Confirmation Process: The Difficulty with Being Smart|year = 2005|last1 = Lott|first1 = John R.|journal = Journal of Empirical Legal Studies|volume = 2|issue = 3|pages = 407–447}}</ref>


=== Lost Bush votes in the 2000 presidential election ===
Besides statements by someone who took the survey and contemporaneous statements by others, Lott was unable to provide any evidence for his survey. He stated that the data, methodology, and intermediate work and results were all lost in a computer crash; no paper records were kept, the work was done by volunteer students who were recruited personally and paid in cash out of his pocket, so no advertisements, pay records or cancelled checks exist. He has provided a copy of his tax records for the year that the survey took place to some academics, and it does show that he had large deductions for research assistants that year. Despite this matter being publicized in the national news media, nobody has come forward to report that they were either a student working on the survey or a subject contacted by the survey, other than one Second Amendment activist who recalls being surveyed about guns in that period of time and now believes it to have been the Lott survey.
In 2000, Lott argued, using a regression analysis, that George W. Bush lost at least 10,000 votes in Florida after the media incorrectly called the state for Al Gore while voting was still ongoing in the more conservative parts of the state.<ref name=":1">{{Cite book|last1=Brady|first1=Henry E.|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=1VQK7EGohB4C|title=Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards|last2=Collier|first2=David|date=2004|publisher=Rowman & Littlefield|isbn=978-0-7425-1125-5|language=en}}</ref> Lott's argument is used in the influential social science methodology textbook ''Rethinking Social Inquiry'' (edited by Henry Brady and David Collier) as an example of poor methodology. Contrary to Lott's study, they show that the number of lost Bush votes ranged from 28 to 56.<ref name=":1" />


=== Abortion and crime ===
Some of Lott's critics (and ) believe that the 2% figure is very likely the result of a trivial error in his memory of a study by ]. Lott is accused of attributing the figure at one point (Kleck's study actually found that 2% of the defensive gun uses involved '''shooting the attacker''', not merely shooting the gun in general. In the past, others have misquoted the same study similarly). However, David Kopel, who ran the website upon which the claim was made, later admitted to doing this himself. Kopel wrote:
With John Whitley at the University of Adelaide, Lott published a study that argued that liberalization of abortion laws led to higher murder rates.<ref>John R. Lott Jr. and John E. Whitley, "Abortion and Crime: Unwanted Children and Out-of-Wedlock Births", (2001) working paper and published article.</ref> In a review of the literature on the relationship between abortion and crime, ], an economist at Baruch College and the National Bureau of Economic Research, praised Lott and Whitley for gathering additional data on abortion but criticized the methodology that they used.<ref>{{cite journal |last=Joyce |first=Theodore J. |date=June 2009 |title=Abortion and Crime: A Review |doi=10.3386/w15098|s2cid=74738947 |journal=] |series=Working Paper Series |url=http://www.nber.org/papers/w15098 |doi-access=free }}</ref>


=== Illegal immigration and crime ===
In addition to both editions of '']'', searches of print and online media have found Lott himself to have referred to this 98%/2% result at least 25 times (though many of these are the same publications being republished). (''Does Allowing Law-Abiding Citizens to Carry Concealed Handguns Save Lives?'', Valparaiso University Law Review, 31(2): 355-63, Spring, 1997; ''Gun-Lock Proposal Bound to Misfire'', Chicago Tribune, August 6, 1998; ''Hardball'', CNBC, August 18, 1999; ''Gun Locks: Bound to Misfire'', online publication of the Independence Institute, Feb. 9, 2000; reply to Otis Duncan's article, The Criminologist, vol. 25, no. 5, September/October 2000, page 6; ''Others Fear Being Placed at the Mercy of Criminals'' Los Angeles Times, March 30, 2001)
Lott has non-peer-reviewed research that purports to show that undocumented immigrants are more crime-prone than U.S. citizens. In doing so, Lott lumped together both legal and illegal immigrants in prison into a category for illegal immigrants, leading to an elevated crime rate for illegal immigrants.<ref name=":5">{{Cite web|last=Lind|first=Dara|date=2018-03-01|title=The right-wing effort to paint DREAMers as a nightmare|url=https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/1/17054546/immigration-crime-dreamers-daca-gangs|access-date=2021-01-04|website=Vox|language=en}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|date=2018-02-05|title=The Fatal Flaw in John R. Lott Jr.'s Study on Illegal Immigrant Crime in Arizona|url=https://www.cato.org/blog/fatal-flaw-john-r-lott-jrs-study-illegal-immigrant-crime-arizona|access-date=2021-01-04|website=Cato Institute|language=en}}</ref> ''The Washington Post'' fact-checker wrote that this was a "significant flaw in Lott's study that undercuts his conclusion. Lott says the overall thrust of his study still holds, but the issue muddles his research and invites guesswork as to the actual crime rate for the undocumented immigrant population in Arizona."<ref>{{Cite news|date=2018|title=Questions raised about study that links undocumented immigrants to higher crime|newspaper=The Washington Post|url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2018/03/21/questions-raised-about-a-study-that-links-undocumented-immigrants-to-higher-crime/?noredirect=on}}</ref>


Lott's claims were heavily promoted by the Trump administration to justify its anti-immigration policies, in particular their attempts to end DACA.<ref name=":5" /><ref>{{Cite web|last=Exstrum|first=Olivia|title=The guy behind the bogus immigration report has a long history of terrible and misleading research|url=https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/02/the-guy-behind-the-bogus-immigration-report-has-a-long-history-of-terrible-and-misleading-research/|access-date=2021-01-04|website=Mother Jones|language=en-US}}</ref>
Before the controversy arose, Lott had repeated his survey for a book that he had written in ], this time meticulously documenting the survey's existence. True to his word, his new survey was of similar size, equally inadequate to have a resolution down to the level of 2% of the defensive gun uses he counted. The reported percentage of defensive gun uses who actually fired the weapon in his new survey was 8%, not the 2% he cites from his original survey. Lott claimed that after weighting the number was reduced to 5%; however, the weighting scheme he claims to have used actually increases the number to 9%. Despite this well documented result, however, Lott continued to cite the controversial 2% figure on televised publicity tours for his new book (''Book TV'', CSPAN-2, May 15, 2004).


=== Mary Rosh online persona === === Women's suffrage and government growth ===
According to a study by Lott and Larry Kenny, "women's suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue and more liberal voting patterns for federal representatives, and these effects continued growing over time as more women took advantage of the franchise."<ref>{{cite journal |url=https://ssrn.com/abstract=160530 |title=How Dramatically Did Women's Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government? |first1=John R. Jr. |last1=Lott |first2=Larry |last2=Kenny |journal=Journal of Political Economy |year=1999|doi=10.2139/ssrn.160530 }}</ref>


=== Affirmative action in police departments ===
To add to Lott's troubles, in early ] he admitted that he had created and used "Mary Rosh" as a ] to discuss gun issues and defend his own works on ]. Lott's actions were discovered when ]ger noticed that Lott made statements that matched those from a poster named "Mary Rosh" and that used the ] from the Southeast Pennsylvania area for Comcast. Lott states that the name "maryrosh" derived from the first two letters of his four sons' first names and it has served as the email address that the children had used. When Lott was asked about the use of the pseudonym he immediate admitted to using it, and stated that he had done it because of all the personal attacks and threats that he had suffered.
Lott published a study arguing that affirmative action in the hiring of police reduced the overall quality of all officers and increased crime. The most adverse effects of these hiring policies have occurred in the most heavily black-populated cities. There is no consistent evidence that crime rates rise when standards for hiring women are changed.<ref>{{cite journal |url=https://ssrn.com/abstract=231100 |title=Does a Helping Hand Put Others At Risk?: Affirmative Action, Police Departments, and Crime |first=John R. Jr. |last=Lott |journal=Economic Inquiry |date=April 2000 |volume=38 |issue=2 |pages=239–277 |doi=10.1093/ei/38.2.239 }}</ref>


=== Environmental regulations ===
After the discovery, Lott stated to the '']'':
Together with John Karpoff and Eric Wehrly at the University of Washington, Lott has worked to show the importance of government regulations through both legal and regulatory penalties and the weaknesses of reputational penalties in reducing ].<ref>{{cite journal |url=https://ssrn.com/abstract=747824 |title=The Reputational Penalties for Environmental Violations: Empirical Evidence |first1=Jonathan M. |last1=Karpoff |first2=John R. Jr. |last2=Lott |first3=Eric |last3=Wehrly |journal=Journal of Law and Economics |date=August 16, 2005 |volume=48 |issue=2 |pages=653–675 |doi=10.1086/430806 |s2cid=154290101 }}</ref> Firms violating environmental laws suffer statistically significant losses in the market value of firm equity. The losses are of similar magnitudes to the legal penalties imposed; and in the cross section, the market value loss is related to the size of the legal penalty.
:"I probably shouldn't have done it &ndash; I know I shouldn't have done it &ndash; but it's hard to think of any big advantage I got except to be able to comment fictitiously."


=== Voter fraud claims ===
Many, perhaps even most, Usenet posters do not use their own name for reasons of privacy, particularly individuals such as Lott who are public figures.


{{further|Attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election}}
In October 2020, Lott was appointed as a senior adviser for research and statistics at the ] within the ] in the ].<ref name=":2">{{cite web | last1=Gerstein | first1=Josh | title=Controversial gun advocate hired by Justice Department last month | url=https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/24/controversial-gun-advocate-justice-department-440251 | date=November 24, 2020 | work=] | access-date=November 24, 2020}}</ref> Lott resigned from the DoJ on January 16, 2021.<ref>{{cite news |title=John Lott, Discredited Gun Researcher, Leaves DOJ |url=https://www.thetrace.org/2021/01/discredited-gun-researcher-out-at-justice-department/ |access-date=January 22, 2021 |work=The Trace |date=21 January 2021 |language=en-us}}</ref> Lott has claimed there was voter fraud in the ].<ref>{{Cite web|last=Gerstein|first=Josh|title=Controversial gun advocate hired by Justice Department last month|url=https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/24/controversial-gun-advocate-justice-department-440251|access-date=2021-01-02|website=Politico |date=November 24, 2020 |language=en}}</ref> He argued there was "irregularities" in the ] in ], and later wrote a paper claiming there was evidence of fraud in the absentee ballots in ] and ].<ref name=":6">{{Cite web|last=Hansen|first=Jordan|title=GOP-backed group claims 'irregularities' on Missoula County 2020 ballots|url=https://missoulian.com/news/local/gop-backed-group-claims-irregularities-on-missoula-county-2020-ballots/article_c43cc57c-ff31-54c3-9359-4a5d042cb799.html|access-date=2021-09-14|website=missoulian.com|date=March 30, 2021 |language=en}}</ref> A 2021 '']'' study by political scientists at Stanford University and the University of Chicago rebutted Lott's paper as being not even remotely convincing, writing that his analysis was "entirely dependent on the completely arbitrary order in which pairs of precincts in other counties are entered in the dataset" and that his conclusions about voter fraud were "utterly baseless."<ref name=":6" /><ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Eggers|first1=Andrew C.|last2=Garro|first2=Haritz|last3=Grimmer|first3=Justin|date=2021-11-09|title=No evidence for systematic voter fraud: A guide to statistical claims about the 2020 election|journal=Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences|language=en|volume=118|issue=45|doi=10.1073/pnas.2103619118|issn=0027-8424|pmid=34728563|pmc=8609310 |bibcode=2021PNAS..11803619E |doi-access=free }}</ref><ref>{{cite web |last1=Grimmer |first1=Justin |title=Comment On 'A Simple Test For The Extent Of Voter Fraud With Absentee Ballots In The 2020 Presidential Election' |url=https://www.hoover.org/research/comment-simple-test-extent-voterfraud-absentee-ballots-2020-presidentialelection |website=] |access-date=14 September 2021 |date=5 January 2021}}</ref>

=== 2021 "graduation address" event ===
On June 4, 2021, two parents of a child killed in the 2018 shooting at ] invited Lott and ] to deliver what they falsely said was a dress rehearsal for a 2021 graduation address for a fictitious school called "the James Madison Academy". The space for the audience contained 3,044 empty folding chairs. Lott first realized that the event was a staged attempt to call attention to school shootings, and not a genuine commencement address dress rehearsal, when news media asked him to comment on segments of video of the "dress rehearsal" that the organizers posted on the internet. They said that the empty chairs were intended to represent the victims of school shootings who would never graduate from high school. In a local ] news interview, Lott said that he is not opposed to all forms of background checks but simply believes that background checks broadly discriminate against persons of color, primarily black and Hispanic, among potential gun buyers.<ref name=Clark1>{{cite web |last1=Clark |first1=Lauren |title=Gun activists tricked into speaking at fake Las Vegas high school graduation |url=https://news3lv.com/amp/news/local/gun-activists-tricked-into-speaking-at-fake-las-vegas-high-school-graduation |website=3LV News |date=June 23, 2021 |access-date=8 September 2021}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/amberjamieson/nra-president-graduation-speech|title = A Parkland Victim's Dad Tricked a Former NRA President into Speaking at a Fake Graduation| website=] | date=June 23, 2021 }}</ref>


==Bibliography== ==Bibliography==
*''Are Predatory Commitments Credible?'' (ISBN 0226493555)
*''More Guns, Less Crime'' (ISBN 0226493644)
*'']'' (ISBN 0895261146)

== External links ==
*
*
*

''Peer-reviewd studies that discuss, replicate, duplicate or disagree with Dr. Lott's research'':
*
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''Other discussions regarding Lott's research, including non peer-reviewed research'':

*
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* Disinfopedia:
* Tim Lambert: (weblog)


* ''Uncertainty and Economic Evolution'' ({{ISBN|0-415-15166-X}})
* National Academy of Science:
* ''Are Predatory Commitments Credible?'' ({{ISBN|0-226-49355-5}})
* Tim Lambert:
* '']'' ({{ISBN|0-226-49364-4}})
* Ted Goertzel:
* '']'' ({{ISBN|0-89526-114-6}})
* ''Straight Shooting'' ({{ISBN|0-936783-47-8}})
* '']'' ({{ISBN|978-1-596-98506-3}})
* ''Debacle: Obama's War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do Now to Regain Our Future'' ({{ISBN|978-1118186176}})
* ''At the Brink: Will Obama Push Us Over the Edge?'' ({{ISBN|978-1621570516}})
* ''Dumbing Down the Courts: How Politics Keeps the Smartest Judges Off the Bench'' ({{ISBN|978-1626522497}})
* ''The War on Guns,'' ] 2016 ({{ISBN|978-1-62157-580-1}})


==See also==
* Otis Dudley Duncan:
* ]
**
* ]
***
* ]
* ]
* ]


==References==
* Michelle Malkin
{{Reflist}}
** John Lott
*** Tim Lambert:


==External links==
{{Commons category|John Lott}}


===Lott's websites===
''Regarding the Mary Rosh identity'':
*
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* {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121221054526/http://www.johnlott.org/ |date=December 21, 2012 }}
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===Lott's research===
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* , anti-Lott website that links to several articles *
* , National Academy of Science
* {{Google Scholar id | GkwOC24AAAAJ }}
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{{Authority control}}


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Latest revision as of 23:14, 5 December 2024

American economist, political commentator, and gun rights advocate (born 1958) For other people named John Lott, see John Lott (disambiguation).

John Lott
BornJohn Richard Lott Jr.
(1958-05-08) May 8, 1958 (age 66)
Academic career
FieldEconomics
InstitutionsUniversity of Chicago
Yale University
The Wharton School
University of Maryland, College Park
American Enterprise Institute
Alma materUniversity of California, Los Angeles (BA, MA, PhD)

John Richard Lott Jr. (born May 8, 1958) is an American economist, political commentator, and gun rights advocate. Lott was formerly employed at various academic institutions and at the American Enterprise Institute conservative think tank. He is the former president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, a nonprofit he founded in 2013. He worked in the Office of Justice Programs within the U.S. Department of Justice under the Donald Trump administration from October 2020 to January 2021. Lott holds a Ph.D. in economics from UCLA.

He has written for both academic and popular publications. He has authored books such as More Guns, Less Crime, The Bias Against Guns, and Freedomnomics. He is best known as a gun rights advocate and has argued against restrictions on owning and carrying guns. The New Yorker and The Trace have said "no one has had greater influence" in the scientific debate over firearms while Newsweek referred to Lott as "The Gun Crowd's Guru."

Academic career

John Lott studied economics at UCLA, receiving his B.A. in 1980, M.A. in 1982, and Ph.D. in 1984. Lott has held positions in law and economics at several institutions, including the Yale Law School, the Hoover Institution, UCLA, the Wharton Business School, Texas A&M University, and Rice University. Lott was the chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission (1988–1989). He spent five years at the University of Chicago, as a visiting professor from 1994 to 1995 and as a John M. Olin fellow from 1995 to 1999. Lott was a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute from 2001 to 2006. He left AEI for SUNY Binghamton. From July 2007 to 2010, Lott was a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland Foundation at the University of Maryland, College Park and lectured on law and economics.

Lott has written op-eds for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Chicago Tribune. Since 2008, he has been a columnist for Fox News, initially weekly.

Research on guns

Concealed weapons and crime rate

In a 1997 article written with David B. Mustard and Lott's subsequent books More Guns, Less Crime and The Bias Against Guns, Lott argued that allowing adults to carry concealed weapons significantly reduces crime in America. In 2004, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) National Research Council (NRC) conducted a review of current research and data on firearms and violent crime, including Lott's work, and concluded "that with the current evidence it is not possible to determine that there is a causal link between the passage of right-to-carry laws and crime rates." The NAS report wrote of Lott's work, "The initial model specification, when extended to new data, does not show evidence that passage of right-to-carry laws reduces crime. The estimated effects are highly sensitive to seemingly minor changes in the model specification and control variables." The criminologist James Q. Wilson was the only member on the 18-member NAS panel who dissented from this conclusion. For similar reasons as highlighted by the NAS, as well as "multiple serious problems with data and methodology", a 2020 comprehensive review of existing research on concealed-carry by the RAND Corporation discounted Lott's studies.

Other reviews said that there were problems with Lott's model. A replication by Dan A. Black and Daniel Nagin found that minor adjustments to Lott and Mustard's model led to the disappearance of the findings. In the New England Journal of Medicine, David Hemenway argued that Lott failed to account for several key variables, including drug consumption. Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue said that the model used by Lott contained significant coding errors and systemic bias. In the American Journal of Public Health, Daniel Webster et al. also raised concerns about flaws in the study, such as misclassification of laws and endogeneity of predictor variables, which they said rendered the study's conclusions "insupportable". Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck considered it unlikely that such a large decrease in violent crime could be explained by a relatively modest increase in concealed carry. A 1998 study by Jens Ludwig that said it "more effectively control for unobserved variables that may vary over time" than the Lott and Mustard study concluded that "shall-issue laws have resulted, if anything, in an increase in adult homicide rates." A 2001 study in the Journal of Political Economy by University of Chicago economist Mark Duggan did robustness checks of Lott and Mustard's study and found that the findings of the Lott and Mustard study were inaccurate.

Other academics praised Lott's methodology, including Florida State University economist Bruce Benson, Cardozo School of Law professor John O. McGinnis, College of William and Mary professor Carlisle Moody, University of Mississippi professor William F. Shughart, and SUNY economist Florenz Plassmann and University of Adelaide economist John Whitley.

Referring to the research done on the topic, The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote in 2003 that "Mr. Lott's research has convinced his peers of at least one point: No scholars now claim that legalizing concealed weapons causes a major increase in crime." As Lott critics Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue III pointed out, "Lott and Mustard have made an important scholarly contribution in establishing that these laws have not led to the massive bloodbath of death and injury that some of their opponents feared. On the other hand, we find that the statistical evidence that these laws have reduced crime is limited, sporadic, and extraordinarily fragile." A 2008 article in Econ Journal Watch surveyed peer-reviewed empirical academic studies, and found that 10 supported the proposition that right-to-carry reduces crime, 8 supported no significant effect and none supported an increase. The article was rebutted by Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue in the same journal in 2009.

In 2013, Lott founded the nonprofit organization Crime Prevention Research Center to study the relationship between gun laws and crime. As of July 2015, he was also the organization's president. The board of directors for the organization includes guitarist Ted Nugent, conservative talkshow host Lars Larson and former sheriff David Clarke. In 2020, Lott left the organization to take a position in the Trump administration.

Defensive gun use

Main article: Defensive gun use

Lott argues in both More Guns, Less Crime and The Bias Against Guns that defensive gun use (DGU) is underreported, noting that in general, only shootings ending in fatalities are discussed in news stories. In More Guns, Less Crime, Lott writes that "ince in many defensive cases a handgun is simply brandished, and no one is harmed, many defensive uses are never even reported to the police." In May 1998, Lott wrote that "national surveys" suggested that "98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack." Lott cited similar figures in op-eds in The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times.

In 2002, he said that brandishing a weapon was sufficient to stop an attack 95% of the time. Other researchers criticized his methodology. A study in Public Opinion Quarterly said that his sample size of 1,015 respondents was too small for the study to be accurate and that the majority of similar studies suggest a value between 70 and 80 percent. According to Lott, Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz's 1994 estimate rises to 92 percent when brandishing and warning shots are added together. Lott said that the lower rates found by others was at least in part due to the different questions that were asked.

Defamation suit

On April 10, 2006, John Lott filed suit for defamation against Steven Levitt and HarperCollins Publishers over the book Freakonomics and against Levitt over a series of emails to John McCall. In the book Freakonomics, Levitt and coauthor Stephen J. Dubner claimed that the results of Lott's research in More Guns, Less Crime had not been replicated by other academics. In the emails to economist John McCall, who had pointed to a number of papers in different academic publications that had replicated Lott's work, Levitt wrote that the work by several authors supporting Lott in a special 2001 issue of the Journal of Law and Economics had not been peer-reviewed, Lott had paid the University of Chicago Press to publish the papers, and that papers with results opposite of Lott's had been blocked from publication in that issue. A federal judge found that Levitt's replication claim in Freakonomics was not defamation but found merit in Lott's complaint over the email claims. The dismissal was affirmed by a three-judge panel of The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on February 11, 2009.

A settlement was reached over the claims made by Levitt in the emails to McCall whereby Levitt did not have to issue a formal apology but rather send a letter of clarification to John McCall that the issue of the Journal of Law and Economics was peer-reviewed, and that Lott had not improperly influenced the editors. The Chronicle of Higher Education characterized Levitt's letter as offering "a doozy of a concession."

Disputed survey

In the course of a dispute with Otis Dudley Duncan in 1999–2000, Lott claimed to have undertaken a national survey of 2,424 respondents in 1997, the results of which were the source for claims he had made beginning in 1997. However, in 2000 Lott was unable to produce the data or any records showing that the survey had been undertaken. He said the 1997 hard drive crash that had affected several projects with co-authors had destroyed his survey data set, the original tally sheets had been abandoned with other personal property in his move from Chicago to Yale, and he could not recall the names of any of the students who he said had worked on it. Critics questioned whether the survey had ever taken place, but Lott defends the survey's existence and accuracy.

Mary Rosh persona

In response to the dispute surrounding the missing survey, Lott used a sock puppet by the name of "Mary Rosh" to defend his own works on Usenet and elsewhere. After investigative work by libertarian blogger Julian Sanchez, Lott admitted to using the Mary Rosh persona.

Further accusations claimed that Lott praised himself while posing as one of his former students and that "Rosh" was used to post a favorable review of More Guns, Less Crime on Amazon.com. Lott has claimed that the review was written by his son and wife. "I probably shouldn't have done it—I know I shouldn't have done it—but it's hard to think of any big advantage I got except to be able to comment fictitiously," Lott told The Washington Post in 2003.

Safe storage gun laws

In a 2001 study, Lott and John E. Whitley reported that safe-storage gun laws not only did not reduce juvenile suicides or accidental gun deaths, but that they also increased rates of violent and property crime. The study was criticized by Webster et al. in the Journal of the American Medical Association for using Tobit regression despite the fact that the data used in the study on youth suicides was "highly skewed and heteroskedastic", and because the vast majority of crimes that Lott and Whitley claimed increased due to safe-storage laws occurred outside the home. Webster and Carroll also wrote in Guns in American Society: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, Culture, and the Law that the Lott and Whitley study's findings with respect to crime were inconsistent with prior research.

Other research and events

In a study published in 2000, Lott concluded that most of the large recent increases in campaign spending for state and federal offices can be explained by higher government spending. Lott also supports the conclusion that higher quality judges, measured by their output once they are on the court (e.g., number of citations to their opinions or number of published opinions), take longer to get confirmed.

Lost Bush votes in the 2000 presidential election

In 2000, Lott argued, using a regression analysis, that George W. Bush lost at least 10,000 votes in Florida after the media incorrectly called the state for Al Gore while voting was still ongoing in the more conservative parts of the state. Lott's argument is used in the influential social science methodology textbook Rethinking Social Inquiry (edited by Henry Brady and David Collier) as an example of poor methodology. Contrary to Lott's study, they show that the number of lost Bush votes ranged from 28 to 56.

Abortion and crime

With John Whitley at the University of Adelaide, Lott published a study that argued that liberalization of abortion laws led to higher murder rates. In a review of the literature on the relationship between abortion and crime, Theodore Joyce, an economist at Baruch College and the National Bureau of Economic Research, praised Lott and Whitley for gathering additional data on abortion but criticized the methodology that they used.

Illegal immigration and crime

Lott has non-peer-reviewed research that purports to show that undocumented immigrants are more crime-prone than U.S. citizens. In doing so, Lott lumped together both legal and illegal immigrants in prison into a category for illegal immigrants, leading to an elevated crime rate for illegal immigrants. The Washington Post fact-checker wrote that this was a "significant flaw in Lott's study that undercuts his conclusion. Lott says the overall thrust of his study still holds, but the issue muddles his research and invites guesswork as to the actual crime rate for the undocumented immigrant population in Arizona."

Lott's claims were heavily promoted by the Trump administration to justify its anti-immigration policies, in particular their attempts to end DACA.

Women's suffrage and government growth

According to a study by Lott and Larry Kenny, "women's suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue and more liberal voting patterns for federal representatives, and these effects continued growing over time as more women took advantage of the franchise."

Affirmative action in police departments

Lott published a study arguing that affirmative action in the hiring of police reduced the overall quality of all officers and increased crime. The most adverse effects of these hiring policies have occurred in the most heavily black-populated cities. There is no consistent evidence that crime rates rise when standards for hiring women are changed.

Environmental regulations

Together with John Karpoff and Eric Wehrly at the University of Washington, Lott has worked to show the importance of government regulations through both legal and regulatory penalties and the weaknesses of reputational penalties in reducing pollution. Firms violating environmental laws suffer statistically significant losses in the market value of firm equity. The losses are of similar magnitudes to the legal penalties imposed; and in the cross section, the market value loss is related to the size of the legal penalty.

Voter fraud claims

Further information: Attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election

In October 2020, Lott was appointed as a senior adviser for research and statistics at the Office of Justice Programs within the U.S. Department of Justice in the Donald Trump administration. Lott resigned from the DoJ on January 16, 2021. Lott has claimed there was voter fraud in the 2020 United States presidential election. He argued there was "irregularities" in the absentee ballots in Missoula County, and later wrote a paper claiming there was evidence of fraud in the absentee ballots in Georgia and Pennsylvania. A 2021 PNAS study by political scientists at Stanford University and the University of Chicago rebutted Lott's paper as being not even remotely convincing, writing that his analysis was "entirely dependent on the completely arbitrary order in which pairs of precincts in other counties are entered in the dataset" and that his conclusions about voter fraud were "utterly baseless."

2021 "graduation address" event

On June 4, 2021, two parents of a child killed in the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School invited Lott and David Keene to deliver what they falsely said was a dress rehearsal for a 2021 graduation address for a fictitious school called "the James Madison Academy". The space for the audience contained 3,044 empty folding chairs. Lott first realized that the event was a staged attempt to call attention to school shootings, and not a genuine commencement address dress rehearsal, when news media asked him to comment on segments of video of the "dress rehearsal" that the organizers posted on the internet. They said that the empty chairs were intended to represent the victims of school shootings who would never graduate from high school. In a local Las Vegas news interview, Lott said that he is not opposed to all forms of background checks but simply believes that background checks broadly discriminate against persons of color, primarily black and Hispanic, among potential gun buyers.

Bibliography

See also

References

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  2. Blake, Meredith (December 16, 2012). "Piers Morgan on gun control: 'How many kids have to die?'". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved January 16, 2014.
  3. Bovard, James. "Review quotes". press.uchicago.edu. University of Chicago Press. Archived from the original on September 19, 2018. Retrieved January 16, 2014.
  4. Spies, Mike (November 3, 2022). "The Right's Favorite Gun Researcher". The Trace. Retrieved January 24, 2023.
  5. Bai, Matt (March 12, 2001). "The Gun Crowd's Guru: John Lott has a high profile—and a target on his back". Newsweek. Archived from the original on May 2, 2015.
  6. ^ "Dr. John R. Lott Jr". Fox News. July 27, 2016. Retrieved July 27, 2016.
  7. Curriculum Vitae of John R. Lott Jr., dated March 17, 2008.
  8. Social Science Research Network
  9. Blogspot.com
  10. Fox News
  11. John R. Lott Jr. and David B. Mustard, "Crime, Deterrence and Right-To-Carry Concealed Handguns", 26 Journal of Legal Studies 1 (1997) working paper PDF Archived 2010-06-16 at the Wayback Machine; journal article PDF (subscription required).
  12. NAS, Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review (2004) Executive Summary, Major Conclusions, p. 2. Ch. 6 Right-to-Carry Laws, pp. 120–151, reviews research by Lott and others on this issue.
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  14. Wilson, James Q. (2004). "Appendix A Dissent". Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review. pp. 269–270. ISBN 0-309-09124-1. Archived from the original on October 16, 2012.
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  18. Hemenway, David (December 31, 1998). "More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding crime and gun-control laws / Making A Killing: The business of guns in America". The New England Journal of Medicine. 339 (27): 2029–2030. doi:10.1056/NEJM199812313392719.
  19. ^ Ayres, Ian; John J. Donohue III (April 2003). "Shooting Down the 'More Guns, Less Crime' Hypothesis". Stanford Law Review. 55 (4): 1193. doi:10.2139/ssrn.343781. S2CID 55757925.
  20. Webster, D W; Vernick, J S; Ludwig, J; Lester, K J (June 1997). "Flawed gun policy research could endanger public safety". American Journal of Public Health. 87 (6): 918–921. doi:10.2105/AJPH.87.6.918. PMC 1380922. PMID 9224169.
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  22. Ludwig, Jens (September 1998). "Concealed-gun-carrying laws and violent crime: evidence from state panel data" (PDF). International Review of Law and Economics. 18 (3): 239–254. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.487.5452. doi:10.1016/S0144-8188(98)00012-X. Archived (PDF) from the original on October 9, 2022.
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  24. Benson, Bruce L. (September 1999). "Review of More Guns, Less Crime". Public Choice. 100 (3–4): 309–313. doi:10.1023/A:1018689310638. S2CID 150500420.
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  26. Moody, Carlisle E. (October 2001). "Testing for the Effects of Concealed Weapons Laws: Specification Errors and Robustness". The Journal of Law and Economics. 44 (s2): 799–813. doi:10.1086/323313. S2CID 154918586.
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  29. Glenn, David (May 9, 2003). "'More Guns, Less Crime' Thesis Rests on a Flawed Statistical Design, Scholars Argue". The Chronicle of Higher Education. 49 (35): A18. Retrieved May 27, 2007.
  30. Carlisle E. Moody and Thomas B. Marvell, "The Debate on Shall-Issue Laws", Econ Journal Watch Vol. 5, Iss. 3 (2008).
  31. "Yet Another Refutation of the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis—With Some Help From Moody and Marvell · Econ Journal Watch: Law and economics, criminal justice policy, guns and crime". econjwatch.org. Retrieved September 13, 2017.
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  33. ^ Gerstein, Josh (November 24, 2020). "Controversial gun advocate hired by Justice Department last month". Politico. Retrieved November 24, 2020.
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  37. Lott, John. "What Surveys Can Help Us Understand About Guns?" (PDF). p. 8. Archived (PDF) from the original on October 9, 2022. Retrieved June 22, 2016.
  38. Discussion of different surveys on defensive gun use Johnlott.org
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  45. Glenn, David (August 10, 2007). "Dueling Economists Reach Settlement in Defamation Lawsuit". Chronicle of Higher Education. 53 (49): 10.
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  50. Sanchez, Julian (February 13, 2003). "Red Herrings". Julian Sanchez – blog. Retrieved July 28, 2016. (Julian Sanchez noted that the 1997 hard drive crash is widely accepted as a fact; the dispute is over the lack of solid evidence that Lott lost a survey data set in that crash)
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  66. Exstrum, Olivia. "The guy behind the bogus immigration report has a long history of terrible and misleading research". Mother Jones. Retrieved January 4, 2021.
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  69. Karpoff, Jonathan M.; Lott, John R. Jr.; Wehrly, Eric (August 16, 2005). "The Reputational Penalties for Environmental Violations: Empirical Evidence". Journal of Law and Economics. 48 (2): 653–675. doi:10.1086/430806. S2CID 154290101.
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External links

Lott's websites

Lott's research

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