Links

John Quiggin points to an interesting compilation of fake Internet identities. Tbogg is surprised that there are still media organizations that take Lott seriously. He also wonders where Lott got his numbers from. Well, the defensive gun use numbers come from this survey Lott says he did, while the statistic about public school shootings was manufactured by selective quoting from news stories.

Glenn Reynolds comments on the Ayres and Donohue's letter on the coding errors. Reynolds also states that he is reluctant to believe charges of dishonesty against Lott because some critics have made ad hominem charges against him, for example, that his research was funded by ammunition manufacturers. However, his academic critics never made such charges. I specifically noted that the funded-by-ammunition-manufacturers charge was an ad hominem as recently as a few days ago and wrote generally about other unfair attacks on Lott years ago.

Timothy McGillicuty comments on Lott's attack on Levitt: To my immense amusement, an NRA nut named John Lott has attacked him for it because, as near as I can tell through the foam and spittle flying out of Lott's mouth, he wrote the Op-Ed piece to hide the fact that he was anti-gun. Roger Ailes posts on the Levitt piece and askjohnlott.org.

Wyeth has his own response to Lott's defence that I dissected earlier.

Paul Bruno writes: John Lott should be below anybody's standards, but since Lew Rockwell insists on publishing Lott's work, I cannot in good conscience keep the link to his site. Roger Ailes is rather unfair to Lott, implying that Lott would deny guns to sixth graders. Actually, in The Bias Against Guns Lott argues that sixth graders should have access to guns for self-defence.

Terry Krepel criticizes WorldNetDaily's unbalanced coverage of Lott.

skippy isn't impressed by Lott's sleight of hand in proving he had a disk crash instead of offering evidence that he did a survey. skippy is rightly skeptical about the existence of witnesses to the disk crash. There are none. However, we do have plenty of evidence that Lott lost data in 1997 and told lots of people at the time he had lost the data in a disk crash, so I'm prepared to let him have the disk crash.

Jesse Taylor has written a letter to the editor about John Lott and also gives his take on John Lott's suggestion that Iraqi civilians should have more guns. Kaimipono is deeply skeptical. Bill Berkowitz describes it like this: Perhaps the weirdest bit of advice came from John Lott Jr., the now-discredited resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Lott, who believes the American people would be safer if we all are armed, suggested that trying to force Iraqis to turn in their guns was a mistake. Also commenting on Lott's advice was Handgun-Free America Director Chris McGrath.…

After I linked to a posting by Cypren that attacked Fox News, Lott read the posting, construed it as an attack on himself and complained about it. Cypren's post seemed to me to quite clearly be an attack on Fox rather than Lott, but I guess Lott's is so used to being attacked that he saw it as an attack on himself.

Terry Krepel writes about biased reporting from CNSNews.com. Krepel observes that their coverage of Lott exhibits bias by omission with two stories about Lott carefully avoiding mentioning the mysterious survey or Mary Rosh.

Cypren criticizes Fox News for presenting this Lott op-ed as if it were a news story.

Tom Spencer mentions the Washington Post's criticism of Lott. ArchPundit finds Lott's criticism (in this interview)of poorly done gun control research ironic. Arie discovers the John Lott story.

The Washington Post zings Lott for throwing stones at the New York Times from his glass house. Matt Welch also comments, while Greg Beato thinks that the New York Times has hit rock bottom when even John Lott is denigrating its integrity. Andrew Chamberlain invites readers to join in an online debate about Lott and scholarly integrity. Tom Spencer comments on the errors that Lott made on his blog.

Jan Haugland writes about how blogs have been bad news for people named Lott: Even if Lott is not an outright fraud (which the evidence so far suggests he is), he is certainly not a scholar, and he is a using unethical methods and sloppy research. Also commenting on blogs and Lott are Greg Vassie and Dan Gillmor.

Dr Limerick thinks Lott isn't washed up, because the AEI and similar institutions will always have a place for him. Andrew Chamberlain tells us why character matters: By Lott's total disregard for norms of honesty, he's revealed a deep character flaw that runs to his core. And people always become what they have in their core. I keep having conversations where people argue the Mary Rosh scandal has no impact on Lott's scholarship. This is absurd. The scandal demonstrates that Lott is a man with no integrity or respect for the truth. Like it or not, this casts doubt on all his work,…

Tom Spencer finds Lott's complaints about a "pattern of deceit" at theNew York Times rather hilarious.

Metafilter has a thread on Mary Rosh, while David Schimke also comments.

Brian Linse writes: The fact that former supporters (and some current supporters like NRO) haven't been outspoken and firm in their denunciations of Lott's irresponsible and unethical behavior is destined to do additional harm to the cause of gun rights.

Tom Spencer comments on Lott's attack on Tom Smith. John Quiggin writes about data mining and Lott.

Tom Spencer thinks that Lott's days are numbered now.