As far as academic gigs go, John Lott has made a good gig for himself by doing half-assed research that was hungrily devoured by those who wanted to agree with his results. While I’ll put peer review over the law review process in most cases, Lott figured out that most reviewers in non-technical journals don’t really know enough to knock down poor statistical choices and so he got his concealed carry stuff published as peer reviewed. As with any simple model of crime, the results suffer from pretty clear signs of multicollinearity and the model choice is half-assed if not quarter-assed. Saying the work was theoretically suspect is generous.
However, these aren’t problems only found in Lott’s work so I don’t find it much to get worked up about. It is a bit disconcerting that half-assed work is used to promote policy, but that isn’t really much new either. Charles Murray has made a far longer run at influencing policy with junk work and we can find all sorts of liberal examples as well.
For some reason the "the dog ate my survey" rang true to me. Probably because I’m an absent-minded moron and have lost or had data corrupted before two professional conferences and had to make the same claim. I actually feel bad for him because it is pretty damn embarrassing. Stupid, but embarrassing.
A real social scientist would be disturbed as Julian Sanchez points out, but Lott gets attention and plenty of air time.
But what we find out now is that Lott definitely has an on-line alter ego named Mary Rosh who has been actively defending and promoting John Lott’s work for quite some time. I understand the idea of using anonymity and the issue of defending one’s work that way makes sense.
More disturbing is the notion that Rosh was not just arguing the points, but actually telling stories about interactions with him and writing gushing book reviews for himself.
This seems a bit more serious. After all, if he owns guns, wouldn’t having multiple personalities be a reason for confiscation?
You can’t really complain when you set yourself up that badly…