Brad Delong points us to a New York Times profile on "rabidly anti-gun" Steven Levitt. The whole thing is worth reading, but this part is especially interesting to me:
The year after he was hired, his wife gave birth to their first child, Andrew. One day, just after Andrew turned a year old, he came down with a slight fever. The doctor diagnosed an ear infection. When he started vomiting the next morning, his parents took him to the hospital. A few days later he was dead of pneumococcal meningitis.
... And not surprisingly for a scholar who pursues real-life subjects, the death also informed Levitt's work.
He and Jeannette joined a support group for grieving parents. Levitt was struck by how many children had drowned in swimming pools. They were the kinds of deaths that don't make the newspaper---unlike, for instance, a child who dies while playing with a gun.
Levitt was curious and went looking for numbers that would tell the story. He wrote up the results as an op-ed article for The Chicago Sun-Times. It featured the sort of plangent counterintuition for which he has become famous: "If you own a gun and have a swimming pool in the yard, the swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is."
In The Bias Against Guns, after writing that Levitt had been described as "rabidly anti-gun", Lott wrote:
Levitt apparently tried to overcome this image by writing his first op-ed about a week before his name was publicly nominated for the panel. Given that panel members are supposed to not have strong views on the topic that they are studying, it was strange that Levitt would write his first op-ed piece at this time. The op-ed argued that swimming pools posed a greater risk to children than guns, but it is hard to understand why he would choose this very time to write his very first op-ed on this particular topic when this would normally be considered the least appropriate time to do so. When I raised concerns about Levitt's strong opposition to guns to John Pepper, who was serving as the staff director for the panel, Pepper pointed to the op-ed piece that Levitt had written as evidence that Levitt believed the same things that I believed on guns. Personally knowing Levitt, I know that was not true and one could point to several of Levitt's academic papers. But the op-ed served its purpose.
(Actually the op-ed was written the previous year and Pepper disputes Lott's account of their conversation.)
It is obvious if you read the op-ed that Levitt wrote it to try to help prevent another parent suffering a loss like his, but according to Lott it was written to cover up Levitt's true beliefs about guns. In a radio interview, Lott once said:
"I have five kids. I can't imagine what it would be like to lose any of them"
Try asking Steve Levitt, Dr Lott.