Jim Henley gets another email from Lott. It's not fair!
Roger Ailes asks "how reliable is a self-reporting survey of 'defensive gun use' in the first place?". You're opening a real can of worms here, Roger. Survey estimates of the frequency of defensive gun use range from 80,000 (NCVS 87-92) to 23,000,000 (NSPOF). There is heated debate in the criminology literature as to what the correct number is. You can, for example, read Hemenway ("100,000 DGUs"), Kleck ("2.5 million DGUs"), Smith ("both sides are wrong") or my own endless writings on this topic. However, despite such huge differences in the frequency of DGUs, these surveys agree about the percentage of defenders that fire their guns. Since they can't all be right, it is a mystery how they could agree so well about the firing percentages. All this makes it less credible that Lott could have conducted a survey that came up with such a radically different shooting percentage.
Oh, and another thing. It is possible that all of the published surveys are wrong and the shooting percentage really is 2%. This still wouldn't let Lott off the hook, since he claims to have conducted a survey that gave 2% firing. The relevant question as to whether his claim to have conducted a survey is credible, is what people tell you in surveys, not what the correct number is.