Otis Dudley Duncan has sent me these comments, which draw attention to a key point that almost all bloggers have missed:
"There are two distinct issues in this case.
- Lott repeatedly made erroneous statements about the findings of other researchers. None of the national surveys that he cited by name actually had any figure at all for merely brandishing or firing. One of them, the Roper survey (which was mentioned in the Feb. 6, 1997, Nebraska testimony) never even did any survey on defensive gun use. Of the polls that did collect data on firing, none of them obtained a figure anywhere near Lott's 2 percent. So everything he has said about surveys on this topic done by others is utterly, totally false. There is no room even for reasonable doubt.
- Did Lott himself carry out the survey that he described in his "Reply" of Sept./Oct. 2000? It appears that he will not be able to produce compelling evidence that such a survey was done. But the internal evidence indicates that no survey with the results he described can have produced responsible statistical estimates of population frequencies: sample size = 2,424; population estimate of 2.1 million defensive uses in a population of about 200 million American adults as of 1997 (rate = about .01); 98% of the uses involving merely brandishing, 1.5% firing warning shots, 0.5% firing at offender. An event (firing in self defense) with a probability of about 1 in 5,000 (.01 x .02) cannot be honestly estimated with a sample size of 2,424, let alone the 1 in 20,000 probability of firing at an offender.
"Thus, while it is important to continue the investigation Lindgren has begun into whether the survey itself was actually faked, there can be no serious question as to whether Lott is guilty of fabricating evidence in his reports on what others found. And at best he has convicted himself of gross incompetence/culpable negligence in his report on his own purported survey. As to the first of these charges, Lott has never seen fit to comment in any way on why, knowing as early as Spring 1997 that the brandishing figure of 98% was obtained in his own survey, he chose to attribute it to surveys done by others. Nor has he explained why the 2000 edition in which the claim about his own survey first appeared there was no explanation of the revision of the statement on page 3."