Julian Sanchez is on the case again. This time he has a bit more detail from Mustard. The key point is that Mustard is "fairly confident" that Lott told him in 1997 that he had done a survey. This suggests that Lott didn't invent the survey in 1999 to explain his 98% figure. Well, this makes me lean more towards Lott having done a survey, but it's still not conclusive. Mustard isn't sure about being told in 1997. All this back and forth is making me dizzy. I'm not going to express another opinion on whether he did a survey until I see Lindgren's new report.
Kevin Drum gives us one, two three postings on the weighting, lack of IRB review and some more implausibilities. For what it's worth, I enquired about the IRB thing last year and was told that folks in Law schools often ignore it, so it was no big deal. Ted Barlow outdoes him with four postings. Ted makes a good point about the sheer quantity of paper you get with even a small survey and has a good summary of the problems in his top posting. ArchPundit costs Lott's survey and also has two postings with a nice list of possible explanations of what Lott actually did, all of which are bad for Lott, though some are less bad. Lott says he got student volunteers to do it, so it would not have cost as much as ArchPundit estimates. Tom Spencer posts twice. Meanwhile Atrios only posts once. Well, actually he posts a bajillion times, but only one is about Lott.
Steve Verdon comes round and agrees that Lott should withdraw the 98% figure but thinks I should lay off now that I've won. But, Steve, Lott has not withdrawn the 98% figure. In fact, he just sent a message to firearmsregprof where he says:
Would one want even larger samples for brandishing so as to get even tighter confidence intervals? Sure, but I have limited personal resources and the point estimate gives us the best guess that we have for the rate of brandishing. I do not believe you can point to anything that has me claiming more for this result than was appropriate. The sentence in the second edition (2000) even added a cautionary phrase at the beginning of the sentence.
Look at that, he insists that 98% is the "best guess that we have for the rate of brandishing." And look at what he says about the change between the first edition and the second edition. Here's the sentence in the first edition:
"If national surveys are correct, 98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack."
and here it is in the second:
"If a national survey that I conducted is correct, 98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack."
He didn't add a cautionary phrase at all. He changed the attribution of the 98% figure. And he won't admit to doing it.