The Rosh Huntress files

In the Washington Post article Lott says:

"I probably shouldn't have done it---I know I shouldn't have done it ---but it's hard to think of any big advantage I got except to be able to comment fictitiously,"

Well, I can think of one.

Last January, the New York Post drafted an opinion piece written by Lott. In that piece Lott claimed that a school shooting had been stopped by students armed with guns and that almost all the newspaper stories had failed to mention this fact, thus demonstrating that the media showed a bias against guns. Next, someone posted the Lott piece to Usenet. A long discussion ensued, with a gentleman named Ed Huntress criticising Lott for failing to mention that the students with guns had actually been police officers, and Mary Rosh stoutly defending Lott. In February, Lott's piece was drafted in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram with one and only one significant change: the addition of these words:

Many stories mentioned that the heroic students had law enforcement or military backgrounds

Mary then posted this version (artfully claiming that there were a "couple" of significant differences) and suggested that the New York Post had edited out that phrase to make the piece fit in the available space. Mary also demanded that Ed Huntress call Lott and apologize since the error was the New York Post's fault. Ed called Lott and reported back:

I talked to John Lott and learned that he hasn't even seen the New York Post's edited version of his editorial.

That's just a brief summary. You should read the whole discussion to really appreciate what an enormous lie Lott told.

So, what big advantage did Lott obtain by his Mary Rosh deception? He made a major omission from his piece. Instead of having to take responsibility for his actions, he was able to blame the New York Post.

This isn't the only time that Lott has attempted to get out of a jam by rewriting history. Consider:

  • the story that the 98% came from a never-before revealed survey after years of attributing it to other sources and the denial that he ever attributed to other sources.
  • the attempts to change the story he told Lindgren and the insistence that he had not changed his story.
  • changing the story about the survey so that it took one month to complete instead of three months after writing: "I am willing to bet that I don't start mentioning this [98%] figure until the spring of 1997. If I use it before I said that I did the survey, I will say that they nailed me."

All this suggests that Mustard's late recollection that Lott had told him in 1997 that he had done a survey may have been caused by Lott insisting that he had definitely told him then and Mustard being less resistant than Lindgren to Lott's history rewriting.

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