Atrios points us to Tim Noah's article at Slate. After the Washington Times whitewash, and the US News and Washington Post completely ignoring Lott's survey, we at last have a mainstream media article that gets to the heart of the matter.
One interesting feature that bears repeating because it is hard for it to sink in because it seems so unlikely: Lott will not admit that he attributed the 98% figure to "national surveys". Look at what he tells Slate:
"A lot of those discussions could have been written more clearly."
Lott is saying that this sentence does not attribute the 98% to "national surveys":
"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 this sentence does not attribute the number to "Kleck's study":
"Kleck's study of defensive gun uses found that ninety-eight percent of the time simply brandishing the weapon is sufficient to stop an attack."
They just "could have been written more clearly."
Julian Sanchez comments on the Slate article with two points, one for Lott, and one against.
- That Lott discussed his 1997 study during a January 1999 talk that Gross attended, and since that preceded Duncan's raising the 98% question later that year, the tape of that talk would be good evidence that there really was a survey. However, Tim Noah has misunderstood David Gross. Gross kept the tape of the talk, so we know exactly what Lott said. He presented the 98% statistic without giving a source, and Gross formed the notion that the source must have been the survey where he was asked about his own defensive gun use. After the talk he mentioned this to Lott, and even then Lott did not say that it was his survey. This part of Gross's story is actually evidence against Lott, and is one of the reasons why I'm inclined to believe Gross---if he was making it up, you think he would have provided more support for Lott.
- Why didn't Lott re-enter the data from the tally sheets? Good question. He was still at Chicago in May 1999 when he wrote to Duncan claiming to have done a survey, so presumably he still had the tally sheets then.