Michelle Malkin writes an excellent article on the Lott affair. And if you think that she is one of those mysterious people out seeking revenge for Bellesiles, you should look at this 1998 article where she praises Lott.
Atrios explains why he cares about Lott. He quotes Sullywatch:
We forget now how much there was an all-out effort (kind of like a certain recent special prosecution) to throw anything they could find at Bellesiles until it stuck, and finally one thing relatively marginal to the whole thesis of the book did.
I can't agree with this statement. If you look at the report of the Emory committee you will see that they found Bellesiles guilty of unprofessional and misleading work. This destroys the credibility of the rest of his work. And while the probate data was only a small part of his book, this was the part that was mentioned most frequently in the media.
Glenn Reynolds has a post on the Slate piece where he offers exactly the same argument in support of Lott that Sullywatch offered in support of Bellesiles. The surprising thing is that despite being privy to months of discussion about this on firearmsregprof, and presumably having actually read the Slate piece, and having been corrected on this very point before and, actually quoting a sentence of mine that mentions that he claim was in Lott's book, Reynolds still somehow believes that Lott's 98% claim is not in his published work. Fortunately two of his readers wrote in to correct him. However, instead of admitting his error Reynolds uses an out-of-context quote from me (without providing a link so readers could see all of what I said) to argue against them. Reynolds also pretends that the only proven charge against Lott is using a pseudonym. However, he has also been caught lying, and even if he did do some sort of survey, he is guilty of unprofessional and misleading work for falsely attributing his 98% claim to other surveys, for advancing his 98% number even though the sample size in his survey was too small to allow a meaningful estimate, and for never once giving the estimate from surveys with an adequate sample size.
Roger Ailes and Charles Murtaugh also observe that Reynolds' Jon Ellis comparison is incorrect. Murtaugh also offers a better argument than Reynolds that the scale of Lott's deception is less than that of Bellesiles.
Tom Spencer has comments and Julian Sanchez has an update.