In response to this story in the Washington Post, Lott has apparently orchestrated a letter writing campaign. Eugene Volokh has posted the four letters. Julian Sanchez points out that all four letters make the same incorrect claim: that the Washington Post is questioning whether Lott had a disk crash. In fact, the article is questioning whether Lott lost his survey in the crash.
In his letter, John Whitley also makes a couple more errors:
I am not an expert on the Dr. Bellesiles case, but my understanding is that there was little or no contemporaneous corroborating evidence of the flood that he reported as destroying his records and that his results were not reproducible by other scholars in the field.
No-one disputes that there was a flood at Emory. What people question is whether the flood destroyed Bellesiles' records. No-one disputes that Lott had a disk crash. What people question is whether the crash destroyed Lott's survey data.
Dr. Lott himself has now reproduced the survey and released the names of all people who worked on it and the phone records from the calls. The results are largely in line with his previous results and no one has questioned the integrity of the new survey.
The sample size in Lott's new survey is much too small for any meaningful measure of the brandishing percentage. It is ridiculous to claim that it is a replication. Whitley also seems unaware of the nine published surveys give numbers ranging from 21% to 67% as to how often defenders shoot, which most definitely do not reproduce the 2% shooting Lott claims.
Archpundit has a few choice comments about Lott. Postwatch makes the same error as Whitley: Lott's new survey does not bolster his 98% claim---the sample size is just too small.