Ron Grossman has a story about Lott and his survey in the Chicago Tribune. I have three comments on the story:
- This is the first newspaper article that mentions that Lott is looking for the students who conducted his survey and it's in a Chicago newspaper. You would expect that some of the students who conducted the survey would still be in Chicago and hence likely to see the article. Also, with two million readers, you would expect about twenty of them to have participated in the survey. If nobody comes forward after this article, then that is strong evidence against Lott.
- Otis Dudley Duncan first tried to make this matter public in 1999. It seems to have been just as hard to get the press interested in Lott's survey as it took to get them interested in the Bellesiles affair.
- Kleck is rightly sceptical of Lott's claim that he has replicated his 1997 survey. Kleck estimates that it would have taken 500 evenings to conduct the new survey instead of the 10 that Lott claimed. The factor of 50 discrepancy is explained by three things. First, Lott had about ten interviewers instead of "a couple" as Kleck was told. That is a factor of 5. Second, Lott did not re-create his 1997 survey---the sample size was halved. That is a factor of 2. Third, Lott did not attempt to conduct serious research in defensive gun uses. Instead he asked just enough questions so that he could get a brandishing number. That is a factor of 5 difference in the amount of time that the survey took. Multiplying these three factors together accounts for the discrepancy. Lott did do a survey last year, it's just that it wasn't a serious research effort---it's purpose was to have something to point to and claim to have replicated the mysterious 1997 survey.
Ken Parish demonstrates the effectiveness of the Lott-orchestrated letter writing campaign. Ken believes that the evidence in the letters make it significantly more likely that Lott did some sort of study. However no-one was questioning whether Lott had a disk crash---the letters do not tell us anything we didn't already know.
Lott's survey gets a brief summary over at the History News Network's History Grapevine.