I came across this quote from Lott in a May 28, 1999 article by Jeff Jacoby:
"There are 15 national surveys that have been conducted by academics as well as polling organizations like the Los Angeles Times and Gallup, and their average estimate indicates that people use guns defensively well over two million times each year. My own survey put the defensive uses at about 2.1 million in 1997."
I thought that this could potentially help Lott. If the source for the quote was something that Lott wrote before Duncan raised questions about the 98% statistic in April, then that would be good evidence that Lott did not invent his survey to provide a source for his 98% claim.
Jeff Jacoby promptly answered my query---the quote comes from a May 25 letter to the editor in the Wall Street Journal. This means that it was written shortly after the May 13 letter and the May 21 phone call to Duncan where Lott first claimed to have conducted a survey. Instead of helping Lott, this just makes things more suspicious. The survey was supposedly conducted in early 1997. Why did the first two mentions of it occur within a few days of each other in May 1999? Then, on June 23 1999, in response to a Usenet posting of mine, Lott sent me an email that stated:
The 2.1 million defensive uses is the average of 15 private national survies on this topic. It is also the same as the estimate that I got from a survey that I did in early 1997.
I was rather surprised to get this email. We had exchanged a couple of emails in 1998, but had not corresponded since then. It looks as if he mentioned the survey in his letter to the paper and email to me just to provide backing for what he told Duncan.