Meanwhile, CNSNews.com seems to be blissfully unaware of the Lott affair, with this story reporting:
"Surveys Lott conducted in January 1997 indicated that guns are used more than two million times a year in self-defense, either by threatening to use a gun, brandishing it, firing a warning shot or actually shooting a criminal."
Mitch Berg defends Lott against Laura Billing's criticism:
For instance, critics of his have long wondered where he came across a "national survey" cited in his book claiming that "98 percent of the time people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack."That's easy. It's a conclusion reached by Gary Kleck in his seminal "Point Blank", the biggest and most thorough survey of firearms use in the United States.
While the 98% figure does appear in "Point Blank", it includes warning shots and misses. Lott specifically denies getting the number from Kleck.
More like this
The Chicago Tribune reports:
Last year an anonymous person from the American Enterprise Institute
repeatedly tried and failed to remove all
criticism of Lott from his
wikipedia page. He
At the The High Road there was some discussion of the cherry picked Lott article I discussed here. One poster, "agricola", criticized Lott, linking to my blog.
On July 12 The Columbus Dispatch published a letter from Paul van Doorn replying to an earlier letter from David Mayer that I commented on. Here is an extract (hyperlinks added by me):