One feature of Lott's behaviour in this affair is his refusal to admit that he attributed the 98% figure to "national surveys" and to Gary Kleck. Instead, he told Slate
"A lot of those discussions could have been written more clearly."
However, in on-line publications by the Independence Institute and the Heartland Institute he wrote:
"Kleck's study of defensive gun uses found that ninety-eight percent of the time simply brandishing the weapon is sufficient to stop an attack."
This isn't the sightest bit unclear. He is attributing the 98% to Kleck. How can he pretend that he is not attributing the 98% to Kleck?
Well, guess what. Lott has figured out a way to pretend that he didn't attribute it Kleck. If you check the Independence Institute article here you will find that the page has been deleted. (This is not because of a reorganization or something---if you look at their page containing all of their opeds from 2000, you'll find that only one missing is Lott's.) If you check the Heartland Institute article here, you will find that the sentence attributing the 98% to Kleck has been deleted. Unfortunately for Lott, it is still possible to see the original versions in Google's cache here and here.