Lott has a long message at his website where he discusses Mary Rosh and argues that when he claimed that he had "not participated in the firearms discussion group nor in the apparent online newsgroup discussions", he was not lying:
Another misunderstanding in the media is that I was lying as to whether I had ever participated in internet chat rooms. I have never made any general statement that I do not participate in such groups. And, obviously, I did participate under my own name for a substantial period of time. There are however two separate statements, one in an email to Glenn Reynolds on 1/13 and one in an email the following day (1/14) to Eugene Volokh that - taken out of context - can be made to look like I am making such a nonsensical statement. At issue here was a posting that Glenn Reynolds had made on his web site (1/12), expressing concern that I was not responding to certain questions regarding my surveys. I only learned indirectly that my surveys had been discussed extensively at the Discussion List for Firearms Regulation Scholars. Reynolds' posting was the first time that I had ever heard of the other blog sites. So my denial of participation was only with reference to why I was not aware of the current debate of my survey work, in particular as to how it had been conducted at the main forum, Discussion List for Firearms Regulation Scholars FIREARMSREGPROF, a list serve site that I was not subscribing to. The statement to Volokh that I had not participated in "the firearms discussion group nor in the apparent online newsgroup discussions" was again specifically for the Discussion List for Firearms Regulation Scholars to let those participating in the discussions there know that I hadn't been following their debate. (For anybody doubting this, Eugene Volokh can verify that neither Mary Rosh nor I participated in any discussions on this topic in FIREARMSREGPROF prior to 1/14. The same holds true for any other forum debating the merits of my surveys.)
And yet in his confession Lott stated
However, I never subscribed to the firearmsregprof posting hosted by Volokh.
thereby conceding that the part of his statement about participating in the "apparent online discussion groups" was untrue.
At the time that he wrote that message he was an active participant on Usenet, with a posting as recent as Jan 4. Now he is trying to pretend that all he was saying was that he did not participate in online discussion of his survey. This doesn't make sense. The whole point of the passage was an attempt to explain why he had not responded by claiming that he was not aware of the discussion. In fact, Lott closely followed discussions of Lott on Usenet. It is true that he did not post to online discussion groups about the survey before Jan 14, but that was because he persistently ducked discussion of the survey. For an example, see this posting where I raised the matter of Lott's survey with him. He responded by asking me what I thought of Bellesiles.
If all Lott was saying was that he hadn't responded in online discussions to questions about the survey, well that is hardly an explanation for why he hadn't responded to questions about the survey.
Furthermore, in his Jan 14 email Lott wrote "I am not going be involved in these online groups". On Jan 15 Mary Rosh posted to a Usenet discussion about Lott's survey, and joined into discussions in other online groups over the next few days.