Lott has an op-ed in The Plain Dealer where he continues to mislead:
My new book, "The Bias Against Guns," examines multiple-victim public shootings in the United States from 1977 to 1999 and finds that when states passed right-to-carry laws, these attacks fell by 60 percent. Deaths and injuries from multiple-victim public shootings fell on average by 78 percent.
Lott does not mention here, or in his new book, this paper: Duwe, Kovandzic and Moody, "The Impact of Right-to-Carry Concealed Firearm Laws on Mass Public Shootings" Homicide Studies Journal, 6:4 pp 271-296 (2002). Duwe et al find no statistically significant impact of carry laws on mass public shootings. Even when they tried to replicate Lott's results they could not find a significant effect.
People's reaction to the horrific events displayed on TV is understandable, but the more than 2 million times each year that Americans use guns defensively are never discussed - even though this is five times as often as the 450,000 times that guns are used to commit crimes over the last couple of years.
Lott is cherry picking numbers from different surveys. Surveys that have measured both offensive and defensive gun uses (NCVS and Hemenway's survey) find that offensive gun use is much more common. Otis Dudley Duncan's paper "As Compared to What?" has much more on the comparisons between offensive and defensive uses.
Annual surveys of crime victims in the United States continually show that, when confronted by a criminal, people are safest if they have a gun.
The surveys do not show that.
Studies, such as one conducted recently by Jeff Miron at Boston University, which examined 44 countries, find that stricter gun control laws tend to lead to higher homicide rates.
The measure of gun control used in Miron's study was a crude three point scale: No gun laws/Some controls/Complete ban. By this measure the US and the UK have exactly the same amount of gun control. Miron's study provides no information about whether the US or the UK's gun control regimes are preferable. And a correlation between gun control and homicide is also explained if more homicides lead to gun control laws.