Jeff Johnson of CNSNews.com describes an AEI event to publicise The Bias Against Guns. Lott repeats his version of the Appalachian Law School shootings, as usual not mentioning that the shooting stopped because the shooter ran out of ammunition and not mentioning that the armed students were off-duty police officers.
Lott also attacked University of Chicago professor Mark Duggan who published a paper, "More Guns, More Crime" in the Journal of Political Economy (CIX p 1086-1114):
He pointed to a recent paper that used subscription to the third-most popular gun magazine in the U.S. as a measure of gun ownership. When subscription rates for the most popular and second-most popular magazines were used instead, the findings of the research were altered dramatically."If I was a referee, I would ask, Why only look at one magazine here? Why not the largest or the fifth largest?" Lott said. "The fact that it had not would make me pretty suspicious and unlikely to go ahead and publish the paper."
Lott insinuates that Duggan cherry-picked his data to contrive his result, but in his paper Duggan explained his choice of magazine:
"In contrast to the three gun magazines with greater circulation (American Rifleman, American Hunter, and North American Hunter), sales data for this magazine are available annually at both the state and the county levels. More important, Guns & Ammo is focused relatively more on handguns than these other three magazines. Because handguns are the weapon of choice in the vast majority of firearms-related crimes and are more likely to be purchased for self-defense purposes than rifles or shotguns, this magazine is a more appropriate one for analyzing the dynamic relationship between crime and gun ownership."
Also at the AEI Event, Carl Moody criticized Lott for bypassing the normal peer review process in publishing results in his book, but said that this was more than compensated because:
"He makes the data available, which means he is probably not cheating. I've checked him out; he's not cheating, and he uses all the requisite controls. "He does it right, and so, I tend to believe the results that John has published in the back of the book"
However, because he made the data available, Ayres and Donohue were able to find that Lott's results were the product of systematic coding errors. These results were published in the back of the book and Lott is still ducking discussion of the errors.