Mark Kleiman writes:
What seems to me even more striking, though Mooney doesn't mention it, is the difference in the way the two are treated in the mainstream press: while no news article about Bellesiles could fail to mention the controversy about Arming America, Lott---who made up an on-line persona who praised him to the skies and claimed on his behalf academic appointments the real John Lott never received, and who still claims to have done a survey with 2000 respondents which reached an utterly implausible finding and of which no evidentiary trace can be found---still gets treated as merely one side in a normal two-academics-disagreeing dispute. [*]
Ralph Luker comments:
Among the active commentators, I tend to find The Volokh Conspiracy's Randy Barnett the most persuasive. His call for an even-handed inquiry into John Lott's scholarship may be met by a National Academy of Sciences report from an expert panel which will examine Lott's work and is due for release in the late fall. It may be the equivalent of the report by Emory University's panel of experts in the case of Michael Bellesiles and we will see if the American Enterprise Institute is prepared to bite this bullet.
Randy Barnett is calling for an investigation into the question of whether Lott has perpetrated a fraud. That's not what the NAS panel is investigating. They will assess whether his results are correct, but it is not their business to decide whether his results are the product of fraudulent research or not.
Brian Linse comments
I find the article to be devastatingly on target, and I believe that anyone still defending Lott after reading it must be suffering from fundamentalism induced denial.