Lott has posted some criticism of Chris Mooney's article.
Let's see how many errors he has successfully identified:
1) Paraphrasing claim from the Chronicle of Higher Education stating that the "coding errors had not been reviewed by a third party." I was never asked by the Mother Jones reporter about this reference. In fact, after the Chronicle piece was published I immediately e-mailed David Glenn at the Chronicle to point out that two different points had been merged together in his piece.
It's hard to see what Lott's beef is here. The Chronicle made Lott's point narrower than he intended, but Lott did in fact claim that the arguments about the coding errors had not been reviewed by a third party.
2) "The cause, according to then Stanford Law Review president Benjamin Horwich, was a minor editing dispute involving literally one word; Lott, however, complains of an editorial 'ultimatum' from the journal."
The SLR issued a "Clarification" which states clearly that there were "certain revisions," not that there was one change involving one single word. The "Clarification" also noted that "the impression that some have gotten from Ayres and Donohue's Reply piece is incorrect, unfortunate, and unwarranted."
There were disputes over certain revisions but Lott got his way on all of them except one. Horwich clearly states
There was one reinstatement of older language that I simply refused to make because it never made sense in the first place. I've already written far too much, so I won't bore your readers with the details, but basically it was a one-word correction to a sentence that was otherwise incoherent. The impact on Lott et al.'s piece was nothing more than to remove a tangential two-sentence footnote.
Lott's final sentence is misleading---the incorrect impression that the SLR is referring to is the one that Lott removed his name because he no longer stood behind the paper. Nowhere does Mooney make this claim.
3) "Fraud [Mooney's article actually says "Faced" here] with no other way to save his thesis, you could say that Lott changed the rules---rules his own team had laid down---in the middle of the game."
[I deleted a long paragraph of Lott's here because it contained nothing relevant to Lott's dropping of the clustering correction.]
Interestingly, in none of Ayres and Donohue's own regressions, not a single one, do they use "clustering" to determine the standard errors. According to our analysis many results continue to show statistically significant drops in violent crime even when using "clustering," particularly the year-by-year estimates reported in the figures for murder, rape and robbery. All the results for murder, rape, and robbery continue to show statistically significant drops when the methods used by Ayres and Donohue on their own regressions are employed.
None of this is an explanation for why Lott dropped the clustering correction. Yes, in Ayres and Donohue's original paper they followed Lott's earlier work and did not use clustering. In his reply, Lott decided to use clustering. He only dropped the clustering after seeing Ayres and Donohue's reply, which did use clustering and showed that Lott's results went away after the coding errrors were corrected. Nor is true that murder, rape and robbery show statistically significant drops when the methods used by Ayres and Donohue on their own regressions are employed. When Ayres and Donohue's methods are employed, murder, rape and robbery show increases in most states. You only get the significant decreases by employing Lott's methods and also removing the clustering correction.
4)"Yet Lott's critique is once again misleading: His own newspaper op-eds aren't peer reviewed, and Lott admits that Regnery Press, his latest book publisher, does not use peer review."
Of course newspaper op-eds are not refereed; that is not customary. However, I have used the op-eds to popularize the work that I have published in journals. While More Guns, Less Crime was refereed and The Bias Against Guns was not, Parts of the empirical work in the three empirical chapters were based upon my past work published in refereed journals. For example, all of the material in Chapter 8 was from a refereed article.
This doesn't even address Mooney's point, let alone show it to be an error. If we should dismiss Ayres and Donohue's work because it didn't appear in a peer-reviewed journal, then we should also dismiss most of The Bias Against Guns since it was not peer reviewed. Yet Lott does exactly the opposite of this. He repeatedly cites his own unpublished study that purports to show that carry laws dramatically reduce mass public shootings, while ignore Duwe's peer-reviewed journal publication that found that carry laws had no effect on mass public shootings.
5) "On the website, Lott claimed the 'corrected' table used 'clustering,' when it did not." This quote is wrong. I was arguing that the tables were labeled as not having clustering.
Mooney's statement is absolutely correct. You can see a copy of one of the "corrected" tables here. In the table Lott states "clustering is assumed by state".
To summarize, Lott has not managed to successfully identify one single error in Mooney's article. And he has managed to prove this comment from the article to be correct:
"Lott will never say, 'that's a good point.' Lott will offer you some rebuttal," says Georgetown gun policy expert Jens Ludwig.