John Lott
John Richard Lott Jr. is an American economist, political commentator, and gun rights advocate. Lott was formerly employed at various academic institutions and at the American Enterprise Institute conservative think tank. He is the former president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, a nonprofit he founded in 2013. He worked in the Office of Justice Programs within the U.S. Department of Justice under the Donald Trump administration from October 2020 to January 2021. Lott holds a Ph.D. in economics from UCLA.
He has written for both academic and popular publications. He has authored books such as More Guns, Less Crime, The Bias Against Guns, and Freedomnomics. He is best known as a gun rights advocate and has argued against restrictions on owning and carrying guns. The New Yorker and The Trace have said "no one has had greater influence" in the scientific debate over firearms while Newsweek referred to Lott as "The Gun Crowd's Guru."
Academic career
John Lott studied economics at UCLA, receiving his B.A. in 1980, M.A. in 1982, and Ph.D. in 1984. Lott has held positions in law and economics at several institutions, including the Yale Law School, the Hoover Institution, UCLA, the Wharton Business School, Texas A&M University, and Rice University. Lott was the chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission. He spent five years at the University of Chicago, as a visiting professor from 1994 to 1995 and as a John M. Olin fellow from 1995 to 1999. Lott was a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute from 2001 to 2006. He left AEI for SUNY Binghamton. From July 2007 to 2010, Lott was a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland Foundation at the University of Maryland, College Park and lectured on law and economics.Lott has written op-eds for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Chicago Tribune. Since 2008, he has been a columnist for Fox News, initially weekly.
Research on guns
Concealed weapons and crime rate
In a 1997 article written with David B. Mustard and Lott's subsequent books More Guns, Less Crime and The Bias Against Guns, Lott argued that allowing adults to carry concealed weapons significantly reduces crime in America. In 2004, the National Academy of Sciences National Research Council conducted a review of current research and data on firearms and violent crime, including Lott's work, and concluded "that with the current evidence it is not possible to determine that there is a causal link between the passage of right-to-carry laws and crime rates." The NAS report wrote of Lott's work, "The initial model specification, when extended to new data, does not show evidence that passage of right-to-carry laws reduces crime. The estimated effects are highly sensitive to seemingly minor changes in the model specification and control variables." The criminologist James Q. Wilson was the only member on the 18-member NAS panel who dissented from this conclusion. For similar reasons as highlighted by the NAS, as well as "multiple serious problems with data and methodology", a 2020 comprehensive review of existing research on concealed-carry by the RAND Corporation discounted Lott's studies.Other reviews said that there were problems with Lott's model. A replication by Dan A. Black and Daniel Nagin found that minor adjustments to Lott and Mustard's model led to the disappearance of the findings. In the New England Journal of Medicine, David Hemenway argued that Lott failed to account for several key variables, including drug consumption. Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue said that the model used by Lott contained significant coding errors and systemic bias. In the American Journal of Public Health, Daniel Webster et al. also raised concerns about flaws in the study, such as misclassification of laws and endogeneity of predictor variables, which they said rendered the study's conclusions "insupportable". Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck considered it unlikely that such a large decrease in violent crime could be explained by a relatively modest increase in concealed carry. A 1998 study by Jens Ludwig that said it "more effectively control for unobserved variables that may vary over time" than the Lott and Mustard study concluded that "shall-issue laws have resulted, if anything, in an increase in adult homicide rates." A 2001 study in the Journal of Political Economy by University of Chicago economist Mark Duggan did robustness checks of Lott and Mustard's study and found that the findings of the Lott and Mustard study were inaccurate.
Other academics praised Lott's methodology, including Florida State University economist Bruce Benson, Cardozo School of Law professor John O. McGinnis, College of William and Mary professor Carlisle Moody, University of Mississippi professor William F. Shughart, and SUNY economist Florenz Plassmann and University of Adelaide economist John Whitley.
Referring to the research done on the topic, The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote in 2003 that "Mr. Lott's research has convinced his peers of at least one point: No scholars now claim that legalizing concealed weapons causes a major increase in crime." As Lott critics Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue III pointed out, "Lott and Mustard have made an important scholarly contribution in establishing that these laws have not led to the massive bloodbath of death and injury that some of their opponents feared. On the other hand, we find that the statistical evidence that these laws have reduced crime is limited, sporadic, and extraordinarily fragile." A 2008 article in Econ Journal Watch surveyed peer-reviewed empirical academic studies, and found that 10 supported the proposition that right-to-carry reduces crime, 8 supported no significant effect and none supported an increase. The article was rebutted by Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue in the same journal in 2009.
In 2013, Lott founded the nonprofit organization Crime Prevention Research Center to study the relationship between gun laws and crime. As of July 2015, he was also the organization's president. The board of directors for the organization includes guitarist Ted Nugent, conservative talkshow host Lars Larson and former sheriff David Clarke. In 2020, Lott left the organization to take a position in the Trump administration.
Defensive gun use
Lott argues in both More Guns, Less Crime and The Bias Against Guns that defensive gun use is underreported, noting that in general, only shootings ending in fatalities are discussed in news stories. In More Guns, Less Crime, Lott writes that "ince in many defensive cases a handgun is simply brandished, and no one is harmed, many defensive uses are never even reported to the police." In May 1998, Lott wrote that "national surveys" suggested that "98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack." Lott cited similar figures in op-eds in The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times.In 2002, he said that brandishing a weapon was sufficient to stop an attack 95% of the time. Other researchers criticized his methodology. A study in Public Opinion Quarterly said that his sample size of 1,015 respondents was too small for the study to be accurate and that the majority of similar studies suggest a value between 70 and 80 percent. According to Lott, Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz's 1994 estimate rises to 92 percent when brandishing and warning shots are added together. Lott said that the lower rates found by others was at least in part due to the different questions that were asked.
Defamation suit
On April 10, 2006, John Lott filed suit for defamation against Steven Levitt and HarperCollins Publishers over the book Freakonomics and against Levitt over a series of emails to John McCall. In the book Freakonomics, Levitt and coauthor Stephen J. Dubner claimed that the results of Lott's research in More Guns, Less Crime had not been replicated by other academics. In the emails to economist John McCall, who had pointed to a number of papers in different academic publications that had replicated Lott's work, Levitt wrote that the work by several authors supporting Lott in a special 2001 issue of the Journal of Law and Economics had not been peer-reviewed, Lott had paid the University of Chicago Press to publish the papers, and that papers with results opposite of Lott's had been blocked from publication in that issue. A federal judge found that Levitt's replication claim in Freakonomics was not defamation but found merit in Lott's complaint over the email claims. The dismissal was affirmed by a three-judge panel of The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on February 11, 2009.A settlement was reached over the claims made by Levitt in the emails to McCall whereby Levitt did not have to issue a formal apology but rather send a letter of clarification to John McCall that the issue of the Journal of Law and Economics was peer-reviewed, and that Lott had not improperly influenced the editors. The Chronicle of Higher Education characterized Levitt's letter as offering "a doozy of a concession."