David Gross thinks that he was surveyed by Lott

Julian Sanchez posts some comments from someone who believes he was surveyed by Lott. Lott is in error when he states that there were no other gun use surveys at that time, but once these have been eliminated, we can regard it as established that Lott conducted a survey in 1997.

James Lindgren writes:

I am very pleased to be able to say that my informal inquiry has been brought to a successful conclusion. I had a long substantive interview with David Gross Sunday night and a short discussion tonight (Monday). I will write up my Sunday interview sometime in the next 5 days. It has some details not in [his] post to this list, including the kinds of questions he recalls as being on the survey and his explanation of how he happened to come forward.

The bottom line is that I found [him] credible. Overall, this is the direct evidence that I had been seeking from the beginning and that I always said had to be out there if a study had been done. I offered to act as an honest broker between Lott and his critics and seek out evidence that would tend to support the existence of the 1997 study if it could be found, and, in that capacity, I said that all trace of a national study does not just disappear because a computer crashes. Well, it doesn't. For any large study actually done, I believed that someone would eventually come forward, though I expected it to be on the asking rather than the answering side.

The inquiry, though necessary painful, was basically successful---and better, I think, than the even messier alternative. Suspicions about whether Lott ever did the 1997 study have been hanging around for over 3 years. If we hadn't had this effort, the suspicions that he had entirely fabricated a study would still be hanging over him.

As to the coincidence of someone coming forward, if 100,000 people knew of the concerns about the Lott study, and if those 100,000 were randomly selected (which they weren't), we would expect one person out of the 100,000 to have been surveyed in a national survey of 2,424 people.

In the next week, I will write up the interview, add it to the report, and change the conclusion from an agnostic one to a more positive one. I will also probably respond to Lott's latest missive posted on FireArmsRegProf. Then I will very happily put aside this unpleasant task. The main concern that I attempted to help people resolve was whether John Lott ever did the 1997 study. Secondary and legitimate concerns remain over the quality of the 1997 work to support the conclusion he reached, Lott's odd and so far unexplained attributions of the 98% figure to other people's studies rather than his own, and his shifting stories about what he told me. Some of these may never be cleared up, but the last of those might well be attributed to the extraordinary pressures that this affair has put him under.

Remaining Questions:

1. Why did Lott repeatedly make false claims that the 98% figure came from other studies and from Kleck?
2. Even Lott cannot possibly be sure that the correct result of his survey was 98% since there is no way to check his calculations. Why did he repeat the figure over and over again?
3. Lott has conceded that the size of the defensive gun use sample in his survey was very small. Too small, in fact, for the result to be statistically reliable. Why did he never even mention the markedly different results obtained from the other surveys with vastly greater sample sizes?
4. Why did he make his 98% claim well before his survey was completed? (And without attributing it to his survey.)