If you want to see another example of Lott's carelessness towards facts, consider this article, published a few days ago:
But, where Vernick and Hepburn said they were unable to find any attribution to the '20,000' statistic, Lott said the proof is readily available in a compendium prepared twice a year by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. He did say the gun law information takes a tremendous amount of time and energy to compile."About ten years," Lott said, "somebody actually took the time to go and do this."
Lott said final analysis of the B.A.T.F. report found approximately 20,000 gun laws to exist in the U.S. and he suspects more federal, state and local laws were added or amended by lawmakers over the past decade.
Lott claims that it took someone ten years to count the number of laws in a compendium. In fact, using the power of random sampling, you could count them in an afternoon. All you have to do is choose some pages at random, count the number of laws on each of these pages, find the average and multiply by the total number of pages in the compendium.
Even if for some reason you wanted to count them all, it would not take ten years. If you generously allow ten seconds to count each law, it would take about a week of eight hour days to count 20,000 of them.
So, Lott either made up or mis-remembered the "ten years" story, but confidently related it to the reporter as if it was true. He also didn't have the good sense to realize that his story was obviously untrue.
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