In his email to Mark Kleiman, Lott accused Ayres and Donohue of lying:
However, the Stanford Law Review allowed Ayres and Donohue to add an addition to their piece commenting on all this. They said that:
"It is important to note that what we now refer to as the PW response has already been widely circulated as a draft, whose first author is John Lott. Moreover, Lott has repeatedly told the press and/or publish to the Internet that Ayres and Donohue have simply misread their own results. But after seeing this Reply to the original Lott, Plassmann, and Whitley paper, Lott asked the Stanford Law Review to take his name off the work. We hope that this indicates that the arguments in our Reply have caused the primary proponent of the more guns, less crime hypothesis to at least partially amend his views. We note that to this day, legislators are still voting for the adoption of concealed-carry laws while citing Lott's work."Ayres and Donohue know that this is false because the ultimatum issued by the Stanford Law Review was made only at their request. Ayres and Donohue's attacks on the quality of our data are not only misleading, but it should be noted that these authors have not been equally forthcoming in sharing their own data.
Now, it is clearly not true that the ultimatum was made at Ayres and Donohue's request. Horwich denies this and the emails that Lott includes provide absolutely no support for this claim. Removing your name from a paper shown to based on faulty data seems an entirely appropriate thing to do, while removing your name to try to prevent a one word correction seems to be a rather unlikely thing to do, so Ayres and Donohue's speculation as to the reason seems warranted.
However, Horwich knew that the speculation was in error, so I asked him why he didn't ask Ayres and Donohue to correct it. He replied:
The most significant reason is that I read A&D's new language as a debater's point: There are two sentences of note:
"But after seeing this Reply to the original Lott, Plassmann, and Whitley paper, Lott asked the Stanford Law Review to take his name off the work. We hope that this indicates that the arguments in our Reply have caused the primary proponent of the more guns, less crime hypothesis to at least partially amend his views."The first sentence is entirely correct if you interpret "after" to be a temporal description, and not a causal description. In light of the second sentence, maybe it's more of a causal "after," but, frankly, that sort of debating tactic pervades this area, and so I didn't think much of it. Moreover, "we hope" acknowledges that the statement was speculation. So the second sentence is literally correct, though mistaken.
Second, and related to this first point, is that I discounted it as a debater's point because I had a different view of events. That might have been myopic.
Third, I wanted to move things as quickly as possible---remember, the ultimatum was only ever about getting the issue out so as not to hold up other authors' pieces. That may be a reason, but not an excuse.
Fourth, I had only ever read the new language as impacting Lott alone, assumed that he expected as much, and had weighed it in his decision to withdraw. It's not my job to consider the optics of other people's decisions. That said, I do regret not having considered how the statement would be read with respect to Plassmann's and Whitley's continued participation. They do not deserve the small cloud of suspicion that it introduced over the work, and I've been taking every opportunity possible to disabuse folks of the notion that Lott's withdrawal was on substantive grounds and therefore speaks ill of Plassmann and Whitley. That is simply not so, and I know all three stand behind the conclusions of the paper.
In sum, then: It was the right decision at the time insofar as the language was literally true and/or ambiguous; and I didn't want to delay publication further still. It was the wrong decision, in hindsight, but only because of the subtle and unfortunate effects on Plassmann and Whitley.
I hope that is enough to put the "removing his name from the paper" thing to rest and Lott will now focus on the miscoded data question. Does he concede that he miscoded the data or will he deny it?