Jeff Soyer has a post where he is taken in by a Lott opinion piece. He quotes Lott:
In a new book, The Bias Against Guns, Bill Landes of the University of Chicago Law School and I examine multiple-victim public shootings in the United States from 1977 to 1999 and find that when states passed right-to-carry laws, these attacks fell by 60 percent. Deaths and injuries from multiple-victim public shootings fell on average by 78 percent.Exactly. I know there has been some minor controversy about his statistics of late but even if we cut in-half his pro-gun figures, it still has to give you pause. And NO ONE is suggesting that he is even NEARLY that far off.
The controversy about Lott isn't just about his dodgy statistics but his misquoting and misrepresenting the findings of others. If you rely on Lott, you are unlikely to ever discover that a study by Duwe et al found no support for the hypothesis that right-to-carry laws decrease mass public shootings. So, in fact, people are suggesting that his results are more than that far off. And Duwe's study has been published in a journal while Lott's study has not been. I think that it is unfortunate that even though he knows Lott's statistics are suspect, Soyer bases an argument on them.