Lott’s emphasis on brandishing has not diminished. In a recent interview, he said, “People have the perception” that guns are not used in self-defense. Lott suggested that the media ignore such stories. “So you’re missing almost all the cases that are out there.”
On February 1, 2003, the day “The Bias Against Guns” was published, the Washington Post ran a story headlined “Scholar Invents Fan to Answer His Critics.” A staffer at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, had become suspicious of Mary Rosh, a woman who regularly showed up on Web sites to defend Lott from his critics. In one post, she described herself as one of his former Ph.D. students at Wharton, and said he was “the best professor that I ever had.” She added, “There were a group of us students who would try to take any class that he taught.” Rosh even explained why it made sense for her to carry a gun. “If a woman is being attacked by a 200 pound man, is she just supposed to wait until the police arrive?” she asked. “I am 114 lbs. and 5’6”. What should I do in that situation?”
The Cato staffer tracked Rosh’s I.P. address to Lott, who admitted that he was behind it. “I probably shouldn’t have done it—I know I shouldn’t have done it—but it’s hard to think of any big advantage I got except to be able to comment fictitiously,” he told the Post.
In the California deposition, Lott said the purpose of the pseudonym was to “keep people from being obnoxious and threatening.” Lott also contended that he was not the sole author of Rosh’s comments. One relative had “begged” him to “protect them from the firestorm that was occurring at the time.”
The episode damaged Lott’s reputation, which was further harmed in 2005, when the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, released a book-length report called “Firearms and Violence.” One chapter assessed Lott’s finding that relaxing concealed-carry laws had caused a decrease in crime. The N.R.C. had tried to replicate Lott’s model, concluding that “it is not possible to determine that there is a causal link” between the two events.
By that point, Lott’s research had been influencing legislation for nearly a decade; a majority of states now had “shall-issue” laws, a number that would grow to nearly forty by the following year.
For half a decade, Lott was confined to the margins. He briefly held a teaching position at Binghamton University, and then spent two years as a researcher at the University of Maryland, his last stint at an academic institution. He wrote for the Washington Times and Fox News’ Web site.
In 2012, a national tragedy presented a new opportunity. George Zimmerman, a self-appointed watchman in a Florida neighborhood, stalked and then fatally shot an unarmed Black teen-ager named Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman was not arrested for weeks, a delay that drew attention to the state’s Stand Your Ground law, which allows citizens who fear for their lives to use deadly force anywhere they have a right to be. (In 2013, Zimmerman was acquitted of charges of second-degree murder.)
The following year, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee convened a hearing on Stand Your Ground laws. The model statute, created by an N.R.A. lobbyist, was less than a decade old, and until Martin’s death few Americans were familiar with it. Lott was called to serve as an expert witness. “These laws help allow individuals to defend themselves,” Lott told the lawmakers. “This is particularly important in high-crime areas.” He went on, “In the third edition of my book ‘More Guns, Less Crime,’ I provided the first published peer-reviewed study examining Stand Your Ground laws using national data. I found that they lowered murder rates by about nine per cent and that overall violent crime rates also declined.”
Lott’s prepared testimony was not subjected to deep scrutiny. It contained footnotes, and the one concerning Lott’s study simply cited the third edition of “More Guns, Less Crime,” without any page numbers. But the book does not mention Stand Your Ground.
When I questioned Lott about the discrepancy, he referred me to a section of his book that deals with Castle Doctrine laws, which, he said, “are a type of Stand Your Ground law.” Lott told me that the section accounts “for the full spectrum of Stand Your Ground Laws,” even though “those words are not used in the book.” But the Castle Doctrine is different from Stand Your Ground. Lott correctly defined the former in his book. “This is the first study to look at the Castle Doctrine,” the text reads, “which eliminates the requirement that people in their own home have to retreat as far as possible before defending themselves.” Stand Your Ground, on the other hand, removed the duty to retreat in public.
The Castle study’s sample period ends in 2005, the year Florida enacted the N.R.A.’s model Stand Your Ground statute. The law largely spread to states across the country from there. Those include Ohio, where in 2021 Mike DeWine, the state’s Republican governor, initially indicated that he would veto the bill, urging the legislature to instead take up a package of gun-safety reforms. He then abruptly reversed course, with his press secretary stating that the decision relied on one of Lott’s op-eds, which argued that such laws reduced murders. This year, a peer-reviewed study published in JAMA Network Open found that Stand Your Ground was associated with up to an eleven-per-cent increase in monthly gun-homicide rates.
Almost a year after Trayvon Martin was killed, the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut, galvanized gun-control advocates. For the first time since the early nineties, tighter federal-gun regulations, including universal background checks, were in play.
The Sandy Hook-inspired proposals failed to get through Congress, but they served as an effective fund-raising tool. Lott launched his nonprofit, the Crime Prevention Research Center, which received its tax-exempt status in August, 2013. The C.P.R.C. has studied gun-free zones and rates of mass shootings across the world, and it publishes an annual report—extensively covered by conservative media—on the number of concealed-handgun-permit holders in America. According to Lott’s research, the number now exceeds twenty-one million.
The C.P.R.C. never takes in more than a few hundred thousand dollars a year, and Lott has always drawn a salary of less than a hundred thousand dollars. He frequently emphasizes that his research is untainted by the gun industry or by special-interest money, and points to the C.P.R.C.’s policy of refusing donations from all manufacturers or groups that have a stake in the gun-control debate.
But, during Lott’s deposition, when asked if the C.P.R.C. receives contributions from individuals who may be affiliated with the gun industry, he admitted, “I’m sure we probably get some donations from people that are in those things. But I don’t go and screen them.” He went on, “I draw the line in terms of banning an individual with their own money.”
Lott said that the C.P.R.C.’s integrity was further guaranteed by the group’s academic advisory board. “I think we’re a relatively unique organization in terms of having people with strong views—or views on different sides of the issue about what’s right or not. The reason why we do that is, like with any good academic-type organization, you need to have critical people who disagree with you to give you comments before you put out research.” He added, “You want to make sure it’s right.”
Lott named several of the C.P.R.C.’s advisers who hold either neutral or supportive views on gun control. One was Scott Masten, a business-economics professor at the University of Michigan, and another was Karpoff, his U.C.L.A. classmate. When I asked Masten about his role at the C.P.R.C., he said, “The sum total of everything I did with respect to the center was agree to be an adviser.” When I asked Karpoff what he did, he said, “Literally nothing.”
On April 10, 2015, Lott held the C.P.R.C.’s fund-raiser at a Hilton Hotel in Nashville, during the N.R.A.’s annual meeting there. In addition to Dana Loesch, who was on her way to becoming one of the N.R.A.’s most recognizable names, several other right-wing celebrities spoke, including the musician and gun activist Ted Nugent, who was both an N.R.A. and C.P.R.C. board member until 2018. Dressed in a camouflage shirt and a cowboy hat, he advocated for the extrajudicial killing of criminals and told the crowd that the C.P.R.C.’s work was just as important as the N.R.A.’s. “John works his ass off,” Nugent said, “and he needs to be paid more.” For the movement to succeed, he declared, Lott’s “almost Mr. Rogers-like delivery” was a necessity. He explained, “the juxtaposition between Ted Nugent the Second Amendment guy and John Lott the Second Amendment guy is dynamic. And we need both.”
As if to underscore the point, Lott delivered a fifteen-minute slide presentation with charts and graphs. Without the C.P.R.C., he said, the public would be exposed only to a “tidal wave” of research that was dishonest, overwhelmingly biased against firearms, and funded by President Barack Obama’s Administration and such insidious billionaire philanthropists as George Soros. Less than two weeks later, Lott pressed the same case on the conspiracy show Infowars, during a period when its founder and host, Alex Jones, was telling his listeners that the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School was staged by the government in order to justify new gun regulations. “He didn’t raise the claim while I was on [the] show,” Lott told me, by e-mail. “If he had, I would have corrected him.”
Around this time, Donald Trump was launching his Presidential campaign. He spoke at the N.R.A.’s convention, and, as the election drew closer, Lott began to campaign for Trump in numerous op-eds and radio interviews.
A month after Trump took office, Lott began corresponding with a top official at the Department of Justice named Ryan Newman, who now serves as general counsel to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. In an e-mail in February, 2017, Lott wrote, “There were a number of ideas that I hope can be dealt with by the D.O.J.” He brought up the D.O.J.’s National Crime Victimization Survey, which, he said, “gun control advocates use” to “claim that guns are rarely used for self defense.” He asserted that “it needs to be fixed by changing a couple survey questions,” such as the poll’s screener about being a crime victim, which, by reducing subjectivity, weeds out potentially millions of unreliable responses.
Eventually, Lott compiled his recommendations into a document titled “A Partial List of John R. Lott, Jr.’s Ideas on Empirical Work That Could Be Done by the Department of Justice.” He circulated the list on multiple occasions to Newman, and, under a slightly altered title, to another D.O.J. official named Gary Barnett. In an e-mail to Barnett, he wrote, “As we discussed, we need new research to advance the Trump agenda and pull indefensible studies done during the Obama administration.”
After Trump took office, one policy that was on the table in Congress was “reciprocity,” which would require states to recognize one another’s concealed-handgun-permit holders, allowing individuals to carry their weapons anywhere in the country. Lott wrote, “Everyone knows the types of claims that will be made during congressional debates about how dangerous permit holders are, so before the various reciprocity bills come up, it is extremely important that [the D.O.J.] do a study on this issue.” He clarified, “It is one thing for myself to do studies on how law-abiding concealed handgun permit holders are. It is something entirely different for the Department of Justice to do it.”
In cities around the country, police chiefs were critical of licensed gun carriers who were driving into metropolitan areas and leaving firearms in their parked cars. Thieves, the police said, were breaking into the vehicles, stealing the guns, and distributing them through the illegal market. Lott wanted this narrative put to rest. “There is one item that I could use your help quickly on [getting] some data before the reciprocity debate that is coming up in September,” he wrote to Newman. “The claim coming out from gun control advocates is that concealed handgun[s] are being stolen from permit holders and then being used in crime.” Lott then appears to ask Newman to do something illegal. “As I suspect you already know, there is a database for this information,” he said, “but unfortunately only law enforcement are allowed access to it.” Lott was referring to the National Criminal Information Center, which is strictly off limits to the public; a violation of the policy can be prosecuted as a federal crime. A week later, he followed up with Newman: “Just so you know, I believe that I was able to get a hold of the data that I had asked about.”