The Shoddy Conclusions of the Man Shaping the Gun-Rights Debate
Illustration by Lia Liao
John Lott is the most influential pro-gun researcher in the country. But his methods and findings have been repeatedly debunked.
by Mike Spies
In 1957, the small-arms manufacturer Armalite created the AR-15—short for Armalite Rifle—at the invitation of the U.S. Army, which was seeking an effective lightweight combat weapon. When the Department of Defense reviewed a version of the rifle in 1962, during the early stages of the Vietnam War, its report stated that the gun’s “lethality” and “reliability” were “particularly impressive.” From forty-nine feet away, it noted, an Army Ranger fired a round into a Vietcong soldier’s head and “took it completely off.”
In recent years, gun companies have aggressively marketed semi-automatic AR-style rifles to civilians. Manufacturers now produce as many as two and a half million such firearms per year, and they routinely show up in the country’s deadliest and most horrifying acts of mass violence, such as the rampages that occurred, less than two weeks apart, in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, in May.
Last year, a federal court addressed the question of whether California could ban such guns. The state was one of eight, along with the District of Columbia, that had a prohibition in place. Multiple plaintiffs, including a handful of gun-rights groups, argued that the California statute was useless, relying on the statistical expertise of an economist named John R. Lott, Jr. Lott, who is sixty-four, with wispy gray hair, authoritatively delivers blizzards of empirical conclusions in an unthreatening Midwestern monotone. In a sworn statement to the court, Lott summarized his research on assault-weapon bans, writing that there is “no credible evidence” that such laws “have any meaningful effect of reducing gun homicides and no discernable crime-reduction impact.”
After a brief bench trial, the judge reached his decision in June, 2021. He overturned California’s ban, and quoted Lott’s assessment verbatim. Afterward, Lott published an op-ed in The Hill. The ruling “primarily concentrated on public safety,” he wrote, and “the judge relied on my research.”
For almost thirty years, Lott, who has a doctorate in economics from U.C.L.A., has provided the empirical backbone for the gun-rights movement. Virtually every statistical argument against regulation—made by lobbyists, Republican lawmakers, and National Rifle Association members alike—is based on his research, which reaches two conclusions: guns make Americans safer, and gun restrictions place them in danger. He stands against droves of distinguished academics who have determined that the opposite is true. But, in the scientific debate over firearms, no one has had greater influence.
Lott’s first and most famous book, “More Guns, Less Crime,” was published in 1998 by the University of Chicago Press, one of the country’s most prestigious academic publishers. The book has been republished multiple times, and offers one seemingly irrefutable statistic after another. It specifies that when states relaxed laws restricting the concealed carrying of handguns, counties saw a roughly eight-per-cent drop in murders, a five-per-cent reduction in rapes, and a seven-per-cent decrease in aggravated assaults. The text is the basis for arguments blaming “gun-free zones” for mass shootings, and the notion, popularized by the N.R.A., that only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun. “Overall,” Lott writes, “my conclusion is that criminals as a group tend to behave rationally—when crime becomes more difficult, less crime is committed.”
Eight books have followed “More Guns, Less Crime,” including “The War on Guns: Arming Yourself Against Gun Control Lies,” and “Gun Control Myths: How Politicians, the Media, and Botched ‘Studies’ Have Twisted the Facts on Gun Control.” Lott has also produced a steady stream of scholarly articles published in academic periodicals, along with op-eds that appear in regional newspapers and the Times and the Wall Street Journal. He has had appointments at Ivy League schools, and his work is touted by leading Republican politicians, including Donald Trump and Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas. “What makes him so invaluable,” Cruz has written of Lott, “is his ability to go beyond philosophical arguments and to engage opponents of gun ownership on the facts.”
Lott’s findings and methods have generated scathing criticism from prominent academics, who have questioned his veracity and exposed flaws in his work. But the critiques have not diminished his stature. Instead, they have fed the conspiracy-oriented mentality of the gun-rights movement. In the eyes of its adherents, and in the messaging of the gun lobby and trade groups, attempts to discredit Lott are really attempts to suppress the truth.
In 2013, Lott founded the Crime Prevention Research Center, a nonprofit to support his research. He takes pains to stress his and the organization’s independence. In his statement in the California case, Lott wrote that the C.P.R.C. “does not accept donations from gun ammunition makers or organizations such as the National Rifle Association (NRA) or any other organizations involved in the gun control debate on either side of the issue.” The same language also appears in his books, on his Web site, and in other legal filings.
Yet Lott is a mainstay at the N.R.A.’s annual meeting, where he typically conducts multiple seminars on his research and hosts a table on the tradeshow floor. In 2015, during the group’s convention in Nashville, Tennessee, he held one of the C.P.R.C.’s first fund-raisers at a hotel around the corner. One of the speakers, a conservative celebrity author and radio host named Dana Loesch, would soon be a face of the N.R.A., alongside its leader, Wayne LaPierre. At the C.P.R.C. fund-raiser, she said, of Lott, “We don’t have anybody else on our side that does what he does.”
Lott did not grow up in a family with a fondness for guns. “I know my grandparents and stuff would be shocked to see how my research has changed my views over time,” he said in a deposition taken during the California case. Lott was born in Detroit, and his family later moved to Florida, where he attended a Catholic high school. His mother and father were churchgoers, and he was close to his maternal grandparents, who were Democrats. Lott now owns two shotguns, a semi-automatic rifle, and two semi-automatic handguns—a Smith & Wesson M&P .40-calibre, and a Ruger 9-millimetre. He has a concealed-handgun permit because, he has said, “I didn’t think that it was proper for me to go and be telling people about these benefits if I didn’t actually kind of walk the walk myself on it.”
Lott received his bachelor’s degree in economics from U.C.L.A. in 1980, and then spent another four years at the school earning his master’s and Ph.D. in the same subject. According to a former classmate, Jon Karpoff, Lott did not stand out in “unusual or unique ways” at U.C.L.A.
Starting in 1988, Lott served for eighteen months as the chief economist on the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which helped inform his views on firearms restrictions. During his deposition, he claimed that the “very people that supply illegal drugs are the same ones that sell illegal guns,” and if the U.S. can’t stop the flow of drugs, then prohibiting firearms would be useless, too. When asked if he had an empirical basis for his assessment, he said that, at the commission, he read through “hundreds of cases,” and was “convinced” that “these guys not only have weapons but they’re entrepreneurs.”
“Would you present yourself as an expert in criminology?” Lott was asked at one point.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
Lott—who has never been granted tenure at a university—returned to U.C.L.A. for another temporary teaching appointment before being hired, in 1991, at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school. He kept in touch with Karpoff, who was at the University of Washington, and in 1993 the two co-authored a paper on corporate fraud. “He really was one of the best economists that I knew,” Karpoff said. “He was very thorough, creative in how to test—genuinely test—rather than just seek to confirm ideas.”
Lott says that he was teaching a class on white-collar crime at Wharton when his students asked him if he might turn his attention to gun policy. He agreed, and began to “read through a number of papers,” Lott said in his deposition. “And I would have to say I was pretty shocked how poorly done the existing research was.”
In 1994, Lott arrived at the University of Chicago, where he eventually became a fellow at the law school. The country was in the early stages of a significant shift. Historically, local and state authorities decided whether to issue permits to people who wanted to carry concealed handguns. But between 1987 and 1991, eight states had enacted “shall-issue” laws that allowed applicants who could legally purchase a firearm to automatically receive a concealed-carry license, as long as they paid a fee and completed a rudimentary training course. Lott and a doctoral student named David Mustard, who is now an economics professor at the University of Georgia, collected and analyzed fifteen years of data from some three thousand counties. In January, 1997, they published their findings in the Journal of Legal Studies, concluding that the new laws had caused violent crime to drop precipitously in the states that adopted them. The study provided the empirical support for the “shall-issue” statute—and justified its continued expansion to other states.
The study was extensively covered in the media, and featured in a congressional hearing on guns. Within a year, multiple statehouses held debates on concealed-carry permits, with Lott serving as the lead witness in four of them. But scientists soon challenged his conclusions. One paper, published in the American Journal of Public Health, warned that “the flaws” in Lott’s article were “so substantial, and the findings so at odds with criminological theory and research, that any conclusions about the effects of “shall-issue” laws based on this study are dubious at best.” David Hemenway, an economist and a professor of health policy at Harvard University, said that Lott’s paper “created a cottage industry of scholars analyzing the same data sources and largely refuting” its results.
The next year, Lott published “More Guns, Less Crime.” The Wall Street Journal called the book “compelling,” and said it was filled “with enough hard evidence that even politicians may have to stop and pay attention.”
In the beginning of 1999, Otis Dudley Duncan, who is regarded as one of history’s most important quantitative sociologists, wrote the first of a number of letters to Lott. He was especially skeptical of a sentence in Lott’s book that stated, “If national surveys are correct, 98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack.” Lott had not specified which surveys, but, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published around the time of the book, he attributed the figure to polls by the Los Angeles Times, Gallup, and Peter Hart Research Associates. The number, he wrote, was a percentage of the “at least 760,000, and possibly as many as 3.6 million, defensive uses of guns per year.”
Duncan determined that Lott’s assertion was simply wrong. In May, Duncan informed Lott he was writing an article about what he would call the “rogue number,” and later that month sent him a draft. One sentence summarized his assessment: “The ‘98 percent’ is either a figment of Lott’s imagination or an artifact of careless computation or proofreading.”