CHRIS MOONEY has a good piece on the Lott affair in Mother Jones. Allowing for the fact that it has a certain Mother Jones slant, it’s not a bad summary, I think.

An example of the slant: Saul Cornell — identified only as an “Ohio State University historian who has written widely on guns” — makes too much of Lott’s importance, as one might expect now that Lott is facing criticism. Mooney perhaps should have noted that Cornell’s work is funded by the anti-gun Joyce Foundation. And perhaps he should also have noted that Cornell was a defender of Michael Bellesiles. (Though I should note that he no longer defends him). Neither, of course, disqualifies Cornell from having an opinion — but one imagines that a scholar who was funded by the NRA would have that affiliation noted in an article like this, and I don’t see why the same shouldn’t apply to those who are funded by anti-gun activists. We also hear about how many “gun deaths” there are, without learning how many — a majority, I believe — are actually suicide, which would seem relevant to me.

UPDATE: Clayton Cramer, a major figure in unmasking Bellesiles’ fraud, offers comments on the Mother Jones article, and on the similarities and differences between the two cases.

Meanwhile, Jacob Sullum writes on gun control’s shaky empirical foundation, and press slant on the subject:

In November 1988 The New England Journal of Medicine published a study that noted Seattle’s homicide rate was higher than Vancouver’s and attributed the difference to stricter gun control in Vancouver. Although the study had serious flaws, including the failure to take into account important demographic differences between the two cities, it received generous coverage in two major newspapers known for their sympathy to gun control.

The Washington Post covered the report in a 600-word, staff-written story on page A4 under the headline “Impact of Gun Control Indicated in Medical Study.” The New York Times story (“Gun Curbs Linked to Homicide Rate”) was about the same length, although it was by a stringer and appeared deeper in the A section.

The Times made up for those lapses with an editorial about the study later that month. Under the headline “Guns Do Kill People,” it said “the study appears to buttress common-sense wisdom about public safety [i.e., our position on gun control].”

This month, when a government-appointed panel of experts announced that their comprehensive review of the relevant scientific literature (including the Seattle/Vancouver study) had failed to find evidence that gun control works, The Washington Post gave the story about 200 words in its “Findings” column. The New York Times (D.C. edition) ran fewer than 150 words of an A.P. story on the bottom of page A23, under a tiny headline that gave no indication of the report’s conclusions.

No surprise, there.

UPDATE: Randy Barnett comments:

There are two additional thoughts that occur to me in the wake of this article. First, in their reworking of the data, Ian Ayres and John Donohue show no decrease in violent crime as famously claimed by Lott and say that the crime figures might even show a slight increase in violence. (Lott always claimed that right to carry laws were accompanied by a small increase in property crimes, which he speculated might be the results of deterrence caused by concealed weapons.) If confirmed, this is indeed a significant revision in the empirical evidence.

But even this data show that right to carry laws do not lead to greatly increased rates of violence as has long been claimed by opponents of such laws. Lott’s finding that violence declined in the wake of these laws was a welcome bonus for gun rights supporters, but debunking the hypothesis that violence would increase as a result of right to carry laws was highly significant as well. (Though, until an investigation is conducted by some nonpartisan group, I now place more stock in Ayres and Donahue’s results than in Lott’s.) This important conclusion seems to survive the controversy.

Second, while many academics claim the superiority of peer-reviewed journals over student-edited law reviews, this incident should give us pause. Lott’s initial figures were originally published in a peer-reviewed journal. So was Michael Bellesiles’ original probate survey that was subsequently debunked only when it was included in his high-profile book.

I think that’s right. One of the things that I found annoying when the Bellesiles scandal appeared was many historians’ dismissal of criticisms by law professors because “law reviews aren’t peer reviewed.” Peer review is good at some things, but one of them probably isn’t catching fraud, or even non-obvious factual mistakes.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Tim Lambert, meanwhile, displays a rather cavalier disregard for the facts, in a comment on this post. Here’s what Lambert says:

Glenn Reynolds thinks that Chris Mooney’s piece is “not a bad summary” but opines that it is somewhat slanted. Reynolds thinks that the article should have noted that Saul Cornell’s work is funded by the Joyce Foundation. This is a curious complaint, since Reynolds earlier objected to opponents of Lott making arguments based on the fact that Lott was funded by the Olin corporation.

Here’s what I actually said:

Lott has been the target of many vicious smears and lies, which tends to make me reflexively doubt the latest charges by his many antigun critics. (For example, because he had an Olin Fellowship at the University of Chicago, antigun people said his research was funded by Winchester, a company the Olin family, which endowed the fellowships, once owned — which is sort of like saying that the Henry Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale is “bought and paid for by Time Magazine.” I don’t think they ever apologized, either.)

I believe that this was hashed out rather thoroughly on an email list to which Lambert belongs, which means that he knows the truth here. This is sloppy of Lambert, at best.

Mooney, meanwhile has more on this on his blog, and has linked transcripts of his interviews with Lott.

MORE: Brian Linse comments: “Having been the first blogger to question Lott’s work, I am extremely gratified to look back on the role the blogs have played in bringing this issue to wider public attention.” Read the whole thing.

STILL MORE: John Lott has responded to the Mother Jones story on his website.

AND MORE STILL: Lambert has updated his post, fixing the Olin reference, and adding:

I meant to say foundation there. My point is that it is wrong to imply that someone’s opinion has been bought, whether that person is Saul Cornell or John Lott.

But the essence of the (false) charge against Lott wasn’t just that his research had been “bought” — itself absurd on the actual facts — but that it had been bought by a firearms manufacturer. When you say, falsely, that someone’s pro-gun work is funded by Winchester, that’s rather a smear, isn’t it?

I agree that people’s scholarship should be addressed on the merits, but that isn’t done here. In fact, when I’m interviewed by reporters I often get the third degree as to whether my research has been funded by the NRA. (No.) Hence my goose-and-gander point.

MORE: Saul Cornell emails:

As long as we are genuflecting toward accuracy, I note that you did not mention that I supported Jim Lindgren’s efforts and even went so far as to introduce him to my colleague Randy Roth. Despite the boasting of Clayton Cramer I think it is fair to say that it was their collaboration that played the key role in exposing the problems with Arming America. I also note that you did not mention that I responded quite promptly to the publication of the WMQ forum by withdrawing public support for Michael’s thesis and that I supported the Emory Report when the Wall Street Journal called for a comment. If you compare my responses to Arming America’s problems with the response of gun rights advocates to Lott, I think any fair reading would have to credit my response as faster. I would appreciate you correcting the record.

I wasn’t aware of the Lindgren support. Otherwise, I disagree on timing. By the time that the WMQ report came out, Bellesiles’ fraud had been made quite apparent in popular publications (one of which, by Melissa Seckora, came out even as Bellesiles received a prestigious Bancroft Award in early American history). The WMQ article came rather late in the game.

And there has been none of the snideness with which historians — including, if I recall correctly, Cornell — met critics of Bellesiles. Like Randy Barnett, I’ve called for investigation (and did so on the Firearmsconlaw list when Tim Lambert first raised the 1997 survey issue, long before it became public) but I’ve also admitted that I don’t understand the statistics involved. With Bellesiles, on the other hand, it was easy to understand the absence of visits to nonexistent archives. Nor have associations of right-wing scholars issued resolutions uncritically supporting Lott without even bothering to review the charges against him, as the (left-wing) American Historical Association did with Bellesiles.

I had hoped that this humiliation would lead historians to do more than “genuflect” toward accuracy, but perhaps not.