IMNTBHO, he's damaged his credibility as an advocate, but his statistics and their analysis should stand or fall on their own merits.
You'd think a guy who's done so much research on guns would know enough not to shoot himself in the foot. :)
This is typical of the double standard on any issue that the OldDominantLiberalMedia favors. Anyone who looks at the several surveys that have been done on using guns to stop crimes or for self defense sees the "98%" number. It just jumps out at you. Look at the number of times guns are to have been used, and the number of times fired, and the number of times anyone gets shot. The surveys all show that that the gun does not have to be fired in the 90% up range, at least the ones I have read.
I suspect that this is mostly a tempest in a teapot, because Lott used a pseudonym to try to make some points in a debate does not discredit him, in my opinion. At least he quickly fessed up to it. The 98% number was apparently confirmed in an interim part of his other, published studies. Since it was never published or credited, haveing a computer crash that wiped it out doesn't seem much of a problem to me.
You said that better than I did. Nice tagline too.