[LS]

No you have your reasoning ass-backwards. There is no reason NOT to trust Lott in the later study because his ORIGINAL study proved out, and all the citations in fact WERE checked (unlike Bellisiles, whose were NEVER checked).

I note a disingenuous reluctance to confront Lott's original study. Methinks you have a serious anti-gun agenda.

[choosetheright]

I fully agree that the statistic that all this fuss is about (the 98% statistic) is very minor and not vital to Lott's primary conclusion (his regression analysis of the effect of changing concealed-carry laws). Indeed, I said that Lott was lying, if he was lying, about something that was "incidental" to his work.

But is the validity of his primary conclusion really all that matters, as you suggest? It may be all that matters when it comes to the public policy questions of what concealed carry laws should say. But it can't be all that matters to the issue of whether Lott is a credible scholar or a liar, which seems to be a real question aside from the validity of his 1997 study.

Methinks your views about honesty and academic integrity are colored a great deal by whether the lying professor in question is pro-gun or anti-gun. I don't have that bias. I think they should be fired if they faked data, no matter which side of the gun debate they are on.