Author's legal efforts to silence critics are off base

Could it be that more guns cause less crime? Could it be that criminals who suspect their potential victims are armed would be deterred from committing crimes? That's what John R. Lott Jr. argued in his 1998 book, "More Guns, Less Crime."

But could it be that Lott is wrong; that other researchers have been unable to confirm his thesis? That's what Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner argued in their best-selling 2005 book, "Freakonomics." How should this debate be resolved? Lott's solution is to try to get the U.S. District Court in Chicago to issue an injunction blocking the sale of "Freakonomics."

That's a terrible way to deal with controversial research about a crucial public policy issue. Instead of trying to silence his critics, Lott ought to respond to their criticisms.

Lott contended in his book that crime was reduced by so-called right-to-carry laws in 35 states allowing people to carry concealed weapons. His supporting research is considered only briefly in "Freakonomics," which has sold more than 1 million copies and has remained a best-seller for more than 56 weeks. Instead, Levitt and Dubner briefly mention the "troubling allegation" that Lott "invented some of the survey data" in "More Guns, Less Crime" and then go on to discuss more broadly that Lott's overall argument is apparently wrong.

"Regardless of whether the data were faked," they say, "Lott's admittedly intriguing hypothesis doesn't seem to be true. When other scholars have tried to replicate his results, they found that right-to-carry laws simply don't bring down crime."

That last sentence, Lott says in his lawsuit, is false and has "seriously damaged" his reputation. Therefore, he argues, the sale of the book should be stopped until the offending sentence has been removed. Yet many other scholars have criticized Lott in stronger terms without triggering a lawsuit.

If you Google "John Lott" and "research fraud," you get nearly 150 results, starting off with a 2003 article published in Science magazine by Donald Kennedy, the editor in chief, which criticizes Lott's "cooked data." You get an article by Yale Law School professors Ian Ayres and John Donohue, published in the Stanford Law and Economics Working Paper series, who have run the numbers. "In most states," they wrote in 2002, right-to-carry laws "have been associated with more crime," not less.

Most important, you get the exhaustive 2004 report from the prestigious National Research Council, which found "no credible evidence" supporting Lott's thesis — pretty much what "Freakonomics" said.