"Last year I worked extremely hard," John R. Lott Jr. wrote last month in an e-mail reply to a review of his research ethics. Among other things, Mr. Lott, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, was busy completing a new book, The Bias Against Guns, due from Regnery Publishing in March. The hectic schedule had kept him from many things, he said, including keeping up on Internet debates on gun control. "I am not a member of the firearms discussion groups and I have not been following them."
Not quite true. Last year, the author, who is best known for the book More Guns, Less Crime (University of Chicago Press, 1998), did find time to be a regular voice in gun-control debates in such Usenet groups as talk.politics.guns, alt.crime, and misc.fitness.weights.
But he didn't do any of this under his own name. Using the pseudonym "Mary Rosh" -- derived from the names of his sons Maxim, Ryan, Roger, and Sherwin -- he vigorously defended the integrity and scholarship of John R. Lott Jr.
"He has probably published more research in refereed journals than almost anyone his age," proclaimed Ms. Rosh in May 2002. Six months earlier she wrote, "I had him for a Ph.D.-level empirical methods class when he taught at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania back in the early 1990s, well before he gained national attention, and I have to say that he was the best professor that I ever had."
Mr. Lott's deception was uncovered in late January by Julian Sanchez, a staff writer at the Cato Institute who maintains a Weblog on libertarian politics. Mr. Sanchez noticed parallels between Ms. Rosh's language and Mr. Lott's, and then scrutinized the Internet-protocol codes attached to their e-mail addresses.
Mr. Lott seems to have used the pseudonym primarily as a means to let off steam. ("YOU ARE AMAZINGLY DISHONEST," Ms. Rosh wrote to a critic of Mr. Lott in 2001. "HAVE YOU ABSOLUTELY NO SHAME?") In an e-mail message to the Chronicle, Mr. Lott says, "I used my own name for a while, but many times it was difficult to get past who I was and to discuss the issues."
On at least one occasion, however, Ms. Rosh appears to have been employed to do a bit of espionage. On November 1, 2002, someone known as "Alpha Male" wrote on the Usenet group talk.politics.guns: "I wouldn't 'do' anything to John Lott besides reject him for publication, which I did. The reason I had to do that is not because I have a thing against guns. ... John Lott's research design did not support his wild claims."
Three days later, Ms. Rosh replied: "Are you saying that you're an academic and that you have actually refereed a paper of Lott's that was submitted to a journal? Was it a real academic journal? I have some familiarity with journals. Which one was it and what piece of his did you referee?" Mr. Lott says that those questions were "purely rhetorical" and that he was simply trying to taunt "Alpha Male" into confessing that he is not an academic and had never actually reviewed any of Mr. Lott's papers. ("Alpha Male" did not return an e-mail asking for comment.)
All of this was unearthed in the context of much more serious, but unproved, allegations about Mr. Lott's research. Otis Dudley Duncan, a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, has long questioned a statement on Page 3 of More Guns, Less Crime: "98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack."
Most studies have found that people who brandish their weapons in self-defense actually fire them more than 20 percent of the time, not 2 percent. For two years, in op-ed essays and other publications, Mr. Lott attributed his 98-percent figure to "polls by the Los Angeles Times, Gallup, and Peter Hart Research Associates." But those polls asked only about how often people have "used" their guns defensively, and do not reveal anything about how often guns are actually fired during such defensive uses. (And in any case, the polls don't contain 98-percent figures of any sort.) In 1999, however, he told Mr. Duncan that the 98-percent figure actually came from his own research -- from a telephone survey he conducted in 1997. The second edition of Mr. Lott's book, published in 2000, amends the sentence so that it begins: "If a national survey that I conducted is correct ..."
Asked to produce data from that 1997 survey, Mr. Lott has told his critics that all traces of it were lost when his hard drive crashed that summer. His former colleague David B. Mustard, now an associate professor of economics at the University of Georgia, confirms that many of their data were lost in that hard-drive crash.
James Lindgren, a law professor at Northwestern University, decided last September to settle the question of the survey's existence once and for all. Mr. Lindgren, who has also been one of the most prominent critics of Michael Bellesiles, the former Emory University historian who resigned in October in the wake of allegations that he had committed fraud in his book Arming America, conducted an audit of the dispute and released a report in mid-January, several days before the "Mary Rosh" revelations.
Mr. Lindgren's conclusion: "I am not confident at all, one way or the other, whether the 1997 study was ever done," he says. "Lott has changed his account of what he told me [in an initial September conversation] in several respects, which I find troubling."
"While I recognized that it is extremely easy to lose data in a computer crash," Mr. Lindgren's report begins, "I had not anticipated that Lott would claim to have done a large national survey without discussing the sampling design with anyone, leaving any financial or other records of the study, or remembering anyone who had worked on it."
Mr. Lindgren hopes that the students who Mr. Lott claims worked on the study -- undergraduates at the University of Chicago, where he then taught -- will come forward to confirm his tale. (Mr. Lott has placed an advertisement in Chicago's alumni magazine asking those former students, whose names he says he forgets, to contact him.)
Mr. Lott says he has since replicated his 1997 survey and found similar results. The later survey will be discussed in his forthcoming book.
As for Ms. Rosh, Mr. Lott has now retired her -- but her career will live forever in Google's Usenet archives. Beyond the gun-control arena, she took part in arguments about television networks' early decision to declare Al Gore the winner of Florida's electoral votes -- a decision that Mr. Lott has publicly condemned. In a July 2001 exchange with someone identified as James Simpson, Ms. Rosh denounced a Florida analysis conducted by Philip Klinkner, of Hamilton College. "You are extremely emotional on the issue of Lott and Klinkner and have made all sorts of charges," she wrote. "Why are you so emotional? Are you Klinkner?"
-- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu michaelperelman.wordpress.com