> Bellesiles Misfires > > An antigun "scholar" as today's Galileo? Oh please, just shoot me. > > BY KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL
My letter to the WSJ: I don't think that Soft Skull should be promoting a fraud like Bellesiles. But the Wall Street Journal is hardly in a position to criticize Soft Skull when it continues to publish John Lott. In the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Lott claimed that polls by the Los Angeles Times, Gallup and Peter Hart showed that 98% of the time, merely brandishing stopped an attack. When he found out that those polls showed no such thing and other polls give a very different number Lott changed his story and claimed that the 98% number came from a survey he had conducted. His stories about how and when the poll was conducted have kept changing. He claims to have lost all the data from this survey and can't produce any evidence that it was ever conducted. He also miscoded his "More Guns, Less Crime" data and when this was discovered he tried to conceal the effect this had on his results by changing the way he did his calculations. When this, too, was discovered he tried to cover up the changes by altering dates and switching files on his website. Lott also made over a dozen anonymous five-star reviews of his own books and on and on. In an earlier comment on Bellesiles, Strassel wrote: "But perhaps the most disturbing aspect of L'affaire Bellesiles is that despite the enormity of the scandal, nearly every institution involved---from Emory University, to Columbia University's Bancroft Prize Committee, to the publisher--has refused to take a professional or moral stance." When is the Wall Street Journal going to take a moral stance on John Lott? -- Tim _______________________________________________ To post, send message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/firearmsregprof
