Chicago Magazine has a nice in-depth article up about one of our favorite subjects: John Lott, Jr., the gun guys' last best (which isn't saying much) hope for statistics. He's a "researcher" (we use that term loosely around him) who's been discredited more times than Shaq's missed a free throw. His latest error in judgement was to sue Chicago researcher Steven D. Levitt for supposedly attacking Lott's "integrity and honesty" (no word on how Levitt was able to find either of those, much less attack them), and Chicago magazine has a closer look at Lott and the suit.

The case is rare—intellectual quarrels don’t often end up in federal court—and it culminates an ongoing dispute between the two men, who knew each other at least casually at the U. of C. “I even had the pleasure of dining at his home with John, his wife, and their four [at the time] young boys,” Levitt told me.

Ostensibly, the two men have a great deal in common. Lott, 48, and Levitt, 39, were both pioneers of econometrics, a discipline that uses statistics and computer software to examine how society actually works (a departure from the usual stuff of economics, such as unemployment rates and bond yields). Levitt brings econometrics to bear on outré questions: How much money do drug dealers really make? Do sumo wrestlers cheat? Do Chicago public school teachers cheat in reporting their students’ scores on standardized tests? “The only things I’m really good at,” Levitt has said, “really and honestly, are asking questions that people seem to find interesting and figuring out how to trick data into answering those questions.”

One question Levitt asked has thrust him into a heated debate on crime and morality. National crime rates plunged suddenly in the 1990s—exactly one generation after the Supreme Court legalized abortions in 1973. In an argument first made in 1999 and repeated in Freakonomics, Levitt has asserted that abortions reduced the number of unwanted children, who tend to grow up to be criminals. Though Levitt takes pains to insist that this finding says nothing about whether abortion is morally right or wrong, both his conclusion and his scholarship have been roundly criticized.

One of the critics was Lott. As soon as Freakonomics appeared, Lott wrote a letter to The Wall Street Journal, calling the authors’ abortion-and-crime theory “plausible” but contending, “if anything, the reverse is true. Their data had a serious error.”

Levitt retorted in an online posting that Lott had coauthored a paper on abortion and crime “loaded with inaccurate claims, errors and statistical mistakes. . . . Virtually nothing in this paper is correct, and it is no coincidence that four years later it remains unpublished.”

Which, you'll note, is a fact. And truth is always a very solid defense against libel. But to get back to the subject of firearms, Lott's problems didn't start with his argument with Levitt. He's been accused by almost everyone of warping, ignoring, and even making up data. And then there's the funny little story of Mary Rosh.

For his part, Lott also stirred controversy by examining crime in the United States, turning econometrics toward the question of whether gun-control laws really reduced violent crime. His conclusion—that gun-packing communities were safer—set off howls of protest from gun-control advocates. Critics attacked Lott’s research as technically flawed if not bogus, and he has been defending himself against such charges ever since.

Lott has had to defend himself over an embarrassing gambit, too. In 2001, somebody named Mary Rosh began posting on online forums, gushing over Lott as a writer and teacher: “I had him for a PhD 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,” Rosh wrote, for example, “and I have to say that he was the best professor I ever had.” This was posted in, of all places, a chat room about the TV show The West Wing (an episode dealt with gun politics).

The writer with this high regard for John Lott turned out to be . . . John Lott. “Mary Rosh” was an alias derived from the first names of Lott’s sons, Maxim, Ryan, Roger, and Sherwin. Julian Sanchez, a blogger at the libertarian Cato Institute, busted Lott, and The Washington Post broke the story in February 2003. “I probably shouldn’t have done it—I know I shouldn’t have done it—but it’s hard to think of any big advantage I got except to be able to comment fictitiously,” Lott told the Post. He later wrote on his Web site, “I had originally used my own name in chat rooms but switched after receiving threatening and obnoxious telephone calls from other Internet posters.”

Right-- he says he used the pseudonym to get away from threats, but is that why he also said he only weighed 114 lbs and was a woman? And there's more weirdness going on with Lott, like the first time he actually met Levitt in Chicago.

Levitt’s friend Austan Goolsbee, also an economics professor at the U. of C., remembers when Levitt, then a junior fellow at Harvard, visited Chicago in 1994 to present a paper. Lott had just been named a visiting professor. “Even before Steve was on the [academic] job market, John came to the first seminar Steve was giving at Chicago and brought his own slides to the talk and attempted to get up and rebut what Steve was saying during Steve’s own workshop,” Goolsbee says. “I cannot even tell you how unusual that is—I have never heard of anything like that happening.”

Can you say "loony"? The one guy in the article they can get to defend Lott is none other than Daniel Polsby, who has plenty of policy errors and issues of his own.

And there's even more! Lott doesn't just attack people who call him out openly on his crazy data, he very likely attacks them anonymously too.

Also that year, Levitt was named to take part in a National Academy of Sciences study of gun issues. In August 2001, a University of Tennessee law professor named Glenn H. Reynolds, the author of the popular, libertarian-leaning blog InstaPundit, and pro-gun activist Dave Kopel wrote an article for National Review Online complaining that the upcoming conference was stacked with anti-gun people. They quoted an anonymous source calling Levitt, in particular, “rabidly anti-gun.”

Levitt fired off an e-mail message to Reynolds that same day: “I don’t understand your National Review article in which I am described as ‘rabidly anti-gun.’ No one who knows me would describe me that way. I love to shoot guns and would own them if my wife would let me. . . . I have never written anything even remotely anti-gun. I think your sources must have me confused with someone else.” Reynolds posted Levitt’s comments on InstaPundit.

In continuing online debates over gun issues, Reynolds and Kopel have refused to identify the anonymous source. However, Tim Lambert, a computer scientist in Australia who maintains an anti-Lott blog, has said on his blog that Levitt told him he was nearly certain that Lott was the source.

We can't get enough of this guy! There's lots more in the article-- we wish we could point it all out here, but we just don't have the space. Suffice to say that Lott is really a "researcher" just like the guy from the Village People is really a "police officer." (An apt comparison, considering Lott's musical tastes)

And yet after all this, Lott still gets quoted in news articles about the statistics of gun violence. The Los Angeles Times still, for some reason we can't fathom, prints his editorials. And gun guys everywhere still quote his stats to us like they're the gospel truth. After everything this guy has done, you'd think they'd at least get some new stats. But no, discredited as he may be, the gun guys are still standing by the one and only John Lott, Jr.