"But it isn’t only pundits who get to wipe their sins clean. Take the notorious John Lott, the right’s most prominent scholarly con artist. A few of the entries on Lott’s lengthy rap sheet give the taste of his modus operandi . He claims he conducted a survey on gun use showing that American gun owners are chasing off would-be home invaders simply by brandishing their weapons with remarkable frequency. The unusual results cannot be checked, since he claims they disappeared in a hard drive crash. After being criticized, Lott created an Internet persona (“Mary Rosh”) so that he could praise his own work, teaching abilities and integrity to the heavens on discussion groups; when a blogger caught him with a little IP-address sleuthing, Lott lied about it before finally coming clean.
What is remarkable about John Lott isn’t that he exists, but that despite being exposed more than once as a fraud, he continues to serve as a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and conservatives continue to cite and praise his work (and for some inexplicable reason, the Los Angeles Times continues to regularly publish Lott’s op-eds)."
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http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/02/22/the_gops_loyalty_fetish.php>BTW, this neoCON stooge's bogus studies are worshipped in the phony "gun rights" movement as fact. Lott also says that tobacco saves the healthcare system money by killing off people before they get old and have a high degree of health problems.