1. John Lott is the former president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, a nonprofit he founded in 2013.
29 Facts About John Lott
1. 2.
John Lott worked in the Office of Justice Programs within the US Department of Justice under the Donald Trump administration from October 2020 to January 2021.
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John Lott has written for both academic and popular publications.
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John Lott has authored books such as More Guns, Less Crime, The Bias Against Guns, and Freedomnomics.
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John Lott is best known as a gun rights advocate and has argued against restrictions on owning and carrying guns.
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John Lott was the chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission.
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John Lott spent five years at the University of Chicago, as a visiting professor from 1994 to 1995 and as a John M Olin fellow from 1995 to 1999.
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John Lott was a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute from 2001 to 2006.
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From July 2007 to 2010, John Lott was a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland Foundation at the University of Maryland, College Park and lectured on law and economics.
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John Lott has written op-eds for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Chicago Tribune.
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In 2013, John Lott founded the nonprofit organization Crime Prevention Research Center to study the relationship between gun laws and crime.
12.
In 2020, John Lott left the organization to take a position in the Trump administration.
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John Lott argues in both More Guns, Less Crime and The Bias Against Guns that defensive gun use is underreported, noting that in general, only shootings ending in fatalities are discussed in news stories.
14.
John Lott said that the lower rates found by others was at least in part due to the different questions that were asked.
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However, in 2000 John Lott was unable to produce the data or any records showing that the survey had been undertaken.
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John Lott said the 1997 hard drive crash that had affected several projects with co-authors had destroyed his survey data set, the original tally sheets had been abandoned with other personal property in his move from Chicago to Yale, and he could not recall the names of any of the students who he said had worked on it.
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Critics questioned whether the survey had ever taken place, but John Lott defends the survey's existence and accuracy.
18.
John Lott has claimed that the review was written by his son and wife.
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John Lott's argument is used in the influential social science methodology textbook Rethinking Social Inquiry as an example of poor methodology.
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John Lott has non-peer-reviewed research that purports to show that undocumented immigrants are more crime-prone than US citizens.
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In doing so, John Lott lumped together both legal and illegal immigrants in prison into a category for illegal immigrants, leading to an elevated crime rate for illegal immigrants.
22.
John Lott says the overall thrust of his study still holds, but the issue muddles his research and invites guesswork as to the actual crime rate for the undocumented immigrant population in Arizona.
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John Lott's claims were heavily promoted by the Trump administration to justify its anti-immigration policies, in particular their attempts to end DACA.
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John Lott published a study arguing that affirmative action in the hiring of police reduced the overall quality of all officers and increased crime.
25.
In October 2020, John Lott was appointed as a senior adviser for research and statistics at the Office of Justice Programs within the US Department of Justice in the Donald Trump administration.
26.
John Lott has claimed there was voter fraud in the 2020 United States presidential election.
27.
John Lott argued there was "irregularities" in the absentee ballots in Missoula County, and later wrote a paper claiming there was evidence of fraud in the absentee ballots in Georgia and Pennsylvania.
28.
On June 4,2021, two parents of a child killed in the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School invited John Lott and David Keene to deliver what they falsely said was a dress rehearsal for a 2021 graduation address for a fictitious school called "the James Madison Academy".
29.
John Lott first realized that the event was a staged attempt to call attention to school shootings, and not a genuine commencement address dress rehearsal, when news media asked him to comment on segments of video of the "dress rehearsal" that the organizers posted on the internet.