John Lott is an economist who conducted his infamous gun control metadata analysis while employed at the American Enterprise Institute, a privately funded conservative think tank. He is not an independent, mainstream scientist and his employers, as strong Second Amendment supporters have never funded research intended to support gun control. He's never published his gun study in a peer-reviewed journal but has authored several general audience books about the subject. He has, however, made his data available and others have duplicated his methods albeit with conflicting results. Very understandable too! Data from the social science field are always very sloppy and easy to mislead with. They're gathered practically all from meta-analyses, nothing like relatively clean experimental data. He's a great example of a scientist who should have stuck to science, and not become an advocate. Once he left mainstream science to work for AEI, his reputation in the academic world plunged. He is however selling lots and lots of books.
