Fox Business host John Stossel defended discredited research conducted by John Lott that found more guns equal less crime by falsely claiming Lott's finding had been “replicated” by the National Research Council (NRC).

In fact, when NRC examined Lott's work in 2004, it found there was “no credible evidence” for Lott's conclusions.

Lott is a well-known pro-gun advocate and frequent source of conservative misinformation about gun violence. He rose to prominence during the 1990s with the publication of his book, More Guns, Less Crime, although his conclusion that permissive gun laws reduce crime rates was later debunked by academics who found serious flaws in his research.

In his December 2 syndicated column, Stossel wrote that the accusation that Lott's research has been “discredited” is a “smear.” Stossel noted that “Media Matters for America called Lott 'discredited' at least 40 times.”

In defending Lott's research, Stossel wrote, “Lott's 'More Guns, Less Crime' study has been replicated often, including by the National Research Council and even by some critics.”

That never happened. One of the “major conclusions” of a 2004 study issued by the NRC was that “despite a large body of research, the committee found no credible evidence that the passage of right-to-carry laws decreases or increases violent crime.” The study exhaustively examined Lott's “More Guns, Less Crime” theory in reaching this conclusion. (NRC's report also did not “replicate” research, instead it submitted existing research to examination by experts.)

Lott was unhappy with NRC's analysis of his work, and issued a response claiming that the committee members “favored gun control” and suggested that “the National Academy is so completely unable to separate politics from its analyses that it simply can't accept the results for what they are.”

In turn, the NRC's executive officer published a letter claiming Lott's response to NRC “contained significant errors” while disputing Lott's claims about the supposedly biased backgrounds of committee members and defending the objectivity of NRC's work.

Critics have replicated Lott's work, but not in the way that Stossel describes. One 2003 analysis of Lott's “More Guns, Less Crime” thesis found that correcting significant coding errors in Lott's work completely undermined his conclusions. In fact, after correcting these errors the data suggested that if anything more permissive concealed carry laws increase crime.

Lott's “More Guns, Less Crime” theory has been repeatedly discredited. David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, offered numerous critiques of Lott's data set in his 2003 book Public Guns Public Health, including descriptions of bizarre scenarios that demonstrated the volatility of Lott's data (emphasis added):

Many of the results for the other control variables do not make sense. For example, the results show both that increasing the rate of unemployment and reducing income will significantly reduce the rate of violent crime. The results indicate that reducing the number of middle-aged and elderly black women (who are rarely either perpetrators or victims of murder) will substantially reduce homicide rates. Indeed, according to the results, a decrease of 1 percentage point in the percentage of the population that is black, female, and aged forty to forty-nine is associated with a 59 percent decrease in homicide (and a 74 percent increase in rape). [Hemenway, Private Guns Public Health, pg. 244]

According to the most recent credible research, permissive concealed carry laws actually increase violent crime, particularly aggravated assault.

In his piece, Stossel stretched in other places to defend Lott. In one instance he described calling attention to an incident Lott was involved in a “smear” despite acknowledging that the claim about Lott is “actually true”:

Barrett continued her smear: Lott “actually impersonated a student ... to say what a great professor he is.”

That's actually true. On the Internet, Lott once posed as a student to praise his own course. Dumb, yes. Deceitful, too. But it doesn't “discredit” all his research.