While testifying before a joint congressional committee on gun violence, discredited pro-gun researcher and National Rifle Association favorite John Lott imploded when questioned about his history of dishonesty, going so far as to blame his own family for authoring fake glowing reviews of his research.

Lott was invited to testify before the United States Congress Joint Economic Committee on September 18 for a hearing on “understanding and reducing the costs of firearm injuries and deaths.” As founder and president of the pro-gun Crime Prevention Research Center, Lott has made a career out of promoting myths about “gun-free zones,” advancing his debunked “more guns, less crime,” theory, and attacking gun safety proposals. He testified at the hearing alongside representatives from two gun safety groups, the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence and Everytown for Gun Safety, as well as a former Republican Texas state representative who survived the 1991 mass shooting at Luby’s Cafeteria.

During the hearing, Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) asked Lott about Mary Rosh, a fictitious persona Lott acknowledged in 2003 that he had invented and used for three years to write positive reviews of his own works and to answer his critics. The senator questioned whether “it show[s] good judgement for a researcher to comment” on their own work “under a name that is clearly not transparent.” In response, Lott crumbled, insisting he didn’t write a Rosh review that called him “the best professor that I ever had” and blaming “somebody else in my family who was responding to attacks that were on me.” Lott had claimed in 2003 that some of the comments published under Rosh’s name were authored by him, while others were authored by members of his family. But in terms of the particular Rosh comment cited by Heinrich during the hearing, Lott claimed that it was written by someone in his family, but he told The Washington Post in 2003, “I'm sure I did that. I shouldn't have done it.”

This dismantling of Lott’s problematic history is a prime lesson for media outlets that continue to invite him to contribute: