In the debate over gun control sparked by the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, most gun-rights advocates have been conspicuously silent. Not John Lott. Quite the opposite, he has been the loudest conservative voice publicly defending firearms. Mere hours after the massacre, he tweeted, “The most consistent feature of these attacks are that they occur in gun-free zones.” The next day he appeared on Piers Morgan's show to say, “Look at what has happened, all these attacks this year have occurred where guns are banned. Look at the Aurora movie theater shooting.” And then Monday, to Soledad O'Brien: “I don't argue Second Amendment. I argue crime. That's what I do.”

As an erstwhile academic and longtime proselytizer for the crime-stopping value of guns, Lott has a freedom of movement in the post-Newtown debate that his less data-driven, Second Amendment–worshipping counterparts do not. A former American Enterprise Institute fellow, he isn't just one of the foremost researchers on the side of the gun lobby; he’s the godfather of pro-gun scholarship. It was Lott’s 1998 opus, More Guns, Less Crime, that, in the words of Benjamin Wallace-Wells, “tipped the terms of the debate, handing the gun lobby, which had previously relied on brute politicking to win over lawmakers, a devastatingly effective academic study supporting their side.” Countless state legislators have relied on Lott's work to make the case, with increasing success, that concealed-carry laws are in the interest of law-abiding citizens. Two decades later, new thinkers are still coming around to his way of seeing things: Jeffrey Goldberg quotes Lott admiringly in his recent treatise in The Atlantic on the need for more guns.

Lott’s research, as the title of his book suggests, is dedicated to proving that more guns in more hands reduces violent crime. In the wake of Newtown, that means guns in teachers’ hands, and an end to the gun-free zones that he says make schools “a magnet for these attacks.” But Lott’s research has always been problematic. For starters, he's a lousy data analyst. Lott allowed Professors Dan Black and Daniel Nagin to reevaluate his data for their 1998 inquiry into the effects of concealed-carry laws on violent crime rates. Their findings, published in the Journal of Legal Studies in 1998, blew a hole in his: “Our reanalysis of Lott and [co-author David] Mustard’s data provides no basis for drawing confident conclusions about the impact of right-to-carry laws on violent crime,” they wrote. “As a result, inference based on the Lott and Mustard model is inappropriate, and their results cannot be used responsibly to formulate public policy.” Four years later, Ian Ayres of Yale and John J. Donohue III of Stanford Law gave his scholarship an even more vicious debunking. (Media Matters summarizes the many challenges to his research here.)

When challenged, Lott has also resorted to fishy means of defending himself. About ten years ago, when critics began to question whether he had really conducted a crucial survey—on how often civilians have used guns to defend themselves against criminals, which had served as the crux of the book that made him famous—Lott failed to produce both the survey itself (citing a hard drive crash) and the names of anyone who had conducted or taken the survey. In the end, only one person, a former national board member of the NRA, ever recalled having taken the survey. Around the same time, Lott admitted that he invented a sock puppet and, under the name “Mary Rosh,” commented on liberal blogs and news articles that were critical of him. (These were all lovingly detailed by my colleague Tim Noah, then at Slate.)

But in the past few days, Lott’s favored method of argument has been one of careful, deceptive word choice.