Editing John Lott (section)

===Defensive gun use===
{{Main|Defensive gun use}}
Lott argues in both ''More Guns, Less Crime'' and ''The Bias Against Guns'' that defensive gun use (DGU) is underreported, noting that in general, only shootings ending in fatalities are discussed in news stories. In ''More Guns, Less Crime'', Lott writes that "[s]ince in many defensive cases a handgun is simply brandished, and no one is harmed, many defensive uses are never even reported to the police." In May 1998, Lott wrote that "national surveys" suggested that "98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack." Lott cited similar figures in op-eds in ''[[Wall Street Journal|The Wall Street Journal]]''<ref name="Lott98WSJ">{{cite news|first=John R. |last=Lott Jr. |title=Keep Guns out of Lawyers' Hands |newspaper=Wall Street Journal |page=1 |date=1998-06-23}}</ref> and the ''[[Los Angeles Times]]''.<ref name="Lott98LAT">{{cite news|first=John R. |last=Lott Jr. |title=Cities Target Gun Makers in Bogus Lawsuits |newspaper=[[Los Angeles Times]] |page=7 |date=1998-12-01}}</ref>

In 2002, he said that brandishing a weapon was sufficient to stop an attack 95% of the time. Other researchers criticized his methodology. A study in ''Public Opinion Quarterly'' said that his sample size of 1,015 respondents was too small for the study to be accurate and that the majority of similar studies suggest a value between 70 and 80 percent.<ref name="2002studycriticism">{{Cite journal|last=McDowall |first=David |date=Summer 2005 |journal=[[Public Opinion Quarterly]] |title=John R. Lott Jr.'s Defensive Gun Brandishing Estimates |volume=69 |issue=2 |pages=246–263 |doi=10.1093/poq/nfi015}}</ref> According to Lott, Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz's 1994 estimate rises to 92 percent when brandishing and warning shots are added together.<ref>{{cite web | url=http://crimeresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/General-Disc-9702-Surveys.pdf |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20221009/http://crimeresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/General-Disc-9702-Surveys.pdf |archive-date=2022-10-09 |url-status=live | title=What Surveys Can Help Us Understand About Guns? | access-date=22 June 2016 | author=Lott, John|page=8}}</ref> Lott said that the lower rates found by others was at least in part due to the different questions that were asked.<ref>Discussion of different surveys on defensive gun use [http://www.johnlott.org/files/GeneralDisc97_02Surveys.zip Johnlott.org]</ref>