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It has become all about your style and process—and for good reason. It is a superior process for capturing the sense of real conversation without subjecting your dear readers to an aspiring writer's juvenile attempts to replicate the sounds of oral and anal flatulence.

For instance, your dear readers "hear" their own version of these sounds in your narrative passage: It's a lot like Tourette's syndrome but without the forgivable clinical diagnosis. You'd think by now we'd have learned to tolerate, or at the very least ignore, the explicit tirades and the constant mimicking and sniffling and spitting but he continues to surprise us and make us squirm on a daily basis.

Indeed, the mark of a master creating the "true" sound of human speech in words on the page for every reader.

Memphis

For a fittin' feast of reading, John, you've found the secret: Dialogue is better spice than 'tis brisket.

Memphis

I haven't read any of your stories for several years now. I vaguely recall reading some shortly after you joined (2011?).

Hang tough with your 12-Step program. And get back to writing as soon as you can.

If your program experience is anything like mine, you won't have enough time left in your life to write all the stories you'll want to write if you don't start writing right away. I started November 11,1982.

Memphis

Which is why I suggested the following first step to the destination:

Even then, the kind of advice I hear that agents and other failed writers are offering is to only include a prologue if it's well done. Have you ever heard of anyone offering the counsel to only include a Chapter 1 if it's well done?

Meanwhile, I would counsel every aspiring writer to read books that have prologues to see what is possible. Here is an incomplete list I've read:
Empire Falls by Richard Russo (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen (winner of and nominated for several prizes and NY Times bestseller)
True North by Jim Harrison
The Bones Seth Greenland
Shining City by Seth Greenland
The Angry Buddhist by Seth Greenland

Rather than reading books to imitate great storytellers, consider reading books by great storytellers to appreciate and envy them. If you are interested in appreciating something, chances are you will unbeknownst absorb some of the artistry subconsciously.

Memphis Trace

Finally, good advice on prologues.

Even then, the kind of advice I hear that agents and other failed writers are offering is to only include a prologue if it's well done. Have you ever heard of anyone offering the counsel to only include a Chapter 1 if it's well done?

Meanwhile, I would counsel every aspiring writer to read books that have prologues to see what is possible. Here is an incomplete list I've read:
Empire Falls by Richard Russo (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen (winner of and nominated for several prizes and NY Times bestseller)
True North by Jim Harrison
The Bones Seth Greenland
Shining City by Seth Greenland
The Angry Buddhist by Seth Greenland

Sometimes I wonder if writers who have made it are telling their agents to advise wannabe writers to only include prologues if they are well done.

Memphis Trace

Well said.

Memphis Trace

I remember Mr. Short vividly—despite not having been active here—for several years. Great to see him here again and to be reminded of all the fine writers he read; and to get first hand again, his wit and wisdom.

Memphis Trace

I joined the group before I posted there.

Memphis Trace

Good stuff. One's a quorum in our forum, which means I can continue to talk to myself publicly.

Memphis

A promising area to consider:

How Banks Could Control Gun Sales if Washington Won’t

By Andrew Ross Sorkin

Feb. 19, 2018
For the past year, chief executives have often talked about the new sense of moral responsibility that corporations have to help their communities and confront social challenges even when Washington won’t.

In the aftermath of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., that killed 17 students and staff members — and at a time when Washington shows little interest in limiting the sales of assault weapons — there’s a real opportunity for the business community to fill the void and prove that all that talk about moral responsibility isn’t hollow.

Here’s an idea.

What if the finance industry — credit card companies like Visa, Mastercard and American Express; credit card processors like First Data; and banks like JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo — were to effectively set new rules for the sales of guns in America?

Collectively, they have more leverage over the gun industry than any lawmaker. And it wouldn’t be hard for them to take a stand.

PayPal, Square, Stripe and Apple Pay announced years ago that they would not allow their services to be used for the sale of firearms.

“We do not believe permitting the sale of firearms on our platform is consistent with our values or in the best interests of our customers,” a spokesman for Square told me.

The big financial firms don’t even have to go that far.

For example, Visa, which published a 71-page paper in 2016 espousing its “corporate responsibility,” could easily change its terms of service to say that it won’t do business with retailers that sell assault weapons, high-capacity magazines and bump stocks, which make semiautomatic rifles fire faster. (Even the National Rifle Association has said it would support tighter restrictions on bump stocks.)

If Mastercard were to do the same, assault weapons would be eliminated from virtually every firearms store in America because otherwise the sellers would be cut off from the credit card system.

There is precedent for credit card issuers to ban the purchase of completely legal products. Just this month, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America banned the use of their cards to buy Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

To be clear: Those three banks won’t let you use your credit card to buy Bitcoin, but they will happily let you use it to buy an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle — the same kind of gun used in mass shootings in Parkland; Newtown, Conn.; San Bernardino, Calif.; Las Vegas; and Sutherland Springs, Tex.

Visa, oddly enough, is the card of choice of the N.R.A.: There is actually an N.R.A.-branded Visa card issued by First Bankcard, a division of First National Bank of Omaha. And Mastercard proudly announced last year that it was the branded card for Cabela’s, an outdoor gear megastore with a seemingly limitless assault-weapon catalog.

Visa spokesmen did not reply to several emails seeking comment. A spokesman for Mastercard sent a boilerplate statement that expressed “disgust with recent events, including last week in Florida.”

“Our payments network is governed by standards that have been established over time,” the statement said. “Chief among these is that we do not and will not permit merchants to engage in unlawful activity on our network.” He said the company would continue to talk to customers and lawmakers about its policies.

If Visa and Mastercard are unwilling to act on this issue, the credit card processors and banks that issue credit cards could try. Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, which issues credit cards and owns a payment processor, has talked about how he and his bank have “a moral obligation but also a deeply vested interest” in helping “solve pressing societal challenges.” This is your chance, Mr. Dimon.

And here’s a variation on the same theme: What if the payment processing industry’s biggest customers — companies like McDonald’s, Starbucks, Apple, Amazon, AT&T, CVS and others that regularly talk about “social responsibility” — collectively pressured the industry to do it? There’s a chance that some of the payment processors would stop handling gun sales. Perhaps their voices would help push one of the banks to step out and lead?

Is all of this a pipe dream? Maybe, but I spent the last 72 hours calling and emailing a handful of chief executives to discuss these ideas. None wanted to speak on the record, because it’s a hot-button topic. But all applauded the idea and some said they had already been thinking about it. A few, I discovered later, called their peers to begin a conversation.

At least two executives said a reason that they haven’t been more outspoken yet is that they fear reprisals from the N.R.A. and other gun supporters — not just in the form of boycotts that could affect their bottom line, but also actions that could imperil the safety of their employees.

Obviously there would be opposition. When Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, was asked at a conference about his former company’s decision to not do business with firearms merchants, he made his displeasure clear. “No, I wouldn’t be doing that if I was still running it,” said Mr. Thiel, who left the company years ago and is a supporter of President Trump.

Perhaps the biggest stumbling block to an approach like this are companies like Walmart, which has huge sway over the financial industry. While Walmart stopped selling assault rifles in 2015, it might look askance at any policy by a bank issuer or credit card company to limit the kinds of products it sells.

Critics of using the finance industry to influence gun sales might argue that such a move would be discriminatory against gun retailers. But gun sellers are not a protected class, like age, race, gender, religion or even political affiliation. This would be a strictly commercial decision.

Another critique is that it is impossible to prevent every shooting, no matter how guns are restricted. And the banks’ actions would affect millions of their own law-abiding customers, effectively dictating what they can and cannot buy.

The most troubling aspect of having the finance industry try to restrict gun sales is that it would push the most dangerous guns into an untraceable world where sales would depend on cash. That’s true. All things considered, though, it would make it considerably harder to even find such guns.

There are other sectors of the finance industry that could step up. For example, Lloyd’s of London is the favored insurance company for gun shows. It could pull out.

None of this is a panacea. But it’s a start. It takes leadership and courage — exactly what these executives say they have. If they don’t want to back up their words with actions, the next time there’s a school shooting that prompts a conversation about gun companies, it should also include the financial complex that supports them.

Memphis Trace

Fodder for your ruminations and exhortations:

On gun violence, we are a failed state

By E.J. Dionne Jr. Opinion writer February 18 at 7:26 PM

The surest sign a political regime is failing is its inability to do anything about a problem universally seen as urgent that has some obvious remedies. And it’s a mark of political corruption when unaccountable cliques block solutions that enjoy broad support and force their selfish interests to prevail over the common good.

On gun violence, the United States has become a corrupt failed state.

This is the only conclusion to draw from the endless enraging replays of the same political paralysis, no matter how many children are gunned down at our schools or how many innocent Americans are slaughtered at shopping centers and other public places. Whatever happens, we can’t ban assault weapons, we can’t strengthen background checks, we can’t do anything.
In corrupt failed states, politics is about lying and misdirection. On guns, our debate is a pack of lies and evasions.

In no other country is the phrase “thoughts and prayers” a sacrilege, a cover for cowardice.

In no other country are the words “mental health” so empty. They are muttered by politicians who have no history of caring in the least about programs to help those with psychological or psychiatric difficulties. But they need to say something to rationalize their allegiance to a gun lobby that appears to be utterly indifferent to mass murder.

President Trump’s rote address to the nation after the killing of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., had all the passion of a CEO delivering a middling annual report. He told us: “We are committed to working with state and local leaders to help secure our schools and tackle the difficult issue of mental health.”

Trump’s speech, as Vox’s German Lopez observed, was “one giant lie by omission.” Those 17 people were killed by an AR-15 rifle, not by a knife or a sword or a bomb. But God forbid the president mention guns. Vox also noted that people with mental illness are more likely to be the victims, not the perpetrators, of violence. Yes, and if Trump cared so much about mental health, he wouldn’t be proposing a $250 billion cut over a decade in Medicaid, which pays for more than 25 percent of the nation’s mental health care.

Memo to the media: Stop saying in somber, serious tones that we must do more about mental health. This might well be true, but in the context of crimes such as those at Stoneman Douglas High, offering such sentiments is to be complicit in propaganda by pretending that a cover story is actually on the level. We should not have to point out over and over that while mental illness exists everywhere, other countries do not have killing sprees comparable to ours.

Trump brought home his complete indifference to the suffering in Florida with a tweet over the weekend that can only be described as obscene.

He attacked the FBI for missing “the many signals sent out by the Florida shooter” because “it was spending too much time proving Russia collusion with the Trump campaign.” It was an extreme example of his pathological self-involvement and an astonishing exercise in evading the issues at the heart of the tragedy.

At the heart of our political system’s failure to address the epidemic of violence is the Republican Party’s decision to become a paid agent of the gun manufacturers’ lobby. The party of law and order cares about neither if doing so means causing the least disturbance to the National Rifle Association.

This is where corruption comes in. One Republican politician after another who couldn’t even utter the word “gun” following the Parkland horror turned out to have received millions from the NRA. And it’s no wonder that Trump decided he cared so much about mental health. The organization spent $30 million to defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Aggravating our difficulty in regulating weapons is the vast overrepresentation of rural states in the U.S. Senate, which makes some Democrats wary of taking on the NRA. This is another classic problem of failed regimes: Their structures are no longer capable of responding to current needs.

No one wants our political system to fail more than Russian President Vladimir Putin does, and our powerlessness on guns hardly enhances our democracy’s image to the world. It is worth revisiting reports last spring in Time magazine and The Post about the relationships that Russians close to their government are cultivating with the U.S. gun lobby as part of the outreach by pro-Putin forces to the far right.

And Peter Stone and Greg Gordon of McClatchy reported in January that the FBI “is investigating whether a top Russian banker with ties to the Kremlin illegally funneled money to the National Rifle Association to help Donald Trump win the presidency.”

Wherever this Russia story goes, we already know that the NRA and its political servants are immobilizing our government on one of the gravest problems confronting us. What would we say about any other country that watched its children gunned down again and again and did absolutely nothing?

Memphis Trace

Is the John Lott you are touting the same as the subject of the following article?:

The GOP’s favorite gun ‘academic’ is a fraud
The journalistic quest for neutrality has led to a sacrifice of intellectual integrity.

EVAN DEFILIPPIS, DEVIN HUGHES
AUG 12, 2016, 4:45 PM

John Lott is, if not the most influential, certainly the most prolific “academic” in the gun debate. He has authored weekly columns in local newspapers on the horrors of gun free zones, published widely-distributed books on the ostensible benefits of right-to-carry laws, and his newest book The War on Guns has received rave reviews by prominent conservatives, like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), and Newt Gingrich.

Before Lott’s flurry of activity, it was difficult to find anybody arguing that widespread gun ownership made societies safer—even the NRA was reticent to make such a bold claim, defending gun ownership with reference to the constitution, not criminology.

But Lott’s recent successes belie a far more shadowy past. A little over a decade ago, he was disgraced and his career was in tatters. Not only was Lott’s assertion that more guns leads to more safety formally repudiated by a National Research Council panel, but he had also been caught pushing studies with severe statistical errors on numerous occasions. An investigation uncovered that he had almost certainly fabricated an entire survey on defensive gun use. And a blogger revealed that Mary Rosh, an online commentator claiming to be a former student of Lott’s who would frequently post about how amazing he was, was in fact John Lott himself. He was all but excommunicated from academia.

Despite his ethical failings, Lott rose from the ashes in the wake of the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School to once more become a prominent voice in the gun debate.

Perhaps unaware of Lott’s previous transgressions, or believing he had turned a new page by founding the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), many in the media who were desperate for an authoritative, pro-gun academic voice seized on Lott’s credentials and provided him with a new platform. In the past few years, Lott and his organization have been cited by dozens of media outlets as an authority on gun violence statistics, including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, LA Times, Politifact, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and many others.

However, the media’s newfound faith in John Lott is deeply misguided. Rather than turn a new page, Lott has instead returned to his old playbook and used his platform to deceive the public. Our own multi-year investigation into Lott and his organization has uncovered a startling array of new ethical violations, ranging from the profoundly bizarre to the outright fraudulent.

Here are just five of the most troubling incidents:

Last fall, Lott’s website proudly declared it published a study in a peer-reviewed journal. “CPRC Has New Refereed Publication in Econ Journal Watch: Explaining a Bias in Recent Studies on Right-to-Carry Laws” blared the headline on his website. A link to a downloadable copy of the paper also touts its place in the economic journal.

Having a study accepted in a peer-reviewed journal was a big win for Lott, boosting both his own reputation and that of the CPRC. After all, this would be one of the few publications in recent history that Lott dared subject to peer-review.

The only problem? The paper was never actually published in the Econ Journal Watch.

As the head editor of the journal explained to us, while Lott’s paper had initially been considered for publication, it was ultimately rejected. The issue of the journal Lott said he was published in has no trace of his paper. It is impossible for Lott to have not known his paper was in fact rejected, and it would have taken little effort to correct both the post on the CPRC website and the uploaded paper on SSRN. This is a clear cut case of fraud.

Lott often claims that there is no difference between the frequency of public shootings in Europe and the United States. This is unabashedly false—but he continues to spread the falsehood anyway.

In February, he made the claim before the Tennessee Senate. “Most people may not realize this, but the rate of mass public shootings in Europe is actually fairly similar to the rate in the United States,” he said. “There is no statistically significant difference there, either in terms of the rate or fatalities.”

A couple of months earlier, he said something similar to the Washington Post, which quickly highlighted that his analysis was quite different from that of other experts in the field. As the Post noted, while Lott said the per capita rates of mass shootings in Europe and the United States were approximately the same, another researcher found the U.S. rate to be five times higher. The Post explained that the gulf between the results was due to Lott and the other researcher using different definitions.

But there is an even simpler explanation for the differing conclusions: Lott wasn’t being honest about his own findings.

While Lott claims the per capita rate in the United States and Europe are approximately the same, his own data tables tell a different story. Accepting his data at face value, between 2009 and 2015, the United States had 25 mass shootings versus 19 in the E.U. and 24 in Europe as a whole. This comes out as a rate of .078 shootings per million individuals in the United States, .038 for the E.U., and .032 for Europe as a whole. The United States has more than double the mass shooting rate of the E.U. and Europe, directly contradicting Lott’s statements about his own data.

Further, Lott’s carefully crafted criteria to include an incident as a mass shooting is highly suspect. Lott goes to great lengths to exclude mass shootings that are the result of burglaries and gang violence, but he includes terrorist attacks. This choice means that while the Texas biker gang gunfight last summer is excluded in his statistics, the November Paris attacks, which accounted for more than one-third of Europe’s mass shooting fatalities, are included.

However, when scholars study these mass shootings, they frequently exclude terrorist attacks from the analysis, for much the same reason Lott excludes burglaries and gang violence: the motivations are different. When researchers use a more appropriate set of criteria, the chasm between the rate of mass shootings in Europe and the United States widens even further. Researchers can also include all incidents of mass shootings (regardless of motivation) or use complex statistical analysis to determine whether the mass shooting difference between the United States and Europe is significant. The result remains the same—the United States fares far worse.

All of these methods point to the same conclusion: even if Lott wasn’t lying about his own results, his analysis would still be deeply flawed.

In their paper “The Impact of Right-to-Carry Laws on Crime: An Exercise in Replication,” Carlisle Moody, a CPRC board member, and three co-authors examine the impact of right-to-carry (RTC) laws on violent crime and critique an earlier study by John Donohue and his colleagues.

Donohue and his colleagues had concluded that the most significant effect of concealed carry laws is an increase in aggravated assault, but Moody et al. reported that: “the most robust result, confirmed using both county and state data, is that RTC laws significantly reduce murder. There is no robust, consistent evidence that RTC laws have any significant effect on other violent crimes, including assault.” This result fits well with Lott’s long established hypothesis that concealed carry significantly decreases crime, and the authors interpret it as a direct repudiation of Donohue’s results.

But there’s just one problem. Moody and his co-authors misread their own analysis.

As Table 3 on page 7 (pictured below) clearly demonstrates, the increase in aggravated assault for county level data is statistically significant, yet is not bolded by the authors like all the other statistically significant findings. In statistics, a result is usually considered significant if there is a less than 5 percent chance that the result is due to random chance, meaning it has a “t-statistic” greater than 1.96. A significant result in turn means that the authors of a study can put a higher degree of confidence in their finding. As the table below shows, the “stat” for the “post-law trend” for “Assault” (highlighted with a red box) has t-statistics of 2.8 and 2.25 for the general and specific model respectively. Further, the result itself is a positive number, indicating an increase in assault.

Nowhere in the Moody paper does it explain why significant T-stats are un-bolded, and it remains undiscussed in the conclusion, despite the fact that it directly undermines the thrust of their entire paper. Ironically, their paper actually supports Donohue’s finding that RTC laws significantly increase aggravated assaults.

Had Moody and his co-authors reported their own results correctly, they would have been left with the puzzling conundrum of concealed carry laws both reducing murder and increasing aggravated assaults. This finding flies in the face of well-established criminological facts and indicates the paper is likely crippled by bad statistical modeling choices.

This isn’t the first time that Lott and his allies have pushed studies with convenient errors that make the results appear to fit their more guns, less crime hypothesis.

As Ian Ayres and Donohue described in a brutal takedown of Lott and his allies’ research, there were at least two previous cases where Lott used this tactic. The first time, Lott presented a series of graphs to the National Academy of Sciences, which David Mustard, one of Lott’s allies, then decided to include in a comment for a 2003 Brookings Institute book. When Donohue demonstrated the results were the product of fatal coding errors, Lott’s ally was forced to withdraw those graphs from the book. Also in 2003, Lott supported (and initially co-authored) a paper appearing in the Stanford Law Review by Plassman and Whitley that also appeared to support the more guns, less crime hypothesis. Again, Donohue proved that their results were based on coding errors, undermining the authors’ central claim.

Given the extensive history of Lott supporting erroneous research, one is forced to wonder whether Moody and his colleagues were influenced at all by the thank you note at the beginning of their paper: “The authors thank The Crime Prevention Research Center for its support.”

After the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida in June, Lott published a piece in which he wrote, “Since at least as far back as 1950, all but three U.S. mass public shootings (with more than three fatalities) have occurred in places where citizens are not allowed to carry their own firearms.”

This claim has been a staple for Lott, who has repeated it in various forms in numerous articles, usually phrasing it as areas “where citizens were banned from carrying guns.” To support his contention, Lott cites his own report analyzing different aspects of mass shootings.

However, what Lott repeats in public is quite different from what his report actually shows. While Lott’s public statements equate gun-free zones with areas that prohibit concealed carry, his mass shooting report expands the gun-free zone definition to include areas where Lott feels it might be difficult to obtain a permit or where there might not be many permit holders despite being able to legally carry. Indeed, Lott admits in the report that more than six mass public shootings in the past six years have occurred in areas that legally allow citizens to carry their firearms, a direct contradiction of his public statements.

And not only does Lott mischaracterize his own research, but the research itself is also filled with significant errors.

In October 2015, after a student at Umpqua Community College in Oregon opened fire in a classroom, killing nine others, the CPRC website immediately proclaimed: “Umpqua Community College is yet Another Mass Public Shooting in a Gun-Free Zone.” As evidence, Lott cited the student handbook and the fact that the campus guards were not allowed to carry.

However, while it is true that campus guards were unarmed, Lott’s claim that concealed carry was prohibited is definitively false. Public colleges in Oregon are prohibited from banning guns on campus, thanks to a 2011 state court decision. The Umpqua Community College student handbook also expressly states that there is an exception to the prohibition of firearms “as expressly authorized by law or college regulations.” This includes concealed carry permits.

“UCC was never designated as a ‘gun-free zone’ by any signage or policy,” Umpqua Community College spokeswoman Anne Marie Levis told Politifact shortly after the shooting. “Umpqua Community College does comply with state law by allowing students with concealed carry licenses to bring firearms on campus.”

Not only was Umpqua not a gun-free zone by policy and law, it also wasn’t a gun-free zone in practice. Multiple reports at the time revealed that there were several armed students on campus at the time of the shooting.

In June 2010, a gunman in Hialeah, Florida targeted his estranged wife who was working at the Yoyito Cafe-Restaurant, killing her and three other women before taking his own life. And again, Lott classified the shooting as taking place in a gun-free zone.

As Lott noted, under Florida law, guns are not allowed in establishments that primarily serve alcohol. As proof that this shooting took place in a gun-free zone, Lott argued that the Yoyito Cafe Restaurant was a popular destination for parties where alcohol was served, and because it primarily served alcohol, the restaurant was a gun-free zone.

That logic is absurd. Serving alcohol at parties is in no way indicative that an establishment is primarily devoted to selling alcohol. Even a cursory glance at the restaurant’s reviews clearly indicate that Yoyito is a small Cuban restaurant devoted to selling traditional dishes.

Furthermore, Lott completely ignores the pertinent Florida law regarding restaurants with bars. A letter from the concealed weapons division of the Florida Department of Agriculture clearly notes that the law is written in such a way as to “allow the carrying of firearms in restaurants or similar businesses that primarily serve food but that also happen to serve alcohol as well.” In other words, the serving area where patrons are dining in a restaurant does not constitute the part of the establishment primarily devoted to the sale and consumption of alcohol.” By law, the Yoyito Cafe was clearly not a gun-free zone at the time of the shooting.

“Dear Dartmouth, I am one of your students, I am being stalked, please let me carry a gun to protect myself” read the headline of a piece on Fox News in August 2014.

The first person account was a harrowing story about teenager Taylor Woolrich’s desperate attempts to escape and protect herself from a persistent stalker who was ruining her life. The article blasted Dartmouth for not allowing her to carry a gun, and noted that carrying a gun was the only way she could remain truly safe.

The story quickly went viral, and is one that’s still brought up by right-wing gun activists. But Woolrich didn’t actually write the article.

As a BuzzFeed investigation later revealed, Lott, who is neither a young female nor a stalking victim, was the one who penned the piece. Indeed, Woolrich’s article is almost a copy and paste rendition of a previous article published by Lott on the Daily Caller.

“It’s his op-ed… Word for word, except the chunks that match what’s said in my speech,” Woolrich later told BuzzFeed. “It’s not like John Lott held a gun to my head and told me to talk to the media… I wanted to talk to the media, if it could mean something positive. But I wanted to talk to the media about stalking.”

Despite reservations about her message being co-opted, Taylor agreed to have him help her write for Fox, worrying: “I don’t know if I should just say yes and not piss him off.” Eventually, Woolrich changed her number and completely broke off contact with Lott.

“I was trying to be brave and just speak up,” she said. “I didn’t realize I was being turned into an NRA puppet.”

While Woolrich may have been eager to share her story at first, this doesn’t excuse the fact that Lott wrote a first person narrative on behalf of someone else, using his own words. When a Fox editor later thanked Lott for the piece, Lott replied, “It was actually easier for me to write this in the first person for her than the way I had originally written it.”

This isn’t the first time Lott has written in the first-person female voice. Back in the early 2000s, Lott and his research were coming under increasing fire from the academic community. Mary Rosh, claiming to be a former student of Lott’s, rose to his defense in online chatrooms and comment sections. She praised Lott as the best professor she had ever had and took deep offense whenever somebody questioned Lott’s research. A few online commenters found her passion rather bizarre, consoling her: “I’m sorry if you’re taking this personally, but you are not John Lott.”

Except she actually was. A blogger matched Lott’s IP address with that of Mary Rosh, and a humiliated Lott was forced to admit that he and Mary were the same person.

As conservative journalist Michelle Malkin emphasized at the time, “Lott’s invention of Mary Rosh to praise his own research and blast other scholars is beyond creepy. And it shows his extensive willingness to deceive to protect and promote his work.”

Why does the media still rely on John Lott?

In an attempt to appear fair and balanced, news outlets have offered John Lott a platform to debate a subject for which there really is not two sides. Gun violence is decidedly uncontroversial among scholars: more guns cause more suicides, homicides, and accidents.

These are the arguments being made by serious academics in peer-reviewed journals from Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and Johns Hopkins. On the other side of the debate, you have John Lott, a handful of conservative academics on the board of the CPRC, Gary Kleck, and a few others.

Much like the public debate over climate change, the journalistic quest for neutrality in discussing gun control has led to a sacrifice of intellectual integrity and honesty. Over the past two decades, John Lott has routinely demonstrated an unwillingness to engage honestly in the gun violence debate. Lott is not a credible source, and it’s time the media stop treating him as such.

Update: Since the publication of this article, the description of the study Lott claimed to have published in the Econ Journal Watch has been corrected on the Social Science Research website. An archived version of the paper touting its publication in the journal is still available here. The news of the study has also been changed on the CPRC website, removing the reference of it being published in the Econ Journal Watch. The original headline touting this publication is still evident in the URL, and an archived version of this news on the CPRC website is still available here.

Memphis Trace