Gun Advocate, Author Of ‘More Guns, Less Crime,’ Gets Justice Department Job

John Lott Jr. author of "More Guns, Less Crime" speaks to the crowd during a gun rights rally at the Connecticut State Capitol in Hartford Conn. on Saturday April 20, 2013. 

The Connecticut Citizens Defense League 

By Matt Shuham November 24, 2020 

A conservative gun advocate and vocal Trump supporter who’s spread falsehoods about the 2020 election has landed a job at the Justice Department, Politico first reported Tuesday.

John Lott, author of the book “More Guns, Less Crime,” has spent years advocating for widespread gun ownership and against firearms restrictions. He’s now a senior adviser for research and statistics at the DOJ’s Office of Justice Programs, a grant-writing office that doles out billions of dollars per year.

It’s not clear whether the position is a political appointment, which President-elect Joe Biden could replace, or a civil service position with protections beyond January.

Lott is also a vocal supporter of Donald Trump, Politico noted. He falsely claimed on Facebook earlier this month that there had been “Massive vote fraud in Pennsylvania,” and has kept up his pro-Trump commentary on social media despite reportedly leaving his former job for the DOJ last month.

“NPR is pretty much Pravda at this point,” he said of the outlet’s coverage of the “March for Trump” event held in D.C. earlier this month. Lott added, falsely, that “a million plus people” had been present for the event.

Neither Lott nor the Justice Department returned TPM’s requests for comment, but Lott’s Facebook page now says he is “Senior Advisor for Research and Statistics” at the Justice Department.

Lott came to the DOJ from the the Crime Prevention Research Center, a pro-gun group he founded in 2013. Politico noted the group’s board includes Trumpy media personalities like former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke and the Trump-supporting musician and NRA board member Ted Nugent.

Lott was replaced as president of CPRC by Andrew Pollack, a gun activist whose daughter was killed in the shooting massacre at a Parkland, Florida high school in 2018. Pollack wrote the forward to a book of Lott’s published earlier this year, “Gun Control Myths: How politicians, the media, and botched ‘studies’ have twisted the facts on gun control.”

Lott’s commentary has at times strayed from the gun debate to voter fraud alarmism.

In 2017, for example, he was a witness at a meeting of President Donald Trump’s so-called “elections integrity” commission, a few months after falsely asserting there had been “massive” vote fraud with absentee ballots in the North Carolina gubernatorial election. At the panel, Lott trolled Democrats by pitching a background check system for voting.

“If they don’t believe that it suppresses people’s ability to defend themselves, would we believe that using this system would suppress being able to go and vote?” he said.


Matt Shuham (@mattshuham) is a reporter in TPM’s New York office covering corruption, extremism and other beats. Prior to joining TPM, he was associate editor of The National Memo and an editorial intern at Rolling Stone.