The New Yorker and The Trace have said "no one has had greater influence"[4] in the scientific debate over firearms while Newsweek referred to Lott as "The Gun Crowd's Guru.

In 2004, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) National Research Council (NRC) conducted a review of current research and data on firearms and violent crime, including Lott's work, and concluded "that with the current evidence it is not possible to determine that there is a causal link between the passage of right-to-carry laws and crime rates.

"[12] The NAS report wrote of Lott's work, "The initial model specification, when extended to new data, does not show evidence that passage of right-to-carry laws reduces crime.

[14][13] For similar reasons as highlighted by the NAS, as well as "multiple serious problems with data and methodology", a 2020 comprehensive review of existing research on concealed-carry by the RAND Corporation discounted Lott's studies.

Black and Daniel Nagin found that minor adjustments to Lott and Mustard's model led to the disappearance of the findings.

[16][17] In the New England Journal of Medicine, David Hemenway argued that Lott failed to account for several key variables, including drug consumption.

[18] Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue said that the model used by Lott contained significant coding errors and systemic bias.

[20] Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck considered it unlikely that such a large decrease in violent crime could be explained by a relatively modest increase in concealed carry.

[32] The board of directors for the organization includes guitarist Ted Nugent, conservative talkshow host Lars Larson and former sheriff David Clarke.

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."

In the book Freakonomics, Levitt and coauthor Stephen J. Dubner claimed that the results of Lott's research in More Guns, Less Crime had not been replicated by other academics.

He said the 1997 hard drive crash that had affected several projects with co-authors had destroyed his survey data set,[50] the original tally sheets had been abandoned with other personal property in his move from Chicago to Yale, and he could not recall the names of any of the students who he said had worked on it.

[52] In response to the dispute surrounding the missing survey, Lott used a sock puppet by the name of "Mary Rosh" to defend his own works on Usenet and elsewhere.

[51] Further accusations claimed that Lott praised himself while posing as one of his former students[53][54] and that "Rosh" was used to post a favorable review of More Guns, Less Crime on Amazon.com.

[55] The study was criticized by Webster et al. in the Journal of the American Medical Association for using Tobit regression despite the fact that the data used in the study on youth suicides was "highly skewed and heteroskedastic", and because the vast majority of crimes that Lott and Whitley claimed increased due to safe-storage laws occurred outside the home.

[56] Webster and Carroll also wrote in Guns in American Society: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, Culture, and the Law that the Lott and Whitley study's findings with respect to crime were inconsistent with prior research.

[60] With John Whitley at the University of Adelaide, Lott published a study that argued that liberalization of abortion laws led to higher murder rates.

Lott says the overall thrust of his study still holds, but the issue muddles his research and invites guesswork as to the actual crime rate for the undocumented immigrant population in Arizona.

"[65] Lott's claims were heavily promoted by the Trump administration to justify its anti-immigration policies, in particular their attempts to end DACA.

"[67] Lott published a study arguing that affirmative action in the hiring of police reduced the overall quality of all officers and increased crime.