Partially in response to Lott's book, a sixteen-member panel of the United States National Research Council was convened to address the issue of whether right-to-carry laws influenced crime rate.

In 2004 they issued the report "Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review" which examined Lott's statistical methods in detail, including computation of the statistical uncertainties involved, and wrote: The committee found that answers to some of the most pressing questions cannot be addressed with existing data and research methods, however well designed.

In the case of right-to-carry laws, despite a large body of research, the committee found no credible evidence that the passage of right-to-carry laws decreases or increases violent crime, and there is almost no empirical evidence that the more than 80 prevention programs focused on gun-related violence have had any effect on children's behavior, knowledge, attitudes, or beliefs about firearms.

[3]The council determined that Lott's data sets can be subject to manipulation given a number of factors, so that different studies produce different results.

In a very unusual dissent for National Research Council reports, criminologist James Q. Wilson wrote that: The direct evidence that such shooting sprees occur is nonexistent.

The indirect evidence, as found in papers by Black and Nagin and Ayres and Donohue [cited in Chapter 6], is controversial.

Indeed, the Ayres and Donohue paper shows that there was a "statistically significant downward shift in the trend" of the murder rate (Chapter 6, page 135).

In sum, I find that the evidence presented by Lott and his supporters suggests that RTC laws do in fact help drive down the murder rate, though their effect on other crimes is ambiguous.

[7] Other refereed empirical academic studies besides the original paper with David Mustard that have supported Lott's conclusions include the following.