'EXPERT': John Lott will share his frequently criticized expertise with the Arkansas legislature today.

The Legislative Joint Performance Review Committee meets at 1 p.m. today and the work of the governor’s school safety commission — more guns in schools means safer schools — will be up for review. The rush to praise guns is to include testimony from a discredited “expert,” John Lott. Moms Demand will be on hand to counter Lott with facts, if allowed.

If we had a transparent state Senate, this joint committee meeting would be broadcast on the web for real-time watching statewide and for archiving of a permanent record. We don’t.

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Here’s the “first, more guns” recommendation on school safety.

If the gun lobby hadn’t succeeded in preventing scientific research about gun safety, there’d likely be many stats available on how suicides and accidents increase as the number of guns increase.

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Instead, we’ll have John Lott.

He’s the guy who invented a female fake name to post comments in praise of himself.

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He’s the guy whose research has been regularly discredited.

Will an Arkansas legislature come armed with this rundown of Lott’s spotty resume to question him.

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Or this one, about his invented “fan”?

Or this one? Bloggers attempting to use facts against gun nuts, offer these opinions based on review of his work

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After every mass shooting or national gun violence tragedy, Lott is the de facto talking head for the pro-gun community on news programs such as Fox News. He has also testified numerous times in front of Congress and state legislatures, having been a critical voice in the expansion of Right-to-Carry (RTC) laws.

Yet his daunting resume fails to tell the entire story. While his initial research was groundbreaking, further examination revealed numerous flaws. Today the “more guns, less crime” hypothesis has been thoroughly repudiated. On closer inspection his impressive credentials reveal an academic nomad, never able to secure a place in academia. His ethical transgressions range from accusations of fabricating an entire survey, to presenting faulty regressions, to creating elaborate online personas to defend his work and bash critics, to trying to revise his online history to deflect arguments. And this doesn’t even begin to cover the whole host of false claims and statistics he has peddled repeatedly in articles and TV appearances.

Check it out. Most of the Arkansas legislature won’t

UPDATE: Here’s an outline of what Lott will be shoveling today.

UPDATE II: The Twitter account of Jessi Turnure at KARK/Fox 16 has a running account of Lott’s bilge.

UPDATE III: Presentations today also include this self-avowed expert with an Army background. Zowee.

UPDATE IV: A lawmaker credulously parrots Lott’s line that universal background checks wouldn’t have stopped mass shootings. Problem: It’s irrelevant, for one thing. Backgrounds checks DO prevent crimes. Also: Properly applied background checks would have prevented the sale of the gun Dylan Roof used in a church slaughter in South Carolina and another mass shooting also might not have occurred had a service-connected problem been properly reported for another mass shooter.

UPDATE V: 2.5 hours into the gun show, Moms Demand hadn’t been given a chance to speak.

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FINAL: No, the Moms didn’t get to speak. And there was this capper, courtesy of the legislature’s leading gun nut, Sen. Trent Garner:

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