as a former student of Lotts, praised her teachers intellect, his evenhandedness, his charisma. "I have to say that he was the best pro- fessor that I ever had," s/he wrote. "You wouldnt know that he was a right-wing ideologue from the class. . . . There were a group of us students who would try to take any class that he taught. Lott finally had to tell us that it was best for us to try and take classes from other professors more to be exposed to other ways of teaching graduate ma- terial." Then there was the troubling allegation that Lott actually in-   vented some of the survey data that support his more-guns/less-crime theory. Regardless of whether the data were faked, Lotts admittedly intriguing hypothesis doesnt seem to be true. When other scholars have tried to replicate his results, they found that right-to-carry laws simply dont bring down crime.       Consider the next crime-drop explanation: the bursting of the crack bubble. Crack cocaine was such a potent, addictive drug that a hugely profitable market had been created practically overnight. True, it was only the leaders of the crack gangs who were getting rich. But that only made the street-level dealers all the more desperate to advance. Many of them were willing to kill their rivals to do so, whether the rival belonged to the same gang or a different one. There were also gun battles over valuable drug-selling corners. The typical crack murder involved one crack dealer shooting another (or two of them, or three) and not, contrary to conventional wisdom, some bug-eyed crackhead shooting a shopkeeper over a few dollars. The result was a huge in- crease in violent crime. One study found that more than 25 percent of the homicides in New York City in 1988 were crack-related. The violence associated with crack began to ebb in about 1991. This has led many people to think that crack itself went away. It didnt. Smoking crack remains much more popular today than most