Michael Bellesiles, a professor of history at Emory University, is the author of Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. He recently wrote in the Atlanta Journal Constitution that after this anti-guns history of guns in America was published, right-wing wackos on the Internet attacked him as a "tool of the liberals," and a "paid agent of the Zionist Occupying Government." But Bellesiles wasn't discouraged. "Ultimately, we all have a duty to speak the truth and hope for the best," he wrote.
And the best he got. Well-known scholars wrote drooling blurbs for his book. Garry Wills penned an arrestingly credulous review that was featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. And last week, Arming America received the distinguished Bancroft Prize from Columbia University.
Only one problem: His critics aren't just Internet wackos. A host of scholars credibly accuse Bellesiles of misreporting the public records that are at the heart of the book. They say he ignored numerous and well-known firsthand accounts that contradict his argument that colonial America was relatively gun-free. Even worse (in THE SCRAPBOOK's view), the book is badly written. Apparently, though, if you're creating a usable history for Handgun Control, none of these flaws disqualifies you from receiving one of the premier awards for American history writing.
Bellesiles's main claim is that probate records and other sources show the number of colonial and antebellum Americans who owned guns was significantly lower than previously believed; that only some Americans were allowed to own guns; and that most Americans didn't want them. Thus, the popular image of early Americans as being familiar and comfortable with guns becomes a put-up job by the gun industry. And thus, instead of being cast as enemies of the Second Amendment, gun-controllers become restorers of an Edenic early America.
Nice try. James Lindgren, a professor of law at Northwestern University, and his student Justin Lee Heather have compiled a devastating refutation of Bellesiles's evidence. Take the period 1765-1790, when Bellesiles claims only some 14.7 percent of American men owned guns. Using one national database, Bellesiles and Heather find that about 54 percent of estates for the year 1774 list guns.
Lindgren and Heather have also attempted to replicate Bellesiles's findings for probate records in Providence for the years 1679-1729. They discovered major reporting errors on the condition of guns, who owned the guns, and even mistakes on such elementary questions as whether a gun owner was male or female. Serious questions have also been raised about Bellesiles's numbers for Massachusetts, Virginia, and other states.
It is heartening to see that a number of academics, some of distinctly liberal leanings, have joined the call for Bellesiles to produce his documentation for the numbers in his book. Alas, the Bancroft winner has alternately insisted that his records were accidentally destroyed and that they're in storage and haven't been organized for publication.
Until he better documents his research, the Bancroft Prize has been devalued -- for no better reason, apparently, than to score cheap points in the debate over gun control. And it's not as if the debate over the book was a secret. Lindgren's rechecking of the probate records, for instance, made up part of Joyce Lee Malcolm's devastating review of the Bellesiles work in the January issue of Reason. It's true that a few Internet wackos have gone after Bellesiles, but they turn out to be better friends of historical integrity than the trustees of Columbia University.