Rich Smith, Cliff Weiss, Others)

SCENE & HEARD

Arm-Twisting

A historian’s book makes the case for gun control. Other scholars hotly

dispute his claims.

BY KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL

Thursday, April 5, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT

On April 18 Columbia University will hand out its prestigious Bancroft

Prize, an annual award presented for outstanding books in history and

diplomacy. One of this year’s recipients is Emory professor Michael

Bellesiles, for his now-famous book, “Arming America: The Origins of a

National Gun Culture.”

That’s hardly surprising, as few books in recent years have so riveted

academic and political circles. Released by highbrow publisher Knopf last

year, “Arming America” was a historical and political bombshell, a rare

piece of work that purported not only to overturn long-held historical

beliefs, but to alter modern politics profoundly in the process.

Few colonial Americans owned guns, Mr. Bellesiles argues. He bases this on

his study of probate and military records, travel narratives and other

primary sources. What this means–though Mr. Bellesiles himself leaves the

conclusion implicit–is that the Second Amendment, written in the

postrevolutionary gun-free America, was not designed as a protection for

individual gun rights. Any manner of gun control, under this thinking, would

as a result be legal and constitutional.

Unsurprisingly, left-leaning journalists, academics and politicians went

weak at the knees. The New York Times praised the work before it was

released. Noted historians like Garry Wills wrote slobbery reviews.

Politicians and lobbyists rushed to incorporate the book’s conclusions into

their work.

But there’s a problem. A growing number of respected scholars, from across

the political spectrum, are saying that Mr. Bellesiles’s research and

conclusions are wrong. They’ve charged that “Arming America” is riddled with

errors so enormous as to seriously undermine his work. They argue he has

incorrectly tabulated probate records, failed to include facts that strongly

argue the opposite case and misquoted and miscited sources. Mr. Bellesiles

denies all this, but has not yet handed over evidence to refute his critics.

“From what I’ve seen,” says Gerald Rosenberg, a visiting professor of law at

Northwestern, “the evidence is so overwhelming that it is incumbent upon

Bellesiles as a serious scholar to respond. He either has to admit error, or

somehow show how his work is right.”

To understand the fuss over “Arming America,” you have to realize how

important Mr. Bellesiles’s work is to the gun-control movement. It’s been

rough going for those who believe the Second Amendment only protects

“collective” use of guns by an organized militia. Over the past 15 years

evidence that the Founders specifically had individual protection in mind

has mounted so persuasively that even leading constitutional scholars on the

left have been swayed.

“Arming America” was the first work in decades that revived the

collective-right argument. And while Mr. Bellesiles says he is a historian,

the book’s promotion was highly political. “Michael A. Bellesiles is the

NRA’s worst nightmare,” screamed one blurb on the back cover. Another:

“Thinking people who deplore Americans’ addiction to gun violence have been

waiting a long time for this information.”

Most newspaper reviews focused largely on the book’s political implications,

while making little effort to evaluate its historical accuracy. Meanwhile

peer review in historical journals that delves into the nitty-gritty of

scholarship is notoriously slow; most reviews don’t appear until several

years after a book’s publication.

Scholars are also exceptionally reluctant to criticize the premises of each

other’s research (interpretations are a different matter). Most remember the

ugly story of David Abraham, a Princeton professor who in the early 1980s

was accused of fabricating documents in a book about pre-Hitler Germany. The

academics accusing Mr. Abraham of fraud ended up sullying their own

reputations. (That’s less true with politically incorrect books. Robert

William Fogel’s “Time on the Cross,” about the economics of slavery, and

Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s “The Bell Curve,” about race and

intelligence, both became punching bags for every left-leaning academic and

reporter in America.)

But Mr. Bellesiles’s book is anything but politically incorrect. Rather, it

was manna from heaven for an increasingly discredited point of view, which

is what makes the criticisms openly leveled against the book so very

serious.

Many of the professors who spoke to me have backgrounds in crime or Second

Amendment issues and made it a point to read “Arming America” when it first

came out. It was their unease upon completing the book that spurred some to

start asking questions. “It didn’t feel quite right, especially these

dramatic changes he found, between a non-gun-owning country to a gun-owning

one,” says Eric Monkkonen, a professor of history and of public policy at

UCLA and author of “Murder in New York City.” “Dramatic changes are more

exciting than slow ones, but rare.”

Scholars first focused on Mr. Bellesiles’s sources. Law professors such as

Eugene Volokh at UCLA point out examples of misquotations or of sources that

don’t contain the information Mr. Bellesiles cites. In more serious

examples, scholars claim Mr. Bellesiles listed sources that, upon further

reading, contained information that would contradict his claims but were not

included in the book.

Example: Mr. Volokh points out that page 223 of “Arming America” says that

“[John] Smilie, like most Anti-Federalists, had no problem granting the

state the authority to decide who should be allowed to serve in the militia,

or to limit those ineligible from owning guns. Nor did most Anti-Federalists

want to see the propertyless carrying arms in or out of the militia.” The

footnote cites three sources but, Mr. Volokh says, none of the sources even

remotely support the claim. One of them, in fact, argues that the militia

should include everyone, “high and low, and rich and poor”; another stresses

that “to preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people

always possess arms.”

Mr. Bellesiles also relies on travel narratives; he mentions some 80 early

travel accounts that fail to mention hunting with guns. Joyce Lee Malcolm, a

professor of history at Bentley College and the author of “To Keep and Bear

Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right,” says “Arming America” fails

to mention references to guns contained in those same narratives and omits

dozens of other travelers who described widespread ownership of firearms.

“If you are trying to derive a general theme, you should do as wide a search

as possible,” says Ms. Malcolm. “And you certainly ought to include

information from the narratives you did look at, even if it is unhelpful.”

The biggest evidentiary dispute is over Mr. Bellesiles’s use of probate

records, or inventories of estates at the time of a citizen’s death. Mr.

Bellesiles based what many reviewers say is the most important part of the

book on this research, the most significant part of which is an undisclosed

number of probate records from 1765-90. From this, he claims that only 14.7%

of adult American males owned guns, that the few guns that did exist were

usually listed as old or broken, and that women did not own guns.

James Lindgren, a professor of law at Northwestern, along with student

Justin Heather, spent months going back through what they say are all the

published records Mr. Bellesiles cites, as well as at a substantial number

of original records at courthouses and on microfilm. They found that, in the

mid-1770s, 54% of men and 18% of women owned firearms, and that most of the

guns were not listed as old or broken. “In the only sources of probate

records that Mr. Bellesiles cites in his published works, there are many

more guns than he discloses,” says Mr. Lindgren. “No one who has seen the

evidence can figure out how he could have made such errors, or why he has

not retracted the obviously mistaken data.”

It’s hard to make a direct comparison to Mr. Bellesiles’s work because the

Emory professor didn’t keep a database; he says he compiled his data on

paper notes that were recently flooded and ruined. Randolph Roth, an

associate history professor at Ohio State who specializes in violent crime

and violent death, has seen Mr. Lindgren’s work and says that “it looks as

though Mr. Bellesiles work won’t be reproducible, that it is off by a factor

of three to four.”

Mr. Roth is troubled that Mr. Bellesiles doesn’t have records. “We’re moving

toward a system were people put their data in a way where we can check each

other and collaborate,” he says.

It’s worth pointing out that not all of these professors have an obvious

political agenda. Jim Lindgren, Gerald Rosenberg, Erik Monkkonen and

Randolph Roth all prefaced their remarks by saying they favor gun control,

that they respect Mr. Bellesiles, and that their criticism is aimed solely

at the goal of accuracy. They marked the discrepancies down as honest

mistakes. “We don’t want to get into political battles,” says Mr. Rosenberg.

“We just want to do good scholarship.”

Mr. Bellesiles told me in an interview that many of the people who have

leveled criticisms at his book are “ideologically motivated,” and that

because of his ruined notes, a hectic teaching schedule and a lack of

graduate assistance, he hasn’t had time to make his own case.

He says he plans to put detailed information about the probate records

(which he says aren’t as relevant as people think) on his Web site as soon

as he has time. He also says Mr. Lindgren used a different database of

probate records. Mr. Lindgren responds that he used exactly the same

databases that Mr. Bellesiles’s cites in his published work.

With regard to criticisms about his sources, he says historians can always

choose quotes or sources to criticize. And he says that in order to keep his

book to a reasonable length, he had to make decisions about which narratives

were most important.

Let’s hope the additional data come soon. For while Mr. Bellesiles insists

modern public policy isn’t his “business,” in a debate like the one over gun

control, which depends so much on knowledge of the Founders’ intentions,

history is a key influence on public policy. Whether Mr. Bellesiles believes

his critics are ideologically motivated or not, his duty as a scholar is to

clear up the many questions his work has raised.

Either way, he’d be wise to have all this in his mind two weeks from now, as

he steps up to accept one of the more illustrious prizes in scholarship.

Ms. Strassel is an assistant features editor of The Wall Street Journal’s

editorial page. Her column appears on alternate Thursdays.