This anti-rkba, cash-in “scholar” claims early americans were not, by
and large, firearm owners. His mission, I’m sure, was to survive peer
review (whatever it is worth these days), publish, and thereby provide a
theoretical basis for other antis to springboard from.

Trouble is, he was sniffed out as the fraud he is– claims his
documentation was lost in a flood. Pitiful.

Here’s the rub:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/27/education/27BOOK.html?pagewanted=print&position=top

ATLANTA, Oct. 26 ? An Emory University professor has resigned after an
academic panel released a report strongly critical of his research for a
widely debated book about the history of guns in America.

The professor, Michael A. Bellesiles, said in a statement that he
“cannot continue to teach in what I feel is a hostile environment.”

Mr. Bellesiles said the controversy surrounding his book, “Arming
America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture,” had made it impossible
for him to continue his research.

Emory officials said Mr. Bellesiles’ resignation would take effect Dec.
31. He has been on paid administrative leave this semester.

The 40-page report, released on Friday, concluded that Professor
Bellesiles had been “guilty of unprofessional and misleading work.”

The report, written by scholars from Harvard, Princeton and the
University of Chicago, said that Mr. Bellesiles’s failure to cite
sources for critical data “does move into the realm of falsification.”
It also suggested that he had omitted other researchers’ data that
contradicted his arguments.

Mr. Bellesiles denied the contentions. “I have never fabricated evidence
of any kind nor knowingly evaded my responsibilities as a scholar,” he
said.

Mr. Bellesiles’s book received national attention for its contention
that early Americans did not own or use firearms in great numbers.

Gun-rights advocates criticized the book, and scholars suggested the
author had made serious errors, prompting Emory to form the
investigative panel in February.

One finding that led to the investigation concerned historical records.

Professor Bellesiles said that he had studied more than 11,000 probate
records in 40 counties around the country and that he had found that
from 1765 to 1790, only 14 percent of estate inventories listed guns. He
said that “over half (53 percent) of these guns were listed as broken or
otherwise defective.”

Those figures are featured prominently in the book and were cited in
many reviews as the core of its argument.

But those who tried to examine the research found that they could not,
because most of Mr. Bellesiles’s records, he said, had been destroyed in
a flood. The records they could check showed many errors, almost all
supporting his thesis.

Professor Bellesiles is one of several historians and professors accused
recently of academic fraud.

In June, Doris Kearns Goodwin, a former Harvard professor, resigned from
the Pulitzer Prize board, months after she acknowledged that parts of a
book she wrote were from another author without attribution.

In February, Prof. Louis W. Roberts resigned as chairman of the classics
department and director of the doctoral program in humanistic studies at
the State University at Albany, in
New York. He had been accused of plagiarizing more than 50 pages of
Latin translations from two other scholars.

In January, the historian Stephen Ambrose, who died earlier this month,
acknowledged that some sentences in his best seller “The Wild Blue” were
copied from “Wings of Morning,” another book about World War II bomber
pilots that was written by Thomas Childers, a professor at the
University of Pennsylvania.