Exposed left-wing lying at its best!

Writing Ideology As History In ?Arming America?
By Adam Cirucci
June 28, 2002

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When Michael Bellesiles? ?Arming America? appeared in late 2000, it met rave reviews from liberals, who touted it as ?the NRA?s worse nightmare.? Critics at The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Chicago Tribune all hailed the book, which aims to expose the myths of gun culture and gun ownership in early America. Even as questions surfaced over the accuracy of his claims, Bellesiles picked up a $30,000 fellowship from the National Endowment of the Humanities and the prestigious Bancroft prize for American history. Those questions, however, soon erupted into a controversy over Bellesiles? findings-a controversy that now has the antigun left, biting its collective tongue.

Professor James Lindgren, a probate specialist and criminologist at Northwestern University School of Law, was one of the first to cast doubt on ?Arming America.? Lindgren noticed that Bellesiles? statistics were mathematically impossible. Bellesiles? main 18th-century probate records report only about one-fifth of the guns that are documented by every other probate researcher. As Lindgren said, ?It’s a simple sixth-grade math problem, computing an overall mean from samples.?

That a professional historian was too careless to conceal such blatant forgery is truly ironic. It sounds humorous. And it would be, if Bellesiles? fabrications were not so widespread.

Alongside the recent blunders of fellow historians: both Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose caught plagiarizing, David McCullough misquoting Thomas Jefferson and Joseph Ellis lying about having served in Vietnam, the initial accusations against Bellesiles do not seem so bad. And for several weeks, the liberal media was happy to cover the differences as just that-a mere disagreement between two historians (Lindgren vs. Bellesiles). Finally, David Mehegan of The Boston Globe went back to the actual probate records to settle the dispute. On September 11, 2001, Megehan published an article citing Bellesiles? errors in ?Arming America.? Lindgren was right and Bellesiles was wrong. Still, it would be weeks until Americans knew just how wrong he was.

Members of the academic community tend to give fellow scholars the benefit of the doubt when it comes to honesty. Typically, a historian is charged with ?misreading? or ?misrepresenting? their data despite the extent of his or her transgression. Then, the historian is given a chance to respond to the allegations or take accountability for the mistakes (something Bellesiles has yet to do). So, even after The Boston Globe and the National Review poked holes in ?Arming America,? the mainstream media continued to paint the story as pure politics. That is, reporters covered it as a strictly Republican (pro-gun) vs. Democrat (gun control) issue, while neglecting concerns of academic integrity. For the liberal media, the attacks on Bellesiles were only ideological bias and NRA spin.

But, the most damning evidence against Bellesiles came from Clayton Cramer, a software engineer and independent historian, who had been researching the data for years. Cramer began checking Bellesiles? work in 1996 when the Professor wrote a piece in The Journal of American History that laid the foundation for his book. Ironically, that piece won ?Best Article of the Year? from the Organization of American Historians. Cramer, who has also written two books on the history of American firearm laws, discovered and documented literally hundreds of errors in ?Arming America.? In truth, Cramer unearthed so many mistakes in the book that he could reasonably write a critique of similar length. Nonetheless, the mainstream media refused to take him seriously because he is outside the preferred academic circles, not to mention that he is a pro-Second Amendment activist. It was only once other scholars (including Lindgren) corroborated Cramer?s claims that they were taken seriously.

As it turns out, ?Arming America? is more fiction than history. Bellesiles did not just steal another writer?s work or lie about his personal life?he lied about his findings. Clearly, Bellesiles wrote his conclusions then contrived records to support them. As other writers investigated ?Arming America,? they uncovered a vast number of errors, discrepancies and fabrications.

The only thing more embarrassing than Bellesiles? refusal to respond to these charges is a growing list of imaginative excuses for his fraudulence. At first, the professor maintained that a flood in his office ?turned most of the legal pads on which I had taken notes into unreadable pulp.? Then Bellesiles directed reporters to the probate records he used at the San Francisco Superior Court, though every record predating 1906 at the courthouse was destroyed during the 1906 earthquake and fire. Just when it appeared that history itself had duped the historian, Bellesiles claimed that hackers had infiltrated his computer and tampered with his data. And when Bellesiles was caught in his lie by email records, he had no qualms about hinting that a fellow professor forged emails in his name.

Today, even liberals are ashamed of Bellesiles, who maintains his NEH fellowship and Bancroft prize. Dr. Roger Lane, winner of the 1987 Bancroft Prize, wrote a favorable review of ?Arming America? when it first appeared. Dr. Lane now says, ?It is entirely clear to me that he’s made up a lot of these records. He’s betrayed us [Liberals]. The guy is a liar and a disgrace to my profession. He’s breached that trust.”

And that is about as bad it is gets.

Adam Cirucci is an intern at Accuracy in Media.

Hear that all you gun hating liberls? “He’s betrayed us [Liberals]. The guy is a liar and a disgrace to my profession. He’s breached that trust.”

That’s another liberal calling your hero the liar that he is, all in the name of more ‘reasonable’ gun control.