David A. Oliver, M.D.)

Thanks to Professor Joseph Olson, Hamline University School of Law, for
sending this out.

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Gun Control Book Based on Fraudulent Data
Wednesday, October 10, 2001

Glen Harlan Reynolds,

Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee College of Law

Emory University historian Michael Bellesiles caused quite a splash when he
published Arming America: The Origins of the National Gun Culture, a book
that ostensibly turned our understanding of the Second Amendment on its head.

The book was enthusiastically received and celebrated by the media
establishment, who welcomed it with rave reviews and awards and pronounced
the book proof that the Second Amendment does not protect individual gun
ownership.

Bellesiles’ thesis was that the framers of the Constitution must not have
intended the Second Amendment to protect an individual right to own guns
because private gun ownership was exceedingly rare at the time-and stayed
that way until after the Civil War when the NRA nefariously created the “gun
culture” that we know today and that we ascribe, incorrectly, to the framers.

Bellesiles backed up his theses with claims that he checked thousands of
probate records and discovered that guns were scarce at the time of the
framing.

This thesis was provocative, but it also appears to be wrong. In fact, it
appears to be worse than wrong. People who have checked Bellesiles’ claims
against the probate records that he says he consulted have found that he
drastically under states the number of guns they show.

Northwestern University law professor James Lindgren, an expert in probate
records who has closely examined Bellesiles’ work, told the Boston Globe that
“in virtually every part of the book examined in detail, there are problems.”

“It’s clear that this book is impressive to legal and social historians who
do not check the background. Law professors and quantitative historians have
been suspicious about the book since its release.”

The data sets Bellesiles’ drew from the probate records he claims to have
examined are unavailable; Bellesiles says they were destroyed in a flood.
Even more damning, one set of records that Bellesiles says he relied on were
destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and have been unavailable to
anyone since then without access to a time machine.

Various scholars have been criticizing Bellesiles’ research for months, but
on Sept. 11, the Globe-fresh from breaking the tale of historian Joe Ellis’s
Vietnam falsehoods – published a story revealing that the paper had
investigated the claims against Bellesiles and found them to be true.

This was little noticed at the time, owing to other events, but on Oct. 3,
Emory University decided that the criticisms constituted “prima facie
evidence of scholarly misconduct,” and ordered Bellesiles to account for
himself. What explanation Bellesiles will offer is unclear, but a finding of
unforgivable sloppiness seems to be about the best he can hope for.

But for our purposes, it doesn’t matter whether Bellesiles is a fraud or
merely exceedingly careless. Because there’s another failure here, one that
in some ways was far more serious than Bellesiles’.

Extraordinary claims, Carl Sagan said, require extraordinary evidence. And
that evidence itself requires extraordinary examination. Yet Bellesiles’
claims – which counted as “provocative” precisely because they were in
conflict with everything we thought we knew about the history of guns in
America – got just the opposite. The people who should have examined his
evidence [such as University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson] rushed
to embrace it, because it told them what they wanted to hear.

Writer Garry Wills, who reviewed the book for the The New York Times Book
Review, wrote that “Bellesiles deflates the myth of the self-reliant and
self-armed virtuous yeoman of the Revolutionary militias.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education featured the book on its front page, with
the headline “Exploding the Myth of an Armed America.” The American Prospect
wrote that “The image of . . . the American founders believing in an
individual’s right to keep and bear arms . . . turns out to be a myth.”

ARMING AMERICA EVEN RECEIVED THE (UP TO NOW) PRESTIGIOUS BANCROFT PRIZE FROM
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY. (emphasis mine) David A. Oliver, M.D.

Instead of reviewers who might be skeptical of Bellesiles’ research,
mainstream publications assigned reviewers who were antigun.

Wills, for example, has had a reputation as rabidly antigun for years.

Carl Bogus, who reviewed the book for The American Prospect, is a longtime
gun-control activist. Richard Slotkin, who praised Arming America in The
Atlantic Monthly, has referred to the notion of guns as instruments of
liberty and equality as “self-evidently crazy.”

That such reviewers would not expend any great effort in checking out
Bellesiles’ claims should come as no surprise, and in fact they didn’t. But
this raises an interesting question about the claim that mainstream,
traditional media organizations always make in defense of their importance:
that they are careful and responsible, while alternative media and the
Internet are not. The Internet, they tell us, is a domain of hype and hoaxes,
while traditional media can be trusted to check things out and get them right.

Yet if one looks at Amazon.Com’s reviews of Arming America, it is immediately
evident that Amazon reviewers found the problems with Bellesiles’ book a year
ago, while the establishment was still smitten.

On Oct. 24, 2000, for example, Amazon reader Sondra Wilkins did something
that Garry Wills did not: she checked some of Bellesiles’ sources and
reported: “In checking his sources, often the ones he lists, even the
particular pages that he lists, contain evidence that contradicts his claims.
He quotes parts of sentences from those sources and ignores the contradictory
information on that same page.”

Another reader, David Ihnat, said he couldn’t believe Bellesiles’ claim that
it took 3 minutes to load and fire a muzzle-loading rifle. His report: “Never
having fired a flintlock before, I tried to load and fire 10 times in
succession, and was able to average 50 seconds per load.” His conclusion:
“Bellesiles has an axe to grind, and worked it throughout this book.”

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the Internet, amateur scholars were posting long
critiques of Bellesiles’ work, only to see those critiques dismissed by
Bellesiles and his defenders as the work of those ignorant yahoos on the
Internet.

It appears, however, that the Internet is sometimes harder to fool than the
establishment. Five days after the Globe story appeared, the New York Times
was repeating Wills’ praise of Arming America in support of the paperback
version.

Keep this in mind the next time the establishment is rallying behind a
“provocative” scholarly analysis that just happens to echo views that the
establishment has always held.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,36122,00.html

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee
College of Law, and writes for the InstaPundit.Com.

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Professor Joseph Olson Hamline University School of Law