Shooting for the truth
Date: Mar 28, 2007 6:27 AM
http://www.washtimes.com/culture/20070326-103034-4965r.htm
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Shooting for the truth

By Robert Stacy McCain
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 27, 2007

In 2000, when Emory University historian Michael Bellesiles
published a prize-winning book that argued that firearm
ownership was rare in early America, Clayton Cramer was one
of the researchers who helped debunk those arguments.

Now, in “Armed America: The Story of How and Why Guns
Became as American as Apple Pie,” Mr. Cramer documents the
history of the nation’s long love affair with firearms.

The following are excerpts of a recent e-mail interview with
Mr. Cramer, who lives near Boise, Idaho:

Question: How much of America’s legal, political and social
views of firearms ownership was because of the nation’s
British origins?

Answer: When the first colonists arrived here, the answer
would be “only a little.” Gun ownership before 1689 was
tightly regulated in Britain. The usual argument was that
since the poor weren’t allowed to hunt anyway, they didn’t
have a need for guns. But it wasn’t the hunting of game
that concerned the English upper classes, but the fear of
revolution.

America became a gun-owning society because of fear of an
Indian attack, fear of an attack by Britain’s European
enemies the Dutch Navy tried to invade Virginia, for
example, on a couple of occasions in the 17th century and
later fear of slave revolt. All of these led the colonial
governments to impose militia duty and gun ownership on the
free men (eventually, only free white men).

Hunting was very common. Hunting put meat on the table.
Hunting was also common to protect livestock and people from
the larger predators, and to deal with pests that damaged
crops. A number of colonies required taxes to be paid
partly in crow heads and squirrel pelts. The primary reason
the colonists hunted, however, was for sport.

The English Bill of Rights of 1689 enshrined a right to bear
arms into English law. By the time of the American
Revolution, English legal books such as Blackstone’s
“Commentaries on the Laws of England” described the right to
arms for self-defense or for revolution as a right of
Englishmen, and this reinforced the American experience that
gun ownership was tied to the notion of citizenship.

Q: What was the role of firearms ownership by ordinary
citizens in shaping the American Revolution?

A: It made it possible. It was more than a year after the
start of the war before the U.S. was able to import firearms
and ammunition from Europe, and Britain had embargoed all
sales of guns and ammunition for more than a year before the
outbreak of hostilities at Lexington, Mass. The Battle of
Lexington, of course, happened because the British
government attempted to seize cannon and gunpowder stored at
Concord. Throughout the Revolution, the widespread
ownership of guns throughout the colonies and the extensive
gun-manufacturing industry of Pennsylvania, North Carolina,
Maryland and Virginia, made it possible for the Americans to
take on the best European army of the era and win (with a
little help from the French).

Q: How did the frontier experience influence Americans’
attitudes toward firearms?

A: Fear of the American Indians and sometimes with good
reason meant that every frontier settlement was heavily
armed. Hunting seems also to have driven this high level of
gun ownership. In looking through city directories for
frontier Pennsylvania in the 18th and early 19th century, I
was struck by how every little village had at least one
gunsmith listed even when the village consisted of only a
few dozen families.

Q: Advocates of gun-control laws sometimes argue that
changes in social, economic and political circumstances have
made the Second Amendment obsolete. Why do you disagree
with that view?

A: The primary reason that five states requested a right to
keep and bear arms be added to the Constitution was because
of fear that the new national government might be taken over
by people with tyrannical intentions. The people,
therefore, needed to retain the ability to resist such a
possibility. As James Madison observed in Federalist 51,
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. In
framing a government which is to be administered by men over
men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first
enable the government to control the governed; and in the
next place oblige it to control itself.”

As we have seen in the 20th century, governments have not
become more civilized, more humane or more decent since the
Second Amendment was ratified in 1791. More people have
been murdered by their own governments in the 20th century
than in all of the previous history of man. It amuses me
endlessly to hear people compare George Bush to Adolf Hitler
and decry what they claim is a fascist government and yet
insist that there’s no reason for any civilian to own a gun.

Q: Why was Michael Bellesiles able to win the prestigious
Bancroft Award for a book that, according to yourself and
other critics like Northwestern University professor James
Lindgren, was based on flawed or even fabricated evidence?

A: The dust jacket of Bellesiles’ book quotes Stewart
Udall, “Thinking people who deplore Americans’ addiction to
gun violence have been waiting a long time for this
information.” Bellesiles told a story that intellectuals
wanted to hear that guns were rare and tightly controlled in
early America, and therefore the Second Amendment could not
possibly be about an individual right to keep and bear arms.
To have given Bellesiles’ book the careful examination such
a startling claim deserved would have destroyed a fairy tale
that the intellectuals wanted.

Q: You’ve got a master’s degree in history, you’ve taught
constitutional history, you’ve written other books why were
your criticisms of Mr. Bellesiles’ work initially ignored by
many members of the academic establishment?

A: To borrow a metaphor from history, the historians
“circled the wagons” in response to attack by barbarians who
didn’t share their vision of a gunless America where there
was almost no violence (one of Bellesiles’ claims). I found
that I could flip open Bellesiles’ book at random, start
checking claims and it was rare to get through a page
without at least one claim being outright fraud, selective
in its use of a quote or misleading because of what it left
out.

Q: The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently struck down
the District of Columbia’s gun-control law, which was one of
the strictest in the country. What impact do you think that
ruling will have on gun violence in the District? And do
you think the decision will be upheld by the Supreme Court?

A: It is very clear to me that the provisions of the law
struck down by the Parker decision assuming that it isn’t
overturned on appeal will probably reduce violent crime in
the District. Don’t have your hopes set too high, however,
because cultural factors are the larger determinant of
murder rates. Boise, for example, has four or five murders
a year in a city of almost 200,000. But we have almost no
gun-control laws. Culture matters most.

Telling people that they can’t have a loaded and functional
firearm available in their home for self-defense is criminal
because it tells someone who intends robbery, rape or murder
that the victims won’t be able to fight back.

The Second Amendment IS Homeland Security !