Book on 'gun culture' is drawing critical fire

May 4, 2002

Michael Bellesiles is having trouble keeping his stories straight.

The Emory University history professor is the author of a controversial book, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, which argues that in colonial and Revolutionary America guns were uncommon, rarely used and not greatly valued. The gun culture most Americans think was present at the country's birth did not, he says, develop until around the time of the Civil War.

The possible relevance of this thesis to the modern debate about guns escaped nobody, so it's not surprising that critics looked very closely at Bellesiles' evidence. What is surprising, because it's so rare, is that under close scrutiny the evidence began to unravel.

One early critic was Clayton Cramer, who has turned debunking Bellesiles into something of a vocation (on the Web at claytoncramer.com). He is an independent historian, which is how professors loftily refer to people who don't teach at universities (he has a real job as a software engineer). He couldn't get his criticisms published -- one journal told him its policy was not to consider papers that merely pointed out errors in other people's work -- but they were sufficiently detailed and cogent that other scholars who couldn't be so easily dismissed began to investigate what Bellesiles had said about their own areas of expertise.

The William and Mary Quarterly published a forum in its January issue in which four leading scholars evaluated the book's claims and Bellesiles replied. The evaluations were so withering -- and the response so flimsy -- that Emory University announced in February that it was beginning its own investigation. The dean of Emory College, Robert Paul, told a university publication, the Emory Wheel, that it was the first time a professor at the college had faced formal charges of research misconduct.

Emory announced last week that its internal investigation had found sufficient grounds to proceed to a second stage of inquiry conducted by scholars from outside the university.

Bellesiles based part of his argument on probate records in 40 counties, purportedly including Los Angeles and San Francisco in California. Unfortunately for him, the San Francisco records were lost in the 1906 earthquake and fire.

As the Wheel summarizes the story, Bellesiles initially insisted "these records were still intact and publicly available." He said he would post them on his Web site. When that didn't happen, he told a reporter from National Review it was because his site had been infiltrated by hackers. Next he said the records could be found at a library in Utah, and then one in California. Neither had them. In September he told The Chronicle of Higher Education he had located the records, and in November that he had no idea where they might be. In January he said in another Emory publication, Academic Exchange, that the records were at the "California History Center." By that he meant the Contra Costa County History Center, whose director said they have no San Francisco records. The chairman of Emory's History Department apologized to the center for Bellesiles' comments.

You see what I mean about keeping stories straight, and this is only one of many inconsistencies. An extended online article by Jerome Sternstein, professor emeritus of history at Brooklyn College (historynewsnetwork.org) follows numerous others, including what happened to Bellesiles' probate-records research notes in a flood.

It is necessary to say Emory confirms there actually was a flood, from a broken water pipe. But librarians were able to restore nearly all the material professors gave them; why Bellesiles took his ruined yellow legal pads home instead is unclear.

Nor is it clear whether the contents of the pads would help Bellesiles' case, since his conclusions are so at variance with those of everyone else who has studied the probate records. Gloria Main, of the University of Colorado at Boulder, wrote in the W&M Quarterly that her research in Maryland for the period 1650-1720 showed 76 percent of young fathers owned arms, mostly guns, and among the most well-off, it was 96 percent. Bellesiles claimed the Maryland figure was 7 percent.

Ira Gruber of Rice University examines Bellesiles' discussion of military history. Bellesiles' efforts "to minimize the importance of guns, militia, and war in early American history," Gruber writes, "founder on a consistently biased reading of sources and on careless uses of evidence and context."

Randolph Roth of Ohio State University, who studies violence in early America, says "every tally of homicides Bellesiles reports is either misleading or wrong," casting doubt on the book's claim that violence was rare in early America because guns were.

Academics are notoriously unwilling to accuse their colleagues of deliberate falsification. Perhaps, as Sternstein suggests, they are content to let the evidence speak for itself.