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"Arming America, The Origins of a National Gun Culture" by Michael A. Bellesiles.

"Arming America, The Origins of a National Gun Culture" is a controversial book written by former Emory University professor of history Dr. Michael A. Bellesiles and released in September of 2000 by Knopf Press. The book was an expansion of an article, awarded "Best Article of the Year" by the Organization of American Historians, written by Bellesiles in 1996, and published in the Journal of American History. The central themes of the book, that guns were uncommon in early America and were of little use and that the modern "gun culture" has no historical foundation, were widely hailed by academics and advocates of gun control and sparked a wide and long running controversy concerning the history of firearm ownership in the United States. Columbia University awarded Prof. Bellesiles the prestigious Bancroft Prize in April 2001, although it was later rescinded by Columbia on December 7, 2002 for “scholarly misconduct”.

Shortly after the book’s release, a number of questions arose when scholars began finding what they said were an extraordinary number of errors. Some scholars outside universities attacked Prof. Bellesiles's honesty, accusing him of fraud for an altered statutory quotation. An Emory University conducting both an internal inquiry and the appointing of the external Investigative Committee. The committee found serious flaws in both the quality and veracity of Bellesiles’ work, and placed him on administrative leave. Although Dr. Bellesiles disputed the Committee's findings in his statement, claiming he was the victim of an “intellectual lynching”, he eventual resigned over the scandal. Knopf Press ended publication of the book in January 2003, rejecting Bellesiles's revisions and corrections as inadequate. Soft Skull Press began publishing a revised version of "Arming America" in October, 2003.

Synopsis

The main argument of “Arming America, The Origins of a National Gun Culture”, is that firearm ownership in the United States was rare prior to the Civil War, and that the average American’s proficiency in the use of firearms was poor. Bellesiles claimed to have examined probates records, wills, census records, and other personal accounts and concluded that firearms were not prominent in early American culture. The book argued that there were in fact few firearms in colonial America, and those that did exist were in poor working condition and few people were proficient in their operation and maintenance. According to Bellesiles, it was not until after the Civil war, when mass production put access to affordable firearms within the reach of average person that Americas “gun culture” began, with manufactures like Colt leading the way with inexpensive, reliable and well marketed weapons.

Controversy

The controversy began almost immediately after the book was released. In October 2000, Northwestern University law professor James Lindgren, an expert in early probate law, asked Bellesiles for the probate database he used. Bellesiles responded by telling Lindgren that he did not possess the records because the only copies of them he had, had been destroyed when his office flooded earlier that year. Bellesiles told Lindgren that he had retrieved the information from the federal archives in East Point, Georgia. When the archive office informed Lindgren that they never possessed the probate records, Bellesiles then claimed he had gotten the information from numerous county archives. After retrieving specific county probate archives cited by Bellesiles for Rhode Island, scholars, including Lindgren discovered that much of what Bellesiles wrote about them turned out to be incorrect.

Looking into Bellesiles’ source for probate records in San Francisco showed that these records had, in fact, been destroyed in the 1906 Earthquake, and could not have been available to him. Bellesiles responded by claiming that he had seen the documents in some other library in California, but this too was investigated and found to not be accurate. In September of 2002, Bellesiles then claimed that he found the San Francisco probates at the Contra Costa County Historical Archive, although its archivist told reporters that none of these documents were from an estate in San Francisco, and that they had no record of Bellesiles visiting the archive prior to July 2002.

After a reporter from the Boston Globe investigated Bellesiles’ claims that early American firearms were of poor quality and operational condition, and found no evidence to support this conclusion in Vermont’s probate records, Bellesiles responded by claiming that his website had been hacked and the documents altered by someone out to destroy his reputation. Emory investigated this claim, but found no evidence to support it. [1] . In June 2002, the National Endowment for the Humanities removed Bellesiles from the Newberry Library fellowship.

At the request of Emory, Bellesiles gave a detailed response to his critics which was published on the website of the Organization of American Historians in December, 2002, but this did little to quell the controversy, and in February, Emory conducted a formal investigation.

Emory Ethics Investigation

Emory university hired an independent panel of three historians, Stanley Katz of Princeton University, Hanna Gray of the University of Chicago and Laurel Ulrich of Harvard, to investigate the numerous charges made against Bellesiles. The panel was asked to investigate five specific claims made against Bellesiles [2]:

1. Did Professor Bellesiles engage in "intentional fabrication or falsification of research data" in connection with probate records from Rutland County, Vermont?
Conclusion: The panel could not prove that Bellesiles fabricated of falsified the Rutland County, Vermont probate records, although the panel was deeply disturbed by Bellesiles scholarly conduct.
2. Did Professor Bellesiles engage in "intentional fabrication or falsification of research data" in connection with probate records from Providence, Rhode Island?
Conclusion: The panel could not prove that Bellesiles fabricated of falsified the Rhode Island probate records, although the panel was deeply disturbed by Bellesiles scholarly conduct.
3. Did Professor Bellesiles engage in "intentional fabrication or falsification of research data" in connection with probate records from the San Francisco Bay area?
Conclusion: Although the panel could not prove intentional fabrication of the San Francisco probate record, they did not believe that Bellesiles could have possessed the data when he claimed.
4. Did Professor Bellesiles engage in "intentional fabrication or falsification of research data" in connection with probate records supporting the figures in Table One to his book, "Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture"?
Conclusion: The panel could not prove that Bellesiles falsified the data in the table, although they did criticize him for his mischaracterization of the data.
5. Did professor Bellesiles engage in "other serious deviations 'from accepted practices in carrying out or reporting results from research'" with respect to probate records or militia census records by: (a) Failing to carefully document his findings; (b) Failing to make available to others his sources, evidence, and data; or (c) Misrepresenting evidence or the sources of evidence.
Conclusion: The panel determined that Bellesiles ignored professional standards in historical research and integrity.

Bellesiles responded to the committee's report by stating that “it is not evident that launching a sharply focused investigation of one small part of a scholar's work brings us closer to the truth on the subject of that research”. He also criticized the university for holding him and his work to a higher standard than other academics and that his critics attacked him with such intensity because he had challenged a long standing belief. He also denied that his work was unscholarly or that he fabricated or misrepresented any of his data or findings based off that data. [3]

Garry Wills, who had reviewed Arming America enthusiastically for the New York Times, later said, "I was took. The book is a fraud." He also told an interviewer for CSPAN that Bellesiles "claimed to have consulted archives he didn't and he misrepresented those archives," lamenting that Bellesiles did not have to do it, since he had good evidence for many of his claims. Wills added, "People get taken by very good con men." Historian Roger Lane, who had reviewed the book positively for the Journal of American History, offered a similar opinion: "It is entirely clear to me that he's made up a lot of these records. He's betrayed us. He's betrayed the cause. It's 100 percent clear that the guy is a liar and a disgrace to my profession. He's breached that trust."

Bellesiles, nonetheless, still has his defenders, the most public of which is Jon Wiener, a historian at UC-Irvine, where Bellesiles received his Ph.D. Wiener claims that Bellesiles's errors are few and that no fraud was involved.

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