Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture

Arming America, The Origins of a National Gun Culture is a deliberately misleading gun-grabber propaganda book written by former Emory University professor of history Dr. Michael A. Bellesiles and released in September of 2000 by Alfred A. Knopf. The book was an expansion of an article written by Bellesiles in 1996, and published in the Journal of American History, which was awarded "Best Article of the Year" by the Organization of American Historians (OAH).

The central claim of the book is the canard that guns were somehow uncommon during peacetime in early America; that they were of little use and that the more widespread use and ownership of guns dates from the time of the Civil War and is the result of advances in manufacturing with the consequent reduction in price and improvement in quality and utility. From that narrative emerges the wobbly theme and the subject of most of the debate, which is that the common belief that America's modern "gun culture" has its roots in America's colonial and frontier era is a myth, with little basis in historical fact.

Although initial concerns over the book were raised by advocates of gun ownership such as Clayton Cramer, much of the scholarly criticism of the book and the most widely cited evidence was developed by James Lindgren (Northwestern University), Randolph Roth (Ohio State University), Eric Monkkonen (UCLA), and Gloria Main (University of Colorado). The book has 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 yanked by Columbia on December 7, 2002 for "scholarly misconduct" - a polite way of saying "lying through your teeth."

Shortly after the book’s release, a number of questions arose when some critics began finding an extraordinary number of "errors." Scholars outside universities attacked Bellesiles' honesty, accusing him of fraud for an altered statutory quotation. Emory University conducted both an internal inquiry and a review by an external Investigative Committee. The committee found serious flaws in both the quality and veracity of Bellesiles' work, and he announced that he was resigning his tenured professorship. Although Bellesiles disputed the Committee's findings in his statement, claiming he was the victim of an “intellectual lynching”, he immediately announced his resignation effective a few months later. Knopf ended publication of the book in January 2003, rejecting Bellesiles's revisions and corrections as inadequate. Soft Skull Press published a revised but equally misleading version of Arming America in October, 2003.

Synopsis of the book

The main claim of Arming America, The Origins of a National Gun Culture is that firearm ownership in the United States was supposedly rare prior to the American Civil War, and that the average American’s proficiency in the use of firearms was poor. Bellesiles bases this assumption on numerous sources, most of which did not support the claims he made about them. For example, he looked at records of the number of gunsmiths operating in colonial America and Britain, and promptly asserted that no guns were being made in America, and few smiths in America were qualified to maintain or repair guns. He also looked at the records of militia companies in colonial America and noted that in every area, militia organizers constantly complained that those who reported for militia duty were poorly armed, with many of their guns in inoperable condition. Finally, he claimed he examined probate records, wills, census records, diaries, and the like, looking for indications of the frequency with which people owned guns, and how likely those guns were to be in working order. He insisted that few people owned guns in colonial America, and those guns that did exist tended to be old, rusted, and inoperable, with few people being proficient in their operation and maintenance. According to Bellesiles, America's “gun culture” began after the Civil War, when government-subsidized mass production of firearms made gun ownership affordable for the average person. Manufacturers like Colt led the way with inexpensive, reliable, and well marketed weapons.

Controversy

Bellesiles cited the Militia Act of 1792 when he wrote (page 230):
"Further, “every citizen so enrolled, shall... be constantly provided with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints,” and other accouterments. Congress took upon itself the responsibility of providing those guns..."

However the Militia Act of 1792 actually reads (differences in bold):
"... every citizen, so enrolled and notified, shall, within six months thereafter, provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints..." '

The 1792 Militia Act as it was originally written (without Bellesiles' modifications) in no way supports his assertion that "Congress took upon itself the responsibility of providing those guns."

Although the scholarly controversy touched nearly every class of evidence used (letters, travel accounts, gun censuses, homicide records, and assault records), the press has focused mainly on problems with probate records. As James Lindgren notes, though the probate evidence is discussed on only 13 pages of the book, “The probate data are the only data purporting to show systematic changes in gun ownership over long periods of time, a crucial part of Arming America’s central claim that gun ownership was very low in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and grew gradually in the few decades before the Civil War. Further, the probate data are by far the most important evidence purporting to show that guns in private hands were mostly in poor working condition.”

In October 2000 Lindgren asked Bellesiles about his documentation for the passages in the book that discuss evidence of gun ownership found in probate records. Bellesiles responded that he recorded his counts in guns in longhand on yellow legal pads, which were conveniently in his attic severely damaged after his office had been flooded earlier that year.

Bellesiles told Lindgren that he had read the (over 10,000) probate inventories on microfilm at the National Archives facility in Georgia. When the archive office informed Lindgren that they never possessed the probate records, Bellesiles then claimed he had traveled around the country to most of the county archives holding the originals of the records of his 40 counties. After examining county probate archives cited by Bellesiles, scholars, including Lindgren and his co-author Justin Heather, discovered that most of what Bellesiles wrote about them was false.

Flips and flops

Looking into Bellesiles' source for probate records in San Francisco showed that these records had apparently been destroyed in the 1906 Earthquake, and (lacking access to a flux capacitor) could not possibly have been available to him. Bellesiles responded to this revelation by telling the Chronicle of Higher Education in September 2001: "I have located the documents and ... sent for them myself." When officials at Emory asked Bellesiles for the San Francisco records that he said he had located, Bellesiles, cornered like a rat in a trap, tried to wiggle away by "admitting" that "I completely forget in which of several California archives I read [them]." Then in January 2002, Bellesiles claimed that he found the San Francisco probates at the Contra Costa County Historical Archive, although (as its archivist documented) none of the documents he copied in January 2002 were from San Francisco estates, and all files that Bellesiles had copied in 2002 were clearly labeled as Contra Costa County estates. Further, in 1993 (when Bellesiles was now claiming to have done his research there), the records were in a large closet to which patrons did not have access. The staff checked sign-in sheets and photocopy records for the early and mid-1990s and determined that Bellesiles had never signed in or photocopied anything then, and they did not recall either Bellesiles or any other patron doing a project requiring them to retrieve all the probate files from a particular period from their then-private stacks. Further, they wondered how anyone could have done such a project in any reasonable time in that period, since their thousands of probate records were then neither indexed nor stored by year.

The wheels fall off

James Lindgren and Justin Heather investigated Bellesiles' claims that early American firearms were of poor quality and operational condition and found that the reports on Bellesiles' website omitted many estates with guns and systematically altered the condition of guns in Vermont's probate records to fit his thesis. David Mehegan, a reporter from the Boston Globe, went to the Rutland, Vermont archives and confirmed Lindgren and Heather's analysis. Bellesiles responded by playing victim, claiming that his website had miraculously been hacked and the documents altered by someone out to destroy his reputation. Emory investigated this claim and found no evidence at all to support it.

Bellesiles eventually replaced his supposedly hacked Vermont file with another Vermont list (which has since also been removed from the internet) that forms the basis for claims made in the current revised edition of Arming America. This new Vermont file also conveniently omitted most of the estates with guns that James Lindgren and Justin Heather found in the Vermont probate records (Lindgren and Heather's counts were verified by Randolph Roth and David Mehegan).

At the request of Emory, Bellesiles gave a response to his critics which was published on the website of the OAH in November, 2001. As reporter Melissa Seckora pointed out at the time, Bellesiles merely desperately tried to change the subject and did not actually respond to any of the many specific claims made by his critics: "Bellesiles refers to criticisms that are either invented or not part of the public debate." Some of Bellesiles' history colleagues at Emory were so dissatisfied with an OAH response that they (correctly) viewed as evasive that they pressed to have the informal investigation moved to the next stage. In February, 2002, Emory announced a formal investigation.

Also in February 2002, the January 2002 issue of William & Mary Quarterly included a forum on Arming America, which included Bellesiles. Articles by historians Gloria Main and Randolph Roth were particularly negative on the quality of Bellesiles' work. Bellesiles responded vigorously, but once again (as New York Times reporter Robert Worth concluded) his response "leaves many serious errors unaddressed."

In June 2002, the National Endowment for the Humanities had enough and revoked funding for Bellesiles' Fellowship at the Newberry Library.

Emory Ethics Investigation

After an internal investigation reached a negative conclusion about Michael Bellesiles' work, Emory University set up an independent external panel of three prominent historians to investigate some of the numerous charges made against Bellesiles. The members were Stanley Katz of Princeton University, Hanna Gray of the University of Chicago, and Laurel Ulrich of Harvard University. Telling, perhaps, was the interesting fact that the chair of the panel, Stanley Katz, had previously joined Bellesiles in signing a public letter criticizing the National Rifle Association. The panel was asked to investigate five specific claims made against Bellesiles. While a complete whitewash was simply not possible under the circumstances, the panel did all they could to deflect blame from Bellesiles:

1. Did Professor Bellesiles engage in "intentional fabrication or falsification of research data" in connection with probate records from Rutland County, Vermont?

Conclusion: Without going to Rutland County to check the original records or obtaining the copies available on microfilm (neither of which the panel did), the panel could not prove that Bellesiles fabricated or 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 or falsified the Rhode Island probate records, although the panel was deeply disturbed by Bellesiles' scholarly conduct. (In effect, the panel appeared to agree with Lindgren and Heather's criticisms that Bellesiles had substantially misrepresented the number of wills that existed, the condition of guns, the frequency of gun ownership, and who owned guns in the Providence records, but considered Bellesiles' corrections (made in later printings of the first edition of Arming America) to be adequate.)

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 records, 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 of his book, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture"?

Conclusion: The panel could not prove that Bellesiles fabricated the data in the table, although they conclude that "the failure to clearly identify his sources does move into the realm of 'falsification.'" The Report finds that Bellesiles' "clear admission of misrepresentation" is in violation of Emory's policies, which prohibit such behavior as "fraud." If Bellesiles did what he claimed to do, then he "willingly misrepresented the evidence."

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 finds Bellesiles' behavior "falls short on all three counts," remarking that "the best that can be said of his work with the probate and militia records is that he is guilty of unprofessional and misleading work." The Report adds: "Taking all this into account, we are led to conclude that, under Question 5, Professor Bellesiles did engage in 'serious deviations from accepted practices in carrying out [and] reporting results from research.'"

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 supposedly 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. Of course, he also denied that his own work was in any way unscholarly or that he fabricated or misrepresented any of his data or findings based on that data.

Nonetheless, on the day that the report was released, Bellesiles heard the train coming and resigned from Emory. The trustees of Columbia University then rescinded Bellesiles' Bancroft Prize, after which Knopf pulled the book from distribution. Soft Skull Press then picked up Arming America and published a revised version where Bellesiles lamely pretends to defend his scholarship point by point.

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, baffling as it may be, still has defenders, including Jon Wiener, a historian at University of California, Irvine, where Bellesiles received his Ph.D. Wiener stunningly claims, apparently with a straight face, that Bellesiles' errors are no more numerous than other such wide-ranging books and that no fraud was involved.

External links

• ISBN 0-375-70198-2
• Second edition: ISBN 1-932360-07-7
• The Final Report of the Investigating Committee
• Columbia's Board of Trustees Votes to Rescind the 2001 Bancroft Prize
• Fall From Grace: Arming America and the Bellesiles Scandal, Yale Law Journal (2002), the final version of this review may be downloaded via this SSRN page
• Clayton Cramer's original criticisms of Bellesiles' research
• Counting Guns in Early America, Wm. & Mary Law Review (2002), article may be downloaded via this SSRN page]
• Bellesiles, M. A. (2003). Weighed in an even balance. Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press.