Arming America: The Origins of A National Gun Culture - Scrutiny

Scrutiny

The book garnered many enthusiastic professional reviews and won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in 2001. Because the book's thesis bore upon ongoing political controversies about gun control and the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, gun rights advocates immediately attacked it. Actor Charlton Heston, then-president of the National Rifle Association, called the book's argument "ludicrous". Conversely, a review by Roger Lane in the Journal of American History called the book's research “meticulous and thorough,” and wrote that Bellesiles had "attacked the central myth behind the National Rifle Association's interpretation of the Second Amendment". Lane declared Bellesiles’s evidence so formidable that "if the subject were open to rational argument", the debate would be over.

Clayton Cramer, a software engineer, gun enthusiast, and early critic of Bellesiles, later argued that the reason "why historians swallowed Arming America's preposterous claims so readily is that it fit into their political worldview so well... Arming America said things, and created a system of thought so comfortable for the vast majority of historians, that they didn’t even pause to consider the possibility that something wasn’t right." Historian Peter Charles Hoffer, himself an advocate of gun control, lent support to Cramer's charge when, in a 2004 examination of the Bellesiles case, he noted that influential members of the historical profession had indeed "taken strong public stands on violence in our society and its relation to gun control." For instance, the academics solicited for blurbs by Bellesiles’s publisher Alfred A. Knopf "were ecstatic in part because the book knocked the gun lobby."

Bellesiles energized this professional consensus by attempting to play "the professors against the NRA in a high-wire act of arrogant bravado." For instance, he replied to Heston’s criticism by telling the actor to earn a Ph.D. before criticizing the work of scholars. He pointed out that Cramer was "a long time advocate of unrestricted gun ownership" while he himself was a simple scholar who had "certain obligations of accuracy that transcend current political benefit." After Bellesiles claimed he had been flooded by hate mail, both the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians endorsed a resolution condemning the alleged harassment. As Hoffer later wrote, Bellesiles was convinced that whether the entire profession agreed with “his stance on gun ownership (and I suspect most did), surely academic historians would not let their expertise be impugned by a rank and partisan amateur like Cramer.”

In the end, however, the politics of the issue mattered less to historians "than the possibility that Bellesiles might have engaged in faulty, fraudulent, and unethical research." As critics subjected the historical claims of the book to close scrutiny, they demonstrated that much of Bellesiles' research, particularly his handling of probate records, was inaccurate and possibly fraudulent. This criticism included noting several serious errors in the tables published in The Journal of American History article, namely, that they did not provide a total number of cases and gave percentages that "were clearly wrong."

In two scholarly articles, law professor James Lindgren of Northwestern University noted that in Arming America, Bellesiles had

• purported to count guns in about a hundred wills from 17th- and 18th-century Providence, Rhode Island, but these did not exist because the decedents had died intestate (i.e., without wills);
• purported to count nineteenth-century San Francisco County probate inventories, but these had been destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire;
• reported a national mean for gun ownership in 18th-century probate inventories that was mathematically impossible;
• misreported the condition of guns described in probate records in a way that accommodated his thesis;
• miscited the counts of guns in nineteenth-century Massachusetts censuses and militia reports,
• had more than a 60% error rate in finding guns listed as part of estates in Vermont records; and
• had a 100% error rate in the cited gun-related homicide cases of seventeenth-century Plymouth, MA.

Critics also identified problems with Bellesiles's methods of citation. Cramer noted that Bellesiles had misrepresented a passage by George Washington about the quality of three poorly prepared militia units as if his criticism applied to the militia in general. (Washington had noted that the three units were exceptions to the rule.) Cramer wrote, "It took me twelve hours of hunting before I found a citation that was completely correct. In the intervening two years, I have spent thousands of hours chasing down Bellesiles’s citations, and I have found many hundreds of shockingly gross falsifications."