From the WSJ Opinion Archives
SCENE & HEARD
Arm-Twisting
A historian's book makes the case for gun control. Other scholars hotly dispute his claims.
On April 18 Columbia University will hand out its prestigious Bancroft Prize, an annual award presented for outstanding books in history and diplomacy. One of this year's recipients is Emory professor Michael Bellesiles, for his now-famous book, "Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture."
That's hardly surprising, as few books in recent years have so riveted academic and political circles. Released by highbrow publisher Knopf last year, "Arming America" was a historical and political bombshell, a rare piece of work that purported not only to overturn long-held historical beliefs, but to alter modern politics profoundly in the process.
Few colonial Americans owned guns, Mr. Bellesiles argues. He bases this on his study of probate and military records, travel narratives and other primary sources. What this means--though Mr. Bellesiles himself leaves the conclusion implicit--is that the Second Amendment, written in the postrevolutionary gun-free America, was not designed as a protection for individual gun rights. Any manner of gun control, under this thinking, would as a result be legal and constitutional.
Unsurprisingly, left-leaning journalists, academics and politicians went weak at the knees. The New York Times praised the work before it was released. Noted historians like Garry Wills wrote slobbery reviews. Politicians and lobbyists rushed to incorporate the book's conclusions into their work.
But there's a problem. A growing number of respected scholars, from across the political spectrum, are saying that Mr. Bellesiles's research and conclusions are wrong. They've charged that "Arming America" is riddled with errors so enormous as to seriously undermine his work. They argue he has incorrectly tabulated probate records, failed to include facts that strongly argue the opposite case and misquoted and miscited sources. Mr. Bellesiles denies all this, but has not yet handed over evidence to refute his critics.
"From what I've seen," says Gerald Rosenberg, a visiting professor of law at Northwestern, "the evidence is so overwhelming that it is incumbent upon Bellesiles as a serious scholar to respond. He either has to admit error, or somehow show how his work is right."
"Arming America" was the first work in decades that revived the collective-right argument. And while Mr. Bellesiles says he is a historian, the book's promotion was highly political. "Michael A. Bellesiles is the NRA's worst nightmare," screamed one blurb on the back cover. Another: "Thinking people who deplore Americans' addiction to gun violence have been waiting a long time for this information."
Most newspaper reviews focused largely on the book's political implications, while making little effort to evaluate its historical accuracy. Meanwhile peer review in historical journals that delves into the nitty-gritty of scholarship is notoriously slow; most reviews don't appear until several years after a book's publication.
Scholars are also exceptionally reluctant to criticize the premises of each other's research (interpretations are a different matter). Most remember the ugly story of David Abraham, a Princeton professor who in the early 1980s was accused of fabricating documents in a book about pre-Hitler Germany. The academics accusing Mr. Abraham of fraud ended up sullying their own reputations. (That's less true with politically incorrect books. Robert William Fogel's "Time on the Cross," about the economics of slavery, and Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's "The Bell Curve," about race and intelligence, both became punching bags for every left-leaning academic and reporter in America.)
But Mr. Bellesiles's book is anything but politically incorrect. Rather, it was manna from heaven for an increasingly discredited point of view, which is what makes the criticisms openly leveled against the book so very serious.
Scholars first focused on Mr. Bellesiles's sources. Law professors such as Eugene Volokh at UCLA point out examples of misquotations or of sources that don't contain the information Mr. Bellesiles cites. In more serious examples, scholars claim Mr. Bellesiles listed sources that, upon further reading, contained information that would contradict his claims but were not included in the book.
Example: Mr. Volokh points out that page 223 of "Arming America" says that "[John] Smilie, like most Anti-Federalists, had no problem granting the state the authority to decide who should be allowed to serve in the militia, or to limit those ineligible from owning guns. Nor did most Anti-Federalists want to see the propertyless carrying arms in or out of the militia." The footnote cites three sources but, Mr. Volokh says, none of the sources even remotely support the claim. One of them, in fact, argues that the militia should include everyone, "high and low, and rich and poor"; another stresses that "to preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms."
Mr. Bellesiles also relies on travel narratives; he mentions some 80 early travel accounts that fail to mention hunting with guns. Joyce Lee Malcolm, a professor of history at Bentley College and the author of "To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right," says "Arming America" fails to mention references to guns contained in those same narratives and omits dozens of other travelers who described widespread ownership of firearms. "If you are trying to derive a general theme, you should do as wide a search as possible," says Ms. Malcolm. "And you certainly ought to include information from the narratives you did look at, even if it is unhelpful."
The biggest evidentiary dispute is over Mr. Bellesiles's use of probate records, or inventories of estates at the time of a citizen's death. Mr. Bellesiles based what many reviewers say is the most important part of the book on this research, the most significant part of which is an undisclosed number of probate records from 1765-90. From this, he claims that only 14.7% of adult American males owned guns, that the few guns that did exist were usually listed as old or broken, and that women did not own guns.
James Lindgren, a professor of law at Northwestern, along with student Justin Heather, spent months going back through what they say are all the published records Mr. Bellesiles cites, as well as at a substantial number of original records at courthouses and on microfilm. They found that, in the mid-1770s, 54% of men and 18% of women owned firearms, and that most of the guns were not listed as old or broken. "In the only sources of probate records that Mr. Bellesiles cites in his published works, there are many more guns than he discloses," says Mr. Lindgren. "No one who has seen the evidence can figure out how he could have made such errors, or why he has not retracted the obviously mistaken data."
It's hard to make a direct comparison to Mr. Bellesiles's work because the Emory professor didn't keep a database; he says he compiled his data on paper notes that were recently flooded and ruined. Randolph Roth, an associate history professor at Ohio State who specializes in violent crime and violent death, has seen Mr. Lindgren's work and says that "it looks as though Mr. Bellesiles work won't be reproducible, that it is off by a factor of three to four."
Mr. Roth is troubled that Mr. Bellesiles doesn't have records. "We're moving toward a system were people put their data in a way where we can check each other and collaborate," he says.
It's worth pointing out that not all of these professors have an obvious political agenda. Jim Lindgren, Gerald Rosenberg, Erik Monkkonen and Randolph Roth all prefaced their remarks by saying they favor gun control, that they respect Mr. Bellesiles, and that their criticism is aimed solely at the goal of accuracy. They marked the discrepancies down as honest mistakes. "We don't want to get into political battles," says Mr. Rosenberg. "We just want to do good scholarship."
He says he plans to put detailed information about the probate records (which he says aren't as relevant as people think) on his Web site as soon as he has time. He also says Mr. Lindgren used a different database of probate records. Mr. Lindgren responds that he used exactly the same databases that Mr. Bellesiles's cites in his published work.
With regard to criticisms about his sources, he says historians can always choose quotes or sources to criticize. And he says that in order to keep his book to a reasonable length, he had to make decisions about which narratives were most important.
Let's hope the additional data come soon. For while Mr. Bellesiles insists modern public policy isn't his "business," in a debate like the one over gun control, which depends so much on knowledge of the Founders' intentions, history is a key influence on public policy. Whether Mr. Bellesiles believes his critics are ideologically motivated or not, his duty as a scholar is to clear up the many questions his work has raised.
Either way, he'd be wise to have all this in his mind two weeks from now, as he steps up to accept one of the more illustrious prizes in scholarship.
Ms. Strassel is an assistant features editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. Her column appears on alternate Thursdays.
