The Historian Who Couldn't Shoot Straight

MICHAEL BELLESILES is a professor of history at Emory University. When his "Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture" appeared in 2000, it came wrapped in a yellow strip of paper printed with four blurbs--one from the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Michael Kammen, who called the book "a classic work of significant scholarship with inescapable policy implications."

Kammen was right about the implications. Although a work of colonial and pre-Civil War history, "Arming America" spoke directly to recent debates about gun control. Arguing that no American "gun culture" existed before 1850 or so, Bellesiles marshaled a variety of sources to show that guns were much rarer, significantly less useful, and far more regulated than previously believed. He recently told a reporter he is actually a longtime gun enthusiast, but in his book's introduction he took dead aim at Charlton Heston and the NRA. And why not? If no absolute, presumptive right to own a gun existed back when the Second Amendment was written, then no such right exists today.

That's why, when the book first appeared, its reviews were practically love letters. In a cover story for the New York Times Sunday book-review section, Garry Wills said "Arming America" had "dispersed the darkness" by showing that privately owned firearms in America were "barely in existence" before the Civil War. In the Los Angeles Times, University of Colorado professor Fred Anderson hailed Bellesiles's "intellectual rigor" and "thorough scholarship," calling the book a "brief against the myths that align freedom with the gun."

Even the more critical reviews proclaimed "Arming America" an important, scholarly achievement. In the New York Review of Books, Edmund S. Morgan declared that Bellesiles "may have overstated his case, but only a little. He has the facts." Rutgers professor Jackson Lears wrote a 6,700-word review for the New Republic in which he took issue with the author's cultural history but assured readers Bellesiles had written a "debunking counter-narrative the old-fashioned way, by means of exhaustive research." Wesleyan University professor Richard Slotkin in the Atlantic Monthly called the book a "groundbreaking study," praising its "stringent quantitative analysis." In April 2001, Columbia University gave "Arming America" the Bancroft prize, the preeminent award for history writing.

Even as the celebrations continued, however, a handful of scholars began to challenge Bellesiles's research. Questions of fact usually lost in the small-print of appendices and endnotes have been dragged into the light of day. And as a result, a much-praised book has been exposed as sloppy, inaccurate, and possibly fraudulent. Meanwhile Bellesiles's career hangs in the balance.

MUCH of the controversy has been generated by small skirmishes. Take, for example, the misquotation of the Militia Act of 1792 on page 230 of "Arming America," where Bellesiles makes it seem that Congress was responsible for supplying militias with guns, instead of the members bringing their own weapons. That's not a small matter: The exact provenance of the militias' guns is a central concern in "Arming America." Caught out, Bellesiles wrote in an article in the Organization of American Historians newsletter that he'd accidentally quoted the 1803 amendment to the Militia Act.

Unfortunately, the passage doesn't match up with the 1803 text either. And there's another problem: Bellesiles thanked a listserv editor named Ian Binnington for notifying him of the mistake, while Binnington says it was a man named Clayton Cramer who discovered the error. Indeed, Binnington says Bellesiles had to have known that, for he responded to Cramer's message reporting the error.

It's hard to imagine that Bellesiles mistook Cramer for anyone else, since Cramer was the first critic on the scene after Bellesiles published the 1996 journal article that became the basis for "Arming America." Cramer has posted on his website a three-hundred-page refutation of Bellesiles, along with copies of historical documents. "I'm one of those weird little people who look up footnotes," says Cramer, a software engineer and a frequent contributor to Shotgun News.

Cramer is a surprisingly good writer, with a master's degree in history, but, he says, "Most journals are not interested in hearing from me." Still, he has his backers. Don Hickey, a historian who peer-reviewed Bellesiles's 1996 article, remarked recently on a historians' Internet discussion group: "When I checked some of the sources that he claimed Bellesiles had misused, I concluded that Cramer was right." Another scholar adds that "if Cramer says something is in the record, it's in there. If Michael Bellesiles says something's in there, it may or may not be."