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Extraordinary claims, Carl Sagan said, require extraordinary evidence. And that evidence itself requires extraordinary examination. Yet Bellesiles’ claims – which counted as "provocative" precisely because they were in conflict with everything we thought we knew about the history of guns in America – got just the opposite. The people who should have examined his evidence rushed to embrace it, because it told them what they wanted to hear.
Writer Garry Wills, who reviewed the book for the The New York Times Book Review, wrote that "Bellesiles deflates the myth of the self-reliant and self-armed virtuous yeoman of the Revolutionary militias."
The Chronicle of Higher Education featured the book on its front page, with the headline "Exploding the Myth of an Armed America." The American Prospect wrote that "The image of . . . the American founders believing in an individual’s right to keep and bear arms . . . turns out to be a myth."
Arming America even received the (up to now) prestigious Bancroft Prize from Columbia University.
Instead of reviewers who might be skeptical of Bellesiles’ research, mainstream publications assigned reviewers who were antigun.
Wills, for example, has had a reputation as rabidly antigun for years.
Carl Bogus, who reviewed the book for The American Prospect, is a longtime gun-control activist. Richard Slotkin, who praised Arming America in The Atlantic Monthly, has referred to the notion of guns as instruments of liberty and equality as "self-evidently crazy."
That such reviewers would not expend any great effort in checking out Bellesiles’ claims should come as no surprise, and in fact they didn’t. But this raises an interesting question about the claim that mainstream, traditional media organizations always make in defense of their importance: that they are careful and responsible, while alternative media and the Internet are not. The Internet, they tell us, is a domain of hype and hoaxes, while traditional media can be trusted to check things out and get them right.
Yet if one looks at Amazon.Com’s reviews of Arming America, it is immediately evident that Amazon reviewers found the problems with Bellesiles’ book a year ago, while the establishment was still smitten.
On Oct. 24, 2000, for example, Amazon reader Sondra Wilkins did something that Garry Wills did not: she checked some of Bellesiles’ sources and reported: "In checking his sources, often the ones he lists, even the particular pages that he lists, contain evidence that contradicts his claims. He quotes parts of sentences from those sources and ignores the contradictory information on that same page."
Another reader, David Ihnat, said he couldn’t believe Bellesiles’ claim that it took 3 minutes to load and fire a muzzle-loading rifle. His report: "Never having fired a flintlock before, I tried to load and fire 10 times in succession, and was able to average 50 seconds per load." His conclusion: "Bellesiles has an axe to grind, and worked it throughout this book."
Oh yeah...he's busted,
[b][blue]NAKED[/blue][/b]