Here's an excellent piece on the controversy - it even includes our favorite researcher [b]Arthur Kellerman![/b]
[url=seattlepi.nwsource.com/printer2/index.asp?ploc=b]Historian's failings have impact today [/url]
Thursday, March 14, 2002
By THOMAS SHAPLEY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST
[blue]Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin aren't the only nationally known historians whose scholarship is in question. The spotlight of peer and public scrutiny has also fallen on Michael Bellesiles (pronounced "Buh-leel"), the Emory University professor who wrote the book "Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture."
Not only are Bellesiles' alleged transgressions less broadly reported than the others. They are, if confirmed, more relevant because his historical thesis has become part of the contemporary public policy debate on the Second Amendment.
While the other historians' purported failings are more, well, academic, Bellesiles' are more relevant. As David Skinner explains in the Weekly Standard, "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... If no absolute, presumptive right to own a gun existed back when the Second Amendment was written, then no such right exists today."
One of Bellesiles' defenders is Dr. Arthur Kellermann, Director of the Center for Injury Control at Emory University's School of Medicine. [/blue]
Excellent. Just excellent. Maybe Kellerman will get fried alongside Bellesiles.