Thursday, April 04, 2002
By Glenn Harlan Reynolds
In the fall of 2000, professor Michael Bellesiles of Emory University published his book Arming America, which purported to establish that the core historical argument behind the Second Amendment was a fraud.
The brave minuteman armed with his trusty rifle, Bellesiles told us, was mostly a myth — Americans at the time of the Revolution, and for many decades afterward, seldom owned guns, but instead relied on the government for protection.
Bellesiles received glowing reviews in the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the Atlantic Monthly, and many other publications, from reviewers who were often visibly pleased that he was sticking it to the National Rifle Association.
As it turns out, the fraud was on Bellesiles’ end. At least, that’s the conclusion of those who have examined his work — from journalists, to historians, to law professors — and found it wanting.
Bellesiles turns out to have quoted sources out of context, to have falsely reported data, and to have claimed to have used documents that have not existed since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. One historian familiar with Bellesiles’ work called it a case of "bona fide academic fraud." Emory University is investigating.
It is, I suppose, conceivable that Bellesiles will manage to convince people that he was merely guilty of extraordinary sloppiness and not outright fraud, but regardless of his state of mind, his book is now well-established as untrustworthy.
Book review editor Karen Sandstrom of the Cleveland Plain Dealer has written that the positive reviews that Arming America received are evidence of a serious problem in the way American book review editors do their job, especially with regard to books that fit the editors’ preconceptions.
Yet despite all these problems with Bellesiles’ work, many of the publications that afforded his book so much laudatory attention when it came out have remained silent.