The Rehabilitation of Michael Bellesiles

Anybody remember Michael Bellesiles? I'll bet all the shooters here do, and with no pleasure. In the year 2000 Bellesiles released a much ballyhooed book called Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. To say this book caused a sensation is like saying an atomic bomb is rather loud. For just the longest time, this book was all anybody wanted to talk about - especially if "anybody" was a friend of gungrabbers. Bellesiles set forth a very well-written thesis claiming that everything we thought we knew about the frontier American "gun culture" was wrong - including the fact that it existed at all. He claimed to prove that there were relatively few guns in the early American colonies and few people thought that guns had any practical utility for day-to-day life. If true, this thesis was potentially devastating to the arguments of those gun rights activists who had built part of their worldview around the exact opposite belief - especially those who put great stock in the importance of the Second Amendment.

Of course, as all the world now accepts, Bellesiles' thesis was not only not correct, it was fraudulent in virtually every particular.

At first, of course, the complaints of inaccuracy came from people invested in gun rights, and of course their complaints were ignored or ridiculed by mainstream academia. But that center couldn't hold, because apparently Bellesiles' inaccuracies were so diverse, detailed, obvious and systematic that - far from being able to dismiss them - antigun academia was unable to explain how such a flawed and dishonest work had ever passed editorial muster and been published in the first place. The scandal was enormous, and Bellesiles lost a prestigious prize and eventually even his tenured position at Emory University. It was all very sad, I'm sure.

You might expect that those who had been so willingly taken in by Bellesiles' work of fiction would very happily allow him, and the humiliating scandal he caused, to quietly slip away into nothingness. For several years, that's precisely what he did. But incredibly, he's back. He's back with a new book. And he's back surrounded by a cloud - nay, by a veritable nimbus - of the lying lies that liars tell.

Bellesiles' new book is titled 1877: America's Year of Living Violently, and I don't know or care what it contains. What caught my - and a lot of other peoples' - eye was this statement in the galley letter for the book - sorry, can't find a link - released by a New York Times editor:

Michael Bellesiles is perhaps most famous as the target of an infamous "swiftboating" campaign by the National Rifle Association, following the publication of his Bancroft Prize-winning book Arming America...

That was arguably the wrong thing to say. The Arming America scandal only wound down about eight years ago, and it's not as though the participants are dead and unable to speak up for themselves. Clayton Cramer, James Lindgren et al were not about to permit their careful and historic debunkings to be downgraded to an 'NRA Swiftboating Campaign,' whatever that is.

James Lindgren was one of the principal Arming America debunkers. In his devastating post-mortem of the book and the scandal, a long 2002 article in the Yale Law Journal, he describes himself thus:

Let me state my biases up front: I dislike guns; I have never owned a gun; I have not touched one since the age of nine. Yet I don’t understand the passion that people bring to the issue of their regulation. My own prior writing on guns has been on the pro-gun-control side of the dispute, and some of it is so free from passion as to be soporific.

If you're interested in the Arming America controversy at all, I highly recommend reading the whole thing. It's rather long and in .pdf format, but quite readable.

What's clear is that Lindgren was certainly not in the pay of the NRA, indeed he was no friend of the NRA at all and apparently still isn't a big fan. In a piece he posted in the Volokh Conspiracy yesterday, he says the following about the likelihood of the Bellesiles takedown having been orchestrated by the NRA:

From what I’ve seen from afar, the NRA mostly concentrates on three things: raising money, publishing magazines, and lobbying Congress.

The real question here is why the NRA mostly stayed out of an inquiry in which people with no knowledge of the dispute just assume they must have had a nontrivial role.

After the Bellesiles affair was over, I asked a law professor who had in the past received funding from the NRA why the NRA was so savvy to stay out of it and let the academics handle it in the normal way. The answer I got is that the NRA wasn’t savvy so much as it is suspicious of academics, whom they neither understand nor trust. If the NRA pays for something, they want to control the message — and most academics won’t take money on that basis.

He says earlier that, from his admittedly sketchy knowledge, the sum of the NRA's involvement went like this:

1. Before the book came out, Charlton Heston criticized it in a column in an NRA magazine (after Heston had read an Economist article on the forthcoming book). Bellesiles more than effectively responded tp Heston with a direct assault on the NRA, enlisting several dozen scholars for his public letter sent to the NRA.

2. Much later Clayton Cramer asked the NRA for a small travel grant to check Bellesiles’s sources in Eastern libraries and he was turned down.

3. Two years into the dispute, when it was nearly over, I read about a Senator attacking Bellesiles in a speech at the NRA convention in Atlanta. He appeared to be relying on (and seconding) news reports in the mainstream press.

4. Other than a review authored by Cramer in Shotgun News and some additional very derivative news articles updating members on developments in the press, that’s all I remember seeing or hearing from the NRA over the 2–3 years of the dispute.

I didn’t regularly see what the NRA sent to members and I doubt that any of the other relevant academics or administrators did either. If the NRA were involved in the Bellesiles affair in any significant way, I would have heard something about it.

So whatever else you want to believe about Bellesiles and his books, it's apparently quite unnecessary to believe that he was done in by some sort of NRA conspiracy. Bellesiles did himself in, and he deserved every bad thing he got - with the exception of the frantic loyalty he apparently still generates within the hearts of the anti-gun crowd.

Though on the ropes for some time now, that crowd is still very much around - it would be a terrible mistake to conclude that they've gone away, no matter how quiet they may have been lately. But their flocking to this defrocked and discredited professor, and the weakness of their arguments concerning him, is a lovely paean to their desperate search for plausible arguments in their own favor.

Rotsa Ruck, guys.