Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture.

• Author: Lindgren, James

Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. By Michael A. Bellesiles. * New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. Pp. 603. $30.00.

Bellesiles has dispersed the darkness that covered the gun's early history in America. He provides overwhelming evidence that our view of the gun is as deep a superstition as any that affected Native Americans in the 17th century.

--Garry Wills, New York Times (1)

Before there was a scandal, there was a book--Michael A. Bellesiles's Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. In this Review, I not only discuss the book, benefiting from some of the substantial published and unpublished literature on it, but review a little of the controversy--at least the controversy as I understand it at the beginning of 2002.

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. (2)

Arming America is a well-written and compelling story of how early Americans were largely unfamiliar with guns until the approach of the Civil War. It tells a wide-ranging, detailed, but relatively unnuanced story of gunlessness in early America. Bellesiles writes: "IT]he vast majority of those living in British North American colonies had no use for firearms, which were costly, difficult to locate and maintain, and expensive to use." (3)

According to Bellesiles, in seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and early nineteenth-century America there were very few guns. (4) Privately owned guns were mostly in poor working condition. (5) By law, guns were not kept in the home but rather stored in central armories, (6) and guns were too expensive for widespread private ownership. (7) He even claims that men generally were unfamiliar with guns and that they did not want guns (8)--preferring axes and knives instead, in part because guns were so inaccurate that they were of little use. He argues that few settlers hunted, (9) and implies that axes made very good weapons in hunting. (10) According to Arming America, in battle "the ax [was often considered] the equal of a gun." (11)

Bellesiles claims that states enacted laws that restricted gun ownership to white Protestants who owned property. (12) White-on-white homicide was rare in colonial America, according to Bellesiles, and guns were rarely the weapon used in homicides. (13) Guns were not culturally important, either: Travel narratives do not show that guns were part of everyday life, (14) even on the frontier, and few people even wanted to own guns. (15) At least in probate records, women did not own guns. (16) Since there were few guns, the laws passed in the early nineteenth century restricting the right to carry concealed weapons were directed at knives, (17) not guns. He further claims that the background of the Second Amendment shows that the Anti-Federalists had no problem with restricting militia membership to those above the lower social classes. (18) Last, with a few exceptions, the militia were extremely ineffective. (19)

Two meta-arguments by Bellesiles might have direct public policy applications (though, as a work of history, Arming America does not directly advocate any gun policies). One is that guns and violence go together. In early America, he claims, we had very low gun ownership and low homicide rates; after the Civil War, we had lots of guns and high homicide rates. (20) The second is that if guns were not widely owned, then it is unlikely that gun owning was understood as an individual right in the Second Amendment.

Since the book's publication, scholars who have checked the book's claims against its sources have uncovered an almost unprecedented number of discrepancies, errors, and omissions. When these are taken into account, a markedly different picture of colonial America emerges: Household gun ownership in early America was more widespread than today (in a much poorer world).

Arming America is changing the way that some historians think about their own profession and how some scholars in fields allied to history regard historical research and publishing. Understanding this book and the scandal it generated is important for scholars and teachers across the social sciences, humanities, and law. Any graduate or professional student who aspires to be an academic might profit by exploring the twists and turns of the Bellesiles scandal.

I. BEFORE THE BOOK

In 1996 a well-regarded, but relatively obscure, historian at Emory University, Michael A. Bellesiles, published an article in the Journal of American History (JAH). (21) It urged a mostly novel thesis about early America--that there were few guns and that there was no gun culture until the approach of the Civil War. His primary evidence was low counts of guns in probate records, gun censuses, militia muster records, and homicide accounts.

The data fit together almost too neatly. In particular, if anyone had looked closely at the probate data, they would have seen that it did not look right. The regional differences were suspiciously slight; the increases over time were extremely regular; the study did not indicate which counties were in which categories; and in most unconventional fashion, the probate data were published with no sample or cell sizes. The results were directly contrary to the existing literature counting guns in probate records, (22) including one source Bellesiles cited but did not discuss, (23) all of which had found substantial numbers of guns.

Last, the 1765-1790 data were mathematically impossible if there were more than about 200 cases in his sixteen Southern counties over the twenty-six-year period, (24) which any scholar familiar with probate records would have known had to be true many times over. If the JAH had insisted on cell counts (which would have been conventional), the impossibility of the 1765-1790 data would have been fairly obvious. (25) This entire scandal might have been avoided in 1996 with more conventional editing at the JAH.

The response by historians to the 1996 JAH article was varied. At a meeting of the Crime and Justice Network of the Social Science History Association, historians discussed how such a piece of work could get through peer review. The consensus was that probably none of the experts in the room (many of whom were quantitative historians) had been asked to review it. The Organization of American Historians, on the other hand, had a different response: They awarded the article the prize for the best article published in the JAH that year. (26) This bipolar response to Michael Bellesiles's work on guns continued until recently--those who are most expert on the subject of guns in early America or tend to understand numbers best were most skeptical about Bellesiles's work, while those who know less about guns or less about numbers were most enamored of it.

Bellesiles's surprising thesis had a few detractors online, mostly among pro-gun activists and scholars unaffiliated with universities, (27) but most historians were impressed. Alfred A. Knopf, perhaps the top nonacademic publisher of serious books of history, agreed to publish a much-expanded version of the article. The educated public first learned of the forthcoming book in a long, positive article in the Economist in the summer of 1999, (28) over a year before the book came out. The Economist article was followed by a similarly positive article in the New York Times in the spring of 2000, still five months before the book's publication. (29)

The response to the Economist article was overwhelming. The president of the National Rifle Association, Charlton Heston, criticized Bellesiles and his forthcoming book, saying, among other things, that Bellesiles had "too much time on his hands." (30) The tone of anti-intellectualism in the NRA response was patent--and made an easy target for Bellesiles and his colleagues. Substantively, Heston criticized Bellesiles's reliance on probate records, because of their incompleteness. (31)

In what was to become a pattern, Bellesiles responded in two very different ways--a political response and a response claiming expertise and care in his work. First, he obtained (or at least received) a public declaration of support from other professors. A group of forty-seven law professors and historians signed a public letter to the NRA expressing a moderately pro-gun-control view. (32) Second, Bellesiles made his own statements supporting his methods. Defending the use of probate records against criticisms of incompleteness, Bellesiles made some unusual claims. He said that probate inventories recorded absolutely everything in an estate, even property given away during life, and that wills recorded gifts given away up until the time the will was written. (33) These statements conflict not only with common sense, but with what is written by every probate scholar that I have read or that Bellesiles cites in Arming America. (34) When initially pressed about problems with the probate records, Bellesiles's response was to defend his reliance on them more vigorously with claims that plugged potential holes in his argument. These claims, however, were not only unsupported but ultimately proved to be false.

When Arming America was published in September 2000, it was treated to some rave reviews. First, it was welcomed to the front page of the New York Times Book Review with an uncritical review by Garry Wills. (35) Then Edmund Morgan wrote an enthusiastic review in the New York Review of Books. (36) Other positive reviews followed.

The only early negative reviews were in conservative, libertarian, or gun aficionado magazines or websites, most prominently the National Review (37) and Reason. (38) By January 2001, an extraordinary number of errors had been identified in...