Disarmed A gun-hating historian comes under heavy fire.

NRO | October 4, 2001 | John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru

[patriot93]

Larry Pratt interviews Author Clayton Cramer Deconstructing Latest Anti-Gun Mythmaker Michael Bellesiles
06-09-2001

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[Criminal Number 18F]

That is just too cool. My ancestors were more or less grubbing in dirt for edible roots at the time... be proud of your American heritage, doc.

d.o.l.

Criminal Number 18F

[Travis McGee]

bttt

[TheGoodDoc]

Taint no sloppy scholarship here, dear friend.

Complete stinking fraud exposed for the forgery it is.

Lock and load!

[PA Engineer]

I like it! First Clymer and now "bel·li·cism (n)". This is a keeper.

[real saxophonist]

'Scholarly misconduct'...

[lds23]

In my estimation, the worse things on earth are violent criminals. Next on the list are liars.

[SJackson]

This is great. And of course, all the gun grabbers who gleefully quoted this guy's bogus "findings" will recant immediately, right? (They'll have to duck to miss all the flying pigs that will appear at the same time.)

They'll still be quoting him ten years from noe.

[Double Tap]

Taint no sloppy scholarship here, dear friend.

Complete stinking fraud exposed for the forgery it is.

Lock and load!

Needed to be said again.

[SJackson]

You seem to have some knowledge of Bellesiles work. I remember reading that when first challenged (his results couldn't be duplicated by anyone else from the same sources), he claimed his original source research was lost in a flood in his basement. Have you ever heard this, or do you know if it is true?

[SauronOfMordor]

I think its high time that the American people wake up to the fact that government grant driven junk science and politically correct social theory are the cancerous norms that have infected universities.

Ten years ago, I was in a discussion group which included a professor. A topic came up, and I naively suggested to the prof that this might be a good research project.

His response was basicly "using what for funding?"

I then found out that, in academia today, no research gets done which is not funded from some outside source. This means that, you cannot start research until you have secured grant funding, and you are not going to get funding until you have convinced the grant providers that your research results are going to produce results that they will like.

[Ditto]

Exactly correct. And the radical left took control of the large foundations many years ago. Those grant moneys have not been used for the advancement of knowledge as envisioned by their benefactors, but for propagandizing and as stipends for loyal supporters. The quest for truth and knowledge in academia ended long ago. It’s time for us to dispel the myth that it still exists.

[Deb]

When you get it all marked up, I bet lots of people would love to see your copy.

[B4Ranch]

Will Rogers said,"History ain’t what it is; it’s what some writer wanted it to be."

This is what Emory University historian Michael Bellesiles had hoped for. Unfortunately, he choose to define the 2nd Amendmant which had been previously defined by the Founders of these United States. There is many papers written about their discussions as to why they decided that new America needed a 2nd Amendmant. These records do exist. Are you reading these Senators Boxer, Sienstein, Schumer, Kennedy, ..........?

[DuncanWaring]

Vin Suprynowicz thrashed this guy fairly vigorously about a year ago.

[Hillary 666]

Key sources for his claim that guns were a much less important part of early American culture than is commonly believed simply don't exist. Many of those he cites, in fact, were destroyed in San Francisco's 1906 earthquake. There's not a historian alive who's seen them. Bellesiles now must explain how they wound up in his footnotes...

Let me guess what happened to his original interview notes:

The dog ate it.
The maid threw it out.
It fell behind the refrigerator.
His kid sister used it in her paper-mache doll.

[Clive]

See also the column by Marc Egnal in the National Post, entitled "Of muskets and terrorism", posted the other day.

My remarks on that column were:

The book was just plain silly on its face.

The Jonathans lived in a mainly agrarian society, surrounded by wilderness, with hostile French and aboriginals on their boundaries.

The demarcation line set by Crown proclamation in 1763 to define the Iroquios territories cut through the middle of what are now the states of New York and Pennsylvania.

The Jonathans needed their guns to augment their diet and to defend their homes.

As to probate: Why would anyone list such a common household item as a gun on a probate? Unless it was a lawyer in a town covering his own arse.

Simpler for the sons to simply take possession of the guns, or simply leave them hanging in the front room where they always were. Who wants to tell the government everything about your household effects?

Special pleading is intellectual dishonesty.

[muawiyah]

The Oneida who had to be relocated to Schenectedy during the Revolution to get out of the way of British terrorists lost a lot of stuff. Years later they were asked to file claims with the United States government (the Oneida having been good American allies).

There were no claims for lost weapons, yet we know the Oneida had lots of weapons. They served as Scouts with the New York regiments, and they hunted for a living.

Just because they didn't claim they'd lost a gun or two didn't mean that they didn't have guns.

BTW, the State of New York betrayed these firm allies in later years by violating the federal law regarding sales of Indian property. Not only that, New York sold all that stolen land to illegal aliens.

[mathurine]

We have records to establish that one of my ancestors in 17th century Quebec was one of several apprentices to an armorer; we have the rifles still in the family that ancestors who served in two different NY Regiments in the Civil War owned. We have rifles and pistols in the family that belonged to all the ancestors we know about on my family's Yankee side and wife's family's Rebel side. Now what the sociological meaning of this could be, I won't speculate, but we have material evidence in both my family and my wife's going back well over two centuries of regular ownership of firearms. On my French Canadian side we have documentary, though no material, evidence, taking it back 350 years in a family which were just plain folks. To the present generation, we simply all have been shooters from our teenage years onward, and I can scarcely imagine it will end here, although there are a few of the younger ones who live in urban locations and don't shoot much because it is a more expensive and less accessible pastime than it is for the rest of us who live in or nearer the country.