[The Raven]

OK.....Why didn't this make the news?

[Joe Brower]

[elbucko]

"OK.....Why didn't this make the news?"

We all know why. The news rooms in this country, ink and electronic, are patently and overwhelmingly against the second amendment and in favor of severe gun control.

[steve-b]

tries to change the subject, to the meaning of "culture"

BWAHAHAHA!! Where have we heard this line of defense before?

[Physicist]

Bellesiles’s malfeasance, although startling in its sweep, brazenness and apparently political purpose, actually reveals something heartening—a considerable strength in America’s scholarly community. Its critical apparatus is working. Scholars and their journals are doing their duty, which is to hold works of scholarship up to the bright light of high standards.

And that's absolutely that last thing that Mr. Bellesiles ever expected. My own astonishment is no less than his.

[Billthedrill]

Part of the reason it didn't make the news is that it is so exquisitely embarrassing. Bellesiles has not a leg to stand on here, and the rapture with which this little academic turd-in-a-punchbowl was received will prove humiliating to those who hyped it as "the NRA's worst nightmare," which was virtually all the mainstream media. Yes, they are uniformly for gun control, but this is much worse - this attacks more than a political position, this attacks their hyperinflated egos. Look for it on page 37, third section...below the fold.

[citizen]

It did make big news............when this fraud was first published -- The NYT, WPost and other lib book reviewers went nuts for it.

They ain't talking now though.

[Cicero]

Scholars and their journals are doing their duty, which is to hold works of scholarship up to the bright light of high standards.

Well, hardly. The scholarly community of historians is doing everything it can to downplay this fiasco. The Newberry Library of Chicago awarded Belisle a second NEH grant, well after the details of the scandal over his first book had started to come out. And it's still not certain that Bellisles will be punished for his misdeeds.

Moreover, many of the most prominent scholars in such fields as history and literature publish lies like this all the time. They seldom get caught, and even if caught they seldom are punished. The academic profession is full of liars and political hacks at the highest levels. This is so because political correctness gets you a lot further in your career than good scholarship.

If a conservative scholar were to commit Bellisles' scholarly sins, he would be out of a job by now. But it's by no means sure, even now, that Bellisles will be punished as he deserves.

[GSWarrior]

He said he had examined probate records in 30 places around the country, such as the San Francisco Superior Court. But those records were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake.

I believe I read that the S.F. Superior Court survived the 1906 earthquake.

[lowbridge]

Belles bump

[dbwz]

The Kellerman/Reay "study" was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1986, and even though it's been thoroughly discredited, we still hear the results quoted as gospel. Expect the same with Bellesisles.

Since major media aren't going to lend any gravity to the seriously flawed methodology in either of these masterpieces, it's up to people like you and me to relay the real deal.