Free Republic

Colonial Firearm Regulation Clayton E. Cramer Recently published scholarship concerning the regulation of firearms in Colonial America claims that because Colonial governments distrusted the free population with guns, the laws required guns to be stored centrally, and were not generally allowed in private hands. According to this view, even those guns allowed in private hands were always considered the property of the government. This Article examines the laws of the American colonies and demonstrates that at least for the free population, gun control laws were neither laissez-faire nor restrictive. If Colonial governments evinced any distrust of the free population concerning...

In his 2000 book Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, then-Emory University historian Michael Bellesiles asserted that guns were actually rare in early America, and that the idea of widespread gun ownership before the Civil War was an "invented tradition." This provocative thesis charmed the academic world and netted Bellesiles the prestigious Bancroft Prize from Columbia University. But as it turned out, Bellesiles was the one doing the inventing. As Bentley College historian Joyce Lee Malcolm wrote in her definitive account of the Bellesiles affair for Reason: The evidence he had presented for his groundbreaking theory was...

Michael Bellesiles was a history professor at Emory University and the director of Emory's Center for the Study of Violence. He was also a senior fellow at the Stanford Humanities Institute and visiting fellow at Chicago's Newberry Library. Several years ago, he published a book called Arming America, which claimed Americans did not own many guns in the early years of the republic and, therefore, the Second Amendment is bogus. The book was well received by gun control zealots. He received Columbia University's distinguished Bancroft Prize for history books. He was the darling of the media. However, there was one...

Philosopher George Santayana said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. It's true. One of the reasons to study history is to avoid repeating past mistakes. When it comes to freedom, we cannot afford to forget the lessons of the past. So you and I need to know the history of gun control, because history teaches us there is a terrible price to pay when we lose our right to keep and bear arms. Over 200 years ago, when the Founding Fathers drafted the Second Amendment, no one questioned the need for private gun ownership....

Kimberley Strassel (de gustibus, Taste page, Weekend Journal, Feb. 6) reminds us of historian Michael Bellesiles's discredited claim that many fewer colonists had guns than previously supposed. In Page Smith's "A People's History of the American Revolution" we learn that close to 90% of the rebel soldiers came from farms, where hunting was part of daily life. But even in towns people were armed. A British soldier looting Cambridge wrote that "even women had firelocks. One was seen to fire a blunderbuss between her father and her husband from their windows. . . ." Boston patriots, ordered to surrender their...

<p>History has its fair share of persecuted geniuses, men who were ahead of their time and made to pay for it. There's the hemlocked Socrates, the house-arrested Galileo, the exiled Rousseau. And to this list of giants it seems that we are now expected to add the name of Michael Bellesiles.</p>

<p>An antigun "scholar" as today's Galileo? Oh please, just shoot me.</p> <p>History has its fair share of persecuted geniuses, men who were ahead of their time and made to pay for it. There's the hemlocked Socrates, the house-arrested Galileo, the exiled Rousseau. And to this list of giants it seems that we are now expected to add the name of Michael Bellesiles.</p>

What do you do when you are about to lose a tenured job, your employer is investigating your fraudulent research and you've alienated a small cadre of supporters in an academic scandal over the explosive topic of guns? Readers might remember Emory investigated former history professor Michael Bellesiles (pronounced bell-EEL) for his 2000 book Arming America, which argued that guns were rarer in early America than previously imagined and that frontier America wasn't violent. Only the book was wrong, and when reputable academics criticized it, Bellesiles couldn't verify many of the records he'd cited. Emory's investigators, charged with finding research...

My goodness! The gun-ban crowd works fast. Crown Random House released my book The Seven Myths of Gun Control in paperback only two days ago, and already anti-gun bloggers are hard at work probing its defenses. John Lott This morning, I awoke to find the following message posted in my blog comments by one Tim Lambert. He writes: "Unfortunately, John Lott has misled you about the media coverage of the murders. Details are here." Lambert is referring to the opening sequence of my book, which describes the grisly August 23, 2000 "Pitchfork Murders" in Merced, California. This incident became a...

Michael Bellesiles, a former Emory University history professor and author of Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, can no longer claim the prestigious Bancroft Prize, awarded to him in April 2001, as his own. In a statement released Friday, Columbia University announced that the school's trustees had voted to rescind the prize because Bellesiles "had violated basic norms of acceptable scholarly conduct." Arming America "had not and does not meet the standards they had established for the Bancroft Prize," the trustees found. Columbia also requested that Bellesiles return $4,000 in prize money.It is the first time...

American history was made by men with guns. Minutemen fighting the British; frontier families with their long rifles; Westerners with their Winchesters and Colt revolvers. At least that has been the popular assumption. But Emory history professor Michael Bellesiles, in his book Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, makes the case that this is all a myth. Very few Americans in the 17th, 18th, and early 19th century, he argues, owned guns: Early settlers trapped, but they did not hunt; the few guns individuals did own tended to be rusty and often inoperable; only after the Civil...

<p>Michael Bellesiles, the history professor who wrote that firearms were rare in early America, has resigned from Atlanta's Emory University after an investigation found he "willingly misrepresented the evidence"in his award-winning book.</p> <p>The three-person committee — composed of scholars from Princeton University, Harvard University and the University of Chicago — found that Mr. Bellesiles' work showed "evidence of falsification," "egregious misrepresentation" and "exaggeration of data."</p>

WASHINGTON - By a strange coincidence, the Washington snipers were caught in the very same weekend that Professor Michael Bellesiles was forced to resign his professorship at Emory University. You may wonder: What's coincidental about that? Here's what. For many Americans, the sniper shootings proved the need for tighter gun laws. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the Democratic candidate for governor of Maryland, the state most terrorized by the snipers, reminds audiences at every appearance that her father and uncle, Senator Robert Kennedy and President John F. Kennedy, died of bullet wounds -- and she blasts her opponent, Republican Robert Ehrlich, as...

Shooting the Messenger: Jon Wiener on Arming America Mr. Sternstein is Professor Emeritus of History, Brooklyn College, CUNY, and co-editor of The Encyclopedia of American Biography.  Michael Bellesiles Chronology: Latest DevelopmentsSummary of the Emory ReportBellesiles's Response to the ReportOther Responses to the ReportRemaining Questions Jon Wiener's recent brief for the defense of Arming America, "Fire at Will", in the Nation, fits into a larger pattern originally pioneered in this case by the subject of the inquiry himself, Michael Bellesiles. It's called "Shooting the Messenger," a tactic invariably employed by politicians who find themselves under indictment for fraud or corruption. Rather than...

"Although we would not normally release any of the materials connected with a case involving the investigation of faculty misconduct in research, in light of the intense scholarly interest in the matter I have decided, with the assent of Professor Bellesiles as well as of the members of the Investigative Committee, to make public the report of the Investigative Committee appointed by me to evaluate the allegations made against Professor Bellesiles (none of the supporting documents, however, are being made public). The text of the report is now available online at www.emory.edu/central/NEWS/"

TWO YEARS AGO, "historian" Michael Bellesiles gained national fame for his book, "Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture," in which he posited that gun ownership in early America was rare and that there was no historical basis on which to claim that the Second Amendment protected individual rights to bear arms. His book won the Bancroft Award, the highest American award for a history book. Then objective reporters and historians began picking apart his book. What they found was a mountain of lies. Bellesiles left out most historical evidence that contradicted his theory — evidence which...

5-20-02 HISTORIAN ON THE HOT SEAT Could Bellesiles's Problems Undermine Gun Control? By Don Williams Mr. Williams lives near the Valley Forge Encampment and has a Masters in Computer Science. He frequently posts comments on H-OIEAHC. Emory University recently announced that an outside panel of scholars will examine Michael Bellesiles’s Arming America—with results to be announced this summer. If the investigation discredits Bellesiles then it could hurt the arguments filed by gun-control advocates in a major Second Amendment case ( US vs Emerson) that is coming before the Supreme Court.If the Supreme Court hears US vs Emerson, the Justices...