L'Affaire Bellesiles

Although the ubiquitous Glenn Reynolds has written frequently on this, I thought I'd put in my two penn'orth. Michael Bellesiles wrote an award-winning book called "Arming America" in which he purported to have found documentary evidence that the US national gun culture was invented comparatively recently. The colonial America he describes was indeed Moore's Utopia, a happy place where homicide was unknown. Fiction, obviously, and recent scholarly investigations have confirmed that. Bellesiles is squirming now that his own university has decided to investigate. Melissa Seckora on National Review Online has drawn attention to the weakness of his defence.

In general this confirms an impression I have had since I started writing on gun issues. I arrived in the US thinking that guns in civil society were an abomination, and I still shudder whenever I see an armed policeman, although I know I should not. But virtually everything put out by the anti-gun lobby is disingenuous, tortuous or just plain lies. My examination of the arguments for Encyclopaedia Britannica shows just how far they go with statistics (although I do worry, as the article suggests, that the pro-gun forces go too far themselves on occasion), but Bellesiles' work is the most egregious example. The argument for gun control had come almost to the brink of success, but it is now in total retreat across the country. That is partly due to 11 September, partly due to the work of John Lott and other principled scholars, but also due to the public realising that the gun grabbers are just plain dishonest. Bellesiles may turn out to be the Anthony Blunt of his faction.