Disarming America - A prize-winning historian and his gun myths - Michael A. Bellesiles book on gun culture seen as academically irresponsible

National Review, Oct 15, 2001 by Melissa Seckora

'The power of image and myth repeatedly overwhelms reality in discussions of early American firearms," writes Michael A. Bellesiles, a professor of history at Emory University, in his book, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. "America's gun culture is an invented tradition."

Bellesiles has done some inventing of his own. His book-which won this year's Bancroft Prize, the most prestigious award in the writing of American history-is one of the worst cases of academic irresponsibility in memory. Yet his remarkable performance has not been enough to cause either his employer, Emory, or his publisher, Knopf, to act.

Some of the most significant statements in Arming America are "based" on data that simply do not exist. In other words, they are based on nothing. For example, Bellesiles claims to have counted guns in probate records of the estates of people who died in 1849-50 and 1858-59 in San Francisco. The problem is that, according to everyone who should know, all the probate records that Bellesiles allegedly reviewed were destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. Rick Sherman of the California Genealogical Society has said, "I am unaware of the existence of any surviving San Francisco probate files for 1849-1859. If this involves an out-of-body experience, I'd like to know how to pull it off."

The thesis Bellesiles sets out to prove is that there were very few guns in early America, let alone a gun culture, and that most of the guns that did exist were old and broken. He published an article on the subject in 1996, in the Journal of American History-a piece that won "Best Article of the Year" from the Organization of American Historians. Five months before the book came out, Anthony Ramirez of the New York Times promoted Bellesiles's thesis, presumably based on the earlier, award-winning article. He said that the probate records were the author's "principal evidence." John Chambers, a military historian from Rutgers, reviewed the book for the Washington Post, saying that the probate records were Bellesiles's "freshest and most interesting source." Edmund Morgan, one of the country's leading historians of colonial America, followed suit, exclaiming in the New York Review of Books, "The evidence is overwhelming. First of all are the probate records."

Certain historians-especially those with a strong quantitative bent- were skeptical of Bellesiles's data, but many others, including Garry Wills, uncritically embraced Arming America, most likely because it appeared to confirm what they have long wanted to believe: that the Second Amendment protects only a collective right to bear arms, that individual gun rights were deemed unimportant at the time of the writing and ratification of the Constitution.

One of those who were skeptical was Joyce Malcolm, a history professor at Bentley College who has written a book on the Anglo-American conception of gun rights. She says, "Bellesiles fails to provide even basic information about the probate figures that form the basis of his claims for the rarity of guns. And he repeatedly makes general statements that are extreme. But if you check his footnotes, a more disturbing pattern emerges. It is not just an odd mistake or a difference of interpretation, but misrepresentation of what his sources [if they exist] actually say, time after time after time."

In documents on his website (www.emory.edu/HISTORY/BELLESILES), and in correspondence with other scholars, Bellesiles has not only reasserted that he used records in San Francisco, he has embellished his story by giving a location: the Superior Court. In a long interview I conducted with him, he confirmed more than once that the archives he used were at the Superior Court, and said further that he had read hundreds of probate records in both San Francisco and Los Angeles. "There were only a few hundred cases, but that's a lot of cases."

When I asked him point-blank whether he had used probate records from San Francisco County, he answered: "I used county probate records from the Superior Court. I had to go the courthouse-the San Francisco Superior Court." But the deputy clerk of the court, Clark Banayad, says flatly, "Every record at the San Francisco Superior Court predating 1906 was destroyed by fire, or other causes, in the 1906 earthquake." This is common knowledge among California probate and genealogical authorities. The probate records cannot be found at the History Center of the San Francisco Public Library either. Librarian Susan Goldstein says that the center stores some archives of the city and the county, including property deeds, general indexes, and contracts, but that it has "no record of the number of guns owned in the city of San Francisco prior to the 1906 earthquake." Kathy Beals, author of three books on San Francisco's early probate records, says that "to my knowledge, there are no official probate files in existence for years prior to 1880, and only scraps from 1880 until 1905."

I then informed Professor Bellesiles that the probate records could not be found at the San Francisco Superior Court. He changed his story: "Did I say San Francisco Superior Court? I can't remember exactly. I'm working off a dim memory. Now, if I remember correctly, the Mormon Church's Family Research Library has these records. You can try the Sutro Library, too."