Talk:Arming America

Exculpating quotes and sources?
It would be futile to ask that anyone post information defending Bellesiles. The gun nut lobby monitors this page full time and deletes any and all posts defending Bellesiles, then arranges a dozen or more sock puppets to continuously post and re-post the same attacks. It is in the nature of the gun nuts and the NRA to simply overwhelm sense, logic, truth and history with weight of numbers. This entire article is not a discussion of the book, but rather a completely one-sided attack on Bellesiles taken almost word for word from one from the more than two dozen articles written by the same three authors and published and re-published and cross-cited endlessly by the gun lobby.

For example, for all of the criticisms and critiques over the source of the famous probate records (San Francisco, or Contra Costa for San Francisco or just Contra Costa) what is not noted is that the the records DO exist and supported his position. Further, the "errors" found by other scholars are ones of magnitude not direction, all of the alternative studies and analysis of probate records, save the ones sponsored by the NRA, found the same answer, just perhaps not so starkly as Bellesiles - which is that gun ownership was small and limited. One author found 24% gun ownership where Bellesiles found 18% but this has been endlessly cited as "a complete and thorough repudiation of Bellesiles central contentions." The exceptions have been pro-gun nutballs who define "arms" to mean guns even when it is transparently a sword or pike. This is the same PhD professor who cited English common law that "A Gentleman may carry Arms in a Coat" to support the argument for concealed handguns in English common law (what else would fit in a coat?), apparently having never heard of a Coat of Arms.

What is equally lost in the debate is that the chart in question is one page out of hundreds. Nothing else in the book has been seriously questioned - the alternative wording of the statute for example relates to which statue at which date, there were several. Bellesiles cited the most recent statue, the critics cited the older statute ("within six months..." etc.). The quotes from Washington, Madison, and later Jackson at New Orleans that the militia had no guns when they arrived, were untrained in the use of guns, had no knowledge of guns and were completely incompetant in their handling have never been questioned or contradicted. The myth of marksmanship at New Orleans has been completely gutted as Jackson's own report notes at length how none of his citizen militia couldn't hit the wide side of a barn with a gun and it was entirely his artillery that won the day. Bellesiles' critics choose instead to quote English newspapers about American marksmanship, ignoring the handwritten reports of the officers and commanders of the American troops.

Bellesiles central argument has never been contradicted and no evidence has ever been presented to show widespread gun ownership or anything approaching a "gun culture" prior to the Civil War. He is correct in all his major conclusions but made numerous tiny errors of citation and reference for which he was hounded out of existence by the gun nut lobby.

Give up now - the gun nuts will threaten to kill you, will stalk your family if they find you and will cyber-stalk you, as they have me, every time you disagree with them. The gun lobby is the scariest and most evil, anti-American force that has ever taken power in this country and now they have a Supreme Court to back them up and re-write the second ammendment to suit their pleasure. Sad days indeed.

—Preceding unsigned comment added by Scottie1492 (talk • contribs) 20:10, 7 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Your lack of secondary sources disturbs me.Chelydramat (talk) 04:11, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

James Lindgren, Gloria Main and Randolph Roth have all stated publicly they are NOT publishing as advocates of gun control, and indeed do not take a public position on the issue, and would prefer to be quoted simply as scholars in the field of early American History, culture and law.

Can someone add links to articles defending Bellesiles? All of the citations in this article and the links attached take only one side of the story and all concern just the note taking on the probate records. Perhaps I am mistaken and every single person comdemns Bellesiles, but why does this article only contain criticisms. The links at the bottom are mostly re-hashes of each others' arguments and are redundant and compound. Having read them all, as well as the further links they contain, it would appear that there are three primary sources criticizing Bellesiles, Lindgren most prominent among them and the best researched, and then about a thousand right wing blogs and advocacy sites that quote and re-quote all the same sources. There seems to be a minor cottage industry in the original authors citing and re-citing each other in order to increase their frequency count on Lexis-Nexis which from an academic's point of view is just outrageous and borderline academic fraud.

By the by - with all this hot air about the sanctity of accuracy in data gathering, where were these same people when the Bush White House declared "the jury's out" on Global Warming? I guess accuracy is only important if it supports your side.

Are there are scholarly articles (i.e. not pro-NRA gun nut blogs), which critique the rest of the book? The sources here only concern themselves with about two pages in the entire book which is almost 600 pages long. Has anyone written about Bellesiles treatment of the militia issues (effective or ineffective? Well armed or needing government issued firearms?), or the War of 1812 (i.e. that it showed the ineffectiveness of citizen miltias and led to the emergence of the modern army -- or did it?)?

I get it that the gun nut lobby hates this guy and does everything in its power to discredit him and pile on the same three citations of innacuracy, but I am sick of hearing that this idiot or that idiot flooded their attic and could still read their high school notes, or that because Bellesiles didn't filoe an insurance report on his notes HE MUST BE LYING!!!; or that moron number 1 hit a bullseye with a flintlock rifle while moron number 2 was reading the Contra Costa County probate records and "proved" that Bellesiles lied about San Francisco records - even if the pages WERE labelled San Francisco. I get it....you hate him and you won; his carreer is destroyed......enough already.

For the integrity of Wikipedia and furtherance of academic scholarship on this important issue can someone add more primary sources, critiques or lack thereof of the rest of the book -- or is this it? One table and three paragraphs were innacurate and for that this guy got burned at the stake by Second Ammendment nutjobs, while standing on the Altar of private gun ownership - all for misquoting a few tables and then making a fool out of himself in the press with lame excuses and poorly thought through answers. —Preceding unsigned comment added by benfeing (talk • contribs) 31 January 2007

The Emory University statement, which I just read, does not convict Bellesiles of Fraud or otherwise assert he committed fraud - I have removed that mistatement.

Recent evidence and further research supporting Bellesiles has been assiduously edited out of this article. The text of the Emory University report has been selectively edited and the author of this article falsely states that they found Bellesiles guilty of fraud - which they did not. Subsequent to the main controversy on this book a number of scholars went back through the same records and have reproduced most of Bellesiles work reinforcing rather than contradicting his conclusions. The charges of fraud and innacuracy turnout to cover only 13 pages of an almost 600 page book and the "innacuracies" when "corrected" by his critics predominantly reinforced his conclusions.

This article is another blatant example of pro-gun lobbying nut jobs using the internet to spread half truths and outright lies to further their bizarre support of the gun industry. —Preceding unsigned comment added by benfeing (talk • contribs) 5 February 2007

As it stands, the article is almost entirely anti-Bellesiles. I've made some changes to the book synopsis and added an introductory paragraph to the controversy section to try to even things out and adopt a more neutral tone, but more work needs to be done. Glaurung quena 23:46, 7 January 2007 (UTC)


 * "The controversy surrounding the book is almost completely partisan..."? This does not match my memory; as I recall, probate experts with no relation to the issue immediately cried foul, since what Bellesiles reported did not match their unrelated research (and then there's the matter of the SF probate records which were destroyed in the famous earthquake and fire).


 * "James Lindgren, a right-wing blogger"? I don't know the intimate details of Wikipedia's POV rules, but this strikes me as rather POV; many would deny that the Volokh Conspiracy is "right wing", and making this the first bit of identification for Professor Lindgren strikes me as misleading if not slanted.


 * I don't know what to do, there's a reason this "article is almost entirely anti-Bellesiles": he wrote an article and then a book based on provably fraudulent research, and was called out on it in many venues, e.g. this is the only Bancroft Prize ever withdrawn. I assume probate records were a focus of the investigations because they are very available and there are many scholars who are intimately familiar with them, but there's no reason to believe that any other aspects of his research cited in the article/book are likely to be reliable---and he claims his notes were destroyed, making it extremely difficult to investigate the sources of his other research upon which this Wikipedia article now bases so much faith in.

The Bancroft committee itself has stated they withdrew the prize over claims of plagiarism and misattribution - not because the book's thesis was itself wrong. There is a great distinction here - the book can be true and accurate in all respects, but the author discredited for academic malfeasance. The research itself has only been shown to be innacurate with respect to the probate records and then the revised figures and aanalysis of Lindgren and others has tended to reinforce Bellesiles arguments rather than contradict it, with only a few exceptions. Lindgren's article was not an attempt to disprove Bellesiles thesis, he largely confirmed it, but rather to suggest that Bellesiles had fudged the data or misattributed the sources or possibly had not done the original research at all. Subsequent researches have managed to reconstruct most of Bellesiles work and the new stiudies and data have overall reinforced the conclusions on this point, that evidence of gun ownership of the peacetime civilian population was scant. It is rather like a charge of plagiarism - the author is damned even if the story itself is true. Bellesiles deserved to have his prize revoked, but let's not confuse that with the book itself being innacurate.


 * Incorrect. The book was shown to be grossly incorrect in most of the claims it used to support its central thesis. In Lindgren, James T., Fall from Grace: Arming America and the Bellesiles Scandal. Yale Law Journal, Vol. 111, p. 2195, 2002, James Lindgren says that

One of the oddest claims to surface recently is that the problems with Arming America touch only the probate data (as if contrary evidence could just be ignored) ... Too much attention has focused on the probate data. Unless one goes through all the book’s comments on a particular topic and the evidence cited to back them up, one can’t really see just how systematic the errors are. Randolph Roth has done this for Bellesiles’s homicide data; Robert Churchill has done this for the gun censuses and militia counts; Justin Heather and I have done this for the probate data; Heather has done this for the stories about axes, bayonets, and edge weapons; Clayton Cramer has done this for several types of sources, including the gunsmith information, militia statutes, and substantial portions of the travel accounts. When one goes through an entire body of evidence, some errors are big and some are small, but the overall effect is shocking. Nearly every sentence that Bellesiles wrote about probate records in the original hardback edition of Arming America is false. Nearly everything that Bellesiles says about homicide is either false or misinterpreted, as is most of what he wrote about the relative merits of the axe over the gun. When the sources do not support the main premise of Arming America, Bellesiles sometimes misreports their content in a way that fits his thesis, as he does in over 200 instances mentioned in this Review.
 * Each of these statements is corroborated by a footnote to a validated source. Collabi (talk) 02:45, 14 March 2009 (UTC)
 * HaHa nice try even in the upside down world of today. A fraud is a fraud and no amount of liberal gooble-de-goop can change that. 2607:FB91:792F:CF71:8843:DCB0:72F9:9348 (talk) 20:22, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

Recasting this article to emphasize all the research he says he did, while only pointing out that the probate based material was definitively proven wrong, puts what I believe to be a misleading slant on the article. Hga 21:41, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

But there do not appear to be any other critiques other than the probate research - and the subsequent work by third parties confirmed all of his earlier statements save one - the state of armaments among the Massachusetts militia. This latter point is inconclusive as the new sources do not provide figures, just anecdotes suggesting a higher percentage of armed citizens than Bellesiles cited. So re-casting the article to suggest that he made two or three errors in research but the rest of the book is unchallenged would - whether you like it or not -- be the truth. As it is, this article is manifestly biased.

If you check out Past Imperfect, by Peter Charles Hoffer, he dedicates a chapter to this book and the controversy surrounding it including problems other than just the probate records. I would prefer to see stricter gun control myself, and I agree with Bellesiles' interpretation of the second amendment, but that in no way changes the fact that his research was flawed, fragmentary, and in at least a few instance, completely fabricated. I would make the edits myself to include more information about the controversy but I'm not really comfortable yet with making Wiki edits more complicated than reverts or typo corrections. Iconnu (talk) 17:44, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

I might qualify as a "Second Ammendment nutjob" in benfeing's terms, but the harshest and most unforgiving criticism of Bellesiles that I have read has come from people self-identified as left-wing or liberal or democrat and supportive of gun control who wished Bellesiles was right and hated him for fooling them and betraying their cause: one even suggested he deserved burning at the stake.Naaman Brown (talk) 17:21, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:Bellesiles2.jpg
Image:Bellesiles2.jpg is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in Wikipedia articles constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.

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Fair use rationale for Image:Arming America.jpg
Image:Arming America.jpg is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.

Please go to the image description page and edit it to include a fair use rationale. Using one of the templates at Fair use rationale guideline is an easy way to insure that your image is in compliance with Wikipedia policy, but remember that you must complete the template. Do not simply insert a blank template on an image page.

If there is other fair use media, consider checking that you have specified the fair use rationale on the other images used on this page. Note that any fair use images lacking such an explanation can be deleted one week after being tagged, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you.

BetacommandBot (talk) 06:51, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Merger proposal
See Talk:Clayton Cramer. THF (talk) 16:40, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Work in Progress
This inadequate entry, which is not up to standard, will be overhauled by several users over the coming period. Please be patient with it as it unfolds. There may be times when it looks spotty. User:thirdcamper (talk) 12:00 14 July 2010(UTC)

Michael A. Bellesiles
I would like to know more about the author (eg. what has he done since AA). I see that he had an article but that it was recently deleted - why was this done? Drutt (talk) 16:08, 4 August 2012 (UTC)
 * The talk page still exists here. I think the redirect was a mistake, but I lost that argument. (Contributions of a sock puppeteer certainly didn't help the cause.)--John Foxe (talk) 21:29, 4 August 2012 (UTC)
 * For archival searches on articles that have been reduced to a re-direct: Type in the name "old article name" which will redirect to "new article" with the caption "redirected from old article name"; then click on the old name to go to the file for the redirect. Click on "View History": all the history is archived with access to previous article versions. Clicking on the date will take you to the archived version of that article.--76.7.120.42 (talk) 21:00, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Amazon lists: "Michael A. Bellesiles teaches history at Central Connecticut State University" and most recent major works as: "1877: America's Year of Living Violently" The New Press, 2012, "A People's History of the U.S. Military" The New Press, 2012. CCSU lists Michael Bellesiles in the History department, Fall 2013, instructor for "HIST 161 American History to 1877". 2013 Annual Report for the Dept of History, under Part Time Faculty notes publication of his book "A People's History of the U.S. Military". He has mixed reviews frpm students at Rate My Professors dor com. A friendly article on his other job (bartender at a restaurant in Chester CT), refers to him as an adjunct history teacher at CCSU. "Like all good bartenders, Michael can hint at a sordid past. In 2002, he was awarded the prestigious Bancroft Prize for his book Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture-a prize that was rescinded for "scholarly misconduct." The book provoked the NRA by blaming America's violence on its gun culture. "Unfortunately, Arming America evoked a highly politicized debate," he says. "It remains dangerous to write about firearms, even when discussing events two and three centuries ago."" http://www.theday.com/article/20120917/NWS10/309209649/-1/zip06details&town=Valley-Courier (As though the NRA could make Columbia U revoke the Bancroft on grounds of "scholarly misconduct".) --Naaman Brown (talk) 21:41, 19 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks for posting that. Perhaps not too far down the line Bellesiles will once again become Wikipedia notable.--John Foxe (talk) 13:50, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

Discredited
"Controversial" is too weak for the lede. I would suggest "discredited". Sources agree on this. Even his responses are criticized. J8079s (talk) 01:44, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I agree and changed "controversial" (a weasel word) to "largely discredited." We'll see how that flies.--John Foxe (talk) 14:42, 18 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Howdy ... as you see, I am the same IP Address who changed "largely" to "entirely". I gently ask, by way of comment here: are Saddam Hussein, or Rasputin, largely dead? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.118.221.130 (talk) 19:11, 6 June 2013 (UTC)
 * I suggest we drop the "entirely" just to be quasi-polite.--John Foxe (talk) 01:44, 7 June 2013 (UTC)


 * Might I suggest we reinstate "Controversial" rather than "discredited". Contrary to what has been previously stated sources do not necessarily agree on this. Jon Weiner's 2002 scholarly review of the book under the journal Nation takes into account most if not all of the books criticisms while still viewing it with favor. This review also calls into question the integrity of James Lindgren who is cited twice within the wiki page's sources and is the figure toward which all the statistics of Bellesiles "false reports" are contributed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Moonmasterj (talk • contribs) 04:56, 25 October 2013 (UTC)
 * For what it is worth, first: Jon Weiner was mentor to Bellesiles when Weiner was his professor at University of California at Irvine: his article is a defense of a former student. (17 Oct 2002 Weiner in The Nation. 25 Oct 2002 Emory announces Bellisilles' resignation and releases their report. 13 Dec 2002 Columbia announces retraction of Bellesiles' Bancroft prize.) I followed this at History News Network and Lindgren was not the only critic. Gary Wills praised AA in NYT Book Review and was later asked to defend Bellesiles. Wills answered: "nobody defends him." He later replied to a colleague: "I was took. The book is a fraud."--Naaman Brown (talk) 01:11, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
 * No, this section Arming_America and this section Arming_America cover "discredited" . It is not his critics rather his peers and former supporters that discredit his book. The book was initially controversial if you want to add a section on current supporters (if any) we could look at it. J8079s (talk) 18:16, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

question
When Emory University faculty published scholarly studies in 2000-2003, were they published via university presses under peer review, or were they published without fact-checking scholarly referees via commercial presses (like Alfred A Knopf) and partisan presses (like Soft Skull Press)? -- Naaman Brown (talk) 11:24, 21 September 2016 (UTC)