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Arming America : The Origins of a National Gun Culture (2000)

Bancroft Prize Winners

It is an article of faith with me that you must always be suspicious of the accepted wisdom. And so I am untroubled by Michael Bellesiles's fundamental point that guns were not ubiquitous in early America. However, he goes beyond that simple thesis to propose the genuinely bizarre notion that guns were not an important part of life in Colonial and Revolutionary America, not even in Antebellum times, and that it was only after mass production for the Civil War made them generally available and cheap that a genuine "gun culture" arose. This is sheer silliness.

As far as I can tell, nearly all of the innumerable statistics that Bellesiles uses in the book have either been called into question or totally discredited. It has of course been left up to conservative publications to do most of the debunking, but recently even the mainstream media has begun to notice that the numbers that Bellesiles either make no sense or in some cases appear to be completely fabricated. Even taken at face value, his own numbers still show that a quarter to a third of American men had guns, which considering that half the population had to be urban, and so unlikely to own guns, strikes me as a reasonable percentage. It may be a glass half full, glass half empty type thing, but I'd say that such numbers show a prevalence of guns. And if his numbers are as dubious as they now appear, then perhaps guns truly were as universal as we've previously assumed.

Forget the factual fantasies though, just think about all of the ramifications if we accept all that his initial thesis implies. For him to be right we have to accept the idea that white European settlers were able to wrest America away from hostile natives without many guns. We have to assume that, despite the abundance of wildlife they found, they were content not to hunt much. And we must assume that Southern plantation owners were able to hold an enormous population in bondage without many guns. All of these things may well be true, but the amusing thing is that they deny most of the crimes that the Left has laid at our collective doorstep over the years. Suddenly, rather than rapacious conquerors and brutes, the early Americans seem downright pastoral, don't they ?

At any rate, before we move on from this little dust up, and dismiss this book as only an utter waste of tree pulp, it is perhaps helpful to consider what the widespread initial acceptance of the book (heck, it even won the prestigious Bancroft Prize) indicates about our intellectual elites. The most important things it tells us is that the practice of History in the modern academy has been thoroughly corrupted by Leftist ideology. The radicals in the generation of the 60s have not all headed off to Wall Street to get rich, many of them went into such institutions as the Academy and the Press where they could continue to subvert the American system that they so loathe. We well understand that professors and journalists are adherents of a political philosophy that is well to the Left of the rest of the country. Yet we cling to the myth that they are capable of setting ideology aside when they report the news, teach our kids, and write their books. This is a foolish delusion.

The Bellesiles incident is an excellent demonstration of what the Left stands to gain from this inchoate conspiracy (I do not wish to suggest that there is some kind of Woodstock Illuminati running it). On this issue, they wish to see the right to bear arms limited, but there's a pesky Constitutional Amendment in the way. So a "historian" manufactures evidence to show that guns were not important at the time of the Founding and that the 2nd Amendment could not have been meant to protect gun rights. Every leading newspaper and magazine hails it as a groundbreaking study whose implications must make us rethink the propriety of gun control. Prizes follow, giving it a veneer of official sanction. So now, when politicians and others debate the gun issue, there's an "unimpeachable" source that shows that the Left was right all along.

Luckily, in this case profound skepticism and tenacious research have exposed the sham. But there are hundreds of thousands of articles, essays, and books published every year that are the product of the same purblind ideology and it is impossible to keep up with the sheer volume of errors, distortions, and lies. So let this one most obvious of deceits serve as a warning, writing History, particularly today, is not an impartial exercise in truth seeking, it is instead quite often a conscious exercise in molding events to suit particular politically desirous theses. By all means, read History, but be warned, much of it is nothing more than one writer's opinion, not fact.

(Reviewed:)

Grade: (F)

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Arming America : The Origins of a National Gun Culture (2000)

Bancroft Prize Winners

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