GUNS, GUNS, GUNS

No, not the Trump assassination attempt: An older Liberal Lie that Guns didn't exist in early America

Many people are focused on the attempt by a gunman (“he was a good boy”) to break into the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and (arguably) attempt to shoot President Trump or J.D. Vance—-although it is entirely possible that someone so unhinged could legitimately want to off Jim Acosta or any one of the Hoax News Media (and no one would notice). He’s in custody, Trump and everyone but a Secret Service agent shot in his body armor are fine, and Trump, naturally, wanted to go back and finish the event.

No, this is a different story, one about a liberal anti-gun prof who hated the idea of Americans having firearms that he lied himself right our of a tenured university position. In 2000, Emory Professor of History, Michael Bellisiles, wrote Arming America, a book that sought to show there were no firearms in early America, that the images of Lexington/Concord were over-hyped, and that gee, all those stories as depicted in “The Patriot’ where 8 and 10-year-old boys were shooting with their father were fiction.

Er, no. Arming America was fiction. He nevertheless garnered glowing reviews, including one from famed historian Edmund Morgan, and he won the Bancroft Prize in History. (Just an aside, do you think two historians who wrote one of the most popular U.S. history books ever would even be considered for that prize? But I digress).

Equally important, the presigous Journal of American History—-one of only two major prestigious journals in history that I have never published in—-ran his preliminary article arguing that guns were rare in early America and that the gun culture came later.

Anyway, after brief hoopla, actual scholars got down to bidness. Clayton Cramer, a pro-gun researcher whom I’ve interacted with and who is first rate, tore Bellesiles a new powderhorn, showing that his sources were altered, misquoted, that he used wrong dates for statutes, that referenced wills that didn’t even exist, and that he flat counted wong. Then, a PRO_gun historian, Michael Lindgren, sought to support Bellesiles, only to conclude Cramer was right—-and more! When Lindstrom asked to see Bellesiles’ data, the author claimed it was (conveniently) all lost in a flood. (BTW, by 2000, all major professors were using computers of one iteration or another, and anyone with an ounce of common sense backed up everything, multiple times, on floppies or early flash drives. (Anyone remember the floppy disc?) Lindstrom found entire archives that Bellisiles claimed he did his research in were demolished in fires or other disasters some 50 years (!!) before Bellesiles supposedly did research there. Lindgren published his assessment in “Fall from Grace: Arming America and the Bellesiles Scandal.” Yale Law Journal 111, no. 8 (2002): 2195-2249.

Bellesiles found himself in even more trouble when he claimed British and European laws prohibited guns, while Henry II’s famous “Assize of Arms” literally required every man, even peasants, to be armed and required mayors to arm anyone not armed. See Stephan Halbrook, That Every Man Be Armed.)

Bellesiles’ Bancroft prize was rescinded; he, er, “resigned” from Emory before they could fire him; and Knopf rescinded his book contract. Bellesiles complained that the whole scandal erupted because “the media” looked too closely at his sources. In other words, “why shouldn’t I be able to lie with impunity?” (Just an aside: My mentor Prof. Robert J. Loewenberg, once admonished me, “Everything is in the footnotes. The rest is just fluff.”)

So lo and behold new evidence has surfaced about gun records in the Boston Siege of 1775, showing that in a “government buy back” of sorts, where the Brits would allow people to leave Boston if they turned in their buns, a whopping 1,778 firearms were handed in by people fleeing the city. Of those, nearly 700 were handguns, which cost two-weeks’ wages at the time. Estimates are this constituted about 20% of all Boston’s population of 5,000. Put another way, at least 50% of the residents had guns. A charitable General Gage said they could all have their guns back when the siege was lifted.

It’s common sense. In a mostly frontier society, virtually everyone had plenty of guns.

Bellisiles wouldn’t be the only mainstream historian called on the carpet for falsities, plagiarism, or other questionable methods. Well-known historians such as Joseph Ellis, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Stephen Ambrose all came under (pardon me) fire. A historian of Nazi Germany, David Abraham, was caught manipulating records. And in perhaps the greatest leftist scholar takedown in history, Robert Maddox rolled up seven “New Left/Cold War” historians for cheating and misrepresenting meetings by diplomats and presidents in the post-WW II period in his book, The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War.

One of the great things about history is that you have to show your work. That is why since about 1990 the trend has been to carefully limit what “work” can be done by requiring all journal publications (not to mention dissertations) include major themes of “race, class, gender.” That allowed historians to refocus their worlds away from facts and toward ideology. Not saying they still don’t cheat, but they cheat in a very Marxist fashion by creating a whole new playing field upon which to debate them that minimizes the primacy of facts.

Still in the long term, that will be a failed enterprise, but it has temporarily protected the leftoids by trying to force debate on a Marxist playing field rather than one centered on reality or facts.

Larry Schweikart (@CyberneticsLS on Truth, @LarrySchweikart on X)

Rock drummer, Film maker,NYTimes #1 bestselling author

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