"Spiking the Gun Myth " Topic

"For many Americans, the gun is a holy object, the emblem and guarantor of their identity. Without it, they would not be the self-sufficient persons they consider themselves, the very models for all lovers of freedom. To take away this external prop would tear out of them their very essence. This private conviction is verified, in their eyes, by a public fact -- that American history, separateness and virtue have always been associated with the gun, if (in fact) they did not take their very essence from it.

Imagine, then, the shock if this star of the show should turn out to be missing through much of our history. It seems impossible; and that was the reaction of Michael A. Bellesiles, a Colonial historian at Emory University, when -- while searching through over a thousand probate records from the frontier sections of New England and Pennsylvania for 1763 to 1790 -- he found that only 14 percent of the men owned guns, and over half of those guns were unusable…."
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Amicalement
Armand

If they had them or not ( and I would guess its a matter of urban/ wilderness question) that the right to have them is a right no matter if only 1 person had them or everyone had them.

A response to an earlier published version of this author's research was published by the William & Mary Law Review in 2002. link

Sounds like nonsense to me

Bellesiles has been exposed as fraudulent six ways from Sunday. Among other things, he was citing as reference an archive which burned down before he was born. When he was called on other citations, he announced he'd "lost" all his evidence. His awards were revoked and he lost his teaching position. But he'll live forever on the Net, cited just the same as though he'd actually done research.

If you talk to the people who actually did check probate records, the comment I heard was "guns were more common than chairs."

But of course 14Bore is right. If you want to attack freedom of the press, call for the repeal of the 1st Amendment. The number of newspaper readers in 1791 is not relevant.

Sorry Raul, but this time you found a clunker.

Dave

As Robert said, pretty much every word Bellesiles wrote was a lie, including "and" and "the." Bellesiles' book is likely the biggest historical fraud since Hitler's Diary. A detailed analysis of some of the problems with Bellesiles' book can be found at:

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A summary quote; "Since the book's publication, scholars who have checked the book's claims against its sources have uncovered an almost unprecedented number of discrepancies, errors, and omissions."

In his review Lindgren was being far too kind to Bellesiles in describing his work as consisting of discrepancies, errors, and omissions, thereby suggesting they were inadvertent mistakes rather than outright lies.

As Robert also says, Bellesiles claimed to have lost all of his supporting research and documentation for his book-he claimed a "flood" as I recall. His statistical "results" concerning gun ownership based on probate records were mathematically impossible based on the records he claimed to have studied and used as his sources. Some of the records Bellesiles claimed to have consulted were destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, while others were kept in archives that had no record of visits by Bellesiles (and they kept records of all researchers who consulted those archives). Bellesiles also relied on data from the wills of about 100 Rhode Island decedents who died without leaving any such wills.

A relatively complete and balanced account can be found at Wikipedia:

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Further, until the 20th Century, wills were rarely used at all. And even more rarely were they used to transmit personal property. As one critic pointed out, if Belleisles is right, not only did 18th/19th Century Americans not possess guns, they didn't possess livestock, farm implements, or household goods.

Belleisles is a member of the extreme wing of the anti-gun movement. And an academic fraud. Emory should can him.

There are records from both sides when towns forced all its residents to turn in all of their firearms. The variety or the guns included everything from shotguns, pistols and small caliber bird guns to very old antiques of veterans. Few guns were a service rating.
The high level of broken guns should not be surprising since this was an era before interchangeable parts. You could not any trigger or lock to replace a broken one. They did not fit.

Ross; Emory did can him-well he quit but probably by request. The last report I heard was that he was tending bar while continuing to write the non-non-fiction he calls "history."

"As Robert said, pretty much every word Bellesiles wrote was a lie, including "and" and "the."

Yep. They revoked his Bancroft Prize, among other things.

He invented records; he lied about source material; also lied about "records lost in flood, etc."