by Christopher Chow

Harvard and Emory University historian Michael Bellesiles' best-selling Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, shook the publishing and academic worlds. But new information casts serious doubt on the book's credibility.

A recent article in the Boston Globe reveals that Bellesiles' key sources for his book were simply fabricated. Probate records which he claimed to have examined from San Francisco from the 1840s and '50s were actually destroyed in the great earthquake and ensuing fire of 1906. Other records which were found in Vermont conflict directly with what is written in the book.

Arming America's premise was very controversial. "This book argues that gun ownership was exceptional in the 17th, 18th, and the early 19th century, even on the frontier, and that guns became a common commodity only with the industrialization of the mid-19th century, with ownership concentrated in urban areas," writes Bellesiles. "The gun culture grew with the gun industry. The firearms industry, like so many others, relied on the government not just for capital development but for the support and enhancement of its markets. From its inception, the U.S. government worked to arm its citizens; it scrambled to find sources of weapons to fulfill the mandate of the 2nd Amendment."

"America's gun culture is an invented tradition," according to Bellesiles. Only about 14% of colonial Americans owned firearms, he claims. The book states that the idea of a pioneering American with a gun for hunting or self-defense is a myth. "The gun is so central to American identity that the nation's history has been meticulously reconstructed to promote the necessity of a heavily armed American public." He writes, "The most likely explanation for a continuing faith in an unchanging American gun culture despite evidence to the contrary is the assumption that what is must have been." Bellesiles concludes, "By the end of this book, the gun will be seen as the axial symbol of American culture, absolutely integral to the nation's self-image and looming ever larger in plans for future development. In a society justly proud of its contributions to human freedom, the gun became the icon of a savage civilization."

Bellesiles claims that even going back to the early Colonial period, guns were rarely used for hunting. "Most Americans in the 17th and 18th centuries got almost all their meat from domesticated animals," and from trapping. "From the start, hunting was an inessential luxury, associated either with the elite gentlemen with too much time on his hands, or with the poorest fringes of civilization, if not outright savagery." He believes that hunting is not necessary in modern America either, "[Most gun owners] do not need to kill animals for their survival." He asserts that many Colonial Americans felt similarly. "Hunting has always drawn mixed reviews in America," he writes.

Stories of Minutemen and heroic Militia are farcical according to Bellesiles. The founding fathers had a hard time getting Americans to fight or even pick up a gun. He writes, "why the American Revolution lasted eight years, longer than any war in American history before Vietnam, was that when that brave patriot reached above the mantel, he pulled down a rusty, decaying, unusable musket (not rifle), or found no gun there at all." This leads to his conclusion that the founding fathers wrote the right to bear arms as the 2nd Amendment, not to grant liberty to the American people, but to force upon them the need for armed militias.

Bellesiles concludes that the popularity of firearms in America did not come about until the Civil War, when, according to him, big gun companies and the U.S. government began flooding America with guns. It was this conspiracy that led to the myth that guns are as American as apple pie. "It was a masterfully crafted mythology that has enraptured generations of moviemakers and historians," he writes. "President Lincoln pulled out all the stops in supporting the maximization of Northern arms production."

"The Civil War established these attitudes permanently by demonstrating the need for one American to be able to kill another.... The Civil War transformed the gun from a tool into a perceived necessity. The war preserved the Union, unifying the nation around a single icon: the gun."

Arming America became a national bestseller and received major praise in the book community and in academia. The New York Review of Books raved, "No one else has put [the facts] together in so compelling a refutation of the mythology of the gun or in so revealing a reconstruction of the role the gun has actually played in American history."

Columbia University awarded Bellesiles the coveted Bancroft Prize for historical excellence. And the Organization of American Historians called Arming America, "A classic work of significant scholarship with inescapable policy implications."

As expected, Bellesiles' conclusions that most Colonial Americans did not own a firearm for hunting or self defense have drawn a huge wave of controversy. Could his claims be true? Northwestern University Law Professor James Lingren is one of Bellesiles' most outspoken critics. Lingren notes how Bellesiles' based his conclusions about the number of gun owners on the number of probate records he found mentioning guns during the period.

Bellesiles ignores the fact that during the Colonial period and Revolutionary War many pioneers did not write wills or keep legal records of their firearms. James Lingren also accuses him not just of misinterpreting evidence but even of falsifying evidence. Lingren examined many of the same probate records as Bellesiles and found listings of guns where Bellesiles found none. And many of Bellesiles' probate records do not classify guns as damaged as he claimed in Arming America. Lingren has stated, "there are problems… An enormous number of people have become cautious. It's clear that this book is impressive to legal and social historians who do not check the background. Law professors and quantitative historians have been suspicious about the book since its release."

The Boston Globe looked into Bellesiles' evidence of San Francisco probate records from the 1840s and 50s. The Globe found that the records were destroyed in the great earthquake and fire of 1906. Deputy clerk of the San Francisco Superior Court, Ida Wong, told the Globe that indeed all the records had been destroyed in 1906. "All that we have here is 1907 and after. Everything before that was destroyed."

Rick Sherman of the California Genealogical Society 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 destruction of documents did not end in San Francisco. Bellesiles claims that his own statistical analysis was based on probate findings he'd put on yellow legal pads. But he says the pads were destroyed in a flood at Emory last April.

Bellesiles cites probate records from Vermont as a key source that what few guns existed were in very poor condition. In Arming America he quotes numerous 1770s and '80s probate records as categorizing guns "broken" or "old," yet the actual records contain no such descriptions.

When confronted with this misrepresentation, Bellesiles said, "I don't know. I am very upset about that. It's a mystery to me. I might have looked at a different record book. It's an egregious error on my part."

Other earlier criticisms of Arming America pointed out how Bellesiles makes several contradictory statements. He maintains that only the British army was able to use guns practically. Militia wouldn't use guns because they were unreliable and inaccurate. Based on this, one might think that the British won the war.

Arming America blames guns for violence among Indian tribes, making it seem as though tribes never fought each other before the advent of firearms.

Bellesiles takes George Washington's quotations about militia greatly out of context. He quotes a letter from Washington as commenting that when his militia arrived for duty, few men were armed. However, the letter actually states that Washington was only referring to one group of men, and he was shocked by the fact that they were not armed, because most militias were.

One of Bellesiles' most outspoken critics is firearms historian Joyce Malcolm of Bentley College. "The more I looked at it, the more disturbed I became. All historians can make mistakes and differ on interpretation, but in his case it's not just interpretation, or one or two points, but matters of fact and repeatedly." She said, "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 difference of interpretation, but misrepresentation of what his sources actually say, time after time after time."

"There are many questions raised about his use of probate records and other materials," states historian David Hackett Fisher of Brandeis University. "They are very serious criticisms. It cuts to the very foundation of what he reports, and convincing answers are not coming from him."

Chairman of the Department of History at Columbia, Alan Brinkley says that despite these recent revelations, he sees no need to rescind Bellesiles' Bancroft Award. "There is a difference between scholarly error and scholarly fraud."

Bellesiles' slanted view of history is evident in Arming America right from the beginning. The first two pages of the book focus on recent school massacres in Littleton, Colorado and Jonesboro, Arkansas. "But the temptation of a gun can trump a claim of faith in God and all dreams of childhood innocence," he writes. "The question asked repeatedly… after every similar mass shooting seems depressingly familiar: How did we get here?"

He makes it clear that he blames school shootings and high murder rates on the proliferation of guns in America. Like many anti-Second Amendment advocates he cites Europe's gun bans as responsible for low murder rates. Bellesiles is shocked by gun advertisements and magazines. There is no question about his hatred for the gun industry. He also jumps on the jaded bandwagon of demonizing Charlton Heston and the National Rifle Association. To Bellesiles, everything involving firearms today is abhorrent.