By Dan Flynn

An Emory University report has concluded that Michael Bellesiles, a professor at the school and the author of Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, engaged in deliberate deception in skewing his data to fit his thesis in his 2000 book. The damning report sparked Bellesiles to resign his tenured position, effective the last day of 2002.

Bellesiles reacted to the November release of the July 10 report by denying its charges and calling the document "just plain unfair." Bellesiles also announced his departure from Emory, explaining that he "cannot continue to teach in what I feel is a hostile environment."

Emory delayed the release of the report to allow for an appeals process and to give the accussed academic an opportunity to respond.

While the committee affords Bellesiles every benefit of the doubt and is perhaps kinder than many critics, it is nonetheless scathing at many points in its report.

Bellesiles engaged in "sloppy scholarship" and "superficial and thesis-driven research." The committee further contends that Bellesiles' "responses have been prolix, confusing, evasive and occasionally contradictory," and that his "scholarly integrity is seriously in question." The report concludes: "we find evidence of falsification." Princeton University Professor Stanley Katz chaired the three-person committee, with University of Chicago Professor Emeritus Hanna Gray and Harvard University Professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich comprising the rest of the body.

Arming America

Released in 2000, Arming America purported that America's love affair with the gun-from the Minutemen to the Wild West to Bernie Goetz's subway vigilantism-is an "invented tradition." "The gun is so central to American identity," the professor argued, "that the nation's history has been meticulously reconstructed to promote the necessity of a heavily armed American public."

The book quickly moved up bestseller lists and won praise from opponents of the 2nd Amendment. By 2001, Columbia University had awarded the book its Bancroft Prize, widely considered among the highest academic honors for books in the field of history.

Despite widespread praise, Arming America elicited skepticism from gun enthusiasts and some scholars even prior to its release. The report states that a controversy that began "to some degree as a debate involving hot political issues, became something else: a dispute over perceived failures of scholarly care and integrity in the documentation, presentation and analysis of archival sources."

The Report

The Emory committee's mandate focused on Bellesiles' use of probate records and information surrounding state militias. Despite this limited purview within the 400+ page book, the "Report of the Investigative Committee in the Matter of Professor Michael Bellesiles" found numerous examples of suspected deception and sloppy work.

A key segment of Arming America is "Table One," which purports to find a low-rate of gun ownership in early America. "Evaluating Table One is an exercise in frustration because it is almost impossible to tell where Bellesiles got his information," the report notes. No scholar has been able to replicate Professor Bellesiles findings, and the report concludes that what Bellesiles claimed to have found was mathematically impossible. "Significantly," the Emory review states, "neither he in his subsequently published data nor any other scholar has been able to replicate the low percentages of guns reported in those tables for the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries." Further confusing matters is Professor Bellesiles inability to produce much of his own source material, which he claims was destroyed in an office flood. "According to Professor Bellesiles, all of the probate research on these pages perished when his office at Emory was flooded," the report skeptically observes.

Central to the information in Table One, and to the entire Emory report, is Bellesiles exclusion of statistics during the Revolutionary War that greatly undermined his thesis. The three-professor panel contends, "here is a clear admission of misrepresentation, since the label on column one in Table One clearly says '1765-1790.' If Professor Bellesiles silently excluded data from the years 1774-1776, as he asserts, precisely because they failed to show low numbers of guns, he has willingly misrepresented the evidence."

San Francisco records that Arming America relies on are non-existent, having been destroyed in the great earthquake and ensuing fire in 1906. Faced with this inconvenient fact, Bellesiles now claims he read these records in nearby Contra Costa County. "If Professor Bellesiles did indeed read Contra Costa records believing they were from San Francisco, then the issue could again be one of extremely sloppy documentation rather than fraud," the report reads. "There are...aspects to the story, however, that raise doubts about his veracity." Specifically, the report notes how Bellesiles didn't rely on the Contra County excuse until a friend suggested it and the records he was able to produce strangely had little to do with his project.

Similarly, the report points out that records that Bellesiles claims to have found in a National Archives center in East Point, Georgia, don't exist there.

When information posted on Bellesiles' website proved false, the Emory professor claimed to be the victim of computer hackers. Similarly, he maintains that e-mails, which just happen to put forward a scenario contradicting Bellesiles' current story, sent from his computer to another scholar were actually sent by an imposter. The committee took notice: "we note his subsequent failure to be forthcoming, and the implausibility of some of his defenses-a prime example is that of the 'hacking' of his website; another is his disavowal of the e-mails of Aug. 30 and Sept. 19, 2000 to Professor Lindgren which present a version of the location and reading of records substantially in conflict with Professor Bellesiles' current account."

The report maintains, "the best that can be said of his work with the probate and militia records is that he is guilty of unprofessional and misleading work."

'Concluded and Resolved'

"Emory now considers the investigation...concluded and resolved," declared Robert Paul, interim dean of the college, after the report's delayed release to the public.

The Atlanta school's student newspaper, The Emory Wheel, editorialized in favor of the report, and several of Bellesiles' former colleagues have lauded the committee's fairness. Not everyone, however, is pleased with the panel's findings.

"I believe that if we begin investigating every scholar who challenges received truth," Bellesiles concludes, "it will not be long before no challenging scholarly books are published."