Abstract
Fifteen years ago, Michael Bellesiles’s Arming America was the darling of antigun intellectuals because it created an entirely new perception of the American relationship to guns. It implicitly argued for a much narrower reading of the Second Amendment that was compliant with an America (then) that hated guns and did not own them. Questions were soon raised about the accuracy of the statistics in Bellesiles’s articles and book, his honesty about where he researched documents, his widespread alteration of quotes, and his citations to documents that directly refuted his claims. He rapidly went from tenured professor of history at Emory University to bartender, picking up some unprecedented punishments for fraud along the way. A new book, Pamela Haag’s The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture makes many of the same arguments and demonstrates the dangers of unexamined assumptions. Judges and their clerks need to be aware that, while the future is unknown, the past changes at the whim of careless historians.
Recommended Citation
Clayton E. Cramer,
Bellesiles’s Arming America Redux: Does The Gunning of America Rewrite American History to Suit Modern Sensibilities?,
41
S. Ill. U. L.J.
403
(2017).
Available at:
https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/siulj/vol41/iss3/2