Armed America

Some years ago, when I ran the civil liberties site for About.com, I had the peculiar pleasure of reviewing a book about the history of firearms in America. The book was written by a historian named Michael Bellesiles and ... well, that's probably all you needed to know. The fate of Arming America and its author made headline news. Repudiated by its publisher, condemned by scholars as a work of fraud, and stripped of its awards, the book now ranks alongside Clifford Irving's "authorized autobiography" of Howard Hughes as embarrassing hoaxes that briefly fooled the publishing industry and some credulous reviewers. Bellesiles himself was forced to resign from his professorship at Emory University.

I'm happy to say that I wasn't one of the reviewers who was taken in. I had early doubts about the book, though I didn't have the scholarly background to say outright that Bellesiles was wrong in his claims. I just thought the book was excessively ideological and belabored minor issues to make anti-gun-rights political points that didn't seem appropriate for a work of history. To do a decent review of the book, I contacted somebody who knew a lot more about the subject than I did: a fellow named Clayton Cramer.

As it turned out, Cramer had been digging into Bellesiles's research for several years. He cited me chapter and verse about problems with Arming America--problems that started coming out in scholarly papers and newspaper articles with much wider circulation than I had with my Website. I'm proud, though, that I was a small part of the wave of criticism that eventually sank Bellesiles's fraud.

Anyway, all of this is a long-winded and roundabout way for me to say that Clayton Cramer now has his own book out about the history of firearms in America: Armed America. The book covers much of the same ground as Bellesiles's work, although it comes to very different conclusions--finding that firearms were actually very common in early America.

I've only just started Cramer's book, but I find it interesting and certainly free of the red flags I saw in the other work. I look forward to finishing Armed America and posting a complete review.