FYI (copy below):
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/62148_shapcol11.shtml
=======================================================
Historian’s failings have impact today

Thursday, March 14, 2002

By THOMAS SHAPLEY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin aren’t the only
nationally known historians whose scholarship is in
question. The spotlight of peer and public scrutiny has
also fallen on Michael Bellesiles (pronounced “Buh-leel”),
the Emory University professor who wrote the book “Arming
America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture.”

Not only are Bellesiles’ alleged transgressions less broadly
reported than the others. They are, if confirmed, more
relevant because his historical thesis has become part of
the contemporary public policy debate on the Second
Amendment.

While the other historians’ purported failings are more,
well, academic, Bellesiles’ are more relevant. As David
Skinner explains in the Weekly Standard, “Arguing that no
American ‘gun culture’ existed before 1850 or so, Bellesiles
marshaled a variety of sources to show that guns were much
rarer, significantly less useful, and far more regulated
than previously believed… If no absolute, presumptive
right to own a gun existed back when the Second Amendment
was written, then no such right exists today.”

That would be a profound strike against the view some of us
hold that the Founders recognized an individual right to
keep and bear arms important enough to enshrine in the Bill
of Rights. Can the “right of the people to keep and bear
arms” be culled from the rights of the people “peaceably to
assemble and to petition the government for a redress of
grievances,” “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers
and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures”?

If so, it would bolster the case that owning firearms is a
collective rather than individual right.

Handgun Control. Inc., in April of last year congratulated
Bellesiles on his book winning Columbia University’s
Bancroft Prize, the preeminent award for history writing.
The anti-gun group praised Bellesiles’ “meticulous
research,” which “debunks the mythology propagated by the
gun lobby that guns were essential for survival in the early
history of this nation… By exposing the truth about gun
ownership in Early America, Michael Bellesiles has removed
one more weapon in the gun lobby’s arsenal of fallacies
against common-sense gun laws.”

Criticism from Second Amendment advocates was to be
expected. But the unexpected criticism came from his fellow
historians.

James Lindgren, professor of probate law at Northwestern
University, asked Bellesiles for the original sources of
some of the data in the book for his own research.
Bellesiles said his notes had been destroyed in a flood.
When an intrigued Lindgren and a colleague checked the
sources themselves, they found numerous flaws — or gaps —
in Bellesiles’ research. Other scholars found additional
problems.

The world of American historians held its collective breath
in anticipation of a review last month by four prominent
scholars in a forum in the prestigious William and Mary
Quarterly.

Three of the four solicited essays raised serious questions
about Bellesiles’ work. David Garrow, a Pulitzer
Prize-winning Emory University colleague, told The Atlanta
Journal and Constitution that “cumulatively, those three
essays make a powerful case for a charge of scholarly
incompetence, of being so blinded by the light that he rode
roughshod over anything that didn’t propel him toward the
light.”

Bellesiles has admitted he made errors in the book and
corrections have been posted to the paperback edition.
Emory University has called for a formal investigation into
allegations against Bellesiles.

One of Bellesiles’ defenders is Dr. Arthur Kellermann,
Director of the Center for Injury Control at Emory
University’s School of Medicine.

Kellermann’s allegiance presents an opportunity to challenge
a long-cherished belief of gun-control advocates that
Kellermann himself fomented in a 1986 report. Along with
co-author Donald Reay, then King County medical examiner,
Kellermann suggested that an individual who keeps a gun in
the home is 43 times more likely to kill a family member
than an intruder. The report was based on a study of
firearms deaths in King County during 1978-83.

Those in the gun-control community took the study and rushed
to sweeping judgments about the safety risks of guns in
homes. In their rush, they failed to note at least one
important caveat from Kellermann: “Mortality studies such
as ours do not include cases in which burglars or intruders
are wounded or frightened away by the use or display of a
firearm. Cases in which would-be intruders may have
purposely avoided a house known to be armed are also not
identified… A complete determination of firearm risks
versus benefits would require that these figures be known.”

Unnoticed, too, was the fact that 84 percent of the in-home
deaths was the result of suicide, irrelevant to crime or
self-defense issues.

And look at the type of households that made their way into
Kellermann’s report. Fifty-three percent had a history of a
family member being arrested. Thirty-one percent had a
household history of illicit drug use; 25 percent reported
alcohol-related problems; 32 percent contained a household
member hit or hurt in a family fight.It’s wrong to make an
ideological point by playing fast and loose with history,
whether the history is colonial or contemporary.

Thomas Shapley is an editorial writer and member of the P-I
Editorial Board.