phil ringnalda

“Arming America” spoke directly to recent debates about gun control. Arguing that no American “gun culture” existed before 1850 or so, [Michael] Bellesiles marshaled a variety of sources to show that guns were much rarer, significantly less useful, and far more regulated than previously believed.
— The Daily Standard

However, as is all too often the case with such groundbreaking discoveries that overturn what we thought was true, he just made it all up. When the book first came out, I thought it more than a little odd that everything every historian had ever written about the ownership of firearms from pre-Colonial times to the Civil War was wrong, but I certainly wasn’t about to verify his every source (or even read the damn thing). Thanks in part to the wonders of the internet, enough other people with questions apparently got together and pooled enough contradictory data to realize that he was at best a stunningly sloppy scholar, and at worst a lying bastard.
[via Reductio Ad Absurdum]