Talk:Arming America

James Lindgren, Gloria Main and Randolph Roth have all stated publicly they are NOT publishing as advocates of gun control, and indeed do not take a public position on the issue, and would prefer to be quoted simply as scholars in the field of early American History, culture and law.

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Can someone add links to articles defending Bellesiles? All of the citations in this article and the links attached take only one side of the story and all concern just the note taking on the probate records. Perhaps I am mistaken and every single person comdemns Bellesiles, but why does this article only contain criticisms. The links at the bottom are mostly re-hashes of each others' arguments and are redundant and compound. Having read them all, as well as the further links they contain, it would appear that there are three primary sources criticizing Bellesiles, Lindgren most prominent among them and the best researched, and then about a thousand right wing blogs and advocacy sites that quote and re-quote all the same sources. There seems to be a minor cottage industry in the original authors citing and re-citing each other in order to increase their frequency count on Lexis-Nexis which from an academic's point of view is just outrageous and borderline academic fraud.

By the by - with all this hot air about the sanctity of accuracy in data gathering, where were these same people when the Bush White House declared "the jury's out" on Global Warming? I guess accuracy is only important if it supports your side.

Are there are scholarly articles (i.e. not pro-NRA gun nut blogs), which critique the rest of the book? The sources here only concern themselves with about two pages in the entire book which is almost 600 pages long. Has anyone written about Bellesiles treatment of the militia issues (effective or ineffective? Well armed or needing government issued firearms?), or the War of 1812 (i.e. that it showed the ineffectiveness of citizen miltias and led to the emergence of the modern army -- or did it?)?

I get it that the gun nut lobby hates this guy and does everything in its power to discredit him and pile on the same three citations of innacuracy, but I am sick of hearing that this idiot or that idiot flooded their attic and could still read their high school notes, or that because Bellesiles didn't filoe an insurance report on his notes HE MUST BE LYING!!!; or that moron number 1 hit a bullseye with a flintlock rifle while moron number 2 was reading the Contra Costa County probate records and "proved" that Bellesiles lied about San Francisco records - even if the pages WERE labelled San Francisco. I get it....you hate him and you won; his carreer is destroyed......enough already.

For the integrity of Wikipedia and furtherance of academic scholarship on this important issue can someone add more primary sources, critiques or lack thereof of the rest of the book -- or is this it? One table and three paragraphs were innacurate and for that this guy got burned at the stake by Second Ammendment nutjobs, while standing on the Altar of private gun ownership - all for misquoting a few tables and then making a fool out of himself in the press with lame excuses and poorly thought through answers.

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The Emory University statement, which I just read, does not convict Bellesiles of Fraud or otherwise assert he committed fraud - I have removed that mistatement.

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Recent evidence and further research supporting Bellesiles has been assiduously edited out of this article. The text of the Emory University report has been selectively edited and the author of this article falsely states that they found Bellesiles guilty of fraud - which they did not. Subsequent to the main controversy on this book a number of scholars went back through the same records and have reproduced most of Bellesiles work reinforcing rather than contradicting his conclusions. The charges of fraud and innacuracy turnout to cover only 13 pages of an almost 600 page book and the "innacuracies" when "corrected" by his critics predominantly reinforced his conclusions.

This article is another blatant example of pro-gun lobbying nut jobs using the internet to spread half truths and outright lies to further their bizarre support of the gun industry.

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As it stands, the article is almost entirely anti-Bellesiles. I've made some changes to the book synopsis and added an introductory paragraph to the controversy section to try to even things out and adopt a more neutral tone, but more work needs to be done. Glaurung quena 23:46, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

"The controversy surrounding the book is almost completely partisan..."? This does not match my memory; as I recall, probate experts with no relation to the issue immediately cried foul, since what Bellesiles reported did not match their unrelated research (and then there's the matter of the SF probate records which were destroyed in the famous earthquake and fire).

"James Lindgren, a right-wing blogger"? I don't know the intimate details of Wikipedia's POV rules, but this strikes me as rather POV; many would deny that the Volokh Conspiracy is "right wing", and making this the first bit of identification for Professor Lindgren strikes me as misleading if not slanted.

I don't know what to do, there's a reason this "article is almost entirely anti-Bellesiles": he wrote an article and then a book based on provably fraudulent research, and was called out on it in many venues, e.g. this is the only Bancroft Prize ever withdrawn. I assume probate records were a focus of the investigations because they are very available and there are many scholars who are intimately familiar with them, but there's no reason to believe that any other aspects of his research cited in the article/book are likely to be reliable---and he claims his notes were destroyed, making it extremely difficult to investigate the sources of his other research upon which this Wikipedia article now bases so much faith in.

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The Bancroft committee itself has stated they withdrew the prize over claims of plagiarism and misattribution - not because the book's thesis was itself wrong. There is a great distinction here - the book can be true and accurate in all respects, but the author discredited for academic malfeasance. The research itself has only been shown to be innacurate with respect to the probate records and then the revised figures and aanalysis of Lindgren and others has tended to reinforce Bellesiles arguments rather than contradict it, with only a few exceptions. Lindgren's article was not an attempt to disprove Bellesiles thesis, he largely confirmed it, but rather to suggest that Bellesiles had fudged the data or misattributed the sources or possibly had not done the original research at all. Subsequent researches have managed to reconstruct most of Bellesiles work and the new stiudies and data have overall reinforced the conclusions on this point, that evidence of gun ownership of the peacetime civilian population was scant. It is rather like a charge of plagiarism - the author is damned even if the story itself is true. Bellesiles deserved to have his prize revoked, but let's not confuse that with the book itself being innacurate.

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Recasting this article to emphasize all the research he says he did, while only pointing out that the probate based material was definitively proven wrong, puts what I believe to be a misleading slant on the article. Hga 21:41, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

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But there do not appear to be any other critiques other than the probate research - and the subsequent work by third parties confirmed all of his earlier statements save one - the state of armaments among the Massachusetts militia. This latter point is inconclusive as the new sources do not provide figures, just anecdotes suggesting a higher percentage of armed citizens than Bellesiles cited. So re-casting the article to suggest that he made two or three errors in research but the rest of the book is unchallenged would - whether you like it or not -- be the truth. As it is, this article is manifestly biased.

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