<P> Bellesiles energized this professional consensus by attempting to play "the professors against the NRA in a high - wire act of arrogant bravado ." For instance, he replied to Heston's criticism by telling the actor to earn a Ph. D. before criticizing the work of scholars . He pointed out that Cramer was "a long time advocate of unrestricted gun ownership" while he was a scholar who had "certain obligations of accuracy that transcend current political benefit ." After Bellesiles claimed he had been flooded by hate mail, both the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians endorsed a resolution condemning the alleged harassment . As Hoffer later wrote, Bellesiles was convinced that whether the entire profession agreed with "his stance on gun ownership (and I suspect most did), surely academic historians would not let their expertise be impugned by a rank and partisan amateur like Cramer ." </P> <P> In the end, the politics of the issue mattered less to historians "than the possibility that Bellesiles might have engaged in faulty, fraudulent, and unethical research ." As critics subjected the historical claims of the book to close scrutiny, they demonstrated that much of Bellesiles' research, particularly his handling of probate records, was inaccurate and possibly fraudulent . This criticism included noting several serious errors in the tables published in the book, as well as in the Journal of American History article, namely, that they did not provide a total number of cases and gave percentages that "were clearly wrong ." </P> <P> In two scholarly articles, law professor James Lindgren of Northwestern University noted that in Arming America, Bellesiles had </P> <Ul> <Li> purported to count guns in about a hundred wills from 17th - and 18th - century Providence, Rhode Island, but these did not exist because the decedents had died intestate (i.e., without wills); </Li> <Li> purported to count nineteenth - century San Francisco County probate inventories, but these had been destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire; </Li> <Li> reported a national mean for gun ownership in 18th - century probate inventories that was mathematically impossible; </Li> <Li> misreported the condition of guns described in probate records in a way that accommodated his thesis, as for instance, claiming that in Providence records most guns were listed as old or broken when fewer than 10% were so listed; </Li> <Li> miscited the counts of guns in nineteenth - century Massachusetts censuses and militia reports, </Li> <Li> had more than a 60% error rate in finding guns listed as part of estates in Vermont records; and </Li> <Li> had a 100% error rate in the cited gun - related homicide cases of seventeenth - century Plymouth, Massachusetts . </Li> </Ul>

Arming america the origins of a national gun culture by michael a. bellesiles