Forum

Historians and Guns

FEW works of history in recent years have generated such extreme responses as Michael A. Bellesiles's Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. Hailed as "astonishingly original and innovative," it initially gained wide and favorable attention as a rare feat of historical scholarship: an inquiry into the past with immediate bearing on the present. "This book changes everything," Michael Zuckerman observed. "The way we think about guns and violence in America will never be the same. . . . Neither will our understanding of the Second Amendment. Michael A. Bellesiles is the NRA's worst nightmare."1 The National Rifle Association heeded that warning. Opponents of gun control launched an immediate counter-attack, not only deriding his findings but also assaulting his reputation, so much so that several institutions, including the Councils of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and of the American Historical Association, issued statements in defense of Bellesiles's academic freedom of inquiry.2	1
But the debate over Arming America is not limited to politics. Even as Bellesiles was receiving the 2001 Bancroft Prize, his work was being subjected to far-ranging criticism by historians, political scientists, and other scholars.3At the center of discussion is Bellesiles's contention that contrary to popular myth, no gun culture existed in early America, indeed, that enthusiasm for guns did not become central to national identity--or more precisely, white male identity--until the era of Civil War. In support of that thesis, Arming America combines archival research and secondary scholarship to forge a far-ranging interpretation. The greatest debate has turned on its claim that gun ownership, as indicated by probate records and militia censuses, was limited to a select minority of white males from the beginnings of European settlement in North America down to the 1820s. That issue has occupied much attention in on-line discussions and reviews, and it has made its way into the press, familiarizing newspaper readers with the once-arcane subject of probate in early America (a subject familiar to subscribers of the William and Mary Quarterly). There is more at issue than probate. Like other ambitious works of scholarship, Arming America musters a variety of specialized studies to fashion its argument. And it deserves to be assessed on the same terms as comparable books: for its care and deftness in using primary sources, its accuracy and insight in drawing on secondary scholarship, and its originality and persuasiveness in developing an interpretive synthesis.	2
In this spirit, the William and Mary Quarterly has asked leading experts in four areas of pertinent scholarship--constitutional history, economic history, military history, and the history of violence--to appraise the claims and implications of Arming America, as seen from their specialized vantage, and invited Michael Bellesiles to reply. Jack N. Rakove, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (1996), sets Arming America in the context of scholarship on the Second Amendment and on constitutional interpretation more generally. Gloria Main, the pre-eminent scholar of probate records, scrutinizes Bellesiles's use of inventories of estates to gauge gun ownership over time. The military historian Ira Gruber considers the account of militias, weapons, and war in American history set forth by Arming America. Finally, Randolph Roth assesses the book's claims about guns and homicide in America from his perspective as a longtime student of violence in America.	. . .