"To be sure, we need history. But we need it in a manner different from the way in which the spoilt idler in the garden of knowledge uses it, no matter how elegantly he may look down on our coarse and graceless needs and distresses. That is, we need it for life and action, not for a comfortable turning away from life and action or merely for glossing over the egotistical life and the cowardly bad act. We wish to use history only insofar as it serves the living. But there is a degree of doing history and a valuing of it through which life atrophies and degenerates. To bring this phenomenon to light as a remarkable symptom of our time is every bit as necessary as it may be painful."
—Frederick Nietzsche, "The Use and Abuse of History"

"Take your powder, take your gun,
Report to General Washington."
—Schoolhouse Rock

History is more than a list of dates and battles: It is how we construct our identities, how we create a mental map of our world and our place in it. As such, history has tremendous power in our society. In fact, ivory-tower academics' paging through dusty old books can have tremendous real-world consequences. Take for example, Rachel Maines' affidavit, in which she used her research on the history of vibrators to argue that laws banning sex toys are "legislative novelties," which was used in the court cases that resulted in the overturning of obscenity laws, or Boswell's work on same-sex unions in premodern Europe, which has been used to advance the case for gay and lesbian civil unions.

Perhaps this is why historians who lie to the public are so excoriated. Joseph Ellis, the acclaimed historian at Mount Holyoke and one of the scholars who helped to make Thomas Jefferson's slave mistress, Sally Hemmings, a household name some two centuries after her death, has apparently lied about everything from his (nonexistent) Vietnam service to his adventures on the football gridiron. The late Stephen Ambrose, another best-selling historian, under pressure to keep the family business of commodifying America's past rolling, evidently lifted entire tracts of his books from other authors. Even Doris Kearns Goodwin, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian, had a shadow thrown over her credibility when it was discovered that she had accidentally typed up quotes from other writers in her notes as her own work. Journalists, who, after all, are the chroniclers of events that haven't yet aged into "history," aren't spared the rod, either, which is why Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass were hounded from pillar to post.

Lying to the public is the job of politicians, not scholars, which is what makes Michael Bellesiles' having been crucified on political grounds all the more tragic. Bellesiles is, of course, the former Emory University professor whose Arming America, published by Knopf in 2000, made a convincing case that America's gun culture is a post-Civil War phenomenon, rather than something autochthonic that had sprung up on the frontier of the new nation. This, of course, has grave implications for the gun-control debate, since it suggests that the Second Amendment, rather than guaranteeing individuals' right to bear arms, was an attempt to remove a possible objection by citizens, who were little enough inclined to own guns as it was, to acquiring weapons for militia duty. The response to Arming America was immediate; in fact, considering the politically charged nature of the gun-control debate in this country, it was perhaps naïve of Bellesiles not to have anticipated the smear campaign that was immediately launched against him. Accusations ranged from his using bad math in his calculations to the outright invention of sources.

A three-person committee, led by the eminent Princeton history professor Stanley Katz, investigated five specific questions relating to the book, and found that while Bellesiles had certainly been sloppy in his work and that his "scholarly integrity" in certain areas "was seriously in question," he was not guilty of outright fraud. Though Bellesiles protested that the committee's findings were based on "three paragraphs and a table in a six-hundred page book," he nonetheless resigned from Emory after the Fall, 2002 semester, the $4,000 Bancroft prize awarded him by Columbia University was rescinded, and I know for a fact that he lost other publishing opportunities because of the controversy. Arming America could have made Bellesiles' career; instead, it ruined him.

The circumstances in which this investigation occurred were highly unusual. Not only were outright threats and demands for retraction made to his defenders, but the scrutiny that Bellesiles' work faced was almost unheard-of. Historians, after all, are only human; they do make mistakes. Many standard, even acclaimed, texts have contained errors that have been rectified by later scholarships. Bellesiles unquestionably made some pretty bad mistakes in his math, and his notes on the probate records were probably pretty sloppy—though we'll never know for sure, as they were destroyed by a flood in the Emory history department. Nonetheless, rather than allowing him to put forth a second, corrected, edition, Knopf allowed the book to go out of print.

Fortunately, Brooklyn-based indie publishers Soft Skull—who also resurrected J.H. Hatfield's rather controversial Fortunate Son—decided to allow Bellesiles a chance at redemption. I, of course, have nothing to lose by reviewing the second edition of Arming America: I'm an independent scholar, not a tenure-track academic, and if anyone would care to contact the history departments I've applied to for next fall to tell them I'm full of shit and they shouldn't allow me into their Ph.D. programs, well, I would be honored by the attention.

Full disclosure: I live in Manhattan, and come from a non-weapons owning backgound. Urban Jews don't have much to do with firearms, and (then-Representative) Chuck Schumer was actually at my Bar Mitzvah—though my uncle, who was in the military, does have a pistol. Nonetheless, I recognize the utility of firearms both as a means of self-defense and for hunting. It would be hypocritical if I did not: I am a fencer and have a large collection of swords, implements that, like guns, are potent weapons and symbols. I am, in fact, a gun-control moderate; I do not think the Second Amendment allows a "right" of gun ownership, I do not think ordinary Americans should have access to military-grade weapons, and I favor severely restricting access to handguns, but I am for private ownership of firearms. However, this has to be within limits: We have to pass a driver's test to drive a car, which is even more necessary to life in America than a gun is; there is no reason why we should not have to pass a course at a "gun dojo"—or join the National Guard—in order to have a firearm.

I was first introduced to the term "anti-gun" as a pejorative, specifically, one used against me concerning this piece I did on this site. It is, of course, a loaded term, aimed at turning its target into a straw man that may be used as target practice. The most vocal tend to be the most extreme, and those who use the term "anti-gun" tend to be politically radical in their own right—a radicalism that, in my experience, is tied up with fear of the government, black-helicopter conspiracy theories, and the general American longing for, and fear of, Armageddon. I even received an e-mail suggesting that, because I supposedly do not support universal and unrestricted gun ownership, I do not value my own life—which is similar to saying that because I support gay rights, I must obviously be a pedophile. The scary part of this isn't so much that the American educational system has failed to train these people in critical thought; it's that they're not only armed, but they're stupid and armed. Our current age would do well to heed Nietzsche's warning of the "use and abuse of history."

Soft Skull made a good preemptive attack by preceeding Arming America with a pamphlet, "Weighed in an Even Balance," in which Bellesiles answers his accusers, or at least those of his accusers who were coherent enough in their arguments to be answerable. Like Arming America, "Weighed in an Even Balance" isn't perfect. Bellesiles could have been more specific in citing those who accused him, and it could have read less like an Internet flame war and more like academic discourse. Bellesiles oversimplifies some details of the argument, and then corrects himself paragraphs later. (For instance, his discussion of early modern military organization and why firearms were adopted would have had me tearing my hair out, if I didn't shave my head.) His style of attributing quotations could also be more transparent, but this is a stylistic, not a historiographical, issue. None of this detracts from the essential value of the work.

A history book should be seen as an argument that combines verifiably true things—Washington said this, Jefferson did that—into a coherent narrative, not a statement of truth in and of itself. For his part, Bellesiles makes a convincing argument for how he sees American gun culture as having developed. If his opponents actually have a counter-argument, they should present it, rather than cast aspersions on his character or misconstrue his motives. (Bellesiles, a former skeet shooter and NRA member, was never "anti-gun.") Never mind the faulty probate records: There are mountains of other evidence to support Bellesiles' position—so much evidence, in fact, that one tires of reading countless pages on state militias who, despite laws requiring attendance at musters, could hardly be bothered to turn up one day a year (and even when they did, the proceedings were farcical), government gun censuses that turned up a pitiful number of weapons in private hands (and even these were likely to be allowed to rust and fall to pieces), and statistics on how the American gun industry (even Eli Whitney's much-vaunted gun works) produced hardly enough weapons to keep the army equipped, let alone the majority of the citizenry. Guns were expensive and unnecessary to early Americans; the few that were available were often shoddy and poorly-made. Sure, there were "long hunters," but Natty Bumpo was as typical of early Americans as Ivanhoe was of medieval Englishmen. The forests were cleared and the country settled by farmers, not by hunters and Indian-fighters.

The image of the American and his gun is, nonetheless, one of the world's great persistent myths. A fourth-grade textbook on Tennessee that I worked on at McGraw-Hill was virtually mandated by the state to make mention of the superior aim of the American "long hunters" and their triumph at King's Mountain, where they killed the British commander Patrick Ferguson, inventor of the Ferguson breech-loading rifle, and defeated his force of Loyalist militia. The victory at King's Mountain likely owed as much to skill in hand-to-hand combat as it did to straight shooting. Unlike Ferguson's invention, which never gained widespread use, most early guns—muskets, to use the proper term—were unreliable, slow, inaccurate, and useless in the rain. The most dangerous part of the musket (other than the likelihood of its blowing up) was the bayonet, and to be effective at all, they had to be used in massed, disciplined volleys, with practiced soldiers able to fire perhaps three rounds a minute—and discipline, practice, and numbers were three things Americans did not have. Americans are a practical people, and from Jim Bowie's sandbar fight to Representative J.J. Anthony murdering House Speaker John Wilson in the Arkansas State House in 1837 to duels in New Orleans, the United States was a knife, sword, and cane culture more than it was a gun culture. Moreover, from the time the Florentine militia that Machiavelli had so championed crumbled before Spanish regulars at the siege of Prato in 1512 to the Iraqi insurgents currently being decimated by the US military, militias have rarely had any success against standing armies. Certain things are best left to the professionals.

So, what made America a gun culture? Bellesiles reaches much the same conclusion that Michael Moore did in Bowling for Columbine: Paranoia and a perceived need for self-defense (against blacks, tramps, Indians, or what have you), combined with the fine art of knowing how to pitch a story to the public, be it Sam Colt calling his revolver the "Peacemaker" or the evening news making anomalous, random acts of crime seem like an everyday occurrence. We Americans think we need guns because we live in a society where we're encouraged to fear one another, where we're encouraged to do to someone else before they do to us, and where we've inherited a legacy of racism and inequality and a religious tradition that preaches that Armageddon is inevitable. Thus, the invention of the "right" of gun ownership.

"Right" is a loaded word. As far as I know, an inherent right to weapons ownership was never one of the Enlightenment principles the Founders held dear to their hearts—though, in European society of the time, wearing a sword was a gentleman's prerogative—and it's not one recognized by the international community at large. No one ever condemned Pol Pot, for instance, because he didn't let Cambodians have guns. The Second Amendment was put in the Bill of Rights because of certain historical circumstances; Michael Bellesiles' Arming America was attacked by the NRA and other gun-rights groups precisely because it showed the Second Amendment in the context of a cash-strapped Federal government that was financially and ideologically dependent on the state militias for national defense; the Amendment was intended to help build citizen militias, and was not so much directed at individuals. Since we have modern armed forces and a National Guard, the Second Amendment lives in a very different world today.

We tend to regard the Constitution and Bill of Rights as sacred documents, but the fact is that they are also historical documents, and, like all historical documents, they are products of a certain time and place. The Constitution has been modified, interpreted, and contravened as circumstances dictate—sometimes for ill, and sometimes for good, as is demonstrated by the fact that we don't get three-fifths of a holiday on Martin Luther King Day. Gun ownership touches a nerve, however, that Constitutional issues like state sovereign immunity do not—even though recent court decisions in the latter field have far more disturbing implications for our civil liberties than those in the former do. In order to have a reasonable dialogue about gun control, people have to stop bowing to the Moloch of the Second Amendment.

Academic freedom is not something that should be compromised as a result of petty political squabbles. Whether or not you agree with his thesis—and it is certainly your perogative to challenge his arguments—Michael Bellesiles, and Arming America, both deserve a second chance. (Hell, considering that known plagiarists Kearns Goodwin and Ellis both won the Pulitzer Prize, he should probably be given that, too.) The second edition of the book deserves scholarly appraisal and vindication, and his arguments deserve serious consideration by academics. The way to defeat any position you disagree with is not to belittle the speaker; it is to engage the argument itself. Until the absolutist-gun-rights camp does this, the rhetoric that they are so eager to spout forth cannot be taken seriously.

Click here to order Arming America. You'd better read it before you e-mail editor@corporatemofo.com, because any message that doesn't show knowledge of the book will be deleted.