You really got to read this editorial by a brit to understand what the Europeans do not understand about America:
HERE is an amazing statistic for you- children in the United States are twelve times more likely to die of gunshot wounds than any other country in the world not actually involved in civil war.
That is not all. Not only is it possible in many American states to buy a handgun over the counter, no questions asked, but it is also possible to buy bullets whose sole purpose is to penetrate the body armour worn by policeman.
Yet despite years of pressure by advocates of gun control, Congress has apparently been unable to agree on any measure that would significantly curtail the availability of guns. Any move to do so is met by the wrath of the National Rifle Association, one of the most powerful lobbies in the United States. Its case is simple: the framers of the American Constitution, those self-reliant frontiersmen, won freedom from English repression in the War of Independence because they had a Constitutional right to bear arms. The famous Second Amendment reads: "The right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed".
Sorry but there are quite a few questions asked when buying a handgun including a background check. Plus, please quote the whole sentence of the Second Amendment instead of parsing sections of it to benefit your editorial:
A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed.
Then he has the gall to bring up a disgraced author in his research:
That is why today there are some 230 million guns in the USA- a rate of ownership of one per adult. But at last someone has had the courage- and you need it to take on the National Rifle Association- to say that this whole story is a load of rubbish. Professor Michael Bellesiles, of Emory University, Atlanta, has looked at gun ownership at the time of the War of Independence, looking mainly at probate inventories, where citizens had to list everything they owned.
Surprise, surprise: at no time before 1850 did more than a tenth of the adult male population own guns.
This is quite shocking actually if you do any research on Michael Bellesiles. He won the Bancroft Prize from Columbia University for his book "Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture" which stated that he studied the probate records of early America and concluded the statistic that this editorial espouses.
Problem is that Mr. Bellesiles' work was utterly and throughly a sham.
The evidence he had presented for his groundbreaking theory was investigated first by experts from a range of disciplines and political viewpoints; then by a special symposium in a learned journal; and finally, as a result of the disturbing findings, by the professor’s university and an outside panel of scholars that it appointed. The results are now in: Bellesiles’ arguments are based on wholesale misuse of evidence and, in some cases, no evidence at all. The "invented tradition" is fact, the professor’s version a folk tale.
Here is a short synopsis on the book:
On to America, where Bellesiles finds guns rare, expensive, highly regulated, inefficient, unwanted by civilians, and nearly useless for military purposes or hunting. He reports that colonists "often perceived the ax as the equal of a gun" and that there was a "complete failure" on their part to care for guns "or to learn their proper use." As a result of popular indifference and neglect, he says, all guns were made into "the property of the state, subject to storage in central storehouses," so thoroughly regulated that "no gun ever belonged unqualifiedly to an individual." As for hunting with guns, Bellesiles writes, "From the start hunting was an inessential luxury, associated either with the elite gentleman with too much time on his hands, or with the poorest fringes of civilization, if not outright savagery." Bellesiles dismisses the militia, which most historians acknowledge was not up to the standards of professional troops, as "little more than a political gesture," most members having no usable guns.
What is his evidence for these startling conclusions? To document the scarcity of guns, Bellesiles relies on his tabulation of 11,170 estate inventories from 40 counties over the years 1765 to 1859. From these he calculates that in colonial America 14.7 percent of adult white men owned firearms, 53 percent of which were either old or broken. On the frontier, he finds, only 14.2 percent of men owned guns. Not until 1849 to 1859, Bellesiles reports, did the percentages of households with guns increase, largely due to the successful advertising of Samuel Colt. For proof that guns were not used in hunting, he relies on a survey of some 80 travel accounts written between 1750 and 1860. His portrayal of the militia draws on an investigation of government records, letters, and other documents.
And on to the lies and distortions :
Fall 2000. Even before the book is in print, having read both Bellesiles’ 1996 article that formed the core of the book and advance press coverage, Northwestern University law professor James Lindgren asks to see Bellesiles’ probate database. Bellesiles tells him there is no database, only yellow legal pads on which he made pencil ticks representing guns listed in the probate records. Unfortunately, Bellesiles reports, the pads were irreparably damaged in a May 2000 flood at Emory University.
As the book becomes available, scholars find serious mistakes in their own areas of expertise. I find English and colonial facts wrong. Clayton Cramer, the author of two books on gun history, finds extensive evidence of hunting with guns even in the accounts Bellesiles says he read. Discrepancies emerge in the book’s claims about low homicide rates, the militia’s preparedness, the range and reloading time of muskets, the supposed preference of Americans for the ax over the gun, laws requiring militia guns to be housed in government arsenals, and comments of the Founders.
Readers point out that Arming America lacks any specific information about the 11,170 probates examined, how many there were from any one county or any one time period, where Bellesiles examined them, and how he computed the national averages. Lindgren (a specialist in early American probates), Justin Heather, and other scholars eventually discover that Bellesiles’ computations are mathematically impossible. To obtain his national gun ownership average of 14.7 percent, for example, the number of probates from frontier counties would have had to be improbably large.
The archivists at the federal archives in East Point, Georgia, where Bellesiles told Lindgren he did most of the probate work, insist they never had the probate records. Bellesiles changes his story, saying he crisscrossed the country for 10 years visiting individual county archives. He can’t remember precisely which ones.
October and November 2000. Scholars examining the only set of probate records Bellesiles specifically cited, those for Providence, Rhode Island, find that nearly everything he says about them is mistaken. Bellesiles claimed the 186 inventories from early Providence were "all for property-owning adult males" and that, while guns appeared in 48 percent, more than half of them were "evaluated as old and of poor quality" and many were "state-owned." But three independent scholars find 17 of the estates were owned by women, 62 percent had guns, only 9 percent of the guns were described as old and of poor quality, and only one was state-owned.
December 2000. As debates about Arming America rage on discussion boards, Bellesiles claims he is getting threatening e-mails. He retreats from online debates and gets a secret e-mail address.
May and June 2001. In response to Bellesiles’ claims that he has received death threats and that a fire was set against his office door, the governing councils of the American Historical Association, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, and other organizations post resolutions condemning such harassment and defending civil exchange.
September 2001. One of the 40 counties from which Bellesiles said he drew data on gun ownership was San Francisco, where he claimed to have examined 1850s probates at the Superior Court. In response to inquiries from National Review’s Melissa Seckora, the court’s archivist reports that all 19th-century documents were destroyed in the great earthquake and fire of 1906. When questioned about this, Bellesiles says he must have seen these documents somewhere else, suggesting several other California libraries. None of them has the records either.
To support his contentions about the poor quality of guns, Bellesiles began posting on his Web site Vermont probate records listing guns described as old and broken. A scholar and a Boston Globe reporter examine the originals and find no such descriptions. Told of this, Bellesiles claims his Web site must have been hacked by someone who altered the documents. Emory University investigates but finds no evidence of hacking.
November 2001. In an unprecedented move, Emory demands that Bellesiles offer a "reasoned, measured, de-tailed, point-by-point response" to his critics. His reply, published by the Organization of American Historians in its online newsletter, instead complains of his ill treatment while addressing little of substance. Oddly, the reply refers to only 12 probates from San Francisco, in contrast to the "few hundred" he claimed to have examined when Seckora interviewed him.
January 2002. Bellesiles claims to have found the missing San Francisco probates at the Contra Costa County Historical Archive. He sends copies of these documents to reporters. The Contra Costa archivists point out that not one of these documents is from a San Francisco estate. Furthermore, they have no record that Bellesiles ever visited the collection prior to 2002.
The January 2002 issue of The William and Mary Quarterly carries a symposium in which three of the four scholars asked to examine Arming America, Gloria Main, Ira Gruber, and Randolph Roth, cite gross error and misuse of sources. Main, a professor of history at the University of Colorado at Boulder, finds Bellesiles’ claim that probate inventories were complete "incredible." She says the amazing difference between Bellesiles’ low figure for gun ownership in Maryland, 7 percent, and hers, 76 percent, "boggles the mind." Gruber, a professor of history at Rice University, concludes Bellesiles worked "to minimize the importance of guns, militia, and war in early America" using "a consistently biased reading of sources" and "careless uses of evidence and context." Roth, a professor of history at Ohio State University, finds Bellesiles’ homicide information is "misleading or wrong" in every instance.
February 2002. Emory launches an internal review, later followed by appointment of an external panel to examine Bellesiles’ work. By this point nearly all of Bellesiles’ early boosters have gone silent.
In fact the review concluded the following:
The committee concluded that he was guilty of "egregious misrepresentation" in his handling of relevant data reported by historian Alice Hanson Jones. Bellesiles told the committee that he had not included her data in his table because it included a "disproportionately high number of guns." "Here is a clear admission of misrepresentation," the committee concluded, "since the label on column one in Table One clearly says '1765-1790.'"
Finally, the committee concluded that Bellesiles is "guilty of unprofessional and misleading work," though at all times he was "both cooperative and respectful." His responses, the committee declared, "have been prolix, confusing, evasive and occasionally contradictory." The committee specifically noted that Bellesiles's disavowal of emails he had sent to James Lindgren was implausible.
In sum, the committee found that "his scholarly integrity is seriously in question."
At which point Michael resigned from Emory but continues to claim that the majority of the book has not been questioned, which everyone agrees is another lie:
Yet it clearly is not true that the essence of the book remains "unchallenged," as Bellesiles claimed in his response to the committee. Virtually every aspect of it — including his conclusions about English weapon use, hunting, axes vs. guns, homicide rates, and the inefficiency of firearms — has been shown to rely on faulty, at times nonexistent, evidence and biased research. This is a matter of fact, not interpretation, as Bellesiles would have it. Scholars should waste no more time on this discredited volume.
[…]Haverford College historian Roger Lane, a gun control supporter who gave Arming America a laudatory review, now writes of Bellesiles: "I’m mad at the guy. He suckered me. It’s entirely clear to me that he’s made up a lot of these records. He’s betrayed us. He’s betrayed the cause."
How about our MSM?
The news media also play a key role. The New York Times and many other news outlets heralded Arming America, while their bias in favor of gun control has led them to ignore scholarly books uncongenial to the cause. In this instance most of the press ignored, or dismissed as politically motivated, growing skepticism about Bellesiles’ evidence.
But the writer of this editorial yesterday quotes his work for the basis of his belief that guns are out of control in America.
Firstly, they were just too expensive. They cost about the equivalent of a year's income for a farmer. Next, no one seemed to want a gun. In 1808, alarmed at the possibility of a British invasion, the American government offered to buy a gun for every white male in the country. All that had to happen was that the local militia applied stating how many guns they wanted. In the next 30 years only half the militias had bothered to apply. It was the Civil War that changed all that. The Union and the Confederacy issued more than seven million small arms to soldiers during the war and when the fighting was over, many soldiers held on to them.
As a result, murders increased dramatically. As the author Alasdair Palmer, an advocate of gun control, has written, "It is a lot easier to shoot people dead than it is to strangle them, drown them, kick them, stab them or axe them to death (the favoured methods of murder before the widespread availability of guns.")
When mass production made guns cheap, then every cowboy in the West carried a Colt, walked tall and was ready for a gun duel, just like in a Hollywood western. Not so, says Palmer. Tombstone, Arizona and Dodge City, Kansas, towns notorious in Hollywood mythology actually had very low murder rates because cowboys had their guns confiscated at the city limits. It was cities such as New York where there were no restrictions on carrying handguns that had high murder rates. In short there was no tradition and culture of the gun, of farmers with rifles and cowboys with Colts, in the United States except in Hollywood movies. So should the Second Amendment be abolished? It turns out that there is no need to do so. The full Second Amendment reads: "A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed."
So it was the right of the people to organise and arm themselves as militias, repeat militias, that was being guaranteed, not the right to carry arms when on private business.
There is nothing to stop Congress imposing gun control, except for Americans' relatively newfound love for the gun. For this a large share of the blame belongs to Hollywood.
A favorite argument of the anti-gun lobby is to state that countries with strict gun control laws have fewer murders, which has been proven false again and again. They fail to mention the fact that in Israel, where 10% of the population have concealed weapons permits, they enjoy a very low murder rate. How about Switzerland which requires a rifle in every home, low murder rate. Brazil and Russia, which have a strict gun control law, they both have higher homicide rates then the US. Washington DC, which also has a strict gun control law, has the highest murder rate in the country.
How about Britain?
In the period 1981-96, as American crime rates fell, British crime rates rose. Britain now has higher rates of robbery, assault, burglary, and motor vehicle theft than theUnited States.2 (The report this article uses covers England & Wales only, because Scotland has a somewhat different legal system, and so the statistics are not exactly omparable. Northern Ireland, of course, has its own unique situation. If it were possibleto add Scotland and Northern Ireland into the figures, however, rest assured that the crime statistics would even be worse.) By 1995, England & Wales had 1.4 times the robbery rate of the U.S.; more than twice the assault rate of the U.S.; and nearly double the U.S.burglary rate.
So if there are less guns then this does not mean the murder rate goes down, it just means the way people are murdered changes:
What is causing these murders? How are they being committed? Is it a rise in the use of guns? This is a superficial question. It is what lies behind the murder rate that matters. A rise in drug use? Again superficial, it's what might lie behind that. Nevertheless, it is worth looking at how people by place are killed if only to help dispel some myths. The cause of death by method is specified on the death certificates of a proportion of those who are murdered. In many cases the exact cause is unspecified. If we take those cases for which a cause is specified then five main causes account for almost all murders: a fight (ICD E960), poison (ICD E962), strangling (ICD E963), use of firearms (ICD E965) or cutting (ICD E966).
The most important myth to dispel is that of gun crimes being a key factor behind the high murder rates in poor areas. Firearms account for only 11% of murders in the poorest wards of Britain compared to 29% of murders in the least poor areas. The more affluent an area, the more likely it is that guns will be used when murders are committed. The simple reason for this is that there are more guns in more affluent areas. They might be legal hotguns rather than illegal handguns, but that makes them no less lethal. The use of firearms has risen in the poorest wards over the 20 years, but only by roughly an additional five murders a year (roughly one extra murder per million people living there). There has been no change in the proportion of murders committed with firearms in richer areas, despite the introduction of legislation designed to limit their use.
I could go on and on but you get my drift. Not only does the writer of this editorial use a disgraced study for the backbone of his article but he then goes on to allege that our murder rate is tied to our gun ownership rate. False.
One last thing, the writer is Philip Knightley. You remember him don't you? This is the guy who stated our military was targetting reporters in Iraq.
Nuff said.
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