[Enjoyed the piece below on the gun culture myth of the US; timely too.John]
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important statement about the campaign against Michael Bellesiles
(historian who wrote an inconvenient book about guns in early America)
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-Law&month=0110&week=
a&msg=P4xZZCNnRg2QFd0CjULMBg&user=&pw=
http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_REPORT/erarchive/2000/December/erDec.11/12_11_00f
irstperson.html
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December 11, 2000
Too much time on my hands
Michael Bellesiles is a professor of history and author of
Arming America (Knopf, 2000)
Bellesiles clearly has too much time on his hands." Or so wrote Charlton
Heston in the December 1999 Guns & Ammo.
After reading a summary of my research in the English journal The
Economist,
Heston called for historians to stop wasting their time in the archives and
just
stick to the traditional narrative of American history. Duke law professor
William Van Alstyne told Lingua Franca that my research was irrelevant, as
the image of the past is far more important than the reality; while Akhil
Amar of
Yale law school stated that historical context is irrelevant to
constitutional
law-that history itself just does not matter.
What led these supposedly conservative figures to convert to
post-modernism?
How could such men suddenly announce that historical context is a cultural
construct anyway? I'm afraid it is my fault.
For the last 10 years I have been spending a lot of time in the archives
searching for every possible source of information on gun ownership in
early
America. During that decade I looked at legislative, military, militia and
probate
records.
Statistical analyses of these records all indicate the same thing: not too
many
Americans owned guns prior to the Civil War. Between 1770 and 1820,
probate records put ownership of any kind of gun, functional or otherwise,
at
14.7 percent of the adult white male property owners. Gun censuses were
conducted (without opposition) by the federal and state governments on many
occasions between 1793 and 1840. Repeatedly they demonstrate that, at the
antebellum peak, there were enough guns in public and private hands in
America for 45 percent of the militia, 20 percent of the adult white males
and
4.5 percent of the total population.
I could go on and on. Suffice it to say that early reports of this research
apparently compelled Heston, Amar, Van Alstyne and other postmodernists to
abandon the material world for a relativist one. If historical research
undermined a traditional vision of early America as a universally armed
society,
then history had to go. This immediate dismissal of my research is not
driven by
a competing body of research. Rather, opponents honestly state that they
find it
a dire threat to an individual reading of the Second Amendment.
Initially this political opposition came as a shock to me. I did not think
anyone
paid the slightest attention to what historians said. We certainly do not
seem to
have much impact on the world outside of academe, which goes its way
blithely believing any old nonsense about the past despite our best
efforts. Just
look at any Oliver Stone movie, or at the continued insistence that the
Civil
War had nothing to do with slavery.
While researching the book, I saw myself happily laboring away in dusty
corners for the edification of other historians and did not pretend to any
political position. In fact, the first draft did not even discuss the
Second
Amendment. And then came these rather interesting attacks on my book. Even
while preparing the manuscript for publication, my editor at Knopf insisted
I
put in a section on the Second Amendment.
That single sentence has proven as controversial as any in American
history: A
well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,
the
right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. Is the
first half a qualifying clause or just an explanatory preamble? Do the
words
"well regulated" have any significance? Do we read "the people" in a
collective
or individual sense? Is there any limit on the arms that people may "keep
and
bear?" Does "shall not be infringed" preclude any form of regulation or
registration?
But this is more than just a linguistic debate. For supporters of the
individual
right to bear arms, the Second Amendment was written as a check upon the
central government, a granting of the means by which the people could
overthrow tyranny. This latter point seemed to fly in the face of
everything that
is known about the framers of the Constitution and of the Bill of Rights.
For a
new government to grant the people the right and support for future
rebellion
seems exceedingly odd. This insurrectionist view would transform the
Constitution, as Justice Robert H. Jackson put it, into a "suicide pact."
Few subjects have been so well analyzed as the constitutional period. Some
of
the best books produced by the American historical profession have been on
this subject; it is a long and distinguished list of scholars. And I think
it is safe to
say that on one point they would all agree: the Federalists hoped to build
a
federal government stronger than its predecessor, capable of defending the
new nation from its enemies while maintaining internal order and security,
and
highly suspicious of the state governments. Not surprisingly, supporters of
the
insurrectionist perspective do not quote the Federalists often. They far
prefer to
quote the anti-federalists.
Let me remind you, the anti-federalists lost.
But, more importantly, it is an error to think the anti-federalists
themselves
favored an individual right to gun ownership. All members of the
revolutionary
generation knew the importance of disarming dangerous citizens. Loyalists
and
even those who insisted on neutrality were legally disarmed by the state
authorities during the Revolution. Catholics, Indians and blacks (freedmen
as
well as slaves) had long been denied access to firearms.
No one during the constitutional debates put forth as a grievance the
disarming
of individuals for political, religious or ethnic reasons. These opinions
did not
change after the Second Amendment passed. When confronted with internal
conflict during the Whiskey Rebellion, anti-federalists favored disarming
those
who would threaten the state.
This, for me, was the greatest surprise: that no one in this historical
debate
made any reference to the wide array of gun laws in effect when the Second
Amendment was ratified. In the 70 years after ratification, laws were
passed
regulating the quality of firearms and munitions; their storage, sale,
transport
and maintenance; and where and when they can be fired. There were laws
giving the state the right to appropriate firearms during internal crises
and to
disarm politically dangerous groups, to conduct gun censuses and to forbid
the
concealment of firearms. Most importantly, there were laws denying the
right to
own guns to those seen to pose a threat to the community: blacks, slave and
free, and even women on a few occasions. These laws worked because the
community supported their enforcement.
Admittedly, all this research could be irrelevant. Perhaps both the
historical
context and the original intention of the framers of the Constitution and
the Bill
of Rights should not enter into our civic deliberations. On the other hand,
it is
my job and my great pleasure to recreate the past, to allow those long dead
to
speak again.
It was never my intention to enter into a highly political area of
research, and
when I was called upon to help write an amicus brief in the upcoming
federal
case of Emerson v. U.S., I initially demurred. But no historian should sit
by
while the past is warped and denied to suit a polemical agenda. As a
consequence, I am now turning my attention to a history of gun laws in
early
America.
That is, assuming I can find the time.
This essay was first published in the August 2000 Department of History
newsletter.
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