Bellesiles Gunned Down

Alfred A. Knopf, publishers of the discredited book Arming America by Michael Bellesiles, finally announces that it intends to stop selling the tome. The disgraced book used falsified evidence to argue that Americans have historically never really liked or used guns very much. Joyce Malcolm, the gun scholar who was one of the first to sound the alarm on Bellesiles in this review in the January 2001 issue of Reason, will provide the definitive account of the whole Bellesiles mess and how rigorous historical inquiry proved him wrong -- in many cases, clearly deliberately so -- in a feature forthcoming in the March issue of Reason.