Book on America's Gun Culture Has Its Author Watching His Back By JENNIFER K. RUARK
A historian whose recent book challenges the notion that Americans have always loved their guns has had to arm himself with secrecy after receiving anonymous threats.
Michael A. Bellesiles has changed his home telephone number and adopted a "stealth" e-mail address to avoid vitriolic personal attacks by people angry about his book Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (Alfred A. Knopf, 2000).
"I've become a wee bit paranoid," says the Emory University history professor, whom The Chronicle contacted through colleagues. In the months just before and after the September publication of his book, Mr. Bellesiles received five computer viruses intended to destroy his computer's hard drive, and numerous threatening e-mail messages and anonymous phone calls, both at home and at his hotel room when he was attending a conference.
After making his argument about guns in an article in The Journal of American History in 1996, "I received a written death threat and someone set fire to my office door," he says. "I thought that was an isolated wacko, but now there's so much stuff on the Internet, and e-mail lends itself to tirades."
One critic sent him 100 copies of the same expletive-ridden message every day for four days.
A computer search turns up dozens of Web pages, most linked to sites dedicated to gun-owners' rights, asserting that Arming America is at best shoddy and at worst a deliberate distortion of history. The book argues that colonial and frontier Americans did not regularly own guns, and that the country's gun culture developed only during the Civil War and with government encouragement.
Not only Second Amendment enthusiasts but also historians disputing Mr. Bellesiles' use of probate records have challenged that argument, and not always politely. John Saillant, a historian at Western Michigan University and the moderator of an electronic discussion group sponsored by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, says he took the unprecedented step of contacting some people who posted messages to ask them to moderate their language.
"People were accusing him of bad faith in a way that's at odds with scholarly writing," says Mr. Saillant. "The Listserv format lends itself to a shoot-from-the-hip style."
On Saturday, the Council of the Omohundro Institute adopted a statement that the group "considers personal attacks upon or harassment of an author such as we have seen directed at Michael Bellesiles ... to be inappropriate and damaging to a tradition of free exchange of ideas and the advancement of our knowledge of the past." The group is inviting other historical organizations to endorse that statement.
Mr. Bellesiles says the most common complaint he receives is that Arming America contradicts his first book, Revolutionary Outlaws: Ethan Allen and the Struggle for Independence on the Early American Frontier (University Press of Virginia, 1995), by never mentioning Allen's band of militiamen, the Green Mountain Boys.
In fact, the new book spends several pages on them. "People have a lot of anger," says Mr. Bellesiles. "I don't think it has anything to do with me or the book."
"Initially I would respond. One message was sent to the board of trustees at Emory calling for me to be fired because I was a communist. I wrote back that I'm a registered Republican, a John McCain supporter, and a gun owner, and the guy wrote back, `You only think you're a Republican; you're really a state-controlled Socialist.'"
Mr. Bellesiles has decided to answer all his critics at once on a Web site he has recently created. Next week he will post a "response to polemicists," he says.
The harassment has declined since Mr. Bellesiles changed his e-mail address, he says, but he still tries to be acutely aware of his surroundings, a technique he learned from practicing martial arts.
After he finishes a book on the history of gun laws, "I'm done with guns," he says. "I wouldn't want to do another gun book except that I'm already halfway finished. These people are so hateful, I don't want anything to do with them."