> Any book with a mass of data is almost inevitably riddled with errors.
...
This book has been
> subjected to extraordinary scrutiny because of its conclusion.
Yup. And how! (Thanks, Michael Pugliese, for posting that stuff from the W&M Quarterly). I'm not passionately anti-gun--in fact, I'm a gun-owner myself. I had Bellesisles in the back of my mind while I was recently studying probates and other early records looking for other stuff, and resolved to make a mental note of it whenever I came across a reference to guns. I just didn't see much. Wisconsin and Minnesota and Iowa were part of "the frontier" in the 1840s-60s, and supposedly "everybody" had a musket hanging on the cabin wall. I wonder.
Jacob Conrad