The article about Bellesisles’ research and the gun ownership controversy generated alot of comments from Followers. It seems Bellesisles’ work has been seriously called into question, to judge from these links I’ve been sent. However, let me make it clear that I found the issue noteworthy not so much because of my belief in his work as due to the degree of ongoing controversy, and the apparent conversion of some former gun control advocates by the new legal commentary. Thus, these responses are less corrections than corroborations of my point.

• “People who have checked Bellesiles’ claims against the probate records that he says he consulted have found that he drastically under
  
  > states the number of guns they show.” Fox News

• “The government steadfastly maintains that the Supreme Court’s decision in
  
  United States v. Miller, 59 S.Ct. 816 (1939), mandated acceptance of the
  
  collective rights or sophisticated collective rights model, and rejection of
  
  the individual rights or standard model, as a basis for construction of the
  
  Second Amendment. We disagree.” [Decision text], [news reports], [more].

• “Today, at Harvard Law School, Bellesiles’s most adamant critic, Northwestern
  
  University law professor James Lindgren, plans to detail evidence that
  
  Bellesiles may have stretched or distorted the historical record in trying
  
  to prove his claim.

  The Boston Globe has reviewed substantial portions of records Lindgren will
  
  cite: 18th-century probate records in Vermont and Rhode Island. The Globe
  
  has also checked into Bellesiles’s claim to have studied certain records in
  
  San Francisco, records county officials say were destroyed by fire in 1906.
  
  In each case, the records appear to support Lindgren’s accusation and
  
  suggest a disturbing pattern of misuse of data by Bellesiles in his book and
  
  in an article defending his thesis which he published on his Web site.” Boston Globe, 9-11-01

• “I thought that you might be interested
  
  in a recent report of some critiques of Bellesiles’ study, done by Glenn
  
  Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee. You can find the
  
  piece at:

  http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,36122,00.html.”

• 
  site_name=GunCite

  site_url=http://http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_bellesiles.html

  comments=”This is a pro-gun site, but refreshingly free of paranoia, as these sites generally go. The URL points to a long article which attempts to demonstrate how Michael Bellesiles is more of a propagandist than a historian. I don’t know how much of it is true, but I always find it interesting to see how much disagreement a single issue can generate.”

Thanks to everyone who wrote in. Yes, FmH can be a conversation.