Having an urgent paper to finish, I am naturally finding as many excuses as possible to read irrelevant material on the net. So I finally read the whole of James Lindgren’s demolition of Bellesiles, via a link from Instapundit (PDF file).

I was not surprised to learn that Bellesiles picture of an almost gunless Colonial America was false, and that gun ownership was actually higher than now. But, as Lindgren points out, that’s not the only thing Bellesiles got wrong. Bellesiles argued that in his mythical utopia, homicide rates were far lower than today, and that rates rose after the Civil War. In fact, as Lindgren shows, homicide rates were very high in Colonial America. He lists a number of cases in an Appendix of which, admittedly, only one is clearly stated to involve a firearm.

As Lindgren notes “

Just as the gun culture and the romance of the gun were supposedly taking over (in the decades after the Civil War), homicide rates were actually plummeting throughout much of the country, while in the Reconstruction South murder was rising”

Lindgren correctly notes:”

The relationship between guns and homicides over time is so complex that it cannot be reduced to the easy formula put forward in Arming America that high gun ownership and high homicide rates go together”

. Still, if the civil strife in the South is regarding as being a special case, Lindgren’s correct figures give the same (positive) raw correlation as Bellesiles’ bogus ones. So Bellesiles story is the mirror-image of the truth, but in an important sense his errors cancel out.