BELLESILES UPDATE: There’s an interesting debate among historians that people who have been following L’Affaire Bellesiles may want to check out. It starts with this article by Don Williams on History News Network, suggesting that the reliance of so many pro-gun-control historians on Bellesiles’ work may undermine their case across the board. This post on H-Net (a historians’ email list) drew this response from historian Jack Rakove, who (though he has never actually admitted that Bellesiles’ work is false) says that individual-rights supporters want to focus on Bellesiles because it hurts the credibility of the entire “collective rights” position. Anti-gun historian Peter Hoffer agrees with Rakove saying that the “collective rights” case is still strong even without Bellesiles (though his reference to the “well regulated militia” language in the Second Amendment is astonishingly ahistorical for, well, a historian). Finally, Williams responds at length here pointing out a number of errors within Rakove’s analysis.

I find this exchange interesting mostly because it indicates that even those who previously defended Bellesiles are now falling back to an alternative line of argument, and suggesting that it’s somehow not sporting for people to criticize anti-gun arguments by pointing out that they’re built on his apparently-fraudulent research.

This would be more persuasive if Rakove et al. would come right out and call Bellesiles’ work fraudulent and retract the statements they’ve made in reliance upon it. Since they’re not yet willing to do that, they still have a credibility problem. Put simply, why should we listen to people who are either so gullible that they were taken in by research that should have raised red flags with anyone who knew anything about the subject — and why should we trust people so ideologically committed to a particular outcome that they are still unwilling to admit the truth about it?