DANIEL PIPES writes that John Muhammad isn’t an exception, but is in fact acting according to type — and suggests that media treatments of him as crazy merely indicate how little most press people know.

BELLESILES UPDATE: The Emory Wheel (which is doing a lot better job of covering this than the New York Times) has a long story on Bellesiles’ resignation with numerous quotes from historians. There’s also an editorial in The Wheel that concludes:

If Bellesiles did find the environment at Emory hostile, he has only himself to blame. Throughout the controversy, Bellesiles repeatedly made conflicting and misleading claims to the media, as well as to those who openly criticized him. His defenses and evidence were consistently erratic, and only furthered the skepticism of those following the case.

He also claims the scope of the committee’s investigation was too narrow, and that his main thesis still holds true despite the errors found in a minor part of his research.

By making this claim, Bellesiles is skirting the real issue. It doesn’t matter now if the argument in Arming America is valid — it matters that he has lied numerous times in defending his book. It’s unfortunate that Bellesiles, who is a talented, brilliant writer and scholar, will have his reputation marred by his evasive statements.

Emory has no reason to apologize to Bellesiles. Should a similar situation arise in the future, Emory should consider acting more quickly in response to public outcry, but not at the expense of fairness and accuracy.

The investigation, and Bellesiles’ subsequent resignation, should be a reminder to the Emory community that academic research is, above all, about searching for the absolute truth. That’s what our professors teach students every day. We should expect the same from them.

Well said.

UPDATE: Tightly Wound blames critical theory:

Now back to Bellesiles. He’s guilty, and I’m not trying to exculpate him, but to me it seems like he was just continuing to do what he was trained to do by the system–look at a subject, determine the conclusion you want to reach, and manipulate the data accordingly. After all, he was just “opening the facts up to new interpretation and exploration.” And it would have worked, too, if not for those pesky kids at the NRA! His politics were correct, thus no one reviewing his work looked at his research, source material, or thought processes. But here’s the kicker: the fact that he continues to insist that he’s going to keep researching probate materials when half of the ones he said he looked at DON’T EVEN EXIST! Bellesiles has completely surpassed me and my fellow students in shaping reality to his own ends. In the current academic envrionment, Mr. Bellesiles gets a gold star.

Read the whole post. I wasn’t familiar with this blog before, but its slogan “Making fun of academics — because it’s easy!” should give you an idea of its focus. Also Jacob T. Levy (noted in the post below, too — he’s on a roll!) suggests that the committee that Emory brought in to investigate Bellesiles can hardly be called tools of the NRA.

MICKEY KAUS thinks that a 50/50 split may become the new equilibrium state in American politics. He also warns Bush that there’s plenty of time left to lose before the elections.

UPDATE: Jacob T. Levy says that Kaus has rediscovered a classic theorem of political science. Way to go Mickey!

TOM HOLSINGER says that the Bush Administration is getting it all wrong on homeland security because it’s neglecting an important tradition.

TIM NOAH writes about why conservatives seem to miss Paul Wellstone more than liberals. But does this mean there will be lots of sad farewell columns written by the left when Jesse Helms expires?

UPDATE: This, on the other hand, is just plain mean.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Just noticed that Oliver Willis seems to have missed the point — or perhaps commented without reading Tim Noah’s piece. Noah’s point was that conservatives liked Wellstone because, being to the left of most Democrats, he made them look more extreme than they were. Hence the Helms point.

TONY ADRAGNA reflects on dysphemisms.

Is “warblogger” one?

THE BAGHDAD VIEW of American “peace” protesters in Iraq. It’s not a very flattering one: “Dear american friends, please stop sending her over here, she is not helping. Some people might think that this sort of thing I like to see happening. It is NOT. Kelly baby you have been used. They have put you on show for the westerners.”

ONE OF MY MOLES says the AP wire is about to produce a story saying that John Muhammad has been linked to a killing / synagogue shooting in Tacoma from last February.

UPDATE: It’s not up yet, but this backgrounder is interesting.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s a link to the story, which says Muhammad is now linked to the shooting of a 21-year-old woman and to a shooting incident at a synagogue. And go to page 17 of this synagogue newsletter for a contemporaneous description: “A more serious incident occurred in May when it was discovered that a bullet was fired into the west side of the Temple by the Biblical garden. It eventually ended up in the ark in the small chapel.”

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan: “So he was a terrorist, a Muslim, a member of the fanatical anti-Semitic group the Nation of Islam and someone who shot up a synagogue. Who’d have thought it?” Yeah, go figure. Who’d have thought those things would go together? Not the “angry white male” profiler crew. . . .

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL: Fredrik Norman identifies a reasonable facsimile.

LILEKS ON WELLSTONE: There’s a reason we worship Lileks. His on-the-scene reporting from Minnesota is hard on some of Wellstone’s detractors — and on some of his friends.

CLAYTON CRAMER points out that the University of Arizona is a gun-free zone, something that — as usual — did nothing to prevent a mass shooing. Indeed, as John Lott and William Landes have demonstrated, mass shootings appear to be more common in places where guns are prohibited.

More poignantly, this policy was criticized in a sadly prophetic piece by Rachel Alexander in the University of Arizona student newspaper several years ago:

The U.S. government surveyed 1,874 felons, and found that 40 percent said they had at one time decided not to commit a crime because they were afraid the victim was carrying a firearm. Too bad the signs prominently displayed around campus let the criminals know we’re all defenseless.

The consequences, sadly, are all too predictable.

UPDATE: I thought the Rachel Alexander column was interesting, so I googled her to see what she’s up to nowadays — and discovered she’s quite accomplished. Who knew?

AMERICANS LESS COMFORTABLE WITH ISLAM: According to this ABC News poll, Americans remained sympathetic to Islam after the 9/11 attacks, but have grown steadily more uncomfortable with it over time:

The percentage of Americans having an unfavorable view of Islam has jumped from 24 percent in January 2002 to 33 percent now.

The portion of Americans who say that Islam “doesn’t teach respect for other faiths” rose from 22 percent to 35 percent.

The article treats this mostly as a failure of tolerance, but at the end it presents this alternative explanation:

Muslim leaders maintained that Osama bin Laden was an aberration, a single twisted soul distorting Islam. But the reality is something more disturbing — that Islam is now being used as a justification for violence — not by a few, but by many. Though many Muslim leaders criticized the terrorists, few stated that the problems with Islam’s misuse were dangerously widespread. As a result, Muslim leaders may have lost some of their credibility. . . .

American University professor Akbar Ahmed admitted as much: “For the first time in history, Muslim civilization is on a direct collision course with all the world religions.”

Ahmed said that at this point, he is aggravated that many Muslims won’t acknowledge this. “After Sept. 11, there was this mantra, ‘We are peaceful, we are peaceful.’ After Muslims killed 3,000 people, it makes no sense to me.”

Yes, Muslims who are unsympathetic to the views of the Islamofascists need to get out front on this issue.

UPDATE: This post by Damian Penny is worth reading.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Steve at HappyFunPundit wonders why this article is so dumb, attributing most of the change in attitude to people like Jerry Falwell instead of to Islamic terrorists. Personally, I think the glass is half full. What impresses me is that the story at least entertains the possibility that Islamic terror might have something to do with American attitudes.

It’s all a function of how high your expectations are, I guess. Mine aren’t very high, so I’m easily pleased.

WELL, HOTDAMN! We’re back in business. There were serious server issues, and mine was the last to be put back in operation. Blogging was ongoing at the GlennReynolds.Com backup site but I’m happy to be back up for real. More to come.

BELLESILES UPDATE: Well, actually it’s a Jon Wiener update, but here’s a withering response to Wiener’s Bellesiles defense from The Nation last week:

What is also particularly notable is that Wiener, a Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, apparently refuses to examine actual documentary evidence in making his case. Equally striking in this day and age when oral history and interviewing participants to events is all the rage among historians, he failed to interview the critics he attacked — Roth, Lindgren, Cramer, and myself — which, I think, is why he has made so many errors. It also accounts for the reason why Wiener’s contribution to the debate over Arming America compares unfavorably with that of such reporters as David Mehegan of the Boston Globe, Robert Worth of the New York Times, Melissa Seckora of National Review, Kim Strassel of the Wall Street Journal, David Skinner of the Weekly Standard, and Ron Grossman of the Chicago Tribune, who, like Wiener, holds a Ph.D. in history.

Contrary to Wiener’s approach to the subject, all of these reporters carefully examined and reported on substantial amounts of documentary evidence themselves in their desire to get to the bottom of the controversy. They also tried to interview scholars on both sides of the issue, which is apparently why their reportage has held up so well to scrutiny, with both Mehegan and Strassel winning prizes for their work on Arming America.

On the other hand, Wiener, whose command of the evidence presented by Arming America’s critics is thin at best, chose to rely heavily on Bellesiles’s preposterous stories and inventions, never bothering to check them out with those scholars who know the material best. While this might be standard procedure when writing a polemic, it is certainly not good reporting and it is clearly very bad history. But it is apparently in keeping with the accusatory style of commentary Wiener has honed and perfected over the years at the Nation.

The author, Prof. Jerome Sternstein, also reports that Garry Wills, who gave Arming America an embarrassingly positive review in the New York Times, has since pronounced Bellesiles’ book a “fraud,” somewhat undercutting The Nation’s thesis that Bellesiles is the victim of an NRA-inspired witch hunt.

Emory, the Newberry Library, Columbia University, the Bancroft Prize, and now The Nation: It looks as if Bellesiles has managed to embarrass one more long-established American institution.

JIANGISM OF THE DAY? Eugene Volokh has castigated Slate’s “Bushism of the Day” feature for sloppiness and out-of-context quotes before, but today Best of the Web says that Slate is charging Bush with fractured English that came, in fact, from Jiang Zemin.

I know that some journalists regard Texan English as something like a foreign language, but it seems unfair to confuse Bush with a native speaker of Chinese.

UPDATE: Slate has run a correction, which says that the error was originally the AP’s. I wonder, though: If you’re going to try to find an example of sloppiness every day (for the “Bushism of the Day” feature) you’re inevitably going to have a problem with uneven material, which means you’re going to make boners like this on a regular basis. Slate’s feature has been uneven at best, and has started to make Slate look worse than Bush. And this is something that should have been predictable from the outset. So why’d they do this? And why are they still doing it?

LEONARD DAVID REPORTS that China is moving closer to human spaceflight.

THE VIOLENCE POLICY CENTER IS STILL TRYING TO FLOG ITS “SNIPER SUBCULTURE” THEORY, even though that was exploded before John Muhammad was even caught. But facts don’t stand in the way of those guys (have they taken the Bellesiles quotes off their website yet?) as this Boston Globe article demonstrates:

Tom Diaz, senior policy analyst at the Violence Policy Center in Washington, D.C., said the subculture is fueled in part by gun manufacturers that market high-powered, military-style weapons to nonmilitary people. Certain training schools that teach people how to hunt a person, what part of their body to target, and how to take down a helicopter, and publications like Plaster’s wildly popular and highly detailed book, also contribute to the subculture, he said. Other critics say the glorification of powerful military weapons and rock star-like admiration of military snipers, as well as video games and movies about lonesome but brilliant long-range killers, all lead to the possibility of more incidents like that in Washington and the chilling shootings at Columbine High School.

”This is clearly a hot trend and, yes, there is a subculture out there,” said Diaz. ”Somebody is buying all these books, videos, and going to these schools. They are not Martians. They are human beings from this country and perhaps from some other places, too.”

So even though it had nothing to do with the D.C. sniper (much less Columbine), this “subculture” is being blamed. Makes sense. After all, these guys pushed gun control as a remedy for the Oklahoma City bombing, too.

It reminds me of one of my law professors who said, quoting a movie I don’t recall: “I use gin for colds. But then, I use it for everything.”

What’s interesting is that this time the Globe isn’t swallowing the VPC’s line whole, but is actually presenting the issue as one with two sides:

Weapons experts have said they do not consider the person who terrorized the Washington suburbs a trained sniper. Professional shooters such as Rodney Ryan, owner of Storm Mountain Training Center, a sniper training school in West Virginia, takes issue with the public perception that the killers have been linked to his profession.

”This guy wasn’t really a trained marksman. He was no more qualified than I am 16,” said Plaster, who is 53. ”He was no more trained than anybody who goes to basic training,” he added.

And here’s the real non sequitur in the VPC’s position: Muhammad is a military veteran, an expert says his shooting skills come from basic training, and the VPC is trying to cash in on the publicity brought about by his acts, but:

Diaz said his organization is not criticizing military snipers or even schools that only teach military and law enforcement sniper techniques, but he insists too many people are teaching dangerous lessons to regular people.

So Diaz is only against the “sniper subculture” in circumstances that are entirely inapplicable to the case he’s relying on for publicity.

Sorry, but this is just pathetic.

UPDATE: Reader Byron Matthews writes:

CBS Evening News tonight had sniper story: How easy it is to get sniper training in the U.S.

Highlight was interview with “Gun Policy Analyst” who said he was “shocked” when he went to the Internet to find how many sites offered training and info about sniping.

The “analyst” was Tom Diaz.

Can you imagine an NRA rep being identified only as a “gun policy analyst”?

Nope. I can’t.

GUT RUMBLES has a slick new website designed by you-know-who — I especially like the warning label!

MEAT MARKETS AND STUD BOOKS: Eugene Volokh lifts the covers on some insider aspects of the law-professor biz.

MELISSA SECKORA has a story on the Bellesiles resignation that’s worth reading. Excerpt:

The committee’s investigation focused on Bellesiles’s use of probate records, which the New York Times has called “Mr. Bellesiles’s principal evidence.” Of particular interest was a key table on which the author’s thesis is grounded. “Evaluating Table One is an exercise in frustration because it is almost impossible to tell where Bellesiles got his information. His source note lists the names of 40 counties, but supplies no indication of the exact records used or their distribution over time. After reviewing his skimpy documentation, we had the same question as [one reviewer] Gloria Main: ‘Did no editors or referees ever ask that he supply this basic information?’ … The best that can be said about his work with the probate and militia records is that he is guilty of unprofessional and misleading work.”

The committee also agreed with Professor James Lindgren of Northwestern University that the entire scandal could have been avoided with “more conventional editing” by The Journal of American History and with Ohio State’s Randolph Roth, who determined that Bellesiles’s numbers were “mathematically improbable or impossible.” Additionally, the committee found that “no one has been able to replicate Bellesiles’s results [on low percentage of guns] for the places or dates he lists”; that he conflated wills and inventories which “greatly reduced the percentage of guns in estates”; took a “casual approach” to gathering data; “[raised] doubts about his veracity” in claiming to have worked with records in California; and raised questions about his use of microfilm at the National Archives Record Center in East Point, Ga. They also called implausible Bellesiles’s claim that false data on his website was put there by a hacker, and his disavowal of e-mails that he wrote to researchers, giving the wrong location for almost all of his probate research.

This is a good one-stop summary for those who haven’t been following the case, and it has links to many useful documents. The big news: “And now that the Emory report is out, scholars expect Columbia to investigate the possibility of revoking Bellesiles’s Bancroft Prize.”

UPDATE: The History News Network has a list of questions that remain unanswered after Bellesiles’ resignation. And this comment thread is amusing, in a nauseous kind of way.

FLIT says the Russian response to the Arab/Chechen terrorists gives nerve gas a PR boost. No, really. He regards the use as a success of sorts, as do I. The bigger problem was being unprepared to deal with the aftermath, and unable or unwilling to give the doctors sufficient information to treat the victims.

Have you noticed, by the way, that nobody much is complaining about the fact that the Russians seem to have shot the terrorists in the head while they were unconscious from the gas?

UDPATE: James Robbins comments on the shootings in this generally supportive piece.

CNN IS NOW CALLING THE ARAB/CHECHEN ‘HOSTAGE TAKERS” terrorists, in what seems to be a change from its earlier approach.

THE WHITE HOUSE IS DEFENDING PUTIN with some well-chosen words:

“The Russian government and the Russian people are victims of this tragedy, and the tragedy was caused as a result of the terrorists who took hostages and booby-trapped the building and created dire circumstances,” Fleischer said.

Asked directly about the use of the knockout gas, Fleischer wouldn’t say whether the administration believed it was appropriate. “We don’t know what all the facts are,” he said.

But, he said, “Given the fact that the terrorists were clearly serious and had already killed people, and apparently had the theater booby-trapped so all would die, it’s important to know what the full circumstances are before venturing further.”

I’m prepared to be convinced that using the gas was a mistake. But those who take that position ought to suggest what else Putin should have done under the circumstances. For more on this subject, look here.

ROBERT PRATHER sends advance warning of an online invasion. Ugh. Why do people think this will work?

CATHY YOUNG WRITES about the D.C. sniper and gun control in the Boston Globe:

Since 1996, Australia has implemented some of the world’s toughest gun laws and a sweeping buyback program. Yet just this month, it has witnessed two shocking incidents. On Oct. 14, South Australia’s mental health chief, Margaret Tobin, was shot dead by an assailant outside her office in Adelaide. A few days later, a gunman opened fire in a classroom at Monash University in Melbourne, killing two.

Editorials in the Australian press responded by calling for even more gun restrictions. Yet they offered little evidence that such measures would have prevented these tragedies, and conceded that criminals were finding ways to circumvent the laws such as smuggling in gun parts from Southeast Asia and assembling them into lethal weapons.

The overall homicide rate in Australia has declined by 10 percent since 1996. But any link between this trend and the antigun policies is hardly clear: In the same period, the United States has achieved an even greater drop in the murder rate. And while the percentage of armed robberies committed with firearms in Australia has decreased markedly, armed robberies overall are up.

Let’s not forget, too, that guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens can actually stop those who prey on the innocent. A largely ignored incident in Pittsburgh, which happened at the same time as the sniper shootings, provides a convincing demonstration. A man who committed a half-dozen sexual assaults in the city’s East End, eluding police and terrorizing women – not as lethally as the sniper, perhaps, but seriously enough – was captured when his intended seventh victim shot and wounded him with the gun she was licensed to carry.

To me the big news is that something like this is appearing in The Globe. And here’s a point that Globe readers might actually appreciate:

Yet the National Rifle Association opposes a national gun registry, fearing a slippery slope toward confiscation of firearms. An extreme position? Maybe. But the extremism of gun-rights supporters is akin to the extremism of abortion-rights proponents who oppose even minimal abortion restrictions. In both cases, they know that there are powerful activist groups that really do see modest restrictions as a first step toward a total ban.

And in both cases, they’re right.