JIM LINDGREN has some interesting comments on the Bellesiles developments (Click here for a link to the post by Prof. Michael Tinkler that set this discussion in motion):

Thanks for the VERY interesting post about another Bellesiles story that doesn’t stand up. So he used a research assistant and a spreadsheet for his probate research on guns, contrary to his prior claims.

Of course, Bellesiles first presented his probate research on guns (which was later republished in Arming America) at the OAH meetings in early 1995 and first published almost all of his Arming America probate data in a 1996 JAH article. There was not enough time between the publication of the Ethan Allen book in 1993 and his OAH talk in early 1995 to have done much more than count the records in Philadelphia, the largest of his 40 counties–if he had no other responsibilities and did nothing else with his time. He has always claimed to have worked on Arming America long before 1993 (the year the Ethan Allen book was published). I didn’t read the Ethan Allen book too carefully, but I

don’t remember any counts of guns in probate inventories. The Vermont counties are in his probate samples in both the 1996 JAH article (Table 1) and Arming America (p. 445, Table 1). This new story suggests that he had started on the data for Arming America by 1988, whether he was conceptualizing something like the JAH article or a book we cannot know. But the research that his assistant reported, if done on Vermont estates, would very likely be on estates in his probate samples in Arming America. I would love to see those early counts because–as confirmed both in William & Mary Quarterly (Roth) and in the William & Mary Law Review (Lindgren & Heather)–guns are in about 40% of Vermont estates, not the 14% that Bellesiles claimed. Bellesiles missed guns in over 60% of the inventoried estates in his Vermont samples. I have never had a research assistant even close to this error rate, and I don’t believe that he has either.

If the research assistant is telling the truth about putting her data on a spreadsheet for Bellesiles under his direction–and there is not the slightest reason to suppose otherwise–why would Bellesiles claim that he was unfamiliar with using computers for collecting probate data when he wasn’t? The most obvious answers are either that he did little probate research beyond that done by the research assistant or that her counts were relatively accurate and thus did not match what he wanted to find for Arming America.

In any event, there are now three different stories about when Bellesiles first

noted the small numbers of guns in probate inventories–

(1) in 1989 or 1990 when he had an “epiphany” reading probate inventories in a Vermont courthouse (as he told the New York Times in April 2000 and Hartford Courant in September 2000), (http://www.nytimes.com/learning/students/pop/042300guns-heritage-review.html)

(2) in the early 1980s when he now says that he counted guns and books in Vermont estates (he recently claimed in his website’s revised Vermont probate report to have recorded guns and books in the early 1980s),

http://www.emory.edu/HISTORY/BELLESILES/new.Vermont.html

and

(3) in 1988 when he directed his research assistant to count guns on microfilm

and put her data on a spreadsheet (a story that Bellesiles has never mentioned

himself).

Indeed. I hope that Emory’s investigation looks into this discrepancy in stories.