BELLESILES UPDATE: George Will’s Newsweek column this week is about the Bellesiles fraud scandal. Excerpt:

Bellesiles’s malfeasance, although startling in its sweep, brazenness and apparently political purpose, actually reveals something heartening—a considerable strength in America’s scholarly community. Its critical apparatus is working. Scholars and their journals are doing their duty, which is to hold works of scholarship up to the bright light of high standards.

As a result, when next the Supreme Court is required to rule on the controversy concerning which Bellesiles’s book was supposed to be so decisively informative, the court’s judgment will not be clouded by Bellesiles’s evident attempt to misrepresent the context in which the Framers wrote the Second Amendment.

A number of readers have emailed me that they’re afraid Emory will try to sweep the Bellesiles scandal under the rug. I don’t think so.

UPDATE: In other Second Amendment news, Terry Eastland says that Ashcroft’s new right-to-bear-arms stance won’t make as much difference as either critics or supporters have been saying.