Please contact us at for a copy of "Weighed in an Even Balance," Bellesiles' pamphlet on what changes he did, and did not, make to the revised edition, and why...Or you may download it by clicking here: http://www.softskull.com/files/weighed_even_balance.pdf

Beginning with the European tradition from which the American colonists emerged, Bellesiles indicates that ordinary people had virtually no access to or training in the use of firearms; it was swords, axes, and fire that were most commonly used against the Indians, and the few guns that did exist were kept under strict control by colonial governments. By the mid-1850s technological advances and the soaring gun production and industrialization encouraged by the Civil War era transformed the gun from a seldom-needed tool to a perceived necessity and fostered an emotional connection between man and weapon.
There was an immediate outcry from the anti-gun-control lobby. Questions qrose as to his research in probate records and the political firestorm expanded to include a committee of scholars and historians who devoted months to checking Bellesiles's footnotes in the archives where he did his research—a practice that is extremely unusual in historical scholarship—and found evidence of sloppy research in five pages.
In this revised edition, Bellesiles answers his academic critics, providing updated research addressing their legitimate concerns, and finding that the underlying thesis of his book remains as solid as ever.

Michael A. Bellesiles is the author of Revolutionary Outlaws: Ethan Allen and the Struggle for Independence on the Early American Frontier and the author of a study of violence in America forthcoming in 2004 from Oxford University Press.

Arming America has been the subject of sustained polemical assault starting nearly a year before its appearance. Along the way a number of accusations have been made against the book’s scholarship and its author. Most of these accusations focus on the three paragraphs and one table dealing with probate records—addressed elsewhere on this web site. I prefer not to enter into the highly political and personal tone of these attacks, and so prefer to simply answer each of the charges of falsification in turn.

I do not mean to suggest for a moment that Arming America is free of error or in some way beyond criticism. I am confident that no work of scholarship is free from error; the individual scholar thus has a responsibility to correct any mistakes in his or her work, as I have consistently endeavored to do with Arming America. In his biography, Truman, David McCullough quotes a memo from General Thomas Hardy of George Marshall’s staff as stating that the military expected 500,000 to one million casualties in the invasion of Japan.(2) As it turned out, the memo was actually written by former President Herbert Hoover and that General Hardy’s covering memo dismisses the prediction as ridiculous. The Army’s highest casualty figure for the invasion was 67,000. Though McCullough acknowledged the error, it has never been corrected in Truman, which is still available in bookstores. The failure to correct that mistake in print has had major consequences, as it is often quoted to justify US actions in dropping two atomic bombs on Japan and was repeatedly cited in the debate over the cancelled Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian.(3) Even the finest scholars, and I certainly place McCullough in that camp, make mistakes. However, acknowledging an error is not enough, it must be corrected. From the first appearance of Arming America, I have done my best to correct any errors.


There is not a document that can be produced that would demonstrate that I "fabricated" evidence because I did not do so. Some people have kindly made corrections and offered alternative readings. Others behave as inquisitors, demanding that I confess to heresy. They do not seek to correct, but to condemn. In this uneven debate, the most relentless critics have demonstrated a willingness to adopt rather unusual methods, such as attempting to persuade reviewers to repeat charges of fraud and even to get those who have found some value in Arming America to publish retractions. Several of these commentators have even stated that the loss of the supportive notes to three paragraphs of the book discredit the entire book, implying that the Arming America is entirely about probate records. Such a statement is a patent lie. Yet it is sadly evident that many people who criticize the book have not in fact read it. It may therefore be appropriate to begin by stating what the book is actually about.


Arming America was the product of ten years of research in scores of archives (4). Arming America examines the development of America’s gun culture from the first European settlements through 1877. The book’s thesis is that the gun culture which is now so widely taken for granted in the United States has not always been a "given" of life in America, but developed during the mid-nineteenth century. An increase in the production of firearms under federal supervision in the 1850s set the groundwork for the slaughter of the Civil War. That war generated a massive increase in the demand for guns, while training millions of American men in the use of firearms. This is not a simple story, and Arming America is a rather complex book. I aimed to explore a broad diversity of experience over three centuries and to avoid sweeping generalizations about what Americans believed as a collective, giving attention to regional, class, racial, and gender differences.

Starting with the earliest use of firearms in Europe, paying particular attention to political and cultural trends in England, Arming America tracks firearms to North America. I attempt to show the gun’s range of uses and limitations in the daily life of colonial America, as well as the effort of colonial governments to acquire and preserve sufficient firearms for their defense. The fourth chapter, which I consider the one original part of the book, argues that the Eastern Woodlands Indians constituted America’s first gun culture. Moving from the attitudes of North America’s natives to wilderness warfare, I follow the lead of many fine military historians in matching the myth and reality of the militia in the eighteenth century. The American Revolution serves as the practical test of these historical arguments, as the militia displayed occasional moments of astounding heroism and a steady pattern of avoidance. I do maintain that the militia’s hesitance to do battle was perfectly rational, given the shortage of firearms and the general ignorance of their proper use. It is certainly the case that the military and political leaders of the patriot cause worked constantly to acquire sufficient firearms for their struggle with England. Since there were no gun manufactories in North America, they had no choice but to turn to Europe, finding willing suppliers in France and the Netherlands.

Chapter seven is the pivot of the book. In this and the next two chapters, I endeavor to show how the new federal government sought constantly to encourage arms production, promote the better organization and arming of the militia, and develop a way of training a large number of men in the use of firearms while avoiding an expensive standing army. These efforts failed miserably, as the War of 1812 amply demonstrated. Meanwhile, state governments walked a fine line between the perceived need to supply arms to reliable citizens for internal defense while preventing those arms from falling into the hands of feared classes—Indians, blacks, the poor, and political radicals. I focus on a number of domestic political disputes in order to uncover the use of firearms and the level of violence. The creation of a hunting subculture in the late 1820s and the erratic progress of uniformed militia companies point to a growing yet still limited interest in firearms. The book’s last chapter focuses on the significant improvements in firearms technology and production in the 1850s and 1860s, as well as the traumatic and decisive experience of the Civil War, to discover the origins of America’s gun culture. I like the way Carl Bogus has put it, that Arming America "explores the development of an American gun culture by following the hardware." The book does attempt to focus on the guns, to find "how many there were, who made them, who had them, where they were kept, and how they were used."

This work offered a reading of America’s fascination with firearms that was clearly at variance with received tradition. This contrary thesis was presented in the spirit of exploration, with the hope that other historians would be interested enough to pursue the subject as well and engage with the findings of this author. Historians, like all scholars I believe, formulate hypotheses to explain some aspect of the past, and then test them against what we can know or think we know. If these tests stand, then the hypothesis may also stand, for a time (for no historical theory lasts for very long). But the failure of the facts to fit every aspect of a thesis is no cause for despair, for we have learned something even from such a disagreement between interpretation and evidence. More significantly, historians have always disagreed on what specific facts mean and how they should be read. The historical profession thrives on such disagreements. What may prove deadly to scholarship is the assumption, in the absence of any other evidence, that any error or sloppiness in the recording of these facts is part of some effort to mislead the reader.