Historians and Rhetoric

[Sanford Levinson]

I think that Michael Bellesiles was not well served by his publisher, who
clearly wanted to make it a "big book" for a general audience and decided
that the best way to market it was as a major contribution, on one side, to
the contemporary debate about guns.  This, presumably, is the rationale for
including Michael Zuckerman's comment that "Michael A. Bellesiles is the
NRA's worst nightmare."  And consider Stewart Udall's blurb that "Thinking
people who deplore Americans' addiction to gun violence have been waiting a
long time for this information."  Frankly, I'm not aware of "thinking
people" have applauded "Americans' addition to gun violence."  I think the
debate is between thinking people who say that the undoubted violence
connected with firearms can be justified by reference to a variety of goods
also linked with widespread distribution of firearms and those who say that
the costs outweigh any such gains.  (Isn't the debate somewhat similar with
regard to upholding freedom for speech that "tends toward" or "promotes"
violence or taking one position or another with regard to the meaning of
the Fourth Amendment?)  Robert Spitzer, who says that "This book will
transform the modern gun debate by moving it from hysteria to sensible
analysis" is a very strong opponent of any and all suggestions that the
Second Amendment might now have (or ever have had) any real bite or that
there might be something to be said for adopting anything other than
basically abolitionist policies re guns--this is what he means by "sensible
analysis".  Spitzer is a political scientist who is content to note, quite
accurately, that courts have been unsympathetic to Second Amendment
arguments and draws from this the conclusion that there is simply nothing
further to say.  I was on a panel with him a couple of years ago that was
one of my more unpleasant experiences in terms of trying to get a real
dialogue, on either constitutional or empirical issues, going.

In any event, there is no reason to believe, as Spitzer writes, that Arming
America "will transform the modern gun debate" or, perhaps more to the
point, that academic historians should be particularly interested in
whether they will contribute to debates about contemporary issues.  In
terms of comparative advantages, I think that historians probably rate even
below lawyers (which is well down the scale indeed) with regard to the
probability of supplying deep insight into resolutions of contemporary
public policy debates.  So what exactly is Mary Beth Norton suggesting when
she says that "B. contributes significantly to one of our most contentious
contemporary debates"?  Let me suggest that, except for hard-core
originalists, neither Bellesiles nor Joyce Malcolm contributes anything at
all to our indeed "contentious contemporary debates" about guns, and even
originalists should accept the proposition that the views of the framers of
the Fourteenth Amendment are of greater significance than those of the
Framers of 1787 with regard to any possible limitations on state power
deriving from the Second Amendment.  (If one emphasizes 1868, the
Bellesiles' book takes on a new meaning, for I read it as fundamentally
arguing that America *did* develop a "national gun culture" by the mid-19th
century, not least because of the roles that guns indeed played during the
War and the settlement of the West.)  In any event, what one looks to
historians for is insight into the role that guns played in various aspects
of our history and the way that views about guns were (or were not)
integrated into the structuring ideologies of the various periods of
American history (and to account for such changes as have demonstrably
occurred).

sandy