I have a brain freeze right now and can’t remember the prof’s name but there was one at Emory University who published a scientific study based on gun ownership back in the 1700’s or maybe it was 1800’s.
He was caught simply making up facts and had to recant his remarks and I think may have even lost his job.
The book was “Arming America.” The author was Michael A. Bellesiles. His Bancroft Prize was rescinded and “resigned” his professorship at Emory.
From wikipedia (yeah, I know):
In two scholarly articles,[15][16] law professor James Lindgren of Northwestern University noted that in Arming America, Bellesiles had
purported to count guns in about a hundred wills from 17th- and 18th-century Providence, Rhode Island, but these did not exist because the decedents had died intestate (i.e., without wills);
purported to count nineteenth-century San Francisco County probate inventories, but these had been destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire;
reported a national mean for gun ownership in 18th-century probate inventories that was mathematically impossible;
misreported the condition of guns described in probate records in a way that accommodated his thesis;
miscited the counts of guns in nineteenth-century Massachusetts censuses and militia reports,
had more than a 60% error rate in finding guns listed as part of estates in Vermont records; and
had a 100% error rate in the cited gun-related homicide cases of seventeenth-century Plymouth, MA.
Critics also identified problems with Bellesiles’s methods of citation. Cramer noted that Bellesiles had misrepresented a passage by George Washington about the quality of three poorly prepared militia units as if his criticism applied to the militia in general. (Washington had noted that the three units were exceptions to the rule.)[17] Cramer wrote, “It took me twelve hours of hunting before I found a citation that was completely correct. In the intervening two years, I have spent thousands of hours chasing down Bellesiles’s citations, and I have found many hundreds of shockingly gross falsifications.”[4]
“Michael A. Bellesiles teaches history at Central Connecticut State University. The author of numerous books, including 1877: America’s Year of Living Violently, he lives in Connecticut.”
Thank you both, should have read further down.
http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2002/10/28/Prof-resigns-faulty-gun-research-cited/UPI-24671035825545/
Prof. resigns; faulty gun research cited
Published: Oct. 28, 2002 at 12:19 PM
By MELISSA SECKORA
WASHINGTON, Oct. 28 (UPI) -- Emory University has accepted the resignation of a history professor whose work on the use and ownership of firearms in early America has been widely criticized.
Emory Associate Vice President Jan Gleason announced Friday that Michael Bellesiles' resignation would be effective Dec. 31. Bellesiles is the author of "Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture," an award-winning book that appeared to confirm that the Second Amendment protects only a collective right to bear arms and that individual gun rights were unimportant to America's founders.
However, Emory released a 40-page indictment of Bellesiles' research composed by a committee of three historians as well as Bellesiles' 7-page response in which he denied any wrongdoing.
The basic thesis of "Arming America" is there were very few guns in early America and that most of the guns that did exist were old and broken. Bellesiles published an article on the subject in 1996 in the Journal of American History -- a piece that was named "Best Article of the Year" by the Organization of American Historians. The book won the 2001 Bancroft Prize, the most-prestigious prize in American-history writing. Columbia is investigating the possibility of revoking the prize.
But over the past year, critics of "Arming America" claimed that Bellesiles miscounted, misinterpreted and made up substantial portions of the information in the book.
The critics said Bellesiles' work focused on nonexistent probate records that he said he read in San Francisco and in Providence, R.I. However, the San Francisco records were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire, and many of the Providence documents that Bellesiles says he read apparently never existed. Bellesiles has also said that his research notes were destroyed in a flood in his campus office, a story that people at Emory familiar with the flood have cast doubt on.
After questions were raised in the media and in faculty workshops at Columbia, Yale, and other major universities, Emory's dean, Robert A. Paul, convened a panel of historians to investigate the charges. The committee was led by Stanley N. Katz of Princeton and included Hanna H. Gray, a former president of the University of Chicago; and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich of Harvard.
The committee's investigation focused on Bellesiles' use of probate records. Of particular interest was a key table on which the author's thesis is grounded. The committee's report stated: "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 James Lindgren, a law professor at Northwestern University, that the scandal could have been avoided with "more conventional editing" by The Journal of American History, and with Ohio State historian Randolph Roth, who determined that Bellesiles' numbers were "mathematically improbable or impossible."
Additionally, the committee found that "no one has been able to replicate Bellesiles' results (on the low percentage of guns) for the places or dates he lists"; that he conflated wills and inventories, which "greatly reduced the (reported) percentage of guns in estates"; he 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.
Committee members also called implausible Bellesiles' claim that false data on his Web site was put there by a hacker and his disavowal of e-mail messages that he wrote to researchers, giving the wrong location for almost all of his probate research.
In a statement, Bellesiles said: "All that remains in question are the few paragraphs and table on probate materials. On those paragraphs, Emory's committee of inquiry found no evidence of fabrication, though they do not charge evasion."
"I have never fabricated evidence of any kind nor knowingly evaded my responsibilities as a scholar," he wrote. "I have never consciously misrepresented any data or evidence. ... I will continue to research and report on the probate materials while also working on my next book, but cannot continue to teach in what I feel is a hostile environment."
He was caught simply making up facts and had to recant his remarks and I think may have even lost his job.
Could that have been Michael Bellisles? His Arming America "study" was a sick joke and I seem to recall him resigning/being fired over it.