As for the few who were privileged enough to handle such firearms, well, they had not a clue how to even care for these pieces of steel, let alone shoot them. Bellesiles claims " 1765-1790 revealed that only 14 percent of the inventories included firearms, over half of those guns (53 percent) were listed as broken or otherwise, dysfunctional." (Bellesiles).
Professor Bellesiles also shows how it wasn't until the years after the Civil War that guns made their way upward into nearly one third of all households. It wasn't, in Bellesiles facts, until Samuel Colt was able to combine the advantages of marketing, with his easier to use, and much cheaper guns that our country became this " invented world" (Bellesiles).
He tries to prove his thesis by shooting a gun of a different kind, the gun of numbers; a gun now pointed back at him by the many critics who have stood in line waiting, praying for someone to say something, anything that could give them something to write about, scream about.
In the span of just over ten years, that's more than 3,650 days, and the ink of over six hundred pages, through the digits of thousands upon thousands of probate records, Bellesiles has uncovered a lot more than just dusted numbers on a page. He has uncovered the heat from a controversy that he can only wish to go away, and enough statistics to make the alphabet jealous, but do the numbers spell "Fraud"?.
Literature Review.
In the days following the release of "Arming America" in September of 2000, Bellesiles" name, and the data he supplied had passed through the lips and pages, and minds of every major historian and book critic alike. He won the highly sought after Bancroft Prize for 2001 - an award aimed at Historical Excellence, which coupled nicely with the "Best Article Of The Year" award that he had earned in 1996 from the Organization of American Historians for his release in, "Journal of American History".
