Guns, Murder, and Probability.pdf

Guns, Murder, and Probability: How Can We Decide Which Figures to Trust? Randolph A. Roth Reviews in American History, Volume 35, Number 2, June 2007, pp. 165-175 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/rah.2007.0038 For additional information about this article Access provided by La Trobe University (9 Oct 2013 07:58 GMT) /journals/rah/summary/v035/35.2roth.html Reviews in American History 35 (2007) 165–175 ? 2007 by The Johns Hopkins University Press Guns, Murder, and Probability: How Can we deCide wHiCH FiGures to trust? randolph roth As historians, we take pride in our openness to new ideas. That is why, I think, so many of us were enthusiastic about Michael Bellesiles’s Arming America.1 Its thesis—that few Americans used, owned, or cared about guns before the mid-nineteenth century—was certainly congenial to scholars who supported gun control, because it suggested America’s homicide problem was caused by an increase in gun ownership and the creation of a “gun culture.” But Arming America had a more fundamental appeal for historians. It proved that they could make important discoveries, that they could confound received wisdom with bold hypotheses and careful research, and that they could play a crucial role in public life. Unfortunately, Arming America was wrong about early America. We also take pride as historians in our skepticism. We admire critics who put the dominant school of thought on the defensive, as Robert Dykstra does in his witty essays on the “new” Western history.2 He believes that “this on-going postmodernist exercise” has done a disservice to the West by exaggerating its violence and that“[d]espite all the mythologizing, violent fatalities in the Old West tended to be rare rather than common.” He blames this “misconception” about Western violence on the mathematical incompetence of recent scholars of Western violence, who commit what he calls