gun culture & intellectual culture

Does everyone already know the story of this book? I'd never heard anything about it before listening to a Ralph Raico lecture a couple years ago, but I'm not a good test case. Having once been something of an NPR-junkie, I now actively avoid all exposure to the mainstream media.

Short version: leftist academic makes huge splash with shocking historical discovery: there never was a gun culture in America before the 20th century; nope, never happened; it was all made up by Republicans seeking the votes of gun nuts. After big splash comes big embarrassment. Leftist academic made it all up. Anyone who bothers to double-check his sources finds that there is no evidence for his conclusions.

Here's the scary part:

Who was responsible for unearthing the truth? Not the prestigious review committee. They only certified what had been discovered by people like Clayton Cramer and Joseph Stromberg, and others from gun-rights organizations. These were not exactly establishment sources, and they were going up against all leading literary reviews and even the National Endowment of the Humanities, which had thrown its weight behind the Emory historian. This was a case of David and Goliath.

Lew Rockwell, "Bellesiles: the Larger Context"

Once you let that sink in, you might take some comfort from Lew's conclusion:

[...] The political paradigm that has limitless faith in the power of government, and no confidence in the ability of individuals to manage their own affairs, has been robbed of its biggest break in many years.

People ask if there is any reason for libertarians to be confident. If you understand the sociology of ideas, it is easy to see that the statist project is running out of intellectual steam. It survives mainly due to the momentum it gathered during and after World War II. But it has no new source of strength other than its domination of existing structures of power, and without intellectual life and vibrancy, it is profoundly vulnerable.

Saying that statism has lost intellectual energy is not to claim assurance of the final victory of its opposite, of course. But we must not rule out the possibility. [...]

See also The Journalist's Guide to Gun Policy Scholars.

(Yes, yes, I know. This isn't exactly breaking news. I never claimed my blog would be topical.)