A Debunking of Pseudo-Historian David Barton's Book on the Second Amendment
Like many a good Christian, pseudo-historian David Barton likes guns and, of course, thinks that every person in America has an unlimited constitutional -- and biblical -- right to own and carry them.
Barton, not surprisingly, has been saying some pretty wild things on the subject recently, many of them on Glenn Beck's web-based TV show, where he went beyond advocating that teachers be armed, saying that the students should be armed, telling this story about an attempted school shooting in the 1850s:
"The great example, in the 1850s you have a school teacher who's teaching. A guy -- he's out in the West -- this guy from New England wants to kill him and find him. So he comes into the school with his gun to shoot the teacher, he decides not to shoot the teacher because all the kids pull their guns out and point it at him and say, 'You kill the teacher, you die.' He says, 'Okay.' The teacher lives. Real simple stuff."
Barton gives no source for his story about those gun-toting kids of the 1850s saving their teacher, making that story impossible to fact check, but many of the other things he's been saying can be checked. This is because they're based on quotes that can be found in his 2000 book, The Second Amendment: Preserving the Inalienable Right of Individual Self-Protection, which, of course, contains a plethora of those footnotes he's famous for.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-rodda/a-debunking-of-pseudohist_b_2595270.html
