Thom Hartman: The 2nd Amendment was ratified to help preserve slavery.

[ThoughtCriminal]

52. "Research methods"

Your "nit" was that he "cites Bellesiles 10 times" and Mr. Bellesiles was “guilty of unprofessional and misleading work,”. If you can trash Bogus on that basis, I don't see how you can defend Kopel. And if an entire book or paper can be discredited for citation errors and lack of proper attribution, don't be surprised if you get called out for doing the same thing.

Actually, I'm reading the Bogus paper now and it appears to be 6 times (out of 506 footnotes - "leaned heavily"?). I believe that your "research method" was to do a word count the number of times that "Bellesiles" appears. The problem with that is that both the mention in the manuscript and the corresponding footnote. But hey, who am I to question this kind of disciplined academic review? I suppose I would have to read Bellesiles' book to really judge that "Leaned heavily" comment. I'm guessing that you probably haven't read it either, but have read criticisms of it.

OK let's just pretend that post 33 doesn't exist. You do much better when you address the arguments directly. Which leads me to...

Having said all that, I'm about half way through Bogus' paper, and so far I would have to agree with you that the case is weak - I might even say extremely weak. Were Mason and Henry talking about slavery? Bogus suggests that everybody in the room knew what they were talking about. That's some pretty smokeless powder. It seems to me that in 1788 Virginia, they would not have to dance around the issue - if they were afraid that the Federal government would facilitating a slave rebellion or emancipation this way, they would just come out and say or write it publicly. So far, I'm not seeing anybody at the time making anything close to a direct argument that the Amendment was vital to protect slavery.

Need to finish reading to do before even a tentative conclusion, but I am not going to plow through everything said at the Richmond Convention for the sake of this argument! Would you?