July 20, 2001
Journalists, Professors Show Why Teens Don’t Know History
by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor
As America prepared to celebrate the Fourth of July, Associated Press reported on a recent survey that provides further proof that a significant percentage of the Nation’s teen-agers are woefully ignorant of our history.
The AP reports began by saying that one in five American teen-agers doesn’t know the answer to this grade-school history question: From what country did America declare its independence?
Twenty-two percent of those who responded to the survey commissioned by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation did not know the answer was England. Fourteen percent thought it was France.
“When you look at these numbers, it means that more than 5 million US teen-agers don’t understand the true meaning of Independence Day,” said Colin Campbell, president of the foundation that runs Colonial Williamsburg, the restored 18th-century (state) capital.
The nationwide telephone survey of 1,020 youngsters ages 12 to 17 was conducted May 31 to June 5 and has a margin of error plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Nearly all those surveyed knew that Washington, DC, is the US capital and that George W. Bush is president. However:
No Surprise
The Williamsburg Foundation study is not the only one to demonstrate the abysmal state of ignorance in which American teen-agers and adults wallow. There have been several others, some of which have previously been reported in Gun Week. And “Tonight Show” host Jay Leno frequently focuses on this state of misinformation.
But this should come as no surprise as we see the misinformation disseminated by academics and journalists, particularly with reference to firearms.
Also published in the San Francisco Chronicle on the eve of the July 4th celebration, was an article by columnist Mark Simon, which leaned heavily on the discredited research of one historian to promote the thesis that the Second Amendment doesn’t mean what it says, and that the Founding Fathers didn’t mean what they wrote.
“As we prepare to celebrate on Wednesday (July 4) the historic declaration that every American has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the question is how much those guarantees depend on the right to own a gun,” Simon began.
“Gun rights advocates would have us believe that owning a gun—or, more precisely, a clumsy, unreliable and highly inaccurate musket—was something so fundamental to the Founding Fathers that it’s as American as apple pie,” he continued.
“But there is an intriguing debate raging as to whether America’s love affair with guns is a more modern taste—perhaps more of a thin mint ice cream than a pie.
“Whenever America’s obsession with guns began, it’s hard to imagine the nation’s Founders anticipated that the subject of gun rights would become the elaborate confection it is today—wrapped in layer upon layer of mythic frosting.
“Gun-rights advocates see themselves as philosophical descendants of the 18th century Minutemen, those stalwart patriots ever-ready to defend hearth and home. In the advocates’ minds, that forms clear justification for preserving and protecting the current epidemic of gun proliferation.
“But their view overlooks some facts,” Simon claimed, before trying to provide substance for his argument.
“In his recent book, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, Michael Bellesiles, a history professor at Emory University, argues it’s a myth that gun ownership was widespread in the America of the Revolutionary War.”
Tainted History
Simon then summarizes Bellesiles’ arguments, never mentioning the many challenges to his research—not just by pro-Second Amendment scholars—but by disinterested historians who were unable to replicate his research. (It didn’t help that Bellesiles claimed his notes were burned—the academic equivalent of the “dog ate my homework.”)
When Bellesiles’ book first came down the chute, it was pretty clear that he, his publisher and his supporters were knowingly perpetrating a hoax as part of their continuing polemic against legal, private gun ownership and the Second Amendment. Bellesiles and the Chronicle’s Simon are part of an organized revisionist approach to history that has infected the educational system at all levels since the early part of the 20th century. As our educational system was being revised, so were the history books. Indeed, in more recent years, educators have shown as much interest in history as they have in the multiplication tables.
And the products of this education system have moved on to journalism schools as well as other professions where they can use their fields of expertise to further confuse or propagandize the public.
Clearly, history isn’t the only subject that journalists and academics either ignored or distorted. Yet another example surfaced just before the Fourth of July. It combines bad journalism with questionable, if not bad, science.
Another journalist, Alan Mozes of Reuters Health, reported on another so-called study related to firearms safety education, and started to make factual mistakes in the first sentence, by repeating propagandizing claims.
“With firearm injuries on a fast-track to surpass car accidents as the leading cause of injury-related death among American youth, researchers have found that many adults do not understand the risks of owning guns,” Mozes started.
“But community-based counseling programs can teach parents to store their guns securely, unloaded and trigger-locked, study findings suggest,” he continued, citing very limited research by Dr. Tamara Coyne-Beasley at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Mozes says that Coyne-Beasley and associates gauged safe gun storage practices among 112 gunowners aged 18 to 81 living in an urban county in North Carolina. The county ranked fourth in the state for adolescent homicides, but no one notes how large a sample of the whole county population is “112 gunowners.”
Also casting doubt on this questionable science is the fact that the report was first published in Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, published by an anti-gun medical group.
Perhaps the agenda behind the research can best be assessed by the last two sentences from the Reuters Health story.
“The safest way to avoid a firearm injury in the home is to remove guns from the home. If you must keep a gun at home, the safest thing to do is to unload the gun and keep it locked up,” Coyne Beasley said.
Mozes concludes with, “According to the report, nearly 6,000 people younger than 20 years die of gun-related injuries each year in the US.”
Surprising Contradiction
How bad is this kind of research? So bad that it was contradicted unintentionally by a July 2 report in Newsday, one of America’s most anti-gun newspapers.
Under the headline, “Gun accidents rare for children,” Newsday’s staff writer Bob Cuza, begins:
“When a child dies after gaining access to a gun in the home, headlines inevitably follow. But the reality is that such accidents are relatively rare among young children.
“In 1998, the most recent year for which statistics are available, there were just five accidental gun deaths among children 14 or younger in New York State and 121 nationwide, according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. By comparison, there were 317 gun deaths among young children nationwide that were judged homicides, according to the Centers for Disease Control.”
Cuza must have gone to different schools than Simon and Mozes. Note the sources he cites and the conclusions he reached. Maybe there’s hope still for some journalists and academics.