A Historian's Blind Spot?

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED MAY 8, 2023

Heather Cox Richardson is one of the most popular writers on Substack. Her newsletter, “Letters from an American,” has more than a million subscribers and earns her more than a million dollars a year, according to a New York Times article in 2020. She’s also written six well-regarded books on US history.

I learned of Richardson through two friends who regularly share her newsletter on their Facebook pages. Her newsletter is generally written in a calm and non-confrontational style, which is a welcome departure from the overwrought tones of many political columns these days. Most of her daily writings can be summarized as falling into two categories — “Here’s what the Republicans are doing today, and why it’s bad,” or “Here’s what the Democrats are doing today, and why it’s good.” (Sometimes it’s a blend of the two.)

As someone who’s not a Democrat or a Republican, but has been unaffiliated with any party for more than 20 years, I typically welcome well-written articles that reveal nefarious activities by either party…and both parties offer plenty of nefarious activities to write about. Most of Richardson’s excoriation of Republicans is well-deserved, and recently she’s made good points in her articles about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ unreported financial support from Republican donors and about the Republican Party’s ridiculous and potentially dangerous posturing over raising the debt ceiling.

One topic on which I disagree strongly with Richardson is gun rights/gun control, and it’s a subject she writes on frequently. As a professional historian, Richardson certainly has a deeper knowledge of American history overall than I do. But as someone who for many years has read widely on issues of guns in the US, I wish she treated the topic with the accuracy and intellectual rigor one might expect from a professional historian.

Her May 6 article, focused on guns and the National Rifle Association, contains several claims that are troubling from the standpoint of accuracy. In the third paragraph, she quotes the text of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution — “A well regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” She goes on to add, “There’s not a lot to go on about what the Framers meant, although in their day, to ‘bear arms’ meant to be part of an organized militia.”

I’m confident that Richardson herself believes that, but not all historians do, nor do all jurists. Thomas McAffee and Michael J. Quinlan in Scholarly Works observed that “the Second Amendment embodied a fundamental personal right to its adopters and that acceptance of their view is supported, rather than foreclosed, by the entire course of America’s constitutional development over the past two hundred years.”¹ Clayton Cramer and Joseph Edward Olson, writing in the Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy, concluded that “the Founding Generation did not understand bear arms as limited to military or collective militia duty but saw it as merely one way of expressing the concept of possession (as a modern speaker might say carry a gun).”² Similarly, civil rights attorney Don Kates, in the Michigan Law Review, said “…the amendment’s phrase ‘right of the people’… creates not a state right, but one which individuals can assert. This is how the identically phrased first and fourth amendments are interpreted.”³

And of course, the Supreme Court settled the matter by ruling in D.C. v Heller in 2008 that the Second Amendment does indeed protect the rights of individual citizens.

Later in the article, writing about the political influence of the NRA at the beginning of this century, Richardson alleges that NRA was “awash in money from gun and ammunition manufacturers.”

“By 2000 it was one of the three most powerful lobbies in Washington. It spent more than $40 million on the 2008 election,” she claims. Her footnotes to the article don’t contain any citations for this information.

The charge that the NRA is mainly funded by gun and ammunition manufacturers is a made frequently by opponents of the NRA, including Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand in 2019. But CNN fact-checked that claim and said that “Gillibrand is incorrect. The NRA is not ‘largely funded’ by gun makers,” and, after a review of 2013 NRA revenues, reported that “much of this money comes from everyday Americans.”⁴

“This remains accurate in 2019,” CNN concluded.

There’s also no citation for the claim that the NRA is one of the three most powerful lobbies in Washington, nor does Richardson define what she means by “most powerful.” Certainly the NRA is politically active and contributes heavily to political campaigns and candidates. But Open Secrets, an independent nonprofit research group that tracks political contributions, reports that the three lobbies spending the most money in 2008 were the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, AARP, and Exxon Mobil.⁵ The NRA doesn’t even appear in the top 20.

Similarly, Richardson offers no citation for her claim that the NRA spent $40 million in the 2008 election. PolitiFact, a fact-checking organization sponsored by the non-partisan Poynter Institute, says NRA giving in 2008 (campaign contributions, candidate contributions, and lobbying) totaled $13,550,340.⁶ Not exactly small change, but not $40 million. Richardson’s other claims about NRA giving in 2012 and 2014 also diverge from what PolitiFact reports, although the figures are close for the 2016 election, and several sources agree with her giving figure for 2020.

Finally, Richardson concludes the article with her most egregious allegation: “The unfettered right to own and carry weapons has come to symbolize the Republican Party’s ideology of individual liberty.”

Yes, that’s “unfettered,” as in “not limited by rules or any other controlling influence.” For Richardson’s statement to be true, the Republican Party would have to support firearms ownership for rapists and other violent felons, for the criminally insane, for terrorists, and for mass murderers. Does anyone believe this has happened? Can anyone even identify a single Republican who advocates such a policy?

I get it — Richardson doesn’t like the contemporary Republican Party. I don’t much either. But I imagine that, as a history professor, she’d take a dim view if her students supported their arguments with claims that are questionable or outright wrong. I’d enjoy her articles more if she’d do less of that herself.

Footnotes

1. McAffee, Thomas B. and Quinlan, Michael J., “Bringing Forward the Right to Keep and Bear Arms: Do Text, History, or Precedent Stand in the Way?” (1997). Scholarly Works. 512
https://scholars.law.unlv.edu/facpub/512/

2. Cramer, Clayton E. and Olson, Joseph Edward, “What Did ‘Bear Arms’ Mean in the Second Amendment?” Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy, Vol. 6, №2, 2008, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1086176

3. Kates, Don B. Jr., “Handgun Control and the Original Meaning of the Second Amendment.” Michigan Law Review, Volume 82, Issue 2, 1983 https://michiganlawreview.org/journal/handgun-probibition-and-the-original-meaning-of-the-second-amendment/

4. Kirsten Gillibrand claims NRA ‘is largely funded’ by gun makers | CNN Politics

5. Top Spenders • OpenSecrets

6. PolitiFact | Counting up how much the NRA spends on campaigns and lobbying

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