Michael Bellesiles published in 2000 “Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. Bellesiles, a professor at Emory University, argued that the American culture of gun ownership grew not from the fight by American pioneers for individual liberty but an early-American congressional mandate necessitated by the actual absence both of firearms and Americans’ proficiency with them.

Bellesiles soon declared the Second Amendment “an individual right collectively defined.” Other very prominent historians gleefully joined the anti-gun chorus armed, so they thought, with the facts to make their political case. One hailed Bellesiles as “the NRA’s worst nightmare.”

Bellesiles became the prince of the gun-control statists, many of them ensconced in universities. He won the Columbia University Bancroft Prize for the best work of American history published in 2000. He proclaimed in 2001 that, “As for the NRA (National Rifle Association), when anyone talks about the history of guns in America, they’re going to have to give me evidence — facts, not folktales.’”

The problem for Bellesiles arose when people presented facts that not only contradicted his “facts” but indeed revealed that his “facts” were simply fiction. He made it up.

Bellesiles completely misstated hard data such as probate and census records, grossly misrepresented political events such as legislative acts both in England and America and simply ignored evidence contradictory to his claims. He even cited records destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

When people asked for his notes and raw data, Bellesiles replied that they were “lost in a flood.” By the end of 2002, his erstwhile supporters abandoned him, Columbia took back its prize and Emory asked him to leave.

I tell you that story to tell you this story. The anti-liberty statists began some years ago screaming that the earth was heating up unnaturally and rapidly because of human activity. They swore that the “science” and the “data” were irrefutable.

They told us that unless we stopped driving cars and eating beef and using ice cubes then we would either bake or drown or get blown away in a hurricane.

Those who oppose individual freedom and favor government usurpation of your rights soon worshipped at the global warming altar. Global warming mythology also conveniently served the cause of global governance because, after all, how can you stop a global problem if you have independent nations?

Predictably, when anyone questioned the global warming religion or produced contradictory evidence they met the scorn of the statists who labeled the dissenters either morons or Luddites.

The statists now refuse even to discuss the issue. Al Gore said recently that, “We have long since passed the time when we should pretend this is a ‘on the one hand, on the other hand’ issue. It’s not a matter of theory or conjecture ...”

We have lately learned why Al demurs. Global warming, it turns out, is the biggest hoax since the Community Reinvestment Act. They made it up. They not only made it up but also bragged about it to each other in hundreds of e-mail recently made public.

Phil Jones, head of the East Anglia University climate research unit that produces the gospel of global warming data, said in a 1999 e-mail that, “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd (sic) from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

Jones and his colleagues also corresponded about blacklisting dissenters from reputable journals and even boycotting other journals in an effort to “redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

Skeptics demanded, upon the revelation of these deceptions, to see their raw data sets. Guess what. The data are gone. Jones and crew dumped them “to save space” when they moved into a new building.

I wonder if the Manhattan Project dumped its data and simply started all over on the atomic bomb when it moved to Los Alamos — seems to be what “scientists” do.

President Barack Obama and his statist cronies, nonetheless, still want us to give away our money and our rights for a cause now proven slightly less credible than the Easter Bunny.

Obama is on his way to trading our birthright for his version of global warming — the adulation of statist academics, journalists and politicians.

The global warming agenda has never been about science or health or human life. The global warming agenda is about stripping us of our freedom and redistributing our wealth. The only things truly endangered are our rights.

Sen. Kevin Bryant represents Anderson County and is a member of the Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee. He can be contacted at Kevin@Kevinbryant.com

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