Michael Bellesiles, a well-regarded historian at Emory University, should have known that if you're going to write about a topic that interests many Americans to the point of obsession, you'd better have your facts straight. In some significant aspects of his 2000 book, "Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture," he didn't. The resulting furor damaged the credibility of his book and threatened his reputation as a historian.

Bellesiles' thesis is that guns were relatively rare in Colonial households, and America's "gun culture" didn't take hold until long after the Founding Fathers drafted the Second Amendment's "right to bear arms.'' That delighted gun control advocates, who were pleased to have historical evidence that our nation's founders were not gun-toters.

The book won praise from critics and the prestigious Bancroft Prize for historical excellence.

But not only did the book contradict conventional wisdom; it also contradicted the work of some quite good historians, who have found gun ownership to be far more common than Bellesiles said. They pored over his research and found parts of it incredibly shoddy.

Bellesiles said he examined more than 11,000 probate records of more than 1,200 counties, counting the number of guns listed in estate inventories. He found that between 1765 and 1821, not more than 17 percent of estate inventories listed guns. The gun ownership rate was even lower in the 1760-1795 period -- about 14 percent, he said -- and "over half of these guns were listed as broken or otherwise defective.''

He claimed he studied certain records in San Francisco that apparently don't exist. Officials there say they were destroyed by the 1906 earthquake and fire.

Other researchers checked Bellesiles' sources and found more guns in probate records than he reported, and did not find notes that they were "old" or "broken" -- descriptions Bellesiles cited to bolster his conclusion that many guns owned by Americans were in disrepair.

Brandeis historian David Hackett Fischer, an authority on early America, says criticism of Bellesiles' use of probate records and other materials "cuts to the very foundation of what he reports, and convincing answers are not coming from him."

Bellesiles says he can't substantiate his research because he kept all his probate findings on yellow legal pads that were destroyed when a water pipe broke and flooded the history department offices at Emory.

While some critics question his methods and conclusions, others question his motives. One said his zeal to debunk the myth of a heavily armed early America led him to create his own myth of a nation in which gun ownership was uncommon.

Bellesiles acknowledges that there are errors in his work, but argues that its main thesis is sound and that he'll be cleared of any scholarly wrongdoing by a panel of distinguished scholars asked by Emory University to examine the controversy.

I have written a lot about gun control over the years, and I have learned this lesson: If you choose to fire a volley in America's battle over guns, you'd better expect somebody to shoot back. Bellesiles offered critics some targets too big to miss.