Michael A. Bellesiles is having his say again. A revised edition of Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture has been issued by Soft Skull Press, a small New York City imprint. The previous edition was withdrawn by Vintage Books in January 2003, after two scholarly committees found serious problems with Mr. Bellesiles's use of historical data. In the months before Vintage's cancellation, Mr. Bellesiles resigned from the faculty of Emory University, and Columbia University rescinded the 2001 Bancroft Prize in History, which had been awarded to the book.

Soft Skull has also released Weighed in an Even Balance, a 74-page pamphlet in which Mr. Bellesiles responds to his critics. ...

Not everyone is pleased with Mr. Bellesiles's choice of publishers."I think he made a very serious mistake in not turning to a university press, not going through peer review," says Saul Cornell, an associate professor of history at Ohio State University who is completing a book about the Second Amendment for Oxford University Press. Mr. Cornell shares Mr. Bellesiles's skepticism toward the National Rifle Association's view of guns in American history, but says that Mr. Bellesiles"should have taken time to think hard about the criticisms of his book. Not just about the charges of misconduct, but about the general criticisms of how he framed the issues."

"I thought that what happened to Arming America was the ugliest thing I've ever seen in my time in academia," says Richard B. Bernstein, the author of the new Thomas Jefferson and the Revolution of Ideas (Oxford), who has been a friend of Mr. Bellesiles's for several years."As far as I'm concerned, my faith in his integrity is unshaken. ... I am very glad that this book is going to get a second lease on life."...

Mr. Bellesiles writes that the pamphlet is"an effort to respond to every specific accusation against Arming America that has been brought to my attention." Only 7 of the pamphlet's 74 pages, however, directly deal with the probate-records dispute that led to his departure from Emory. An investigative committee appointed by Emory found, for example, that Mr. Bellesiles was guilty of"egregious misrepresentation" when he omitted data from 1774 to 1776 in a table describing gun ownership during the period 1765 to 1790. The pamphlet contains no explicit discussion of that quarrel. (The table in question, however, has been entirely revised in the book's new edition. It now includes data from only 2,633 probate inventories, as opposed to 11,170 in the previous version, but contains inventories from 1774 to 1776.)