A Gun-Control Advocate and His Fabricated ‘Facts’

S aul Cornell is a professor of history at Fordham, a gun-control advocate, and a contributor to Slate. I have concluded that he fabricated evidence for his most recent article.

If you follow the gun-control debate, then you are used to gun-control advocates (some of whom pose as straight-news reporters) making elementary mistakes, often out of pure ignorance — for example, they regularly confuse semiautomatic weapons (which fire one round with each pull of the trigger) and fully automatic weapons (machine guns) or dramatically understate current restrictions on gun sales. As I will show in this column, this is not a mistake of that kind — it is an actual fabrication, a made-up “fact” of the sort associated with such journalistic fantasists as Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass.

What first interested me was Professor Cornell’s claim that “the easily modified semi-automatic AR-15 used by the white supremacist shooter who killed 10 people in Buffalo on Saturday was 200 times more lethal than the muskets that helped win the American Revolution.” Because I have worked as a journalist for all of my adult life, I am habitually skeptical of quantitative claims with no obvious basis and doubly skeptical of quantitative claims that produce nice, round numbers such as ten or 100.

The purported source of Professor Cornell’s questionable claim is the “Theoretical Lethality Index” included in a 1964 study of the battlefield effectiveness of military weapons conducted by Trevor N. Dupuy, a military historian and retired colonel, on behalf of the U.S. Army. The table cited by Professor Cornell makes no mention of AR-style rifles or of the 5.56mm NATO cartridge they typically fire, that cartridge not having been developed until a decade later. It does contain an estimate that World War II–era machine guns were about 115 times as lethal as Revolutionary-era muskets. I do not have any opinion on the quantitative basis for Dupuy’s estimates, though I do have some serious reservations about how, exactly, an analysis of military weapons’ performance under battlefield conditions might be applied to civilian weapons in the hands of a criminal barricaded inside a classroom full of nine-year-old students or in a grocery store. But that is a minor point — the major point is that the study not only does not characterize AR-style rifles as 200 times more lethal than 18th-century muskets, it does not characterize them in any way whatsoever.

When I asked Professor Cornell about this, he responded that he had used World War II–era machine guns as a stand-in for modern AR-style rifles. Which is to say, Professor Cornell’s own explanation of this discrepancy is that he was willfully misrepresenting the data in the Dupuy study. World War II–era machine guns came in many different varieties, but all of them were, by definition, fully automatic weapons, and practically all of them fired cartridges that were far more powerful than the 5.56mm NATO round used in most AR-style rifles. For perspective, these weapons were used against light-armored vehicles and aircraft as well as against infantrymen — they were vastly more powerful than a modern sporting rifle.

When I called attention to this, Professor Cornell conceded that it had been a mistake to use World War II–era machine guns as a stand-in for AR-style rifles, and added that he should have instead used the 1903 Springfield rifle, which, by his estimate, would produce the much lower figure of 10x lethality for the AR-style rifle rather than 200x. This is, of course, absurd: Even if Professor Cornell had chosen a different weapon from the Dupuy study, it still would have been a willful misrepresentation of the contents of that study, which, again, makes no reference to modern AR-style rifles at all. Professor Cornell’s proffered alternative to misrepresenting the evidence in one way is, incredibly enough, to misrepresent the evidence in a different way. If that sounds difficult to believe, I don’t blame you for finding it so; I will happily provide the entire email conversation to the editors of Slate or to Fordham if either institution should ever stir itself to take an interest in this intellectual dishonesty.

But Professor Cornell’s explanation, self-indicting though it is, still doesn’t make sense: Substituting the World War II–era machine guns for the AR-style rifle, as he says he did, still would not produce that figure of 200x lethality. When I asked him about this, he replied that “this was all done quickly and I can’t reconstruct the process I used to come up with the figure based on my computer drafts.”

In response to my criticism, Slate has appended a correction to the article, which now says that the problem was an “extrapolation” error and that the real number is something like 50x. How that figure was arrived at is anybody’s guess, given that Professor Cornell doesn’t know how he arrived at the earlier one, but the most relevant point is that this explanation is a lie. There was no extrapolation error, because there was no extrapolation, because there was nothing from which to extrapolate. The matter of AR-style rifles simply is not considered in the study, and there isn’t anything comparable from which to extrapolate. This is just Professor Cornell assigning an arbitrary number to his subjective assessment — the subjective assessment of a not especially well-informed academic who as of Wednesday morning did not, by his own account, appreciate the difference between firearms that are used to shoot squirrels in 2022 and those that were used to shoot down airplanes in World War II.

Like any other working journalist, I have made arithmetic errors and misunderstood statistics. What should be emphasized here is not that Professor Cornell produced the wrong number but that he simply made up a number and then attributed it to a study that says nothing at all about the thing he claims it characterizes. The number could have been 10x, 10,000x, or pi times the radius squared — any figure would have been equally fictitious.

I have a good deal of experience in writing about bias in gun-policy journalism. But this is not bias — it is fabrication. Here we have a professor at a major university writing an article in a major media outlet on the subject of a very contentious public-policy matter, and the first claim of fact in the piece is simply made up in order to bolster a weak argument made by a writer who believed — with good reason, apparently — that he could count on the bias and laziness of his editors and the stupidity of his readers to permit the fabrication to go undetected and unchallenged. This is precisely the sort of thing that undermines confidence in our journalistic institutions and fuels conspiracy-theory nonsense. If our institutions do not have enough self-respect to stand up for their own values, then who is going to do it for them?

We need honest journalists and honest academics. The Paul and Diane Guenther Chair in American History at Fordham University is not one of them.