While in New Jersey yesterday, I skipped Hillary Clinton's Rutgers affair (which didn't seem to go over all that well with the team...), and I drove to the beautiful Ramapo College campus, in Mahwah, right near New Jersey's border with New York state.

I arrived at sunset, and managed to take a picture of this beautiful building:

I didn't know what the building was as I'd never been there before, but a little research revealed that it's the Birch Mansion:

The mansion is located in a prominent spot in the main quad. The red brick Queen Anne-style mansion was completed in 1890 at the cost of $100,000 for Lillie and John Mayer as a gift from their parents, who lived across the road from them. It is known as being haunted, as Lillie was shot inside of it. It was allegedly accidental, but rumors subsist to this very day that the mansion is haunted. It is now used for events and office space.

Anyway, I digress, for I wasn't there to go haunted house hunting, but to attend a lecture by Clayton Cramer, sponsered by the Center for Business and Public Policy at Ramapo College in cooperation with the New Jersey Coalition for Self Defense (NJCSD): From the announcement:

The author played a key role in exposing the Michael Bellesiles scandal several years ago in which the revisionist historian at Emory University was exposed as a fraud, leading to Bellesiles resigning a tenured position and having his Bancroft Prize for History revoked.

Bellesiles's claims, proven to be false, about the presence and cultural significance of guns in early America raised serious questions about the extent to which academic historians let their current, shared political preferences blind them to the obligations of critical evaluation of novel claims. Cramer will also discuss the development of gun culture in the early United States, and the lessons that it has for modern America.

I'm on the left, Cramer is in the center, and on the right is Dr. Murray Sabrin, Professor and Executive Director of the Center for Business and Public Policy. Dr. Sabrin is also not only a distinguished academician, he's a noted Libertarian who among other things ran for New Jersey governor against the notorious Jim McGreevey. Dr. Sabrin also writes a blog called ShapTalk.com.

It was a special honor to meet Clayton Cramer, and not just because I like his blog and agree with him on the gun issue, but because he is a leading debunker of the kind of lying bogus research that once went unchallenged. He epitomizes the best of what I think the blogging ethos should about. I don't care what your politics are -- right, left, social conservative, libertarian, or socialist -- getting to the facts and the truth should always be the ideal, and it clearly is for Clayton Cramer. (Even when I've disagreed with him, he has never been one to try to avoid or obfuscate facts.)

College campuses have of course been on edge lately, and the organizers were quick to point out that the timing of the lecture on guns was coincidental. But it was refreshing to see this viewpoint presented at a college campus. The crowd, by the way, was very polite, and not a single anti-gun heckler came.

(I guess they're too busy celebrating Lenin's birthday this weekend. On the other hand, maybe they were already worn out by Hillary's speech at Rutgers...)

MORE: Thank you, Glenn Reynolds for the link, and welcome all!

Hey, if you've come here to read this, be sure to buy Armed America. It's excellent, and this information needs to be spread around. (If you already bought the book, why not buy another one and donate it to your local library?)

UPDATE: Be sure to read Clayton Cramer's account of the event. He's disappointed in the low turnout, and observes that no enough people care:

Unfortunately, NJCSD's efforts to get the Association of New Jersey Rifle and Pistol Clubs to publicize the event (and perhaps get .1% of their 30,000 members to show up) didn't fly. My emails to officers of the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association were either ignored or NYRPA members weren't much interested in what I had to say. Look, I know that I'm not Charlton Heston, but I'm not exactly chopped liver, either. To have this few people show up for what even my harshest critic (my wife) says was a really good speech was a bit disheartening.

There are days that I wonder if the reason that gun owners have been losing for so long is that most really don't care that much.

To the extent I wasn't feeling demoralized, it was probably because I deliberately refused to turn on the damned television all week.