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Back in 1994, Harvard University Press published Joyce Lee Malcolm's To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right, a splendid examination of how the English Bill of Rights (1689) came to include the right to keep and bear arms. The book was distinguished not only by Malcolm's detailed use of primary sources but also by her willingness to acknowledge uncomfortable facts. Other authors had located the origins of this right in the medieval past, trusting overly much Parliament's claim in the English Bill of Rights to be "vindicating and asserting their ancient rights and liberties." Malcolm very carefully demonstrated that this "ancient right" was, in 1689, actually a fairly recent discovery.

Malcolm's new book is not the tour de force that To Keep and Bear Arms was. There are three distinct topics in Guns and Violence. The first is a history of the right to keep and bear arms, and for the most part, she carries this off well. The second is a history of crime in England, and here Malcolm's treatment has some serious limitations. Her discussion of the the third topic is concentrated in chapter 7, where Malcolm compares England with America and attempts to dismantle the widely held belief that England's supposedly low crime rates are the result of gun-control laws. Unfortunately, that chapter differs considerably from the rest of the book in tone, losing something of the scholarly style of the first six chapters.

Malcolm is strongest when she demonstrates that the right to keep and bear arms enjoyed widespread support in England until recently, even among the upper classes, who should have worried the most about armed peasants. In 1893, a bill was introduced in Parliament to restrict ownership of handguns "less than fifteen inches long" to reduce gun accidents. Members of Parliament pointed out that the government's own figures showed there simply wasn't a serious problem; moreover, they said, the proposed legislation "attacked the natural right of everybody who desired to arm himself for his own protection."

Two years later, a revised form of the bill was introduced. While Prime Minister Gladstone acknowledged that the problem at issue "was not of such magnitude" as to justify the government pushing forward on this particular bill, he argued that such a law was nevertheless justified if it "could save one life or one human being's eyesight." The bill came under ferocious attack, with mp Hopwood condemning its "disregard of individual liberty," mp Cross complaining that the power it granted to stop and search individuals for handguns was "monstrous," and mp Moulton questioning the wisdom of "interfering with such a large number of people" in the hopes of reducing "an accident list which amounted to something like eight or nine cases a year."

Why then was such a law proposed in the first place? An undersecretary at the Home Office explained to his superior that it was required because increasingly Britons were carrying pistols; "even ladies are taking to it." This was apparently not hyperbole. English police were still generally unarmed, but when, in 1909, London police chased across the north of town after payroll robbers, "they borrowed four pistols from passersby while other armed citizens fulfilled their legal obligation and joined the chase."

But that changed radically with the 1920 Firearms Act, the first English law in modern times to restrictively license handguns and rifles and thus an important divide between bobbies borrowing pistols from Londoners out for a walk, and today, where the only civilians carrying pistols are criminals. While I come to the same conclusion as Malcolm about the motives behind the 1920 statute—that the government lied to Parliament when it claimed that the goal of the Firearms Act was to disarm criminals; the actual goal was to prevent an imagined Bolshevik Revolution—I was surprised to see how reliant she was on Colin Greenwood's seminal 1972 Firearms Control: A Study of Armed Crime and Firearms Control in England and Wales and Thomas Jones's Whitehall Diary as sources. Greenwood's book is a fine piece of both history and criminology, but not a primary source. It would have strengthened Malcolm's case had she used more of the primary sources that Greenwood cited. Nor did Malcolm use the Cabinet papers declassified in 1969-70. These provide an overwhelming wealth of evidence for the real intentions behind the Firearms Act.1

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