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The title of Malcolm's book suggests that it is about "guns and violence," yet she examines not just gun-related crimes (e.g., murder, armed robbery) but also property crimes. Malcolm was, I think, attempting to show that introducing firearms in English history did not change the proportion of property crimes to personal crimes. But this point needed to be driven home to clarify why she presented material that otherwise seems tangential to her thesis.
Malcolm's use of crime statistics left me a bit uneasy in places, though she has my sympathies in dealing with a difficult problem. As she points out, English crime statistics for the medieval period are of relatively higher quality than can be found for nearly any nation in continental Europe. Still, even English crime statistics before the sixteenth century are inadequate for anything but an impressionistic interpretation.
Malcolm relies on a variety of studies of medieval English crime rates, all of which seem to be in agreement that homicide rates in thirteenth-century England were ten to twenty times higher than today. Many of these studies are for a particular period and place, dependent on the availability of surviving judicial records. Are they representative of England as a whole?
And if these older records are representative, how accurate are they? Even in the modern era, British crime statistics are terribly misleading. Malcolm quotes the economic historian Howard Taylor as saying that nineteenth- century English murder statistics are suspect; many murders may not have been reported in some jurisdictions "[b]ecause the discovery of a suspicious death and its subsequent investigation and prosecution could make a large dent in a police authority budget." This raises questions about the conclusions that Guns and Violence draws from several centuries of data that are unreliable and probably not even consistently unreliable.
Chapter 7 is by far the most disappointing part of Malcolm's book, though it is likely to be the most noticed as well. I strongly agree with her conclusion—that the availability of guns, if it has an influence on crime rates, is small, and perhaps not in the direction that gun-control advocates assume. Nonetheless, I found the tone of chapter 7 to be at odds with the rest of the book. The first six chapters are a scholarly examination of historical evidence; the seventh chapter reads more like a political argument. There are also a few factual errors in that chapter. While they do not impair the accuracy of Malcolm's conclusions, they are a bit frustrating in an otherwise carefully researched work. Chapter 7 belonged somewhere, but perhaps not here.
The most frustrating aspect of the book, however, is Malcolm's almost complete disregard of the moral component to understanding the nature of guns and violence in the history of England. Malcolm points to the Victorian period as an age "cursed with every ill modern society pegs as a cause of crime—wrenching poverty alongside growing prosperity, teeming slums, rapid population growth and dislocation, urbanization, the breakdown of the working family, problematic policing, and, of course, wide ownership of firearms." She seems to have given no attention to popular morality in understanding how the Victorian era managed to avoid a significant violence problem. I found only one reference in Guns and Violence to the importance of moral values, a summary of a 1948 House of Lords discussion of rising crime, violence, and disrespect for the law.
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