Who’s Afraid of the Second Amendment?

Originally posted at The Festering Swamp on April 18, 2007

Here are my thoughts on last year's Virginia Tech massacre, which if I'm not mistaken, took place in Tom Kratman's hometown. As an academic, I wish the Texas legislature would pass a bill allowing people who carry Concealed Handgun Licenses, like me, to carry their weapons while at work. Banning guns from campus does nothing to protect faculty, staff, or students from gun-wielding psychopaths. Rather, it just turns us into sitting ducks. – Mike LaRoche

Not surprisingly, the recent shootings at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University have sparked calls from the usual suspects to renew efforts at restricting gun ownership rights. Gun control advocates reason that if Virginia had stronger sales restrictions on firearms, the massacre at Virginia Tech may have been prevented. Statistics from the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, however, undercut their own thesis that stronger gun control laws make citizens safer. Check out Of Arms and The Law, a pro-Second Amendment blog, for further information.

History is not on the side of the gun control lobby, either. The historical origins of the right to bear arms date back to early modern England. In fact, up until the early twentieth century, Britain had a laissez-faire policy toward individual handgun ownership. In a 2002 review of Guns and Violence: The English Experience by Bentley College historian Joyce Malcolm, Glenn Reynolds writes:

It is a standard observation in American and English debates over gun control that England has strict gun controls and low crime rates, while America has (comparatively) liberal gun laws and higher crime rates. It is usually assumed that there is a cause and effect relationship, with the low crime stemming from the strict gun controls in England, and vice versa in the United States.

This turns out not to be the case. As Malcolm observes, violent crime rates in England, very high in the 14th century, fell more or less steadily for five hundred years, even as ownership of firearms became more common. By the late 19th century, England had gun laws that were far more liberal than are found anywhere in the United States today, yet almost no gun crime, and little violent crime of other sorts. (An 1870 act, which was seldom enforced, required the payment of a small tax for the privilege of carrying, not simply owning, a gun.)

Despite a well-armed populace, Malcolm reports, "statistics record an astonishingly low rate of gun-related violence in the late nineteenth century." How low?

In the course of three years, according to hospital reports, there were only 59 fatalities from handguns in a population of nearly 30 million people. Of these, 19 were accidents, 35 were suicides, and only 3 were homicides; 3 an average of one a year.

Despite these rates, which Malcolm is right to call astonishingly low, the British government decided at the turn of the 20th century to begin a program of gun control that would ensure "that nobody except a soldier, sailor, or policeman, should have a pistol at all." The claimed justification was the "enormous" number of handgun injuries.

After World War I, the divergence between American and British gun laws became wider, with the United States continuing the laissez-faire tradition inherited from Britain, while Britain itself opted for a more statist model.

The bottom line for Britain is this: over time increased handgun restrictions have resulted in a rise in crime - a trend continuing to this very day. Not coincidentally, other individual rights in Britain have eroded as well. The old adage of "fear a government that fears your guns," while perhaps trite, is very true.