Book Review: "Guns and Violence - The English Experience"

[alfsauve]

Guns and Violence - The English Experience by Joyce Lee Malcolm is from the Sowell's & Williams' reading lists of books on liberty and rights.  A 250 page paperback that cover English gun laws and experience from the middle ages until present time.  Written by Dr. Malcolm, who is a Professor of Law/ Legal History at George Mason University, it is broken up chronologically by period of English history.  It ends with the present day crime situation in England and covers briefly the American experience with gun control.   For her last chapter she makes a case for finding what she calls "the right equation".

Dr Malcolm earned a PhD from Brandeis University in comparative history and "is a historian and constitutional scholar active in the area of constitutional history, focusing on the development of individual rights in Great Britain and America. She has written many books and articles on gun control, the Second Amendment, and individual rights. Her work was cited several times in the recent U.S. Supreme Court opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller."

I found the book to be very slow reading as it goes through the British experience in the middle ages, the Tudor-Stuart years and the 18th and 19th history.  Others may find all the minutia of those years fascinating.   It does serve as a historical backdrop for how the British arrived at their present situation.  Once the book moved into the 20th century and Dr Malcolm started bringing in comparisons with the US the book started to pick up for me.   Because of the British infatuation with record keeping there are a lot of details of British legal history dating back to middle ages.  I just found them to be a little overwhelming.

One interesting item about British gun control is how worried the Royals and the government of England were about the control of the country after the French Revolution.   Evidently they were concerned that a similar uprising could possibly take place in England and this precipitated some of the current trend in gun control and people control.  

Understand that you may only be paying for the last 50-75 pages when you buy this book, it is worth reading to get a historian's perspective and one that is factually based and appears to be unbiased by agenda.


Her conclusion.

[ SPOILER ALERT ]

















Less Guns = More Crime.