By David Hardy

Dr. Joyce Lee Malcolm, professor of history at Bentley College, specializes in early modern British history. Although a historian by avocation, her work in constitutional history earned her a fellowship to Harvard Law and and fellowship with the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Her work in the second amendment field did not stem from a gun hobby; last I heard, she had never owned a gun. Rather, she was in Britain, engaged in researching their civil war of the 1660's. She encountered a paradox: the royalists were hiring thousands of mercenaries, despite significant local support. Further research into original records showed the mercenaries were being hired, not for their own services, but because they had firearms. Still further research showed, however, that the British themselves had plentiful supplies of guns. If you have supporters, with guns, available at little cost, why waste money on importing mercenaries?

The trail led to records documenting the reasons. Both sides had opened the civil war by confiscating gunsincluding the guns of any friendlies considered lukewarmthe guns being taken from them to be given to more staunch supporters. British citizens reacted by hiding their weapons, and refusing to use them even for the side they supported.

The research continued on into the post-civil war period, where she documented rising support for recognition of individual rights to arms and for preventing government disarmaments of civilians. The outcome was her book, To Keep and Bear Arms, published by Harvard University Press in 1994.

Dr. Malcolm's work solidly establishes that an individual right to arms was a given in Anglo-American political thought by the end of the 17th century. It's hard to summarize a book of this size (the footnotes alone are 40 pages of fine print). She notes that even prior to the civil war there was widespread distrust of government, keying upon its attempted disarmaments. Charles I passed measures to control supply of gunpowder, for example, let it get into "vulgar hands," which members of Parliament attacked as "a project for disarming of the Kingdom." In the end, parliament passed statutes ending the royal control over gunpowder imports. With the outbreak of civil war, both sides attempted to disarm lukewarm supporters, and British commoners began to hide their guns. When they were convinced to turn out, the armaments were impressive. One band, known as The Clubmen because they were supposedly armed only with clubs, still managed to turn up 7,000 musketeers with their own arms.

Following the civil war, and Cromwell's Protectorate, Charles II was restored to the throneand promptly tried to secure his position by disarming all but friendlies, and establishing a select militia composed only of his supporters. Royal orders called for disarming any who were not "well-affected." The gentry (whose attitude toward the monarch began as favorable, but thereafter varied) got their own disarmament order in the Game Acts, which limiting hunting to the wealthy, and allowed them to disarm any person whose land value fell below the limit, on the claim that a gun was intended for poaching. James II continued the policiesuntil he was overthrown in the Glorious Revolution. One contemporary noted of the last event that it was unprecedented: a king with a standing army, a navy, and a treasury, found his power broken as a spider's web might be snapped by touch of a finger. Prof. Malcolm relates the notes on debates over formulation of a declaration of rights, which James' replacements, William and Mary, were required to swear to uphold. Among those rights was a right of protestant subjects to keep arms. Parliament members saw that as vitalsome complained that they had themselves been disarmed; one complained it was "an abominable thing, to disarm a nation." Thomas Erle proposed that, in addition to arms kept for the militia, every person with more than ten pounds of property "be provided of a good muskett in case of an invasion." She notes of the history of the declaration, that it was steadily amended to emphasize the personal right to arms and to downplay the militia relationship. "In light of this shift, it is particularly ironic that American lawyers have misread the English right to have arms as merely a "collective" right inextricably tied to the militia. In actual fact, the Convention retreated steadily from such a position and came down squarely, and exclusively, in favour of an individual right to have arms for self defense." She notes that this was the British understanding well thru our revolution.

In 1780, after the Gordon riots, Lord Amherst wrote a lt. colonel, ordering him to disarm Londoners other than the militia. He was attacked, and a formal parliamentary inquiry convened, with members demanding "some species of punishment for the blow directed against our dearest privileges." Anherst escaped only by arguing that his order had been misconstrued; he had only meant to disarm rioters, and in any event it was too much to expect an officer in an emergency to "be acquainted with all the privileges of the Bill of Rights." "The argument that today's National Guardsmen, members of a select militia, would constitute the only persons entitled to keep and bear arms has no historical foundation."