Published on Subversive Liberty, May 29, 2000

The Historical English Right to Keep and Bear Arms

by

Colin Greenwood
Retired British policeman, author of Firearms Control (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972)

In his response to Pierre Lemieux’s article Thank You Commissar published in the Ottawa Citizen, Mr David McConnell makes facetious comment on the English Bill of Rights of 1688 (lWm & M Sess 2 c2) and points out that, despite his trials and tribulations, Mr Lemieux did not lose his weapons. I am inclined to add, “Yet”.

In making his very political point, Mr McConnell takes the Bill out of context and so fails to understand (or perhaps fails to convey) what it meant then. Mr McConnell’s copy of the Bill (which he keeps by his bedside) seems to be incomplete. The full version should begin by referring to the various complaints against the catholic King James II who had endeavoured “to subvert and extirpate the laws and liberties of the Kingdom”.

There were thirteen specific complaints and the sixth of these, set well above matters such as free elections, was that King James had “caused several good subjects, being protestants, to be disarmed at the same time when papists were both armed and imployed contrary to law.” The Bill did not seek to disarm catholics, but merely to place protestants on an equal footing by asserting that “the subjects which are protestants may have arms for their defence, suitable to their condition and. as allowed by law”.

This statement must also be taken in the context of its day. The right to keep arms was a long established part of English Common Law but, because the Common Law is capable of change by various mechanisms, the right was not absolute and Charles II had modified it through his Militia Act of 1662 which continued the practice of requiring subjects to keep arms of a particular type according to their ‘condition and degree’ -- that is their rank in society and their wealth.

The rights and liberties of Englishmen continued to expand under Common Law. In the 17th century, many of the supposed rights did not, in practice, extend to the bottom of the social ladder but by the 18th century, Common Law rights were well established. and of such a nature that Sir William Blackstone, in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765) was in no doubt that the right to keep arms was a vital part of the Common Law. Blackstone listed the rights or liberties of Englishmen and showed that to vindicate these rights when attacked, the Common Law provided that the subject was entitled to justice in the courts, the right Of petitioning the king and parliament for redress of grievance and, “the right of having and using arms for self preservation and defence.”

It was Blackstone’s statement of the Common Law which formed the basis of the American Constitution, for the revolutionaries complained that their Common Law rights bad been violated by the Crown and, in the light of their experiences at that time, they placed great emphasis on their right to keep arms.

Constitutionalists might argue about whether in Britain, Statute law can over-ride the basic principles of the Common Law, but in 1920 the Government of Britain was in fear of revolution and documents such as the. Cabinet Diaries reveal debates about the number of aircraft available for use against insurgents within the British Isles. In that climate, the registration of firearms (other than shotguns) was imposed for the purpose of “ensuring that all arms are available for redistribution to friends of the government”.

Though the registration system was at first imposed reasonably, there has been a continual and inexorable tightening of the noose around the neck of this right.

It is extremely unfashionable, except in so called ‘redneck’or right wing circles, to quote some of the clichés of the pro gun lobby in the USA or Canada. One cannot quote the clichés of the British gun lobby since it hardly exists and what there is of it makes no statements worthy of quotation.

Let me take just two clichés. The first is, “registration leads to confiscation”. It is highly likely that many of those proposing registration do so with the best of motives and do not intend confiscation. But it is an inexorable process. Registration has been used in Britain first to reduce the number of gun owners to a tiny fraction of their original levels and then, when an opportunity arose from a combination of an awful tragedy and a coming election, handguns were banned. Tens of thousands of innocent people were punished for the act of a madman. Millions of pounds were spent in confiscating all the legally held handguns and destroying them.

The second piece of apparent hyperbole from the gun lobby is, “When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns”. There are effectively no legally held handguns in Britain, yet we are subject to street battles involving handguns in the hands of criminals -- perhaps not yet on a daily basis, but certainly on a weekly basis.

The British Government seeks to make the most of the confusion caused by its change of statistical recording methods claiming that the ban on handguns may have had some small effect. Some commentators have claimed. that the use of handguns in crime has increased by some staggering amount from the moment that handguns were banned. Neither claim is true. The ban on handguns has been a total irrelevance and underlying crime trends have continued unchanged now that only outlaws have guns.

Canadians have much more to consider than the attitude of the commissars of gun control. They should reflect on the fact that confiscation is impossible without prior registration. The Government cannot seize legally held guns until it knows who has them and how many they have. The greater the bureaucracy of gun control, the more people will be forced out of gun ownership and the easier the eventual confiscation process will be.