Britain has some of the world’s toughest gun regulations, and not only do the vast majority of people approve of that, 76% think they should be stricter. That’s from a sober poll taken in 2021, but Hawley’s Small and Unscientific Survey reports pretty much the same thing.
How did I conduct my survey? Effortlessly. I’m an American transplant, which leads British friends and acquaintances to ask periodically, “What is it with Americans and guns anyway? Are you people crazy?”
I’m paraphrasing heavily. Most people are too polite to ask if we’re crazy, but if you listen you can hear the question pulsing away, just below the surface. Basically, they’re both baffled and horrified by the US approach.
I should probably tell them that a majority of Americans (56%) also want stricter gun laws but haven’t managed to dominate the national conversation yet. That’s probably because they haven’t poured as much tightly focused money into political campaigns as the pro-gun lobby.
Am I being too cynical? In the age-old tradition of answering a question with a question, Is it possible to be too cynical these days?
Irrelevant photo: The Bude Canal
What are Britain’s gun laws?
For a long time, they were somewhere between minimal and nonexistent.
Way back when William and Mary crossed the channel in small boats, the price they paid to become Britain’s joint monarchs was accepting the 1689 Bill of Rights, which acknowledged that Parliament was the source of their power. It also guaranteed the right to bear arms–unless of course you were Catholic, who were the boogeymen of the moment. You were also excluded if you were some other (and barely imaginable) form of non-Protestant.
The relevant section says, “The subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions, and as allowed by law.”
That leaves some wiggle room: “suitable to their conditions”; “as allowed by law.” (The US second amendment is ambiguous as well. Maybe it’s something about weaponry.) So when in 1870 a new law required a license to carry a gun outside your home, it wasn’t a violation of W and M’s agreement, because this was a law. As far as I can tell from the wording, if all you wanted to do with your gun was set it on the kitchen table and gloat over it, you could skip the license.
In 1903, a new law required a license for any gun with a barrel shorter than 9 inches and banned ownership by anyone who was “drunken or insane.”
You could have a lot of fun poking holes in that. Could I get a license if I was sober all week but on the weekend I routinely got so drunk I fell in the horse trough? If I had a title and expensive clothes, would I still be considered a drunk (or a nut)?
Never mind. That was the law they passed. Nobody asks me to consult. It’s a mystery.
But let’s go back a couple of years, to 1901, as Historic UK does in its post on gun laws. Handguns were being widely advertised to cyclists, with no mention of licenses, although the ;need for them may have been so obvious to everyone involved that they didn’t need mentioning. Or enforcement may have been patchy.
Bikes were the hot new thing–the AI of the day–and everyone who had any claim to with-it-ness was rushing around on one. And maybe the cyclists felt vulnerable, out there in the countryside on their own, or maybe gun manufacturers saw an opportunity and manufactured a bit of fear to boost sales. To read the ads, every cyclist needed a handgun. They were advertised, variously, as the cyclist’s friend and the traveler’s friend. One ad said, “Fear no tramp.”
Before World War I (it started in 1914; you’re welcome), Britain had a quarter of a million licensed firearms and no way to count the unlicensed ones. Then the war turned Britain, along with a good part of the rest of the world, on its ear. One of its smaller side effects was that when it ended soldiers came home with pistols.
How’d they manage that? The army didn’t want them back? I consulted Lord Google on the subject, but I seem to have asked the wrong questions, because he went into a sulk and refused to tell me anything even vaguely relevant. But bring guns home they did, in large enough numbers that the government started losing sleep over it, because this was a turbulent time and the government had a lot of things to lose sleep over. For one thing, the Russian Revolution not only meant it had to share a planet with a revolutionary socialist government, it also kicked off a wave of revolutions in Europe that must’ve made it look, for a while, as if Britain would end up sharing the planet with multiple socialist governments.
Life was turbulent on British soil as well. Not all that long before the war, in 1911, a shootout in London involved two Latvian anarchists, a combination of the Metropolitan and City police departments, the Scots Guards, and Winston Churchill. The anarchists might not have been anarchists, though, but expropriators, carrying out robberies to support the Bolshevik movement. Either way, they were well armed and the police were armed only with some antique weapons they pulled together. Until the Scots Guards showed up, they were outgunned.
In “Forging a Peaceable Kingdom: War, Violence, and Fear of Brutalization in Post–First World War Britain,” Jon Lawrence argues that postwar Britain lived with a fear of violence from returned soldiers, the general public, and/or a government “brutalized” by the war. (The quotation marks are his. I’ll hand them back now that we’re ready to move on.)
The press was full of violent crime reports. When isn’t it, and when don’t we at least partially believe it’s a balanced picture of the world we live in? Still, the stories are part of the picture: fear was the air people breathed.
The soldiers returning from the war are also part of the picture: they came home to unemployment and its cousin, low pay. A wave of strikes swept the country, including a police strike and in 1919 a strike by soldiers–or if you want to put that another way, a mutiny. Some of that was violent and some wasn’t. All of it kept the government up at night.
In many cases, unemployment led to whites turning their anger on Blacks and immigrants, blaming them for taking their jobs. Familiar story, isn’t it? (Black, in this context, includes people from India. I only mention that to remind us all how fluid the categories that seem so fixed in our minds really are.)
Longstanding Black British communities were joined by a good number of sailors from both the military and the merchant fleets who were stranded in Britain when they were fired and their jobs filled by white sailors. Their hostels were a particular target for violence. Black and immigrant communities often defended themselves, leading to some full-on battles–and more lost governmental sleep.
For a fuller story on that, go to Staying Power: the History of Black People in Britain, by Peter Fryer. We’ll have to move on, because most of that is, again, a side issue to this topic. The point is that that was a turbulent period with a nervous government. In 1920, a new law allowed the police to deny a firearms permit to anyone “unfitted to be trusted with a firearm”–a loose category if there ever was one.
And after that?
In 1937–a different era but the midst of the Great Depression, so still a turbulent time–most fully automatic weapons were banned, then in 1967 shotguns had to be licensed. Applicants had to be “of good character, . . . show good reason for possessing a firearm, and the weapons had to be stored securely.”
In 1987, a man killed 16 people and himself, using two semi-automatic rifles and a handgun, and the government came under pressure to tighten the laws. In response, semi-automatic and pump-action rifles were banned, along with anything that fired explosive ammunition and a few other categories of weapons. Shotguns remained legal but had to be registered and stored securely.
After a 1996 shooting of 16 schoolkids and their teacher, in which the shooter used four legally owned pistols, a new law banned handguns above .22 caliber, and in 1997 .22s were outlawed.
In 2006, in response to a series of shootings, the manufacture, import, or sale of realistic imitation guns was banned, although it was still legal to own one. The logic there is that they look realistic enough to commit crimes with, so this isn’t exactly gun control; it’s more like toy control. The maximum sentence for carrying an imitation gun was doubled, and it became a crime to fire an air weapon outside. The minimum age for buying or owning an air weapon went from 17 to 18, and air weapons could now be sold only face to face.
In 2014, police were required to refuse or revoke a firearms license if the applicant or license holder had a record of domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse, or mental illness, which implies that they’re expected to actually check.
And the result?
I know a few people in Britain who own rifles and shotguns that they hunt with. When they applied for licenses, they had to show that they had a secure place to store them, that they had a legitimate reason for owning a firearm, and that they were “of sound mind.” They had to pass police checks and inspections of their health, property, and criminal records. If any of them have moaned about it, I haven’t heard it.
As a way of looking at the impact, I thought I could find a nice, simple set of statistics comparing homicide rates in the US and UK, but nothing’s ever simple. If you use two different sites, one for each country, you end up comparing apples and motor scooters, but I did eventually find one that compares many countries’ murder rate per million people. In 2009 in the UK, it was 11.68; in the US, it was 44.45–four times higher. We’ll skip the intentional homicides, which aren’t the same as murders, along with the accidental deaths and the suicides. They might all be worth thinking about if we’re talking about the impact of gun ownership on death rates, but they’ll make my life more difficult and I don’t know how you feel about that but it won’t make me happy, so basically, screw it.
Another site I found compares mass shootings between 1998 and 2019. The UK’s had one. Twelve people died in it and one was injured. The US has had 101, making it the world’s leader in mass shootings. In the deadliest, sixty people died and more than eight hundred were injured. In the second deadliest, forty-nine died and fifty-eight were injured.
So is the US, with its permissive gun laws, a freer country than the UK? That’ll depend on how you define freedom, and that’s above my pay grade since I do this for free. Some people measure freedom by a country’s voting system, some by people’s sense of security and safety, and some by the right to carry a gun. I have yet to meet anyone in Britain who feels oppressed by the gun laws or measures their freedom by their access to weaponry. I’m sure someone out there does, but they’re a minority, and a small one.
What about the argument that access to weapons makes the little guy a more powerful political force? My observation is that the little guy struggles to be heard in both countries, but that guns and threats of violence in the US are allowing a minority–a sizable one but still a minority–to increase its power at the expense of their fellow citizens. That’s not a good fit for my definition of freedom.
Notes from the U.K. 
It is the responsibility of people applying for a shotgun licence to get their GP to provide information about their medical history to be provided by their GP to the police firearms licensing department. As a GP, I have to consider how potentially homicidal the person is – not an easy task. How would my patient react if I considered that they were unsuitable to hold a shotgun licence? It’s a heavy responsibility.
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That is a heavy weight–and potentially a frightening one.
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sorry, I mangled the grammar in that comment
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You got the point across perfectly, though.
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My dad used to have a shotgun and the licences and the security. When he first had it, it lived in the cupboard under the stairs, which anyone could access. Later it had to go into a locked cupboard. He used to hunt wood pigeon.
People really are too polite to ask you to your face if Americans are crazy, but it is what they’re thinking. Most Britons (at least those over a certain age) reading your post will have read the title and thought “Dunblane”, because that changed everything and that’s why we don’t understand Americans.
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I did think about going into the shootings that turned people toward gun regulation–a fairly recent one in Plymouth was on my mind, involving a guy who had a history of mental health problems and should never have been given a license–but it got to be too much for one post. And once you start listing the key turning points, it’s easy to miss one. They all deserve a moment of recognition.
By way of an attempt to understand the whole American thing and guns, I can offer a few wild guesses: 1, We have a lot more people who hunt. They can be cranked up about the idea that someone wants to take their guns away. 2. We have the National Rifle Association, which has spent an eye-watering amount of money doing just that, and investing heavily in the political process. 3. My generation, at least, grew up watching westerns on TV, and some of us mistook them for fact. (I was lucky enough to have my mother walking through the living room when my brother and I were watching TV and saying, “It’s not really like that, you know.” About almost anything we watched. She must’ve felt like she was losing the battle.)
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It must be really tricky to spot the people with mental illness, but I have always assumed that the police can access medical records, but perhaps they can’t because of data protection.
I don’t understand why people who hunt in the US should worry. People still do it here. Perhaps they’re afraid that they wouldn’t pass the tests, or perhaps they just don’t like the idea of having to lock their guns away safely. I can see that that is my British prejudice against guns showing, but I did grow up in a house that had a gun in it without ever being worried that it would be used for anything other than its intended purpose.
We also watched Westerns growing up, but I think I was able to separate fact and fiction from a fairly early age.
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Westerns may have had a different impact when they’re supposedly about your country. They built on the myth of the American rugged individualist–tough, armed, ready to fight. Sigh. National mythology. I grew up in New York City. No one I knew had a gun.
Why would people who hunt worry? I don’t know that they all do, but–oh, hell, I shouldn’t speculate. It’s nothing I’ve talked to enough hunters about to say anything sensible.
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I think the difference is probably also because the New World was a frontier for Europeans (and of course already inhabited – by people and vast numbers of delicious bison), which led to a “wild” social order, so owning and using guns would be necessary to survive. The land that is now Britain presumably went through a series of similar events, but before the invention of firearms – or maybe not, my history is rubbish.
I know Westerns are fiction, but I got the impression they depict social realities at least approximately. I hope I’ve not got that wrong up to my mid-60s! What I remember as a kid was the embarrassment when it was explained to me that they were historical. I’d thought the Wild West of America was happening right then, in the late 1960s.
I guess the USA is a curious and sad anomaly, but at one time probably most of Europe (the men thereof) only went out with their sword or dagger in case of bandits or an argument getting out of hand. Have you written about the history of bladed weapons in these fair isles?
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Bladed weapons? I haven’t, and the prospect is overwhelming–so much time to cover, and so many varieties of weapons and different purposes they were put to. It’s a post I’d be interested in seeing someone else write…
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I thought ‘Dunblane’ and ‘Hungerford’. We are so fortunate to have had so few that we can remember each of them.
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Good point–and one I hadn’t thought of.
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trust me cuzzy
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Um, on what? Who? Huh???
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A bit absurd for OP to point out Dunblane & Hungerford considering they happened so long after our gun laws were effectively repealed by parliament.
If I were OP I’d also be leary of quoting “democracy” as a reason for us Brits giving up our right to bear arms. Parliament is sovereign and also, alas, consistently lies to & betrays the people. Politicians will acknowledge our wishes, then go ahead and do the complete opposite.
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I won’t comment on other people’s comments, but I will say the the US experiment with a barely restricted right to bear arms hasn’t made it look appealing, and last time I checked a majority of people want tighter restrictions. There too, legislators make noises about democracy and vote the way they want. Or are told to vote. Or the way their largest donors want. Democracy’s a funny old thing, and far better oiled in theory than in practice.
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Thanks for advising me on Englands gun laws! I was watching a series on Britain’s most evil was the title and I had heard that police do not carry firearms. Which seems to be true. I do agree that we Americans can be crazy about guns and laws. The show I watched in every episode it was all stabbing. I am in agreement on all fronts that England is leading the charge in reforming their interrogation tactics and they can’t lie when interrogating I also heard that their percentage rates of getting the right perpetrator has gone up to over 94 percent this was a few years ago. Us judicial system is horrible. I feel it shouldn’t be elected position such as da etc. they should not lie and the length of interrogations should be shorter with breaks. Sentencing guidelines should be restructured and put the final judgement back in the had of the judges. This is just a few observations. I won’t even start on the political systems here. But the problem in the us is that gun laws only tattle the problem of law abiding citizens ( I use this term loosely). It’s all the illegal guns and ghost guns and hell they probably have others I not aware of. The mass shootings are truly disturbing. I think the us should take a few pages out of the UK ‘s book. Thanks for listening. I think England is truly an amazing country! Wish it could be practiced here in the USA. Take care
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British cops don’t routinely carry guns, but there are specialist units that do. As I understand it, they don’t patrol–they’re on call. A cop I knew had done some training for the German police, who are armed, and his take on the difference was that it left them less able to de-escalate a situation. They had to keep a distance to protect their guns. The interaction got louder instead of quieter. It was a way of thinking about it that I wouldn’t have expected.
You’re right that there’s a lot of concern about knife crime here. I don’t dismiss the concern, but you can’t do the kind of damage with a knife that you can with a gun.
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I had a 6th former bring in his gun licence to show the A level History class. There was some connection with the 1816 game law, I forget what. We did ask him why he liked shotting small birds. We never got a sensiblwe answer from him. Wierdly, I would have said he was a nice kid, but the killing small creatures-thing suggests I am poor judge of character.
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shooting not shotting
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Oh, hell, close enough for blogging. I knew what you meant.
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Good!
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I know any number of non-homicidal and otherwise nice people who hunt and fish and enjoy it. What can I tell you that you don’t already know? To b e fair, not many of us–maybe none of us–are pure. Vegetarian that I am, I’m currently making soup out of a dead chicken for my meat-eating partner.
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Indeed, I too am a Vegetrian. I am feed dead animals (mostly fish) to my cats and dog.
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Understood.
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What more can I add? I’ve certainly never come across anyone who thinks we should relax the gun laws.
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So we’ll add Canning’s Small and Unscientific Survey to Hawley’s. I’m seeing the beginnings of a landslide here.
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Solid evidence, Ellen.
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Absolutely unassailable.
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And people ask me why I do not move back to the US! I have two family members that have been murdered by firearms in the US! I have a 13 year old son and do not wish for him to be terrorized by going to school and having to endure active shooter drills! The gun laws here in Portugal are as about strict as the UK by the way. When someone is actually murdered with a gun here it makes national news because it is so rare. People do not live in fear here. My niece and nephew live in Texas and they have pistols in their houses because they never know who is going to knock on their door and fire away at them!
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I hear you.
Some long time ago, I saw statistics saying that having a gun in the house actually raises the odds of someone being shot there, but I don’t have a link and don’t have the time to go looking, so I’ll offer than as rumor rather than verifiable fact.
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There is a blogger named Mike the Gun Guy who has also quoted these stats but he states that it is hard to track because only gun related deaths are actually required to be reported to the ATF by police, so most at home gun injuries are never reported, and if no police are called and the injured person goes to a doctor or hospital they are also not required to report them to police or the ATF! Mike states that guns will all eventually go off because that is what they are deesigned to do!
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Interesting. That’s more or less what Chekhov said about a gun in act one–it has to go off in act three. Admittedly, it’s a little different in theater.
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Respectfully,
This is not true about the hospital not reporting gun shot victims. I just retired with 30 yrs service at a Sheriff’s Office in Texas. The hospital ALWAYS calls to report the situation with someone with a gunshot wound. The Deputies take the casing of the bullet for ballistic testing immediately.
Others go to the scene of the crime and start an investigation promptly. And we respond to take a report with the victim, while other officers look for the suspect. The ATF, Texas Rangers respond as well, also FBI may respond. This is not taken lightly.
Although MSM have their own agenda, we work with facts. And facts only. This happens across our State.
We have many fire arms here. Many belong to harsh criminals and that have fire arms that are illegal and not registered with the State and Government, not decent citizens for protecting their self, family and property.
Thank you kindly.
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Thanks for your comments on reporting. I appreciate them. As for who has firearms, I’m sure the man who shot and killed a state legislator in Minnesota–along with her husband and her dog–would’ve told you that he was a decent citizen and until he decided a string of murders would make the world a better, safer place, I’m sure he had a good line of verbiage about the need to protect his family.
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So, Texas is the entire USA? It is no federal law that requires all gunshot victims to report their injuries to the ATF or police, as well as doctors in hospitals. Good for Texas! This should be a national gun control law…
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Fair comment. Thanks, Peter.
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were they murdered by firearms ? or the people carrying them guns dont kill people people kill people im uk and i know that this is a fact
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Old, old argument and not a very good one: people kill people but they do it a lot more efficiently and in greater numbers with firearms than without them.
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Thank heavens for our gun laws. I have enough trouble remembering my house keys, wallet and phone. I imagine getting to the coffee shop and saying, darn, I forgot to bring the gun! But seriously, like others, I was thinking Dunblane as I read this.
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Even worse if instead of forgetting the gun at home you left it on the table at the coffee shop.
A lot of people seem to have been thinking Dunblane.
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Another important law in the UK is that trespass is a civil offense, the remedy for which is to leave the private property by the shortest route, or as directed (usually by being shown where the public footpath actually does run). Nobody deserves to be shot for mistaken trespass “because the property owner was in fear for their life”.
I have carried automatic weapons in a war zone. It didn’t make me feel one bit safer, and being around armed police, I can tell that they are twitchier than their unarmed colleagues. I do not agree with the slogan that an armed society is a polite society, as evidence from social media suggests otherwise. In summary, I’m of the opinion that the fewer guns that there are around, the more relaxed everyone can afford to be.
56% in favour of abolishing casual gun ownership is encouraging. Here’s hoping the number keeps on increasing.
Kind regards, Chris.
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Indeed, adding all those guns to US society seems to have made everybody–okay, a lot of people–paranoid and ready to “defend” themselves. I agree with you.
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Interesting - in Britain there is a shooting and the laws and requirements are revised and tightened. In the US there is a shooting which leads to an uproar that “they’re coming to take our guns.”
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It’s an interesting difference, isn’t it? I keep wanting to explain it by doing a deep dive into cultural differences, then I realize I’m making it up–basically, confabulating. But I would love to be able to explain it.
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Sensible.
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Oh how I wish the gun laws here in the U.S. were even close to what you have there! But alas, the gun manufacturers buy and sell our members of Congress, particularly those in the Republican Party, and they refuse to vote for any, even the most moderate, gun regulation. I would like to re-blog this post, with your permission?
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Absolutely. I’d be happy to have you reblog it. Thanks.
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Thank you so much, Ellen! I will be reblogging it tomorrow (Sunday)!
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I find it hard to believe that I am safer because so many people over here have guns. Too many people are living in fear and shooting before thinking.
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I can’t think of anything to add to that, except that it’s ironic and interesting how fear breeds fear.
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Maybe I am wrong, but it might help to throw gun laws in Canada into the mix. We took our cues from Britain, but we also had a wild west component. Our gun laws could be a lot tougher, and I wish they were, but fewer Canadians have a need to commit mass murders because — for the most part — we have more respect for our fellow citizens.
We still have far too much gun violence, but still we can walk out our doors without having to wonder if we will be coming back home later. I would not feel as safe were I living in the USA.
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Y’know, some 20 years ago, when I was still living in the US, a dear friend from New Zealand packed up her baby and went back home. One of the reasons (not the only one, but still) was that she didn’t want to raise her child in such a violent country. And I remember thinking, Violent?? Things weren’t as bad then as they are now, but honestly it seemed so normal that I just didn’t take in how unnecessary and horrible it was.
It’s heartening to hear that Canadians don’t feel as strong a need to murder each other. Long may it be so.
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It is illegal to se.l a handgun in Canada now. Unfortunately, that created a huge black market. The main source of handguns? I don’t have to say it.
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You don’t. Too obvious to need a prize for guessing.
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Three tries. The first two don’t count.
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Got it in four.
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Yay!!!!
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I tell you–and I say this without bragging–I am a clever devil.
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We tend in this country to use legislation to state the principle, but a lot of the heavy lifting of details is done in supplementary guidelines (which may or may not count as “law”). I did once look through the Home Office guidelines to local police on firearms control, and it does go into a lot of detail on all sorts of things. For example, if you want a gun for hunting, it has to be suitable to the game you’re after (and it goes into things like muzzle velocity), and of course you must have permission of the landowner where you plan to hunt. That raises another socio-economic difference – all land is owned by somebody, and hunting for game on it is a potentially lucrative opportunity for a landowner, which is why poaching was treated so seriously for so long. Nowadays, the nearest a non-landowner can get to hunting is by paying a heck of a lot to take part in an organised shoot (or knowing someone who can invite you).
On why there is some obscurity about the possession of guns from WW1: as a guess, I’d say that, though rifles and machine guns and the like would come from the regimental armoury, officers (and no doubt better off other ranks) would buy their own handguns (or acquire them from the enemy one way or the other). WW2 produced as much uncertainty, I’d guess, which is why we have had occasional gun amnesty periods, where you could surrender a gun at a police station, with few or no questions asked.
Your reference to the Bill of Rights reminded me of chatting to a couple of US tourists in Salisbury Cathedral while we were looking at their copy of Magna Carta – the tourists wanted to check whether Magna Carta did indeed guarantee the right to bear arms. I knew it wasn’t really a declaration of individual human rights, but I had to wait to get home to do a bit of digging to find out about the bit in the 1688 Bill (I suspect the US founding fathers were fairly heavily influenced by the revolution of 1688 in other ways too). I have yet to understand the point of view that the Second Amendment to the US Constitution is sacred and infallible, but the Constitution itself is capable of producing a government so oppressive that it would be necessary to be armed against it.
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Interesting little contradiction you’ve put your finger on there. The closest I can come to an answer is that these days, for a large (and I’d have say rightwing) segment of the country, whatever suits their purposes is sacred and whatever doesn’t isn’t. And what’s sacred is only sacred as long as [see above]. So it’s individual liberties except for abortion (and other things, but that’s the current flash point) and states’ rights until a state does something that pisses them off. It’s freedom of speech until you say or publish something they don’t like–or put it in a library. And so endlessly on.
Damn, I’m tired.
Yes, according to whatever article I read on the Bill of Rights, it did heavily influence the writers of the US Constitution.
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Just to add that Dunblane and Hungerford came immediately to my mind, too. Can’t drive on the M4 without the latter, and every time I see the Scottish tennis player, Andy Murray, the former.
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A number of people have said those came to mind. I decided not to list specific shootings because trying to prioritize which ones get listed and which ones get left out was too grotesque.
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Perhaps Britian’s attitude toward guns is a bit more “engineered” than it first appears. “All the Way Down the Slippery Slope: Gun Prohibition in England and Some Lessons for Civil Liberties in America” — Olson and Kopel. “The Failed Experiment Gun Control and Public Safety in Canada, Australia, England and Wales” — Gary A. Mauser. And to further reduce firearms ownership, there is Project Titanium in the UK. The aristocracy in Britain has been working against the Bill of Rights of 1689 for centuries. Scotland applies ‘Firearm Regulations’ to pellet/air weapons as well, thanks to Tommy Sheridan. And now the Scottish police have stopped renewing pellet gun permits in a classic example of regulation creep. To further understand firearms law in the UK, watch the 7:28 minute video on YouTube, “How do we own machine guns in the UK? The answer.” Pay particular attention to the legal requirements recited. Also, lest you think Britain’s anti-gun attitude might change, read about John Needham and the “Unfortunate Fate of a Vickers Machine Gun.” The willingness to destroy even nonfunctional historical artefacts does not bode well for the future of our culture.
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No system’s perfect, but I much prefer Britain’s to America’s. Talk about a failed experiment, look at the US experience. And in something like 18 years in this country I have yet to meet anyone who isn’t shocked by the US approach.
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Surelymthisis not the case now, with machete gangs of illegal immigrants running rampant?. North Africa mainly, Syria , Paki & other Muslims running rampant.?
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Oh, for fuck’s sake, wherever you’re getting your “facts,” they’re not in touch with reality.
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Data on what causes firearm violence has some very interesting aspects if considering “demographic groups”Firearm homicide rate per 100,000USA – demographic group 1 = 19.8USA – demographic group 2 = 6.4Finland – 3.3Austria – 2.8France – 2.6Canada – 1.8Czech Republic – 1.7USA – demographic group 3 = 1.7OECD, WHO, CDC
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Sorry, the format here makes that pretty much impenetrable.
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During World War II, British officials appealed to American civilians to send their personal firearms to help defend against a potential German invasion, even before the US officially entered the war. The British Home Guard, also known as the Local Defense Volunteers, was formed to assist with defense, and many members, lacking proper weapons, utilized civilian-donated firearms.
Elaboration:
British Home Guard:
The Home Guard, formed in May 1940, was a civilian defense force in Britain.
Lack of Weapons:
Initially, the Home Guard faced a shortage of proper weapons.
Civilian Donations:
Faced with this shortage, the British government appealed to the public to donate their personal firearms.
American Committee:
The American Committee for the Defense of British Homes was formed to facilitate the collection and shipment of weapons from the US.
Donation Scale:
NRA members and others contributed thousands of firearms, including pistols, rifles, shotguns, and binoculars. “Send us anything that shoots”:
A British military spokesman pleaded for any firearms that could be spared.
Limited Success:
While the donations were a significant effort, the final total of donations was 25,343 firearms and 2,042,291 rounds of ammunition.
Lend-Lease Act:
Later, the US government formally began providing military aid to Britain through the Lend-Lease Act, a more significant supply program.
I’m an American. I’ve owned a rifle since I was 8 years old. I’m 63 now, own many different firearms, hunt and recreational shoot. Furthermore, I also did 24 years in the US armed Forces. Firearms are tools, and some people are afraid of tools, and fearful people should stay away from them.
How many people in the UK are killed/hurt by knives? I’ll tell you: According to the House of Commons Library, In England and Wales, there were approximately 50,500 offenses involving a sharp instrument recorded in the year ending March 2024. This includes homicides (killings) where a sharp instrument, including knives, was used. Specifically, 244 homicides using sharp instruments were recorded in the year ending March 2023.
How about the 100 or so killed by a truck in Nice, Fr. a few years ago? Bottom line, If someone wants to hurt you, they will find a way to do it. Criminals do not follow laws. That’s what criminals do.
I’ve read through the ‘superior, condescending attitudes’ commenting above, and I had to chuckle. That’s why I posted the above UK history, that was curiously omitted from the original blog, it just doesn’t fit the echo chambers logic. As long as there are people out there willing to harm others, no matter their tool of choice, I will defend my family, home, and country the best way I can. There is a difference between a citizen and a subject, though I don’t suspect many will understand, and I’m not here to persuade anyone otherwise.
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The British are citizens, at least as politically engaged at Americans, and overwhelmingly support the country’s gun laws. People do hunt, and the hunters I know are supportive of the gun laws. Does the country have homicides involving knives? Yes, but when people default to killing with a blade instead of a gun they can’t kill as many people. The UK’s homicide rate, adjusted for the size of the population, is a sixth of the US’s.
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Not to be argumentative. This topic intrigues me. The population of the UK (2023 figures) is 68.35 million. The population of the US is 340.1 million (2024 figures) meaning the population of the UK is roughly 20.09% (or a fifth the size of the US). I did not include the 11.7 to 20 million (depending on the source) of undocumented persons currently living in the US, which would bring the average closer to the UK one sixth comparison to the US you provided. As I have never seen a firearm kill or wound a person of its own accord, I must assume the deaths are caused by persons with intent.
You may have heard of the recent New Orleans attack, in which a driver killed 16 people. The assailant was shot dead by police before he could detonate explosives. Yes, a firearm can make murder more efficient, but let’s not excluded those vehicles, knives, baseball bats (cricket bat?), or hammers that provide plenty of carnage without regulation. One needs the desire to kill or hurt another human being.
There are an estimated 393 million privately owned firearms, making it the highest rate globally. Approximately 40-42% of US households own at least one firearm, and the number of guns has been increasing. Why is that so? Probably because the weak justice system is a revolving door for criminals. Sympathetic judges and district attorneys often return criminals back onto the streets, even those with prior gun charges. US prisons are country clubs for some criminals to hone their skills. Try to reform them, or institute the death penalty for violent criminals, and the same groups come to their defense, little regard for the victims. There is no deterrence anymore. So people must take their own safety in hand. The news never reports where a firearm saved people, often without a shot fired.
To that point, firearms aren’t even in the 10 leading causes of death in the US, in rank order: Diseases of heart; Malignant neoplasms; Accidents (unintentional injuries); Chronic lower respiratory diseases; Cerebrovascular diseases; Alzheimer disease; Diabetes mellitus; Influenza and pneumonia; Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome and nephrosis; and Intentional self-harm (suicide). Of the firearm deaths, suicide accounts for 58%.
All that aside, I would be curious on your thoughts as to why Hitler, Stalin, and Mao (among others) did their very best to ensure their civilian populations were disarmed. Would the world be any different? Maybe not, but maybe some of the estimated 100 million killed might have lived.
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Italy and Germany already had gun control laws when Hitler and Mussolini took power. You may be interested in a Wikipedia entry about that as it applies to Germany–or you may not. Up to you, of course I have limited energy to give to this debate, so I won’t repeat what it says. I’ll only add that a long list of democratic countries also have strict gun control laws, and that if it were true that gun control and dicatatorship were synonymous, then your argument that dictators impose it presents a problem: it would follow that the absence of gun control didn’t prevent their rise to power.
Watching the US news (and I’m both American and British), I’m very munich afraid that the US may become an example of a country sliding into authoritarian rule in the presence of a highly armed population.
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Ms. Hawley,
First, since “Wikipedia” is so erroneous that it will not be accepted as a valid source to cite in college and professional papers, I’d take their gaslighting of history as just that. (Yes, I reviewed their atrocious list of “references.”)
Regardless, all the despots mentioned didn’t rescind anti-gun laws, they compounded them. Still 100M+ dead due to not being able to fight back.
“Authoritarian rule”? Really? (I won’t get into how 125+ million gun owners with close to a billion *responsibly owned* weapons is a VERY GOOD thing!). Over half the country sees that perspective as ridiculous.
Please don’t watch the mainstream US news. We say that if they could slant and lie about the weather, they would. Reference the 60 Minutes QueMala Harris interview being edited so heavily it actually made her sound coherent.
Having an executive branch *rightfully and Constitutionally* exerting their power to eliminate a vast amount of Gov’t waste, fraud, and useless employees is far from “authoritarian,” it is a necessity. Almost $37T (actually over $103T) in debt, if not addressed in an immediate, radically surgical manner means that the US will go bankrupt very soon. This may be our last chance. If the communist/fascist/globalist/totalitarian/green party takes control of either/both houses in ’27, this country will be toast. Hyperinflation. Immediately afterward, the rest of the world’s economies will go into the toilet. Fact.
BTW, I’m not a Republican/conservative/etc. I’m a Constitutional minarchist.
Oh, ~700 “district judges” do not have the jurisdiction to affect anything, but obstructionists will obstruct. Allowing them to contradict the federal executive branch is like letting municipal judges interfere in what a state governor and his people do. Correcting alleged excesses of authority in either case is the job of the legislatures. Fact.
Also, all the hysterical Chicken Littles who are freaking out over the US reciprocating global tariffs by *half* of what the rest of the world charges America should settle down and shut up. Who cares about the “markets” and what they are doing? Wait 2-6 months and watch how they come bounding back with new record highs once the negotiations are settled.
FYI, Dhimmis were all for tariffs under Clinton and Obama. Only reason they don’t like them now is because Trump is doing them. TDS at its worst!
Some “Americans” have the British subject/slave mentality* and cannot handle a freedom that ends at the tip of another’s nose, so to speak. And/or they, like the British, think the Gov’t is a Santa Claus that should take from some and give to others, instead of demanding that the needy/unfortunate should rightly rely on the freely given private donations of The People. (Americans are the most generous in the world, by a wide margin.)
The American *liberty-minded* worldview is unique, and it appears you do not share it. I respectfully suggest that you leave socio-politico-economic and 2nd Amendment issues to people who thoroughly comprehend them and their 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. effects.
Thank you.
P.S. – The only reason you should be “munich” afraid is if this administration does NOT get to carry out the will of The People and complete what they are only starting to do. Why you don’t see that as beautiful escapes me.
*Since Brits let their “betters” run roughshod over them and take away even their swords and knives, instead of forcing those tyrannical politicians to retire or, last resort, killing them all, they prefer to be serfs. Recall that before firepower existed and became widespread, freemen carried swords to differentiate themselves from slaves and the defenseless.
From the Magna Charta to butter knives. It’s an ingrained Brit “subject” thing, I guess. They’re basically sheep. Shame they’ll riot over a stupid soccer game but won’t stand up for their implements of self-defense (or replacing their gov’t).
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Hello, Ms. Hawley.
I came across your blog while doing a web search (*not* Google!) for “British gun laws.” It’s toward the top, so congrats, but that may not be a good thing! Being a Traditional American, I found it to be … amusing, let’s say. However, I want to be completely civil. Logic and facts, not emotions.
(As you state later, I also don’t want to invest much time in this issue. I use Dragon talk-to-text software, so I “typed” my responses up in Word in a few minutes each.)
Yes, we’re a rowdy bunch of gun-toting individualists who believe in self-reliance and not in “Gov’t help.” Maybe that’s why we’re still the greatest country in the world. Remember, when seconds count, the police are minutes (or a half-hour) away. *grins*
We don’t care what Brits (foreigners) think. You know how to cure someone of their irrational fear of inanimate objects? We take them shooting! They have so much fun they decide they love guns and want one (or a dozen) of their own. Especially women who think there’s no moral superiority in being unarmed, raped, and dead, and prefer being live lionesses who turn predators into prey. I’ve trained over a hundred people from ages 8 up. It’s difficult to take a weapon away from even a kid when they are educated to shoot and are perforating an attacker. Darwin was correct about one thing. *laughs*
The Gallup poll? Well, 56% want stricter laws? How about the *entire* story from ’90 to ’23, eh wot?
Down from 78%. Kept as is? From 17% to 31%. LESS strict? From 2% to 12%. Hmm. The whole story shows the prospect of more gun laws becoming more unpopular. To be as nice as possible to you, that didn’t fit your narrative, though, did it?
I won’t go any further into your numbers and assertions. As Samuel Clemons said, “There’s lies, damned lies, and statistics.” With this anti-gun stuff, he’d say, “That’s what I’m talking about!”
More at the end.
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Let’s get a few stereotypes out of the way: I have owned a gun, I’ve hunted, and I used to work for a hunting and fishing magazine. I’m not afraid of guns, I’m worried about what people with anger management and/or mental health issues having unrestricted, or minimally restricted, access to them. I’m worried about the way their fetishized and used as a political football. Beyond that, at the point where you tell me not to listen to the mainstream media, sorry, the conversation’s over. I’m not here to give a platform to someone who only wants me to suck information from the sources he approves of.
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I’ve found this interesting, and Ellen Hawley’s perspectives mature.
As an now-elderly ScotBrit, I’ve lived in 70s South Africa and 80s South Oman where ownership/carriage of firearms was commonplace. In the latter, boys at puberty found/were given an elderly weapon as a badge of manhood. Outside of the airbase fence, I was required to carry an M-16! However, carriage of an AK-47 was proof-positive of insurgent leanings and by Sultan’s Decree, once spotted, one could be shot on sight.
In 70s Pretoria I was issued with a 9mm automatic and 10 boxes of ammo; I wasn’t alone in keeping it at home for the wife’s sense of security when I was away. A friend’s wife kept an Uzi under her bed…. In one rented house a Lee-Enfield rifle and boxed ammo was left for us in a bedroom cupboard. I knew of no ‘involuntary discharge’ accidents in either country.
I sense a growth of concern in England over violent crime – druggies’ burglary, gang warfare spillover, increased knife use – with a drop in police effectiveness, and wish for some beneficial change to laws that are seen as no deterrant. Similarly, I’d like to see some change in the US laws that make schoolkids, ordinary citizens…. far less likely to encounter ‘active shooters’.
Traditional ‘checks and balances’ do seem to need some radical tweaking.
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Thanks for your comment. This post usually drops me into dis-spiriting arguments and it’s a pleasure to find a comment that isn’t the opening to yet another one.
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