Product Description

Joyce Malcolm illuminates the historical facts underlying the current passionate debate about gun-related violence, the Brady Bill, and the NRA, revealing the original meaning and intentions behind the individual right to "bear arms." few on either side of the Atlantic realize that this extraordinary, controversial, and least understood liberty was a direct legacy of English law. This book explains how the Englishmen's hazardous duty evolved into a right, and how it was transferred to America and transformed into the Second Amendment.

Malcolm's story begins in turbulent seventeenth-century England. She shows why English subjects, led by the governing classes, decided that such a dangerous public freedom as bearing arms was necessary Entangled in the narrative are shifting notions of the connections between individual ownership of weapons and limited government, private weapons and social status, the citizen army and the professional army, and obedience and resistance, as well as ideas about civilian control of the sword and self-defense. The results add to our knowledge of English life, politics, and constitutional development, and present a historical analysis of a controversial Anglo-American legacy, a legacy that resonates loudly in America today.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #195482 in Books
• Published on: 1996-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 254 pages

Review
Joyce Malcolm's book reminds us forcibly that arguments for gun ownership were, until quite recently, respectable and persuasive, and that gun control and peaceable behaviour appear to be unrelated phenomena.
--David Wootton (London Review of Books )

A work of genuine excellence, as persuasive in its argument as it is unsettling in its implications...Malcolm's prose is both vigorous and elegant, and occasionally even witty, a virtue rarely to be found in a constitutional treatise. The book should generate a healthy debate about the future of gun control in America.
--Douglas R. Egerton (American Historical Review )

A wide audience, including social scientists, historians, lawyers, and anyone interested in the gun-ownership debate, should welcome this concise, well-written history.
--Allan D. Olmsted (Contemporary Sociology )

[Malcolm] provides a skillful analysis of how the Englishmen's duty to bear arms was transformed into a right to bear arms.
--Robert E. Shalhope (Journal of American History )

About the Author
Joyce Lee Malcolm is Professor of Law, George Mason University School of Law.

Customer Reviews

Funk's Commentary in the Howard Law Journal
From T. Markus Funk, "Is the Second Amendment Really Such a Riddle? Tracing the Historical "Origins of an Anglo-American Right" 39 Howard Law Journal 411 (1995):

Few topics of contemporary social, moral, and political debate can provoke as much raw emotion and open hostility as the Second Amendment, particularly in relation to the topic of gun prohibition. This subject routinely causes many well-intentioned people of whatever view to give up all pretense of courtesy and reason in favor of ad hominem attacks on those with whom they disagree. Readers of history professor Joyce Lee Malcolm's To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right will find these ugly by-products of the contemporary conflict refreshingly absent. Malcolm clearly keeps her distance from any broad normative judgments about the social utilities or costs of civilian firearms possession, offering instead a sober, scholarly, historical discussion of the Amendment's origins. Meticulously tracing the British history of regulations on firearms ownership from the Middle Ages on, she provides a detailed and illuminating history that includes the English Bill of Rights and, a century later, the American one. Because it is only in this historical context that the Second Amendment's meaning can be fully understood and appreciated, Malcolm's book is essential reading for anyone interested in this complex and controversial subject.

very impressive piece of scholarship
Professor Malcolm does a very thorough job of showing how the notion of a right to arms contained in the English Bill of Rights of 1689 (and which appeared in a broader form in the U.S. Bill of Rights) was developed during the English Civil War between King and Parliament, contrary to the claims of Parliament who described the right to arms as being one of their "ancient rights and liberties." Others who have examined this provision of the English Bill of Rights have sometimes let themselves be taken in by this high sounding language, but Professor Malcolm has been careful to look beneath the surface.

The last chapter of the book examines how this right ended up in the U.S. Bill of Rights. While necessarily shorter than my detailed study in _For the Defense of Themselves and the State: The Original Intent and Judicial Interpretation of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms_ (Praeger, 1994), it is still a fine telling of the process by which the Second Amendment was adopted.

Authoritative writing, but minor flaws are irritating
Ms. Malcolm nicely lays out the history of the tension between English rulers and subjects over the control of weapons. She made me realize that the current dispute in this country over access to firearms has a long pedigree. Her depiction of the circumstances under which England, in 1689, declared the right to bear arms "true, ancient, and indubitable," when in fact it was none of those is particularly interesting. (See p. 115.) She provides evidence for her view that "it is particularly ironic that some modern American lawyers have misread the English right to have arms as merely a 'collective' right inextricably tied to the need for a militia" (p. 119) when by 1689 the opposite was true. I'm not a historian or a gun enthusiast, but I find all of this quite fascinating.

When the book turns to the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, however, its energy seems to flag. I am sympathetic to the argument that the Second Amendment confers a right on "the people" respectively, i.e. as individuals, "to keep and bear Arms." But Malcolm's argument is undermined, however slightly, when she urges that "[s]ome" i.e., more than one, nascent American state constitutions "included a specific right for an individual to have firearms for his own defence" (p. 150), but quotes and cites, as best I can discern, only the Pennsylvania bill of rights in support (pp. 148, 149). Is there more than one, or not? Another apparent example of waning energy toward the end is the treatment of an argument that "like the Convention Parliament in 1689, the senators [debating drafts of the Second Amendment] rejected a motion to add 'for the common defense' after 'to keep and bear arms.' " (P. 161.) To me, that point seems crucial, but Malcolm does not explore it further, beyond providing a footnoted reference to another source.

Finally, some minor quibbles. Noting the author's regular use of English spelling, I thought she was English until I realized, on reading the penultimate page, that she is an American (p. 176). Perhaps Malcolm was reared and educated in England, but nevertheless her anglicizations are distracting and seem affected. It also seems affected to spell "dissension" archaically as "dissention" (p. 153), and to print "u" as "v" in quoted material, as in "Vs" (Us) (p. 41) or "vpon" (upon) (p. 59). If one is going to do that, why not also ask the typesetter to print quotations with the long "s" that looks similar to the lower-case "f"? (Actually, I wouldn't so much object to that, though it would also come across as affected: at least the long "s" is still an "s," though of archaic form, whereas a "v" is not a "u" at all.) These are, of course, trivial items, but when I encounter them, I think, "Come on, Harvard University Press copy-editors, get with it!"

After all the foregoing griping, it may appear that (1) I am a detail-obsessed curmudgeon of uncommon degree, and (2) I disliked the book. The first point may be true, but the second is not. I look forward to seeing how others eventually build on Malcolm's scholarship.