Book Review: Guns and Violence: The English Experience

• Published date: 01 September 2006
• Author: Darrell D. Irwin
• Date: 01 September 2006
• DOI: 10.1177/1057567706290537
• Subject Matter: Articles

government and its supporters, the revolution was a necessary or justifiable mechanism to seize the

power from those inhuman beings who have always oppressed the people. The same dialectic or

relativism is also applied to justice. For example, a public trial of landlords in the Land Reform era

(the early 1950s) may be seen as savagery (i.e., torture plus self-righteous judges) or a necessary solu-

tion to the injustice enforced by the landlords, depending on who judges the public trial.

Although this book contributes to the study of violence by providing the perspective of dialectic

and historical details, the readers need to read the findings in the book with caution. First, the sur-

vey of violence in 20th-century Chinese literature is based on very selected fictions, poetry, and

drama. Thus, we are not sure to what degree this book reflects all Chinese writers’ points of view

about violence nor whether Chinese literature in this period reflects the reality of violence in China.

Second, many key terms such as violence,crime,justice, and rationality are used at the philosophi-

cal or abstract level. Thus, the meanings of these terms are vague. Also, some terms such as civility

and savagery are judgmental or opinion based. In social sciences, key concepts or variables in the

study of violence need to be specific and clear. Therefore, it is difficult to empirically test the rela-

tionship between the terms noted above.

Shanhe Jiang

University of Toledo, OH

___________________________________

Malcolm, J. L. (2002). Guns and Violence: The English Experience.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

DOI: 10.1177/1057567706290537

The scholar concerned with the comprehensive study of the right to bear arms, the extent of gun

ownership, and gun control and its impact on violent crime in a society must certainly read Guns

and Violence:The English Experience, by Joyce Lee Malcolm. The England the author relates to her

readers is the pre-gun England of the 1200s up until the England of Prime Minister Tony Blair; the

book is a history of this England’s involvement with guns. Malcolm’s chapters are organized by cen-

turies, and the Tudor-Stuart Centuries, from the 16th to 17th centuries, are when firearms were first

commonplace and then were gradually restricted. The linear approach used by the author is histori-

cally informative, yet one finds “the patterns of serious crime do not seem to have changed much

between the fourteenth century and 1800” (p. 36). Thus, her readers arrive only later in the book at

the century of significant change in gun control: the 20th century. The central argument found in the

book is an examination of whether gun ownership is a personal right and needed for personal secu-

rity, clearly Malcolm’s view, or whether gun ownership leads to crime and must be restricted by

leaving the monopoly of force in the government’s hands, a 20th-century English government view.

A pivotal period in England’s history came when the English Bill of Rights in 1689 gave the great

majority of Englishmen the right “to have arms for their defence.”This individual right was extended to

subjects, particularly so “Protestants, may provide and keep Arms, for their Common Defence” (p. 59).

This historic moment was a rebuff to the accession in 1685 of King James, a Catholic who was disarm-

ing English Protestants. Malcolm delves into the wording of the various revisions to the Bill but neglects

to discuss the animosities from the previous Gunpowder Plot, where Catholic conspirators, including

Guy Fawkes, on November 5, 1605, tried to blow up the English parliament with wet gunpowder.

The recurring theme in Malcolm’s studious book is the erosion of English gun ownership, which

was defined as an individual right in 1689. The gradual control of guns by the English government

128 International Criminal Justice Review