Guns make people safe.

Joyce Lee Malcolm, Guns and Violence: The English Experience, Harvard University Press, 2002 (hup.harvard.edu)

In a new book, British historian Joyce Lee Malcolm finds that wider gun ownership made the U.K. safer. Before the widespread availability of firearms, she explains, "England was boisterous and violent, more so than court records reveal.... Most homicide was impulsive, committed `in hot blood.'" With the introduction of firearms during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, England's homicide rates actually fell sharply.

This decline continued through the next century, as the right to bear arms became widely established. The national homicide level dropped by two thirds between 1660 and 1800. Malcolm concludes that "there is no sign in any of the evidence ... that use of guns increased either homicide or crime generally."

The nineteenth century saw violence hit record lows. Malcolm quotes historian J. J. Tobias, who points out that people "accepted that criminals were becoming less violent, each generation seeing an improvement over the previous one." An 1839 Royal Commission concluded that "burglaries and depredations in the streets are now rarely accompanied by violence."

The latest century, however, brought two changes to ...