From: [c--am--r] at [optilink.dsccc.com] (Clayton Cramer)
Newsgroups: rec.guns
Subject: Review of Joyce Malcolm's _To Keep And Bear Arms_
Date: 14 Jun 1994 23:43:32 -0400

Joyce Malcolm, _To Keep And Bear Arms_, Harvard University Press, 1994
$37.95, hardback

When I first heard about Joyce Malcolm's _To Keep And Bear Arms_,
I worried that it would destroy sales of my book, which wasn't quite
out yet.  Not to worry!  It is a complementary work, not a competing
one.

Joyce Malcolm is Professor of History at Bentley College in 
Massachusetts, and her specialty is the English Civil War -- a
period of time with so many players and continually changing sides
that it makes you appreciate the simplicity of the American
Civil War.

Malcolm's book may not be appreciated by some RKBA supporters.
For example, she shows that the notion of a RKBA is not of great
age in England.  Instead, she traces how the Anglo-Saxon obligation
to militia duty (which included suppression of riot and local
crime) over a period of several hundred years became enshrined as
a right of Englishmen, simply because it was customary.  Like
my new book, Malcolm is skeptical that the RKBA comes from the 
Machiavellian republican tradition, except in the most indirect
sort of way.

One of the more useful aspects of Malcolm's book is that it is
focused on the English Civil War, and the disarming of Englishmen
by first the Puritan Parliament, then by Charles II and James II.
The groups to be disarmed, of course, were somewhat different,
since the Puritans were afraid of the Catholics, and the Jacobean
kings were more concerned about the Puritans.  What is especially
interesting is how similar the techniques used for disarming the
"persons suspected to be fanaticks, sectaries or disturbers of 
the peace..."  

Malcolm's focus, of course, is on the English Civil War.  Where
I spend a few pages discussing it and the English common law
origins of the RKBA, she spends seven chapters.  Where I spend
much of a chapter tracing the Second Amendment's history of
amendment through Congress, she reduces it down to a paragraph.
#From the standpoint of American history of the RKBA, Malcolm
ends at the adoption of the Second Amendment -- which is about
one-third of the way through my new book.  As I said, complementary,
not competing.

The final chapter of Malcolm's book, however, provides a history
of what has happened to the RKBA in England since the English
Bill of Rights.  I am pleased that there is now a scholarly
history that discusses fortrightly that the Pistols Act of 1920
was passed largely out of fear that the masses would rise in 
socialist revolution if they were not disarmed.
-- 
Clayton E. Cramer {uunet,pyramid}!optilink!cramer  My opinions, all mine!
"What do you mean I can't take a leave of absence to overthrow the government?
What sort of cheap-skate company is this?"