What gun control laws did Great Britain have when the American colonies revolted?

Question

What gun control laws did Great Britain have when the American colonies revolted? It seems to me that if the United States put the right to keep and bear arms in its constitution, it must have been from a bad British experience. Was it just because they wanted civilians to revolt against the government, or was there a gun control law Britain had they felt was unreasonable?

Answer 1

The Right to Bear Arms or Arm Bears is a tricky issue. The issue as applied to the American Colonies was complex. There was no out & out ban against guns. An unenforceable tenet in a time & place when hunting game & killing the natives was expected. What Britain did to anger the Coloniest was to insist that they get their guns & powder from Britain, through commercial channels that could be policed. And the amount of weapons and especially powder that an individual could own was the biggest bone of contention. A man might argue that he needs a rifle and a certain amount of powder but when that man owns more than a dozen rifles and several barrels of powder, well he might be agitating against authority.

Authority was the the issue in the American Colonies. When Britain asserted authority by demanding that Americans enumerate their weapons & stores of powder and restricted the amount of gunpowder imported into the colonies and prevented th colonies from starting a gunpowder manufactury of their own, the Americans got angry. Hence the ammendent proclaiming the right to bear arms.

(and that amednment didn't come into play until after the American Revolution, in 1789 when the US Constitution was cobbled together and ratified)

Note the odd paralell in Iraq circa 2007 wherein citizens must register their one gun per person with the authorities and keep a careful inventory of bullets bought, etc.

Here is link and snippets...
http://www.fff.org/freedom/0694e.asp
"""------------The early British colonists, imbued with the English distrust for standing military establishments as a threat to civil liberties, incorporated the tradition of the citizen-soldier. In 1636, the first militia unit, the North Regiment of Boston, was formed, followed two years later by the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, the oldest American military unit in existence.

One of the first acts of Parliament following the accession of William and Mary to the throne of England as a result of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was to restore the old constitution with its provision that every man may arm for self-defense.

In 1760, Britain began adopting mercantilist policies toward her American colonies. By 1768, these had produced such hardships and a reversal of the previous prosperity that British troops had to be sent to suppress riots and collect taxes.

Between 1768-1777, the British policy was to disarm the American colonists by whatever means possible, from entrapment, false promises of safekeeping, banning imports, seizure, and eventually shooting persons bearing arms.

By 1774, the British had embargoed shipments of arms to America, and the Americans responded by arming themselves and forming independent militia companies.

On the night of 18 April 1775, General Gage, Governor of Massachusetts, dispatched several hundred soldiers of the Boston garrison under the command of Major Pitcairn to seize the arms and munitions stored by the illegal colonial militias in Concord.

When Pitcairn encountered the Minutemen on the Lexington common blocking his way, he demanded that they throw down their arms and disperse. Although willing to disperse, the Minutemen were not willing to surrender their arms. The rest is history.

Three days after the British retreat from Concord, General Gage refused to allow Bostonians to leave the city without depositing their arms and ammunition with a Selectman at Faneuil Hall, to be returned at a suitable time after their return. When the citizens of Boston foolishly complied, Gage seized the arms and refused to permit their owners to leave the city. ("Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms," July 6, 1775.)

The news of Gage's seizure of the arms of Bostonians not engaged in hostilities and rumors of British troops sailing from England to seize the arms of the colonists swept the colonies.

The colonists considered these actions a violation of their constitutionally guaranteed right to have and use arms for self-preservation and defense, as indeed they were.

In 1777, William Knox, Under Secretary of State for Colonial Affairs, advocated for the American colonies the creation of a ruling aristocracy loyal to the Crown, the establishment of the Church of England, and an unlimited power to tax. To prevent resistance to these measures, Knox proposed disarming all the people:

The Militia Laws should be repealed and none suffered to be re-enacted & the Arms of all the People should be taken away, & every piece of Ordnance removed into the King's Stores, nor should any Foundry or manufacture of Arms, Gun-powder, or Warlike Stores, be ever suffered in America, nor should any Gunpowder, Lead, Arms or Ordnance be imported into it without License; they will have but little need of such things for the future, as the King's Troops, Ships & Forts will be sufficient to protect them from danger.

We hear the same argument today. You don't need arms for your own protection. The police and military will protect you. The question is, who will protect us from the protectors? """"

//------------------- o O o -----------------\\ Peace..............

Answer 2

Good questions... The revolt was stated as pushing back against the English Crown for taxation without presentation. Many feel this is a good slogan, but doesn't hold up under close scrutiny. Others feel the real reason was that the predominant Americans did not feel they were getting the respect they merited/desired from the British aristocracy. Still others feel those most able to benefit from and independent America were the people most likely to sign. Draw your own conclusions - but many of those same people lost all they had by putting their name on the Delaration of Independence... It became a "World War" because the French and English were at odds and it made sense for France to destabilize the English by aiding the Americans/spreading out England's resources as a distraction to lessen their impact in Europe, just as Lincoln hoped to destabilize the South (during the Civil War) by signing the Emancipation Proclamation. With most of the new thinkers printing their thoughts and sharing their ideas from France and the U.S., and with France deposing its rulers on the heels of the American Revolution, it would make sense that those countries would become the laboratories of a sort for working through these new and dynamic thoughts shared by people such as Voltaire.

Answer 3

English Gun Laws

Answer 4

There were no gun control laws back then, remember the colonies were pretty much rural/wilderness outside the metro areas. Farmers needed to protect themselves and their livestock from wild animals and maurauding indians. SO anyone could own a firearm.
What was written into the constitution was the assurance to the people that it was they who controlled their government and not the other way around. So citizen if this government starts to act like a dictatorship or declares a king you know what your rights are and wht you can do about it.

Answer 5

I do not believe that Great Britain had any gun control laws in the 18th century. Firearms could be brought and carried quite freely. Duelling with pistols was, for example, still quite common.

Answer 6

Probably none at all