The tragic shootings at Bondi Beach and Brown University have put questions of gun control back in the spotlight. Within forty-eight hours of the Bondi attack, the Australian Prime Minister was already promising a review of gun laws. In the USA, in contrast, commentators expressed scepticism that anything would change. In the last two decades, Supreme Court rulings have limited the scope for any restrictions on the ‘right to bear arms’ described by the Second Amendment.
Debates on gun control are almost as old as guns themselves. The first European restriction specifically on handguns was introduced in 1517, in Styria, Austria. My research has explored how the arguments played out in northern and central Italy in the same period. Between 1494 and 1559, the Italian peninsula, then divided into numerous small states, was the theatre for a series of wars. These involved many localized conflicts as well as an overarching struggle between France and Spain for hegemony on the Italian peninsula, which the latter won.
Firearms had become a decisive military technology by the start of the sixteenth century: the Spanish victory at the 1503 Battle of Cerignola is probably the first in which handguns were key. Through the first quarter of the century, many Italian states took inspiration from German and Spanish practice to institute their own militias, equipping local men to defend their states with weapons including guns. Niccolò Machiavelli was a notable advocate of this approach in Florence, where access to weapons was a key demand of republicans opposing tyranny. It is this tradition to which some present-day US advocates for gun rights appeal. More generally, militia service was an important route through which wider populations became familiar with firearm use.
The early part of the sixteenth century also saw the emergence of debates paralleling contemporary concerns about which types of firearm should be banned. This is particularly notable in the development of the wheellock mechanism. Unlike the military matchlock, which required the shooter to keep a burning cord alight, the wheellock had a self-lighting mechanism and could therefore be concealed. This technological shift was the context for the earliest explicit bans on firearms. Wheellocks were prohibited in Habsburg territories in 1518 (these spanned modern-day Germany and Austria), and in 1522 in the Italian city-state of Ferrara.
Within a few decades, bans on small wheellocks extended across the Italian peninsula. Larger firearms were generally permitted, especially for hunting and livestock control, but there were restrictions on carrying them in cities, as well as in busy public places (churches, fairs and markets). Gun control laws generally followed an older tradition of restrictions on arms-bearing, in which higher-ranking individuals (and their servants) had, or could request, the privilege to bear arms. (At this stage the language of ‘rights’ had not yet developed.) In most cases these requests were handled by city officials, although they were criticised both for being too lax and for policing too enthusiastically. However, the rise of militias extended routine access to guns, putting that approach to arms control under pressure. Restrictions on the production of the most dangerous type of gun, the small wheellock, were briefly tried but did not last, and gun control laws primarily targeted gun users.
By the middle of the sixteenth century there was a growing sense in Italy that people should be allowed to carry guns for self-defence. One Venetian official wrote of his belief that increased arms ownership had contributed to a fall in homicides in the area around the city of Brescia (an important location for gun production). However, an anonymous treatise on the use and misuse of firearms, probably from the 1570s, criticized the idea that guns were of practical use in self-defence.
These debates established the basis for policing of gun use in the coming centuries. Across Europe, gun laws had somewhat different emphases to reflect different local cultures, but typically focused on preventing poaching and limiting carry of the most dangerous weapons in specific places, while ensuring arms were available for militia service. In sixteenth-century England, for example, there were property qualifications for handgun ownership, a system of licensing, and bans on the smallest weapons, but also significant exemptions for country dwellers and those living near the coast or the Scottish border.
The 1689 Bill of Rights extended gun rights in England to Protestant subjects, who were permitted to ‘have arms for their defence suitable to their condition [social status] and as allowed by law’. Earlier restrictions on the use of guns for hunting continued to be enforced by the courts. However, more arguments emerged against gun control, notably those of the Milanese criminologist Cesare Beccaria, who argued that it made ‘the situation of the assaulted worse, and of the assailants better’. It was not until the later nineteenth century that the idea of stricter gun laws came back onto the agenda.
Shifts in technology like the development of revolvers and machine guns challenged laws established to regulate earlier types of weapon. The authorities were also concerned by threats to social order, especially in the aftermath of the First World War. The Firearms Act of 1920 required UK gun owners to obtain a certificate from the local police chief and to demonstrate a ‘good reason’ for their possession of the weapon. Europe’s disarmament after the Second World War ironically fed a consumer market for guns in the USA, as enterprising dealers bought up surplus military stock and shipped it across the Atlantic.
UK laws on firearms were tightened over the course of the twentieth century with a ban on military-type semi-automatic weapons introduced following the 1987 Hungerford massacre and an almost complete ban on handguns following the 1996 attack at Dunblane Primary School. The Port Arthur massacre in Australia that same year prompted a stricter gun control framework there, though its implementation has been devolved to states, some of which have favoured more liberal approaches. The absolute number of guns in Australia has risen in the past thirty years. The Bondi Beach attack may prove to be another of the historical shock moments that shift public attitudes on access to guns. In the USA, in contrast, even horrific school shootings have not moved the debate. The arguments about guns and self-defence first set out five hundred years ago persist, despite the very different nature of today’s automatic weapons. By understanding just how far these arguments go back, however, we gain a new perspective on how deeply cultural attitudes to firearms are embedded.
