Part VI describes how the British gun licensing system is administered today and how police discretion is used to make the system much more restrictive, even without changes in statutory language. Part V focuses on the turbulent 1960s, and how the government enacted a mild licensing system for shotguns, in order to deflect public cries for re-imposition of the death penalty, following the murder of three policemen by criminals using pistols. The gun control system was gradually expanded in the 1930s, relaxed in enforcement during World War II when Nazi invasion loomed, and then re-imposed with full force. Part IV describes how social unrest before World War I intensified the pressure for gun control, and finally resulted in the creation of a licensing system for rifles and handguns after the war. Part III describes the unimpaired British right to arms of the late nineteenth century and the changes in popular culture that began to threaten that right. Part II of this Essay briefly sets forth the legal background of the British right to bear arms, as it developed from ancient times to the late nineteenth century. These principles can be applied to any debate where slippery slopes are an issue. This Essay does not require that the reader have any affection for the British right to arms presumably, the reader does have affection for some civil liberties, and the Essay aims to discover principles about how slippery slopes operate. The investigation of the British experience offers some insights about the current gun control debate in the United States, and also about ongoing debates over other civil liberties. This Essay pays particular attention to how the public's "rights consciousness," which forms such a strong barrier against repressive laws, can weaken and then disappear. Instead, the object is simply to examine how a right that is widely respected and unrestricted can, one "reasonable" step at a time, be extinguished. In studying the destruction of the British right to arms, this Essay draws conclusions about how slippery slopes operate in real life, and about what kinds of conditions increase or decrease the risk that the first steps down a hill will turn into a slide down a slippery slope.įor purposes of this Essay, the reader will not be asked to make a judgement about the righteousness of the (former) British right to arms or the wisdom of current British gun prohibitions and controls. As the century closes, the right has been almost obliterated. (p.400) When the twentieth century began, the right to arms in Great Britain was robust, and subject to virtually no restrictions. This Essay aims to refine the understanding of slippery slopes by examining a particular nation that did slide all the way down the slippery slope. In response, proponents of today's reasonable restrictions argue that the jeremiads about slippery slopes are unrealistic or even paranoid. Is it possible for a nation to go from wide-open freedom for a civil liberty, to near-total destruction of that liberty, in just a few decades? "Yes," warn many American civil libertarians, arguing that allegedly "reasonable" restrictions on civil liberty today will start the nation down "the slippery slope" to severe repression in the future. ![]() ALL THE WAY DOWN THE SLIPPERY SLOPE: GUN PROHIBITION IN ENGLAND AND SOME LESSONS FOR CIVIL LIBERTIES IN AMERICA
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