From: "Alexander Ellis", [EMAIL PROTECTED] When the revolver first came on the world scene, it, too, was seen as menacing because of the sudden increase in available firepower: III. The Late Nineteenth Century In the final decades of the last century, Great Britain was much like the United States in the 1950s. There were almost no gun laws, and almost no gun crime. The homicide rate per 100,000 population per year was between 1.0 and 1.5, declining as the century wore on.[31] Two technological developments, however, began to work together to create in some minds the need for gun control. The first of these was the revolver. Revolvers had begun to achieve mass popularity when Colonel Samuel Colt showed off his models at London's 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry in All Nations.[32] Revolver technology advanced rapidly, and by the 1890s, revolver design had progressed about as far as it could, with subsequent developments involving fairly minor tinkering. As revolvers got cheaper and better, concern arose regarding the increase in firepower available to the public. And in fact, the change from one or two shot weapons to the repeat-firing, five or six shot revolver represented perhaps the greatest advance in small arms civilian firepower that has ever occurred. Compared to the seemingly more benign single-shot muzzle-loaders of the past, the revolver seemed a frightening innovation.[33] Revolvers were also getting less expensive, and concerns began to grow about the availability to criminals of cheap German revolvers.[34] Cheap guns were, in some eyes, associated with hated minority groups. For example, in the late 1860s, the London Lloyd's Newspaper blamed a crime wave on "foreign refuse" with their guns and knives. The newspaper stated that "[t]he revolver's appearance .. we owe to the importation of reckless characters from America .... The Fenian [Irish-American] desperadoes have sown weapons of violence in our poorer districts."[35] All of these developments have their parallels in modern United States. The current popularity of semi-automatic pistols, with a magazine capacity of thirteen, fifteen, or seventeen rounds, frightens some people who view the old six-shooter as a harmless traditional weapon. Furthermore, the fact that semi-automatics were invented over 100 years ago does not stop the press from portraying them as dangerous new guns, just as the revolvers of the 1850s were portrayed as dangerous new guns in the 1880s. The above is excerpted from http://www.2ndlawlib.org/journals/okslip.html This is an exceptionally interesting and informative essay, about how England went from essentially no restrictions on guns to essentially no allowance of guns in less than 100 years. Cybershooters website: http://www.cybershooters.org List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___________________________________________________________ T O P I C A The Email You Want. http://www.topica.com/t/16 Newsletters, Tips and Discussions on Your Favorite Topics
