Retrato do autor
13 Works 259 Membros 3 Críticas

About the Author

Joyce Lee Malcolm is a professor at Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University. She is the author of Guns and Violence, Peter's War, and To Keep and Bear Arms. She lives in Alexandria, Virginia.

Includes the name: Joyce Malcolm Lee

Obras por Joyce Lee Malcolm

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Sexo
female

Membros

Críticas

Malcolm really admires Arnold, a talented general who proved bad at the politics that often consumed revolutionary forces/the Congress far behind them. She argues fairly convincingly that he was abused and hard done by because of the manipulations of people less talented, but does not really try to justify the betrayal of his own troops (even acknowledging that this was a civil war and he wasn’t betraying his nation/people).
 
Assinalado
rivkat | Dec 7, 2020 |
It’s rare to encounter a work of social science that manages to overturn a major tenet of conventional wisdom. But Joyce Malcolm’s excellent Guns and Violence: the English Experience does just that.

I’m an American, but I live overseas and have numerous British friends. One point on which they universally disagree with my views is the issue of gun control. Every single Brit I know, whether a Labour supporter or a Tory, believes wholeheartedly that guns must be banned in order to maintain a civilized society, and that the USA’s lax (in their view) regulation of firearms is more or less directly responsible for what they assume to be far higher rates of violent crime than in the UK.

They need to read this book.

Malcolm begins by tracing out the laws on firearm ownership in England from the late middle ages to the present day. Several impressive facts emerge. First, acting in self-defence was not just expected throughout much of English history – it was considered a duty of citizenship. Next, firearm ownership was rarely controlled, was positively encouraged at points, and there is no correlation between rates of gun ownership and rates of violent crime. In fact, the opposite holds true: guns were widely distributed in 19th-century England, but crime rates fell steadily, to the point that England was an almost miraculously safe country by late Victorian and Edwardian times.

But all this changed in the 20th century, as increasingly draconian laws were passed periodically, starting in 1920, limiting the right to firearm ownership and abrogating a crime victim’s right to self-defence. The argument always made was that rising crime rates necessitated stricter gun control, but in fact Malcolm argues convincingly that British governments’ concerns about maintaining public order in the face of perceived threats from Bolsheviks, unionists and other class warriors were the real reason for these crackdowns.

Never the less: if banning guns really kept crime down, wasn’t it worth it? Malcolm eviscerates this misconception:

Still, it is important to know whether the many English firearms acts of the twentieth century have been beneficial: have they worked? The short answer is no, not if the goal was to reduce the use of firearms in crime, to make it more difficult for criminals to obtain guns, to ‘shift the balance substantially in the interests of public safety.’ Armed crime, never a problem in England, has now become one. Handguns are banned, but the kingdom has millions of illegal firearms. Criminals have not trouble finding them and exhibit a new willingness to use them. In the decade after 1957 the use of guns in serious crime increased a hundredfold. … In 1904, before passage of gun restrictions, there were only 4 armed robberies a year in London. By 1991 this had increased 400 times, to 1,600 cases. From 1989 through 1996 armed crime increased by 500 percent at the very time the number of firearms certificate holders decreased by 20 percent. (p. 209)

Although still one of the world’s safest societies as late as the early 1950s, Britain is now a hotbed of crime, much of it violent, and most of it unopposed, as law-abiding citizens fear being arrested and convicted themselves for putting up even token resistance to the criminals who prey on them. Malcolm notes:

The ancient constitutional right of Englishmen ‘to have arms for their defence’ exists only on paper. That right of a free person to be armed, long regarded as a badge of citizenship, is now considered a grave menace to public order. However, English governments have gone far beyond this in their zeal to monopolize force by prohibiting any implement an individual might use to protect himself. In so doing they have effectively removed an even more basic right, the most basic right of all, the right of personal security, again in the name of public order. These policies have had a perverse impact. If they did not cause the unprecedented surge in violent crime, they certainly abetted it. There is now little to deter criminals, who are in the enviable position of being protected by the majesty of the law and of the courts from confronting victims armed even with walking sticks, let alone firearms, are shielded from any resistance by their victims that might qualify as ‘unreasonable force’, and whose chances of arrest and punishment are minimal.

Government created a hapless, passive citizenry, then took upon itself the impossible task of protecting it. Its failure could not be more flagrant.
(pp. 210-211)

Malcolm’s last chapter contrasts the American experience: in recent years, i.e. since the early 1990s, gun control laws have generally been relaxed, and rather than leading to a sudden increase in crime, especially violent crime, as most British people would assume, the exact opposite has occurred. American crime rates, especially for violent crime, have in fact declined. Malcolm cites many examples, but perhaps the most startling is the state of Vermont: its gun laws are the nation’s most lenient: it has none. Its crime rate is also the very lowest in the union.

In her UK/USA comparison, Malcolm hits on a highly salient point: ‘The English have been reluctant to reconsider the premiss behind seventy years of failed arms policies. Not so Americans, who seldom hesitate to question first principles.’ (p. 220) That sums it up very nicely, and jibes well with my experience. Brits can be remarkably conservative, in the broad sense of the word, when it comes to challenging assumptions. But how many of them have paid in pain and even with their lives over the past century for this stance?

I highly recommended this well-written, meticulously-researched, conventional-wisdom-defying book.
… (mais)
1 vote
Assinalado
mrtall | Sep 14, 2011 |
In her new book Peter's War: A New England Slave Boy and the American Revolution (Yale University Press, 2009), George Mason law professor Joyce Lee Malcolm attempts to create a history of one slave's experiences during the Revolutionary War. Unfortunately, the slave she chooses - like most slaves - did not leave much of a paper trail, so the narrative Malcolm is able to draw out is at best incomplete and at worst based on a rather surprising amount of speculation for a book published by a press which normally takes scholarship very seriously.

After discovering the 1765 bill of sale for a nineteen-month old slave in Lincoln, MA, Malcolm says, she was captivated by finding out more about this boy, Peter, and what happened to him later in life. After researching, she writes, "In the end I have discovered Peter's footprints but not his voice. I have set those footprints down in the landscape he inhabited, among the people he knew and the dramatic historic events in which he participated" (p. x).

If Malcolm had done only what she said she would do, I wouldn't have minded in the slightest, (although I suspect she would not have had enough material for even a short article that way, let alone a book). Unfortunately she goes far beyond footprints, placing thoughts and motives in the head of young Peter that there is, so far as I can tell, no evidential basis for whatever.

From the very first pages, Malcolm presumes to divine Peter's thought processes: "In many ways his childhood was little different from that of other New England farm boys of the time. Sometimes it had been easy to forget the difference between slave and free and, beyond that, the racial barrier that had made him always the outsider" (p. 3). Later, we learn that by December of 1775, "Home seemed more comfortable than before" (p. 106), and when Peter's mistress dies, "He would miss her terribly" (p. 119). Malcolm suggests that when Peter's master remarried, Peter was "anxious" and "filled with uncertainty" (p. 145). We do not have a single letter or reminiscence written by Peter, so as a reader I kept asking myself, is it possible to know any of those things? Perhaps his emotions can be guessed at, but that is all Malcolm has to work with: guesswork, and unstated guesswork at that.

Malcolm writes several paragraphs about the day on which Josiah Nelson purchases Peter from the owners of his father, a slave called Jupiter. Because Josiah's wife Elizabeth doesn't sign the bill of sale, Malcolm presumes that she wasn't there. "Elizabeth was probably too embarrassed to be present," the author writes (p. 9), without any evidence testifying to her absence (let alone to her emotional state of mind) other than the lack of a signature.

Peter finds himself drawn into the Revolutionary War from its very first day, as the Nelsons' farm sat right on what we now know as Battle Road. Malcolm believes that Peter enlisted several times in local militias and the Continental Army, serving in different locations and engagements throughout the war. However, it is not at all clear to me whether the men she's following are even the same person. She suggests that Peter changed his last name to Sharon in late 1779 when he was emancipated and enlisted again, but provides only the sketchiest of evidence for why he would have done so (she suggests it is a "clear indication of deep anger and dismay", p. 193), but offers no supportive documentation of this fact. Does Peter Nelson become Peter Sharon? Perhaps, but with the evidence I have, I'm not entirely comfortable thinking so.

For reasons not entirely clear, Malcolm adds several chapters about Titus, also known as Captain (or Colonel) Tye (the ranks were 'honorary' only), an escaped slave who fights for the British, leading guerilla raids in the NY/NJ region. Titus hasn't anything to do with Peter, and his inclusion here is puzzling.

There are also several editorial slips, including a typo or two (extremely rare for a Yale book) and a rather gaping contradiction about the training of the British regulars who marched on Lexington and Concord (described on p. 52 as "hardened professionals", they are, just fifteen pages later, "young, untested troops"). But what is most troubling about this book is the complete lack of footnotes. A monograph which deals with a subject as difficult and as fragmentary as a slave's experiences positively screams for documentation, and yet Malcolm has omitted all specific references ("for ease of reading," she says, p. x). There is a brief Essay on Sources (pp. 235-241), but Malcolm does not indicate what she got from where, and for most of her conclusions it is impossible for the reader to tell. This is utterly insulting to any serious reader, who certainly should be curious about Malcolm's sources and what uses she makes of them.

Overall, a book which makes too much of the available evidence, and tries to be more than it can be.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2009/03/book-review-peters-war.html
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
JBD1 | Mar 15, 2009 |

Prémios

You May Also Like

Estatísticas

Obras
13
Membros
259
Popularidade
#88,671
Avaliação
3.8
Críticas
3
ISBN
24
Línguas
1

Tabelas & Gráficos