Most of us have heard the same arguments for gun control our entire lives. Whether we believed them at any point or not might be something different, but we all heard it, and the older we are, the more annoying it likely becomes.
After all, they’re the same arguments, and they’ve all been disproven by none other than reality itself. Look at the last couple of years, for example. We were told that the Bruen decision would result in more violence. Instead, homicides went down, including a record drop in 2025.
Still, the arguments have been the same for generations, and they never admit they were wrong.
Well, over at Reason, J.D. Tucille has a book review up about a piece of non-fiction that shows us that, to some extent, the arguments are even older than some of us realize.
The introduction of firearms was as important as that of the printing press. Or so argues the author of The Firearm Revolution, a fascinating book on the social impact of guns in Europe. Firearms empowered relatively untrained commoners to challenge aristocrats who’d spent their lives mastering expensive arms and armor. Guns enriched skilled artisans, leveled the playing field between the weak and the strong, and disrupted the established order. In the process, they sparked modern-sounding debates over whether the government could effectively regulate such weapons.
The author, Catherine Fletcher, teaches history at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her specialty is early modern Italy—a focus that lends itself well to this subject, given that peninsula’s fractured political landscape at the time. Italy’s mutually hostile republics, principalities, and possessions coveted the advantages that firearms offered over competing powers. So those states encouraged gunmakers to produce new weapons, they trained troops to use firearms and deployed them in seemingly endless conflicts, and then they found themselves trying and largely failing to curtail the resulting social transformations.
“Many of the arguments raised today in relation to gun control are to be found in sixteenth-century sources,” Fletcher notes. “These include calls for restrictions on the ownership of those weapons judged most dangerous, demands from users that they be allowed to keep guns for self-defence,” and so on.
Guns initially allowed peasants, with relatively little training, to take down fully armored knights in the late medieval period. As someone whose other interest is knighthood in the Middle Ages, this is something I’ve seen discussed repeatedly, and while it wasn’t the ultimate killer of knighthood as it was back in the day, it took a massive step forward.
As is true today, the early guns also became equalizers. Sure, they were little more than tubes packed with powder and shot, touched off by a fuse, much like artillery was for centries yet to come, and they weren’t really comfortable to shoot and weren’t super accurate, but they still did a number on anyone they hit, and they didn’t require a lifetime of training to use effectively.
For 500 years, it seems that we’ve been dealing with the same arguments, more or less, that we’re dealing with today.
Take the argument that “real men use their fists.” We’ve heard it all before, of course, but so did people back in the day. Tucille quotes Fletcher by noting period sources lamenting, “it is very often the case that a manly and brave hero is brought down by a pathetic little brat with a gun.”
Sound familiar?
The truth is that the gun, from the outset, was an equalizer that allowed those peasant levies and others to hold their own against the warrior elite. The intelligent embraced this fact and used gunmen to great effect. Those who didn’t tended to get shot by those gunmen.
Honestly, finding out these anti-gun arguments go back that far is about as surprising as waking up and finding out Gavin Newsom is being a douche. You just kind of expect it, even if you’re not sure you’ll see it yourself.
For what it’s worth, I just picked up a copy of the book on Kindle, and will probably do my own review soonish.
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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