Bentley professor points to history

By Jonathan Saltzman, Globe Staff, 8/18/2002

Thirty years ago, Joyce Lee Malcolm was among thousands of angry Vietnam War protesters who were arrested when they blocked the streets of Washington and tried to shut down the US government.

Today, the Bentley College history professor is a leading defender of gun rights and a darling of the National Rifle Association. She has won praise from conservative US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and dissected the Second Amendment right to bear arms before congressional subcommittees.

If that seems like an unusual political progression, this expert on 17th-century England demurs.

Malcolm, whose newest book, ''Guns and Violence: The English Experience,'' was called required reading for ''even the most hardened anti-gunners'' in a recent Wall Street Journal review, said her defense of gun ownership, like her protest against the war, stems from an unwavering belief in the rights of individuals.

''People's views tend to shift,'' she said in her modest book-lined office on the Waltham campus, ''but, in this case, I think the basic principle is the same.''

In ''Guns and Violence,'' her second work on gun rights, Malcolm challenges the conventional view that England, with the most restrictive gun laws of any democracy, is a peaceful oasis compared with America, where it is legal to carry a concealed weapon in 33 states.

In fact, she contends, the opposite is true. When guns were freely available in England in the 19th century, the country had an astonishingly low rate of violent crime. It was only since the 1950s, when England began an inexorable march toward an outright ban on guns, that violent crime rose. Today, she said, guns are outlawed in England.

In contrast, America's rates of violent crime have been falling since 1991, reaching a 30-year low in 1999. The chances of being mugged in London are six times greater than in New York. Moreover, she said, England's rates of burglary and robbery are much higher than those of America, and 53 percent of burglaries in England occur while people are at home, compared with 13 percent in the United States, where burglars admit to fearing armed homeowners.

''All hell has broken loose'' in England, Malcolm said in an interview. If you call the police to report a burglar, she said, ''They say they'll be there in a couple of hours; they have too much to do.''

Although Malcolm disagrees with gun-control activists who say that more guns mean more crime, she is quick to emphasize, ''I'm not a gun nut.'' She does have an old shotgun in a closet in her home in Belmont. How she came to buy it may hint at the origin of her interest in gun rights.

Malcolm was a graduate of Barnard College in the late 1960s, when she was robbed in her home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She had just brought laundry up from the basement, she said, when a burglar who had entered her unlocked apartment confronted her, tied her up, and shoved her in the closet. She spent about 20 minutes there before wriggling loose; he had fled.

On another occasion as a young woman, she said, she was getting into her car outside a shopping center in her native Utica, N.Y., when a man flung open the front passenger door and got in. Keeping his hand in his pocket as though he had a weapon, he ordered Malcolm to drive off. Fearing what might happen if she complied, she demanded that he get out. He did.

She wasn't hurt in either incident. But when she moved to Sudbury to study for her doctorate in comparative history at Brandeis University, she said, she bought a shotgun for protection. Now she laughs darkly about the two episodes. Nonetheless, she said, they may have shaped her view that ''no one should be made a victim or left defenseless because of regulations that deprive them of an ability to protect themselves.''

Since she arrived at Bentley about 20 years ago, Malcolm has taught courses on early modern Europe, war from the Middle Ages to the Vietnam era, and Irish history. The shelves in her office are filled with volumes on historical figures ranging from Martin Luther to Henry VIII to Richard Nixon. But it was her research on the English Bill of Rights of 1689 that drew her into the gun-control debate.

That document, Malcolm said, noted Parliament's recognition of the right of all English Protestants - about 90 percent of the nation - to keep arms to defend themselves. The Second Amendment is a direct descendant of this document, she said, although some scholars disagree.

Although many Britons took advantage of this right, she said, violent crime remained low for hundreds of years. A government study for the years 1890 through 1892 found only three handgun homicides, an average of one a year, in a nation of 30 million people. In 1904, there were only four armed robberies in London, then the world's largest city.

But in the 20th century, the government began banning guns. Ostensibly, the concern was crime, Malcolm said, but the real reason, at least initially, was a fear of revolution. Today, the pendulum has swung so far against gun ownership that someone who defends himself with a firearm is often in more trouble than those he is fending off, Malcolm said. In 1994, an English homeowner was arrested for using a toy gun to detain two burglars who had broken into his house until he could call the police.

Some scholars have skewered Malcolm's work. Carl T. Bogus, a professor of law at the Roger Williams University School of Law in Rhode Island, said Malcolm has misinterpreted the meaning of the English Bill of Rights and that it merely expressed Parliament's prerogative to make laws concerning firearms.

''I think that her main thesis has been discredited by other scholars, and she's not the person I would look to to analyze complicated epidemiological and criminalogical data,'' said Bogus, a former director on the board of the advocacy group Handgun Control Inc.

Malcolm dismissed his criticism. ''He's the expert in English history - right,'' she said. ''He's a lawyer.''

Other academics praise her. Sanford Levinson, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Texas and a self-described liberal Democrat, said Malcolm is one of a growing number of scholars - Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law authority at Harvard Law School, is another - who have recently begun to take the arguments of gun-rights activists seriously.

''In a different world, where the debate had been more genuinely balanced, you wouldn't see this kind of yearning for some sign that you're not being dismissed,'' said Levinson, who himself has written that gun owners have valid constitutional arguments.

Malcolm, for her part, said one of the most satisfying reactions to her work came a year ago from a Bentley groundskeeper. He unexpectedly appeared at her third-floor office one day to shake her hand.

''He said he wanted to introduce himself and thank me for having written about this history,'' Malcolm said. ''I really felt gratified that it had touched people and that I was helping to speak up for people and historical backgrounds that had really been suppressed or ignored.''

This story ran on page W1 of the Boston Globe on 8/18/2002.
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