Americans go to the polls next week in the midterm elections, with Donald Trump’s Republicans facing the prospect of losing control of Congress. The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll puts the Democrats eleven points ahead among registered voters, 47% to 36%, with the Republicans struggling against rising prices and an increasingly toxic president. There is even the possibility that some quite radical Democrats will find themselves elected to Congress. It is the sort of political environment in which we might expect substantial changes in public policy, particularly on issues where there is already widespread public support for reform.
Gun control, however, isn’t one of them.
In 2024, 44,447 Americans died from gunshot injuries, including 15,364 homicides and 27,593 suicides. The number of gun deaths has actually fallen from its recent peak, although gun suicides reached another record. In the first ten months of 2026, there have been 27 school shootings resulting in deaths or injuries, according to Education Week’s relatively narrow definition, with 17 people killed and another 29 injured. Since the beginning of 2018, the same organisation has recorded 268 such shootings. These are not figures for every occasion on which somebody discharged a firearm on school premises, other organisations report considerably higher numbers.
The political response is peculiar. In 2023, Pew found that 58% of Americans wanted stricter gun laws, with just 15% wanting them relaxed. Some individual proposals attracted considerably more support. Raising the minimum age for purchasing a firearm to 21 was supported by 79% of respondents, including 69% of Republicans. A 2025 Johns Hopkins survey found that 74% supported requiring firearms to be securely locked away when not in use. Yet even if the Democrats were to win both houses of Congress, meaningful federal legislation would face the Senate filibuster, which generally requires 60 votes to overcome, and the prospect of a presidential veto.
Of course, the American Constitution makes gun control rather more complicated than it is in Britain. The Second Amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms, and the Supreme Court has interpreted that right as extending to individual possession for self-defence. But there is an interesting historical irony here, because the American right to bear arms wasn’t invented by the Americans.
Its origins lie in British law.
The English Bill of Rights of 1689 established that Protestant subjects could have arms for their defence, subject to their circumstances and the law. It was part of the settlement following the Glorious Revolution, intended to constrain the power of the monarch and prevent the arbitrary use of royal authority. The right was subsequently discussed by William Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, which were enormously influential among the American revolutionaries. The Second Amendment developed from this English tradition.
The Americans therefore inherited a legal tradition that the British themselves subsequently developed in a very different direction. Britain gradually restricted civilian firearms ownership, while the United States came to regard it as an important constitutional freedom. The distinction is not simply that one country values liberty and the other values public order. Both countries began with related ideas about the relationship between citizens, weapons and the state.
It is worth remembering that Britain wasn’t always a country in which firearms were difficult to obtain. During much of the nineteenth century, guns could be purchased with relatively little interference from the authorities. The Gun Licence Act of 1870 introduced a licensing requirement, principally as a revenue measure, but the foundations of the modern system of police certification weren’t established until the Firearms Act of 1920. That legislation followed the First World War, when the government was concerned about political instability, revolutionary movements and the circulation of military weapons.
I had assumed that the slaughter of the First World War might have encouraged British people to surrender their firearms, but the historical evidence is less straightforward. There is no convincing national figure demonstrating a mass voluntary surrender immediately after 1918. There is, however, a documented surrender after the Second World War. In 1946, the government reported that 75,996 weapons had been handed in following a public appeal, including 59,112 pistols and revolvers.
The American story is equally complicated. The popular image of the nineteenth-century United States is one of cowboys, six-shooters and frontier towns where everybody carried a gun. Hollywood has had rather more influence on our understanding of American history than historians might like. Most Americans weren’t cowboys, and the Wild West was neither as universally armed nor as consistently lawless as the films suggest.
But it would be equally misleading to assume that widespread American gun ownership is a twentieth-century invention. Research into colonial probate inventories suggests that firearms were already common in the eighteenth century. One estimate puts ownership at around half of white colonial households in 1774, although probate records disproportionately represent people with property and cannot be treated as a modern household survey.
We cannot establish a reliable date at which American gun ownership overtook British ownership, largely because comparable nineteenth-century statistics don’t exist. What we can demonstrate is that the two countries developed very different patterns of ownership, and that the American stock of privately held firearms increased enormously during the twentieth century.
The historical estimates for the United States are striking.
| Year | Firearms per 100 residents |
|---|---|
| 1950 | 38 |
| 1960 | 43 |
| 1970 | 55 |
| 1980 | 74 |
| 1990 | 85 |
| 1999 | 93 |
| 2017 | 120.5 |
These figures measure the estimated number of firearms in civilian circulation, not the proportion of Americans who own one. Some people own dozens of guns, while others own none. The 2017 Small Arms Survey estimated that American civilians possessed approximately 393 million firearms, more than one for every resident, compared with roughly five or six per hundred people in England and Wales.
The gap is extraordinary, but the question that interests me is how it developed. Prohibition and the growth of organised crime undoubtedly contributed to the mythology of the armed American gangster, while the mass production of relatively inexpensive firearms made gun ownership increasingly accessible. But the historical roots of American gun culture go back much further, and to a rather less romantic aspect of the country’s history.
Slavery.
The American colonies were societies in which large numbers of enslaved people were controlled by a much smaller population of slaveowners. Maintaining that system required the constant threat, and frequent exercise, of violence. Guns were not simply a means of defending property against criminals. They were also a means of defending a particular system of property ownership, one in which human beings were themselves regarded as property.
Research by James Lindgren and Justin Heather into early American probate inventories found that large slaveholders had 4.3 times the odds of owning firearms compared with small slaveholders or people who owned no slaves. That doesn’t prove that slavery caused them to purchase guns. Wealthy plantation owners also possessed more land and other property, and these factors undoubtedly influenced ownership. Nevertheless, the association is significant.
More importantly, the relationship between firearms and slavery wasn’t confined to the ownership of weapons by wealthy planters. Slave patrols, often composed of ordinary white citizens, enforced restrictions on enslaved people, searched their homes, prevented escapes and suppressed resistance. White citizens were encouraged, and sometimes required, to participate in maintaining a social order in which Black people were systematically denied the freedoms that white Americans claimed for themselves.
This is a rather different version of the American tradition of the armed citizen. Instead of an individual standing up to a tyrannical government, we have individuals using firearms to exercise tyranny over other people, frequently with the encouragement and authority of the government itself.
Britain was hardly innocent in this history. British merchants, manufacturers and governments were deeply involved in the Atlantic slave trade, and British firearms were exported across the empire. But there was an important difference between slavery in Britain’s overseas possessions and the American slave states. In the latter, armed white civilians played a direct role in maintaining the system within the society in which they lived. In British colonial territories, by contrast, the authorities often restricted the possession of weapons by colonised populations.
The common factor was not a principled commitment to either private gun ownership or gun control. It was the use of weapons, and restrictions on weapons, to maintain political and economic power.
There is evidence that this history has had consequences extending well beyond the abolition of slavery. A study published in 2023 found that Southern American counties with higher proportions of enslaved people in 1860 had higher levels of contemporary gun ownership. The association remained after researchers accounted for a range of demographic, economic and political factors.
The researchers suggested that slavery and its aftermath shaped a persistent culture in which firearms were associated with personal security, racial hierarchy and the preservation of social position.
The American Civil War ended slavery, but it didn’t end the use of private violence to enforce racial hierarchy. Organisations such as the Ku Klux Klan used intimidation, murder and organised violence to prevent formerly enslaved people from exercising their rights. The willingness or ability of state authorities to prevent this varied enormously, and in some places the authorities were themselves implicated.
America has been through 3 periods of political violence. The lynchings that followed reconstruction after the civil war was the first. The killings of both Kennedys, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X was the second. We are living through the third.
This brings us to a rather important question about the nature of the state, and to the German sociologist Max Weber.
Weber defined the modern state as the institution that successfully claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a particular territory. It is one of the most useful definitions of a functioning state, because it identifies something more fundamental than the provision of public services, the collection of taxes or the existence of democratic institutions.
The important word is legitimate. Weber wasn’t arguing that nobody except a police officer or soldier could ever use force. Individuals can defend themselves, and the state can authorise others to exercise coercive powers. The point is that the state determines the circumstances in which force is lawful, rather than leaving individuals and private organisations to make that decision for themselves. When the Government loses control of that monopoly of legitimate use of force we call it a failed state.
This is not an argument for an all-powerful government. Quite the opposite. One of the principal purposes of establishing public authority over the use of force is to prevent powerful individuals from imposing their will on everyone else.
In a society without an effective monopoly on legitimate violence, the freedom of an individual depends to a considerable extent on their ability to defend themselves against other individuals. Those with weapons, money or the capacity to organise violence have an advantage over those without them. Liberty becomes something that can be exercised at somebody else’s expense.
There is an interesting tension between this understanding of the state and an influential strand of American gun culture. The Second Amendment is frequently defended on the grounds that armed citizens provide a safeguard against tyranny. But the history of slavery and racial violence demonstrates that armed citizens are among the principal instruments of tyranny.
That is not a minor historical embarrassment. It challenges the assumption that the possession of weapons necessarily protects freedom.
The argument is not that every American gun owner wants to intimidate their neighbours. Pew found that 72% of gun owners regarded protection as a major reason for owning a firearm, and 81% said that possessing a gun made them feel safer at home. Those are understandable motivations, particularly in a country where firearms are so widely available.
But the consequences of millions of individuals seeking security through the possession of lethal weapons extend beyond the individuals concerned. The more people believe they need guns to protect themselves, the more other people may feel the same. What begins as an attempt to secure individual safety can become a collective problem in which everybody feels less secure.
There is another distinction here, between owning a weapon for personal protection and claiming the authority to use violence for political purposes. The existence of armed militias, vigilante organisations and groups that regard themselves as entitled to enforce their own interpretation of the law raises questions about the boundaries of legitimate authority. The Kyle Rittenhouse case shows how willing US courts are to legitimise political violence. It does not automatically mean that the American state has lost its monopoly on legitimate force. But it demonstrates the persistence of a particular American political tradition in which private armed power is a virtue rather than a problem.
This brings us to another political philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, and his distinction between negative and positive liberty.
In his 1958 lecture, Two Concepts of Liberty, Berlin distinguished freedom from interference by others from the freedom associated with self-direction and the ability to control one’s own life. The distinction is more complicated than the familiar shorthand of freedom from and freedom to, but it helps us understand the competing claims made about firearms.
For somebody who believes that possessing a gun is an essential individual right, restrictions on ownership represent an interference with liberty. But the person who feels unable to walk through their neighbourhood without carrying a gun is also experiencing a restriction on their freedom. So is the parent who worries about sending their child to school, or the shopkeeper who feels compelled to keep a firearm behind the counter.
The problem is that these different freedoms can conflict. The ability of one individual to exercise a particular right may restrict the practical freedom of another. And the more unequal the distribution of power, the more likely it is that some people will be able to exercise their freedoms at the expense of others.
This is particularly relevant to the history of slavery. The slaveowner’s freedom to control his property was incompatible with the enslaved person’s freedom to control their own life. The armed white citizen’s ability to enforce racial segregation was incompatible with the freedom of Black Americans to exercise their civil rights. The Freedom of right wing Americans to form heavily armed militias to enforce their views on the large number of Americans that don’t agree with them is a threat to American freedom.
Indeed, the American civil rights movement provides a useful counterexample to the idea that freedom is always best protected by restricting government interference. In 1957, President Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce the desegregation of Central High School. Federal authority was used to protect the constitutional rights of Black children against resistance from state authorities and sections of the local population.
In that instance, the exercise of government power was necessary to secure individual liberty.
It is tempting to conclude that Britain developed a political tradition in which the state protects liberty, while America developed one in which liberty must be protected against the state. That would be much too simple. Britain has a long history of state violence and the suppression of political protest, while American constitutional protections have frequently been essential to defending individuals against arbitrary government action.
Nevertheless, the contrast between the two countries’ attitudes towards firearms tells us something important about the relationship between individual freedom and public authority.
The American gun movement contains a powerful belief that the armed citizen represents the ultimate safeguard against tyranny. Yet American history demonstrates that the capacity to exercise private violence has also been used to maintain systems of domination. Slavery, racial segregation and organised intimidation were not examples of freedom being defended against the state. They were examples of some people exercising power over others, sometimes in collaboration with the state and sometimes in defiance of it.
This tradition of private coercive power deserves much more attention in discussions of American gun rights. The language of resistance to tyranny obscures the fact that the ability to threaten or exercise violence is itself a form of power, and one that can be used to restrict the freedom of others.
That doesn’t mean the millions of Americans who own guns for hunting, sport or personal protection share the ambitions of armed extremist groups. Nor does it mean that the history of slavery provides a complete explanation for contemporary American gun culture. But it does mean that we should be sceptical of the claim that private firearms ownership is inherently an expression of liberty.
Which brings us back to the midterm elections.
The Democrats may increase their representation in Congress, and some of their new members may hold much more progressive positions than the party’s traditional leadership. There is also considerable public support for specific restrictions on firearms ownership. But political change doesn’t automatically resolve the deeper disagreement about the relationship between individual rights, public safety and the legitimate exercise of force. Those who hold guns to enforce their views over others by force will only give up that power by force. Indeed they will interpret any attempt at gun control as an opportunity for a show of force.
The constitutional obstacles are substantial, but the cultural ones may be greater. The Second Amendment has become something more than a provision about firearms. For many Americans it represents a particular understanding of citizenship, independence and the relationship between the individual and the state. Changing that understanding is a rather more complicated undertaking than winning an election.
There is a final irony in the fact that the Americans inherited their right to bear arms from Britain. The British subsequently developed a system in which the possession and use of firearms became increasingly regulated, while the United States developed one in which private ownership came to occupy a central place in national political identity. Neither outcome was inevitable, and neither can be explained simply by referring to the intentions of seventeenth-century English parliamentarians or eighteenth-century American revolutionaries.
Weber’s definition of the state brings us back to the fundamental issue. A functioning state should establish the conditions in which ordinary people can exercise their freedoms without having to defend themselves through violence. Its monopoly on legitimate force is not necessarily an enemy of liberty. Properly constrained by law and democratic accountability, it can be one of liberty’s most important protections.
The tragedy of America’s relationship with guns is that a right intended to protect individuals against the arbitrary exercise of power has become an excuse for a minority to exercise arbitrary power over others. The freedom to bear arms is constitutionally protected. The freedom to live without the threat of armed violence is rather harder to guarantee.