Bogeymen Versus Sportsmen

Firearms violence, in one form or other, rarely drifts far from the front page. Be it small town school disasters such as Newtown or inner city street gang shootouts, our culture is regularly bombarded with coverage of the mayhem and horror that come with gun violence. Despite the countless hours spent covering such tragedy, however, attention is infrequently paid to the lengthy history of firearms legislation and how indeed we got to a place where the carnage can occur.

Enter Saint Mary’s history professor R. Blake Brown, with his second book, Arming and Disarming: A History of Gun Control in Canada. Author of 2009’s A Trying Question: The Jury in Nineteenth-Century Canada, Arming and Disarming unites Brown’s extensive work writing and lecturing on the history of Canada’s firearms laws.

As...