Runners, Guns, and Bobbies

There’s a show on Acorn, City of Vice, that presents the establishment and early development of the first police force in London, the Bow Street Runners, sanctioned by Parliament and sponsored in 1749 by my favorite 18th century novelist, Henry Fielding, who gave up on writing in order to become a magistrate in Westminster. In one of the shows Fielding is trying to convince one of the parliamentary leaders, the Duke of Newcastle, that a police force was essential to the safety of everyone in the city. Newcastle’s first response is that a police force runs counter to the tradition of freedom among the British.

 

The same argument makes the Second Amendment an absolute basis for the tradition of freedom among the Americans. And so just as from Newcastle’s point of view, freedom from police control is worth the death, theft, and mayhem endured by citizens of London, so too, as Charlie Kirk said, the unrestrained ownership of firearms is worth the deaths of random people in the streets, schools, churches, synagogues, stadia, theaters, nightclubs, etc. etc. of the US. The Bow Street Runners ultimately receive permission to organize, however, according to the show because Fielding arranges for some of his supporters, disguised as thieves and murderers, to assault Newcastle as he is leaving his preferred whorehouse. The good duke is so frightened by his experience that, within days, he compels Parliament to fund the Runners.

 

The lesson I learned from the show is that 18th century British aristocrats have a great deal more sense than 21st century American politicians. Survey after survey shows that the citizenry of the US supports the idea of gun laws, in particular gun laws that restrict the sale and ownership of assault weapons. But despite all the deaths by gunfire that the country suffers, assaults that include attempts on the lives of the politicians themselves, the Congress of the United States refuses to constrain, if that’s what it is, the “freedom” of Americans by passing any such law.

 

Once upon a time the US did have an assault weapons ban. From 1994 to 2004 the ban resulted in a drop from 19 to 4 deaths from mass shootings by such weapons. When the ban ended the numbers rose, from the 4 in 2004 to 79 in 2019. Similar results no doubt came from the institution of the Bow Street Runners. The difference, though, is that British folk decided that it made a lot of sense to have a police force. It was not for another 80 years, in 1829, that Sir Robert Peele organized the various competing police and watch forces in London and founded the Metropolitan Police, the Bobbies. But there was no doubt that, despite Newcastle’s fear, the freedom of the British public was not infringed by the police. Oddly enough, neither was the freedom of the American public from 1994 to 2004.