When did the Anti-gun movement start?

Weapon control goes back to well before the advent of firearms. A couple of posters mentioned the early prohibitions against crossbows in the Middle ages and Elizabethan English rules about swords and other edged weapons. If I remember correctly Karate and Ju-Jitsu and several other Oriental martial arts came about because of legal restrictions on weapons. I think we can reasonably say that the anti-gun movement goes back as far as firearms, and that the "weapon-control" movement goes back as far as weapons. It is always about control, and people without weapons, or with less effective weapons, are easier to control. It is the people in power, or who want to be in power, who seek to control access to weapons by the "wrong people" - who are any people who threaten or could potentially threaten the people in power.
 
Weapons control - swords, bows and arrows is about as old as recorded history. Typically imposed by rulers on their subjects.

The ironic thing that is never mentioned in the current debate is that all of the primary organizations in the gun control movement are funded by politicians and pacs and not for profits run mostly by boards dominated by politicians, CEO's, and a few academics. Organizations that would cease to function without the continual infusions of cash from their rich donors, creators. None have any real dues or paid membership numbers. They are totally dependent on the powerful few who fund and run them.

Contrast this with the principle Second Amendment groups and organizations which all have large grass roots of dues paying members and which receive the bulk of their finances from their members and are huge long term sustained grass roots organizations.

This is never reported or discussed in the MSM, which is overwhelmingly supportive of gun control, which is itself dominated, owned, and run top down, by corporations and CEO's.

Kind of an important story that goes forever unreported. Gun control advocates are afraid of such a story catching hold in the MSM, which is why the NRA and such are continually defamed as a tools of the gun manufacturers and as either representing a minority extremist view or that the leadership of the NRA doesn't represent the true views of the bulk of its members.

This is also why they focus so much on snapshot polls after a tragedy has whipped up emotions as they want to portray their organizations as having massive public support. But the truth is they never have enough support to financially sustain their organizations from grassroots supporters.

Superficially they may sometimes be ahead in public polls of support for nebulous gun control proposals, but when people are informed of the specifics of an issue their support always falls. A good example of this is the support for a so called AWB, the polls done by reputable organizations are close, but when you realize that polling has also showed more than 20 percent of those polled who support and AWB think that they are talking about machine guns not semi-automatic firearms then that shows the true depth or lack of depth of their movement.

The old saying is true - support for gun control at times may be a mile wide, but it is an inch deep. While support for the RKBA is a mile wide and a mile deep. There are many in the RKBA movement who volunteer not only their money but their time and effort. And many more are single issue voters or weigh the issue as much more important when voting.

It is often said in the press and claimed by gun control advocates that the RKBA movement is based on fear. Yet the truth is that the gun control movement depends on the ignorance and fear of the bulk of those members of the public they hope to persuade - many RKBA advocates have won over rank and file gun control advocates with trips to the range and facts. The opposite is almost never true.
 
Weapons control indeed has a very long, if not glorious, history.

For hundreds of years before the birth of our Republic it was in general widely understood and accepted English tradition that ordinary, honest people have arms to be used for, at various times and under various conditions, self defense, defense of their communities, prevention of crime and apprehension criminals, assisting in maintaining public order, defense of the nation, and (yes) hunting. But at various times times some rights were circumscribed, often for one group or another, depending on who was in power. For example, sometimes arms were forbidden to Catholics, and at other times to Protestants.

The foregoing is covered in great detail in Joyce Lee Malcolm's excellent book, Guns and Violence, the English Experience (Harvard University Press, 2002).
 
If we want to start about arms control, then it goes back to the Romans, Phoneicians, and others who invaded other countries and wanted to maintain total control
 
The first "modern" gun control plea I ever saw was in an early talkie movie about gangsters.

I "think" it may have been the original "Scarface".
It prominently showed gangsters using the then-new Thompson SMG.
At the end of the movie there was an added-on "public service" speech by some bluenose calling for the banning of these evil weapons of mass destruction.

A couple of years later, Congress passed the Gun Control act of 1934.

In the middle ages, knights didn't like the idea of some peasant being able to shoot them out of the saddle with a cross bow or early firearm.
A knights trained war horse cost the equivalent of a nice farm, and armor was on the level of buying a high end Mercedes.
All that could be defeated by a serf with a few days experience. So, they tried to ban them.

Mercenary's of the day often pooled their money and bought a cannon.
The aristocracy didn't like getting blown out of the saddle so they tried to ban cannons the hard way.
Cannoneers pulled the cannon around with ropes called petards.
Knights ordered captured cannoneers to be hanged with their own cannon rope, thus "Hoist by his own petard".

In the Renaissance, there were bans on wheel locks, along with very much the same hysterical claims that they were the cause of so much murder and crime.

In Japan the gun became quite popular, which negated the life time of training by the Samurai and his sword. So, Japan banned the gun, and there the ban worked. Most Japanese warlords gave up on the gun as dishonorable.

In America early gun control appeared in the cow towns of Kansas when carrying of guns was banned to keep down the shooting by cowboys.

However, the first true gun control in the US was in the South during Reconstruction to prevent blacks from arming themselves and resisting the KKK.
It just took the fun out of night riding while wearing a mask if some freedman could dispense a load of 00 buckshot into your sheet.

Bottom line, no doubt someone tried to ban the new flint ax some cave man developed because it was to much more deadly then the standard non-assault stone ax.
 
Yep, some southern states passed gun control laws after the Civil War aimed at disarming slaves. Later NY City passed gun control laws aimed at disarming immigrants.

Lobbying of congress by well organized anti-gun groups did not exist in the 60s. There were no organized gun control organizations at the national level until the 1970s.

There was The Emergency Committee For Gun Control run by John Glenn and Robert Kennedy. The committe was made up of Kennedy volunteer staffers. It received support from the AFL_CIO, the Conference of Mayors, the ACLU, the American Bankers Association and other professional and civic groups.

Congressmen from the northeastern states wanted gun registration and gunowner licensing. Those were shot down in congress. The driving forces behind gun control in the US senate were senator Thomas Dodd of CT and senator Joseph Tydings of MD. Tydings is the adopted son of senator Millard Tydings.

Dodd had been condemned by the US senate for using campaign funds for personal use. He lost his re-election bid in 1970.

In 1970 i was a US Army soldier stationed in southern MD. On election day i hauled a hundred or so Republican voters to the polls in my Ford Econoline van. MD voters did a trick on Joseph Tydings that election day.

To make a long story short, the deaths of JFK, Robert Kennedy, MLK and the demand for gun control by LBJ and the administration lead to the gun control act of 1968. While the Vietnam war raged, LBJ went on the air beating the drums for gun control; much like the present administration is doing today. Polls, if one can ever believe polls, showed 80 percent of US voters in 1968 wanted gun control.
 
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There is always someone trying to take your guns away. Even in the Old West the local marshal or sheriff frequently didn't allow the carrying of firearms in city limits. Wild Bill did it in Abilene and The Earp brothers did it in Tombstone. According to what I've read they usually had the overwhelming support of most of the citizens.
 
April 19, 1775

Really, the concept of passivism by the common people came from Europe and the feudal system.
For some, nothing has changed. There are those who want us to be 'subjects' unable to protect our freedoms.
 
The gunfight at the OK Corral was over gun control.
The Earps wanted the Clantons to give up their guns, while in town.
They didn't, and the rest is history.
 
in europe it started when the ruling classes discovered that an uneducated, unwashed peasent, after a few hours of practice could shoot them off a horse at 60 yards before the peasant could be speared or spitted upon the nobles sword blade, or trampled under the horse.

in america it started at the time the rich people wanted their policies forced on anyone. its easy when you look at the west. once the big money came in, and it was "do what mr ward says or the whole family starves to death because he decided to fire you for disagreeing with him"
 
I know the Dred Scott Case involved a sort of gun control as southern democrats feared that freed slaves would have the right to bear arms.
 
mayosligo, you are correct. From Scott v. Sandford:

[If the Constitution applied equally to blacks] It would give to persons of the negro race, who were recognised as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, singly or in companies, without pass or passport, and without obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless they committed some violation of law for which a white man would be punished; and it would give them the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went. And all of this would be done in the face of the subject race of the same color, both free and slaves, and inevitably producing discontent and insubordination among them, and endangering the peace and safety of the State.
Click to expand...

I quoted the whole block because the context is very important. One group wants to maintain dominion over another. The only way to do that is either through a monopoly or a sizable disparity of force.

This has been the way of things since our ancestors first realized that tools could be used to hurt another human being. Jews were often disallowed weapons in medieval Europe. The Muslims disarmed the dhimmi. The Byzantines disarmed the Turks. The Manchu disarmed the Dungan. The list goes on.

Now, do I believe Joe Biden wants me disarmed so he can put on a crown and prance around while he trashes my living room? Not really, but I'm guessing he won't fire his Secret Service detail either.

And in a free society like ours, that distinction should be considered repugnant and unacceptable.
 
Cannoneers pulled the cannon around with ropes called petards.
Knights ordered captured cannoneers to be hanged with their own cannon rope, thus "Hoist by his own petard."

IIRC, petards were small explosive devices used originally for breaching gates/walls. Thus, being "hoist with one's own petard" means being "blown up by one's own bomb," as it were. In Hamlet, the title character puns on the phrase using petar, referring to flatulence. A blast by any other name, so to speak...
 
Gun control efforts have certainly been around since at least the Civil War, but the current climate of significant public interest in gun control is a relatively new thing. I'm pretty old, born in 1943, and I can tell you that even after the assassination of JFK there was relatively little public demand for new gun control laws. Things certainly escalated after RFK and MLK Jr. were killed, but the explosion of interest in this subject seemed to come after the TELEVISED shooting of Pres. Reagan and the universally reported shooting of John Lennon. The liberal minset, when faced with the evidence that high taxes and increased government spending does not bring about prosperity, say that what we need is MORE taxes and MORE spending and heaven on earth will arrive. Similarly, when obviously gun control does not change human nature and thugs keep using guns in a criminal manner, the liberal, aka progressive, says the problem is that we just didn't make the gun laws strict enough. Even if all guns were banned and confiscated, crime would not go away, so the do-gooders would say something like "the problem is knives, and clubs and bombs, so if we just pass more laws controlling these things everything will be fine". Just look at Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, someone I have mentioned many times on these forums. NY law insured that all the law abiding folks on the commuter train were unarmed, including her husband and son. But these laws did nothing to stop the Colin Ferguson from entering the train with a 9mm semi-automatic and shooting dozens of commuters who were essentially helpless to resist. Instead of recognizing that her husband might be alive today had he and/or others been armed and capable of stopping Mr. Ferguson, she continues to this day to just demand more and more restrictive gun laws that the criminals will continue to ignore. Remember, you can't fix stupid.
 
In my opinion it started, and the folks went up in arms about it, on April 19, 1775. The reason British troops came ashore in Boston harbor that day, to disarm the colonists and keep them under the thumb of the Monarchy.
 
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