1916

Mcdiarmada was Irish, I'm pretty sure most were apart from connoly

Be different and approach 1916 from the eyes of John Devoy (IRB) from America who raised the money for 1916 to happen and Padraig Pearse described him as perhaps the greatest of all the Fenians.

whisky_galore wrote: »

Pretty amazing that the authorities allowed sales of arms and freely advertised as 'Xmas presents'!
Were there gun licences back then??

Not as far as I know.
The interesting part where did the shop get the guns to selling during the war? British soldiers arriving in Ireland were know to have sold their rifles. This lead to soldier being banned for Bring their weapons with them to ireland.
Rifles were them issued to them when they got to their barracks.

History of Firearms Legislation in Ireland[edit]
Irish firearms law is based on several Firearms Acts, each of which amends those Acts which were issued previously. The initial Firearms (Temporary Provisions) Act, 1924[10] which was introduced as emergency legislation following the founding of the state, was replaced by the Firearms Act, 1925,[11] which laid the foundations of the system of licensing that has continued unaltered until quite recently. Relatively small modifications were introduced in the Firearms Act, 1964
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_legislation_in_Ireland#Overview_of_Law

Weapons of the Irish Revolution – part I 1914-16

The Volunteers borrowed, bought and stole Lee Enfields wherever they could in the months leading up the Rising. So many service rifles began to go missing in the months leading up to the Rising – mostly sold off by British ‘Tommies’ at Dublin port – that troops embarking at Hollyhead for Dublin were instructed to leave their rifles behind in Wales and pick up new ones at barracks in Dublin.
http://www.theirishstory.com/2015/05/09/weapons-of-the-irish-revolution-part-i-1914-16/#.WItRrPl_uLQ

The famous author, Neville shute Norway, better known simply as Neville Shute, was a junior member of the Red Cross, and rode his bicycle around Dublin carrying first aid supplies to the injured of both sides during the conflict.

Obscure enough for yez?

tac

Not wishing to diverge much from the thread on 1916, but I agree - his works have a little detachment from them that makes you think that he is always looking in on events, and much of his work is slightly autre monde. 'No Highway' and 'An old captivity' and a few others are quite eerie in their way.

'On the beach' is something else, having recently watched the original movie with Gregory Peck as well as the mini-series. Too moving for words and, at the time, very prescient/apposite.

Apologies for thread drift.

tac

The ends of major wars are typically followed by a spike in the crime rate, as you have a large number of demobilised soldiers who are suffering economic dislocation and, in some instances, what we now recognise as a degree of trauma. The British Vagrancy Acts were passed after the Napoleonic wars; they provided for the arrest of anyone in possession of a firearm "with felonious intent" but, as the title suggests, they were mainly directed at (and enforced against) homeless people, travellers, itinerants and the landless poor.

Throughout the nineteenth century manufacturing methods improved, making guns cheaper, and wages for the working classes rose, making guns more affordable, so that by the end of the nineteenth century even the poorest classes of society (who commit the most crimes, naturally) could afford guns. Much of the political discourse about firearms in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries revolved around the right of the citizen/subject to defend himself against tyranny (in the US) or the desirability of an armed population from which a militia could be raised to defeat those damned Frenchies, should they invade (in the UK). But by the turn of the twentieth century, certainly in the UK, guns were seen as desirable to defend oneself from crime because, increasingly, petty criminals might be armed.

The restrictions on pistols that pedroeibar1 mentions were introduced in 1903. I note that this is just about the end of the Boer Wars. I don't know if there's any definite connection there, but it wouldn't amaze me. The 1920 legislation did arise out of a concern about unrest - Republican unrest in Ireland as much as fears of Bolshevik unrest in Britain - but it was also a response to the rising rates of "ordinary decent crime" that followed from the huge demobilisation of 1918. The truth was that the increase was more in crimes against property - burglary, robbery - than in crimes against the person - murder, manslaughter, assault - but what caught the public imagination was the increase in the use of firearms in housebreaking, burglary, robbery, etc. There were also a number of prominent cases that came before the courts in which ex-soldiers charged with lurid crimes pleaded shell-shock in mitigation of their behaviour; relative to the crime wave as a whole these cases weren't that significant, but they also caught the public imagination.

The truth is that as long as guns were something that only middle-class people could afford in significant numbers, the UK had a relatively relaxed gun access regime. But once they became affordable to the masses that situation was liable to change, and the kind of disruption and insecurity that followed the Great War was sufficient to bring about a change, which has never really been rolled back.

Well, an interesting point is that, under the 1920 regime, it was accepted that a good reason for wanting to have a gun was "self-defence" - i.e. to defend your home/wife/little ones against the hordes of shell-shocked ex-soldiers presumed to be rampaging across the countryside. So if you (were a nice middle-class person who) applied for a gun licence because you were worried about crime, you would generally get one. But by the 1930s this was no longer seen as a good reason for wanting a gun. Whether it was the effect of the 1920s gun control legislation or just a coincidence, armed crime was at extremely low rates, and it was believed that having low rates of gun ownership in society was more effective in maintaining peace, order and law than having an armed citizenry ready to defend themselves against the marauding proletariat. And that's pretty much been the view ever since.

A shocking proportion of crimes are committed by young men between the ages of 15 and 25, or thereabouts. It’s a developmental stage that men go through, a combination of strength, aggression, poor risk appreciation, inability to defer gratification. Regardless of how you treat offenders of this age, most of them will come right with maturity. Having minor criminal convictions before age 25 is not a good predictor of a life of crime but if you’re still offending at age 30, that’s a bad sign.

Right. In a big war, a large proportion of the men between 15 and 25 are in the army, where (a) their aggression/violence is channelled in ways that we consider non-criminal, and even admirable/heroic, and (b) in any event they are much more closely supervised and controlled than in civilian life. The result is typically a large drop in the crime rate . . .

. . . . which is reversed when the war ends and large-scale demobilisation occurs. You’ve got a bunch of young men who are now just as impulsive and aggressive as ever, and some of them are more so, and the discipline/supervision/morale which controlled and channelled them has been taken away. Plus, they’re suffering significant familial and economic dislocation. Crime-statistics-wise, it’s the perfect storm.

None of this, the brighter student will note, has anything to do with the availability of firearms. That may also be a factor - the men concerned have been taught to shoot, many of them may have “souvenired” weapons and in any event there are large amounts of military surplus floating around. But, I think it’s a relatively minor factor; guns or no guns, you have this phenomenon.

In the online statistic available from this period (from here), offences involving firearms are not broken out from those not involving firearms. Here are the relevant figures for total crimes of violence against the person:

1912 2,117
1913 2,004
1914 1,729
1915 1,367
1916 1,219
1917 1,030
1918 1,042
1919 1,483
1920 1,546

OK. The steady decline during the war and the sharp rise afterwards are obvious. There’s a similar trend in the robbery offences. It’s notable that the post-war rise in crime doesn’t reach pre-war levels (at least, not by 1920; the trend does continue after that) but that wouldn’t have prevented popular perceptions of a crime wave.

Was there a disproportionate rise in armed crime? (Presumably, there was at least a proportionate rise.) As noted, I don’t have figures on that. It’s plausible, for the reasons already stated, but I can’t go beyond that. But was their public perception of/concern about/fear of a rise in armed crime? I imagine there was. A staple of the 1920s detective novel is the dastardly housebreaker/con man/other petty criminal armed with a revolver (foiled by the gentlemanly amateur detective, similarly equipped). (And, as you point out, the bolshevist agent usually carried a revolver as well.) This, of course, doesn’t tell us anything about the reality of crime in the 1920s, but I think it does tell us something about people’s impressions and perceptions of crime - which, when it comes to “get tough with crime” legislation, is at least as important and the reality.

As for the state of the country in 1847 and the legislative response, your researches may have overlooked the Constabulary (Ireland) Act 1846 which gave a power to proclaim curfews and which made it an offence to have firearms or ammunition in your home or in your possession in a district subject to curfew, “unless duly authorised to keep the same”. And then you’ve got your Crime and Outrage (Ireland) Act 1847, which conferred much more sweeping powers, making it a crime to possess or carry arms or ammunition in a proclaimed district (unless licensed); giving a power of arrest of anyone carrying arms; conferring powers to search for and seize arms, or components of arms, or ammunition; conferring a power to call in arms.

True, these powers and restrictions didn’t apply generally; they only applied in proclaimed districts, but the executive could proclaim any district, of any size, at any time. There was obviously a concern about armed crime, and a perceived need to have the legislative tools to deal vigorously with it, not by punishing the crimes themselves, but by restricting or preventing access to arms in the first place.