Gun Control

The Gun Debate Hasn't Changed in 500 Years

Guns disrupted the established order—and sparked modern-sounding debates over whether they could be effectively regulated.

J.D. Tuccille | 4.17.2026 12:03 PM

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(Princeton University Press)

The Firearm Revolution: From Renaissance Italy to the European Empires, by Catherine Fletcher, Princeton University Press, 352 pages, $35

The introduction of firearms was as important as that of the printing press. Or so argues the author of The Firearm Revolution, a fascinating book on the social impact of guns in Europe. Firearms empowered relatively untrained commoners to challenge aristocrats who'd spent their lives mastering expensive arms and armor. Guns enriched skilled artisans, leveled the playing field between the weak and the strong, and disrupted the established order. In the process, they sparked modern-sounding debates over whether the government could effectively regulate such weapons.

The author, Catherine Fletcher, teaches history at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her specialty is early modern Italy—a focus that lends itself well to this subject, given that peninsula's fractured political landscape at the time. Italy's mutually hostile republics, principalities, and possessions coveted the advantages that firearms offered over competing powers. So those states encouraged gunmakers to produce new weapons, they trained troops to use firearms and deployed them in seemingly endless conflicts, and then they found themselves trying and largely failing to curtail the resulting social transformations.

"Many of the arguments raised today in relation to gun control are to be found in sixteenth-century sources," Fletcher notes. "These include calls for restrictions on the ownership of those weapons judged most dangerous, demands from users that they be allowed to keep guns for self-defence," and so on. 

Thanks to firearms, a farmer or part-time militiaman could shoot an armored knight off a horse. Fletcher quotes a 16th century critic complaining that "it is very often the case that a manly and........

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