How is that different from the 1890's?? Heck in the 1890's you could buy guns through the mail! They used the exact same line in the movie and I thought it was dumb then and I thought it was dumb last night.
shareThey were from England, not the US.
shareThe UK didn't pass it's first gun control act until 1903. So it was the same in England.
shareMaybe legally, but certainly no culturally. Jack the Ripper saw the development of The Met into the police force we know today. They were issued clubs and whistles because guns weren't much of an issue. Most criminals, even the most hardcore, used knives in the UK, not guns. Most of the guns were long guns used for hunting and such.
shareNope, sorry, culturally as well as legally. Guns weren't much an issue in Victorian England because ALL crime was low by today's standards, not because nobody had guns. Guns weren't much of an issue, but that was not because they were unavailable: they were totally unregulated in any way whatsoever, and the only thing stopping ANYONE from buying one was an inability to afford it. Gentlemen quite commonly carried weapons on their person if they ventured anywhere near the seedier parts of English cities -- sword canes and pocket revolvers sold in very large numbers in the period. There was a thriving gun culture in England in the Victorian era, and the right of English subjects to keep and bear arms went back to medieval times and was actively exercised. And the official attitude of the times was quite favorable to the exercise of this right as well. In 1900 Prime Minister Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, the Marquess of Salisbury, said he would "laud the day when there is a rifle in every cottage in England." That same year, there was a cooperative effort led by the Duke of Norfolk and the mayors of London and Liverpool as well as a number of prominent gentlemen, to promote the creation of rifle clubs for working men. The Prime Minister and almost all the rest of the aristocracy viewed the widespread ownership of rifles by the working classes as an asset to national security. When the first gun regulations were enacted in England in an effort to disarm anarchists and other political radicals, not criminals, and the first really stringent controls were passed in 1914 as a World War One national security measure aimed at curbing any possible domestic trouble fomented by foreign agents.
It really is lamentable how well the media of today have succeeded in changing people's attitudes about guns, not merely to where they are different, but where they are woefully ignorant that attitudes were ever different, and most people did NOT view guns and gun owners as evil.
A man like the H.G. Wells of this story -- a utopian dreamer who believes there will one day be an ideal society without violence and with nearly perfect justice -- might envision a day when no one had or needed weapons, and he might have been saddened to discover they were still widespread, but the idea that he would have been shocked, shocked! by their widespread availability is simply absurd, given that he came from exactly such a society himself.