Bushkin.

Over the next stretch of revisionist history, we have a special treat for you, six episodes, all devoted to one theme, an examination of the many, weird and strange corners of the American obsession with guns.

It's about what we don't know, what we get wrong, how we screwed up, and how utterly bizarre things get in a country where guns stand at the center of our culture.

Our journey begins in seventeenth century England with a mysterious merchant named John Knight, who inexplicably has become a twenty first century legal celebrity.

Then on to the New York City subways, the hallowed halls of the Supreme Court, a little town in rural Alabama, the south side of Chicago, and the wild wob West Dodge City.

To be exact, I'll show you what it means to get out of Dodge.

We'll consider a what if involving the assassination of Robert Kennedy.

I'll shoot assault rifles in a range in the woods of North Carolina and sit in the basement of the University of Chicago Hospital as an er doc pours out his heart to me.

Now, as you may already know you can hear this entire series starting right now by becoming a pushkin Plus subscriber.

You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts or on our website Pushkin fm, slash Plus, or hear the episodes weekly right here in the Revisionist History Feed.

We'd also love to hear from you as you listen.

You can write into our contact form at revisionististory dot com.

All right, here we go.

It's sixteen eighty six in Bristol, a major port and manufacturing center on the southwest coast of England.

A local merchant named John Knight, Sir John Knight is riding up a steep road outside the city to an Anglican church, Saint Michael's on the hill greystone slate roof sturdy walls built during medieval times to withstand the full brunt of hostile force.

The city of Bristol spread out below.

Sir John Knight bursts in and then, oh my god, John Lone.

My name is Malcolm Gladwell.

You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.

In this episode, I invite you to descend with me into the deep and bottomless historical pit.

That is Sir John Knight, the irrepressible Englishman who has achieved more than three centuries after his death, a sudden and extraordinary celebrity.

How was it that the John Knight case came to such a promise?

Who uncovered it?

It doesn't sound like this wasn't a case that was in There wasn't a famous case name at the time.

I don't.

I hate to say.

It's like, you know, if you talk about history, like you know, you can go to Africa and find a rock with somebody's name on it.

This is, you know, founded by white guy in nineteen eighteen.

No, it was existent, right, it was there, It's always been there.

So I wanted to explain how that happened and why he matters.

And I know that this is something you've thought about, so I naturally wanted to call you.

First question sulled for me.

Who is the first modern legal scholar to reference Sir John Knight?

Depends on what you mean by William Hawkins into seventy six in his seventeen sixteen treatise.

I mean last fifty years his most recent celebrity.

Who well, I mean he was around in case law, you know, not as common as he's been in the twenty first century.

But he was.

He was always around in case law to some degree.

You know, shows up in a major eighteen forty three case in North Carolina and then another nineteen sixty eight North Carolina case, among others.

So yeah, I think, I you know, I was.

I got really interested in the way the Second Amendment debate has been transformed, and instead of focus on history and got the reason I got into is that I got really fascinated by the Sir John Knight case.

Now oh, yes, right.

And everyone says, oh, the person you have to talk to is Joyce Malcolm.

So here I am, and here you are.

Here I am.

When you were doing your book, your original work on this, how did you come across the Sir John Knight case.

Ah, well, it's a long time gone out.

John Knight's name is spoken first only in the smallest of historical circles.

Then it gets repeated again and again with increasing frequency in bigger and bigger rooms.

I was at a conference in d C where they were discussing Second Amendment issues, and they had people giving papers from all perspectives, and I was just there to offer some historical input and I found myself having to clarify some of the basic details and mis assertions have been made about what had actually happened.

So I said, I happened to know about this because I've read a lot of the sources.

Do we know what Sir John looked like, his family life, his personal circumstances, Not really, but we do know something of his character, principled to a fault, contentious, possess of a steadfastness of mind.

Indeed, so he was a Bristol merchant, he was from quite an important Bristol mercantile family, and perhaps because his father had been a sugar maker, Sir John Knight appears to have gone out to the West Indies and spent a period of time there, apparently rather controversially, because when he then applied a couple of years before we're deinning with to be the governor of the Leeward Islands, he appears to have been vetoed by the people there saying that from their experience of him, he was the last person that they wanted to come out as the governor, and it may have been partly his resentment at that throwback, people have suggested may have been one reason why he turned against the government of James the Second, which up until that point he had been very strongly supporting.

So he appears to have been a man of a short tempera much disliked by many other people, highly manipulative.

But do we need to make friends of our heroes, No, we don't.

What we demand of our heroes is that they serve some larger cause, that they stand for something that their name would be uttered with reverence on some grand stage.

I know you've had a substantial debate with your friends on the other side about the Statute of Northampton.

Do you know who that is?

Neil Gorsuch, Supreme Court Justice, during oral arguments in November of twenty twenty one, posing a question to the legendary appellate lawyer Paul Clement.

We haven't heard about that today, and I just wanted to give you a chance.

Thank you, Justice Gorsich.

I'd say just a couple of quick things about the Statute of Northampton.

Wait for it.

Wait for it.

First of all, I think that it was very clear from the Knight's case and the treatises that this Court relied on in Heller that by the time of the framing of the Knight's Case.

When the final accounting is done of the twenty first century, a handful of Supreme Court cases will stand out as landmarks.

The Citizens United Case from twenty ten, for example, which freed corporations to spend enormous amounts of money on political candidates, the decision to overturn abortion rights, and very high on that list, a pivotal gun rights case that came before the Court in late twenty twenty one.

We will hear argument this morning in case twenty eight forty three New York State Rifle and Pistol Association versus Bruin.

New York Rifle and Pistol otherwise known as the Bruin Case.

Broome was about the Second Amendment to the Constitution, a well regulated militia comma being necessary to the security of a free state Comma the right of the people to keep and bear arms comma shall not be infringed.

What does that sentence mean?

For years and years scholars have argued about that.

We even weighed in on it here at Revisionist History.

If you remember in season three's Divide and Conquer episode with an investigation of the significance of the commas that surround the phrase being necessary to the security of a free state.

But then along comes the Bruin Case.

For one hundred years, a law has been on the books in New York State that says you can only get a handgun if you prove you need one for some specific purpose.

And the gun lovers of New York are unhappy about this.

They sue.

The Supreme Court agrees to take the case, and in November of twenty twenty one, lawyers for both sides gather for what is the first stage in all Supreme Court cases, oral arguments.

They're in the Court's Central Chamber on First Street, across from the Capital, an imposing room in the grand Neoclassical Revival style, forty four foot ceilings twenty four ionic columns in marble shipped from Liguria, Italy.

The justices are sitting all in a row behind a long curved Mahogany table, there to hear the lawyers on both sides of the Bruin case present their oral arguments.

The room's packed, A sense of anticipation is in the.

Air, mister Chief Justice, and may it please the Court the text of the second Amendment in Shrine's aright, not just to keep arms, but to bear them, and the relevant history and tradition exhaustively surveyed by this Court in the Heller decision confirm that the text protects an individual right to carry firearms outside the home for purposes of self defense.

Paul Clement, lawyer for the gun rights group.

I'm happy to continue by point I missed a Clement, I'm sorry to interrupt you.

That's Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Thomas would go on to write the Court's majority opinion in the case.

This is the moment where he tips his hand shows us where he's leaning.

If we analyze this and use history, tradition texts of the Second Amendment, we're going to have to do it by analogy.

So can you give me a regulation in history that is a base that would form a basis for legitimate regulation today.

If we're going to do it by analogy, what would we analogize it to?

What would that look like?

If you were a law student armed with a yellow highlighter, you would underline the words history and tradition.

Why Because Thomas is telling us something crucial here.

He doesn't care about the commas in the Second Amendment.

He doesn't care about the arcane theories of the legal scholars.

He doesn't even care about what the citizens of New York State may or may not think about restricting handguns.

He cares about what the Founders thought when they wrote the Second Amendment.

And when he says you're going to have to do it by analogy, what he means is the only way to decide whether a restriction on guns is valid, is consistent with the Second Amendment?

Is did the Founders way back when ever, consider a restriction that looks like this New York law, would they have been okay with it?

And Clement agrees, So can you give me a regulation in history that is a base that would form a basis for a legitimate regulation today.

Yes, that's what this case is about.

We're arguing history here.

Mister Chief Justice, and may it please the court.

Then the attorney for the other side stands up, Barbara Underwood, Solicitor General of the State of New York.

For centuries, English and American law have imposed limits on carrying firearms in public and the interests of public safety.

The history runs from the fourteenth century Statute of Northampton, which prohibited carrying arms in fairs and markets, and other public gathering places to similar laws adopted by half of the American colonies and states in the Founding period.

The Statute of Northampton.

That's the third time we've heard it mentioned in a case heard in the twenty first century about a law passed in the twentieth century.

The court has asked for insight into how the Founders felt in the eighteenth century, and the lawyers said, well, then we need to look to the fourteenth century.

Thirteen twenty eight to be precise, your honor, during the reign of Edward the Second, the English Parliament passed the Statute of Northampton, which says that no man shall disturb the peace by riding armed night or day, without quote forfeiting their bodies to prison at the King's pleasure.

The Statute of Northampton is part of English common law.

English common law is what the first English settlers brought with them on the Mayflower.

English common law is what the Founding fathers learned in school.

You want an analogy from history, you want to play early history, I give you a crucial law from thirteen twenty eight, which absolutely the Founders knew about, that restricts guns way more than anything.

We're talking about in this court, your honor cases are chess.

This is check.

The only way the gun rights crowd can win is if they can find their own bit of ancient history that trump's the Statute of Northampton, and incredibly they do.

John Lowe, Yeah, yeah, going back to when you were doing your book, your original work on this, how did you come across the Sir John Knight case.

Ah, well, it's a long time ago now, but I looked through all of the cases and there are these little handbooks on what the law was at different times that were published is to help justices of the peace and judges.

I looked through the laws.

I did a lot of manuscript reading and really investigating what Parliament was doing, what was happening at that time.

Joyce Malcolm the Patrick Henry Professor of Constitutional Law and the Second Amendment at the ntonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University in Virginia.

In a world where history matters more than law or public sentiment, historians become heroes.

The magazine National Review once described Joyce Malcolm as the nice girl who saved the Second Amendment.

She quote looks nothing like a hardened veteran of the gun control wars.

Small, slender and bookish.

She's a wisp of a woman who enjoys plunging into the archives and sitting through panel discussions at academic conferences.

Malcolm felt the argument over gun rights had been set adrift from history.

If we didn't know what the founders thought, how would we know what we should think.

In her most famous book, To Keep and Bear Arms, The Origin of an American Right, she set out to answer that question, and while pouring through case books from the eighteenth and nineteenth century, she found it the key that unlocked the whole mystery.

No more than a handful of paragraphs and a short summary, but the story it told was riveting.

It's sixteen eighty six.

England is overwhelmingly Protestant, legally and officially dominated by the Church of England, but for a brief period in the sixteen eighties, the king was James the Second, who was Catholic, and Church of England loyalists were outraged by the possibility that the king might try and empower his fellow Catholics, and one of those outraged Church of England loyalists was a merchant from the coastal town of Bristol, a man named Sir John Knight.

One day, Knight rides up a steep road outside Bristol to the Anglican Church of Saint Michael on the Hill Sin the story goes waving his guns, gives an impassioned speech.

James the Second hears of it and has Knight arrested charges him under the Statute of Northampton.

The information sets forth that the defendant did walk about the straits armed with guns, and that he went into the Church of Saint Michael in Bristol in the time of divine service with a gun to terrify the King's subjects.

And what happens.

The jury decides not guilty.

Joyce Malcolm reads this and it takes her breath away.

Everyone thinks that English common law, on which the American legal tradition is based was hostile to people walking around with guns.

But that is not true.

John Knight was acquitted.

John Knight goes up against the Statute of Northampton and John Knight wins.

One side says the Statute of Northampton.

Check The other side counters Night checkmate.

So there's been this big debate about what the Statute of Northampton meant.

But I can say that if it was archaic by the seventeenth century, it was certainly archaic by the eighteenth century, when we've got the Second Amendment, and for sure the twenty first century.

The nice girl who saved the Second Amendment.

And if you read through the briefs file before the Supreme Court in Bruin, what do you find John Knight.

Everywhere we hear about the famous case of Sir John Knight, we get history lessons on John Knight.

We learned that the legal entanglement he found himself in after he burst into the church at Saint Michael's on the Hill is the most quote significant precedent quote in understanding a crucial turn in Second Amendment law.

During oral arguments, Neil Gore sutch lobes as softball Paul Clement about the Statute of Northampton.

I know you've had a substantial debate with your friends on the other side about the Statute of Northampton, and.

Paul Clement knocks the question out of the park John Knight Baby.

Then six months later comes the final ruling in Bruin.

Just as Clarence Thomas promised, It's all about history.

Eight pages on the perier between twelve eighty five and seventeen seventy six, five pages on colonial America, nine pages on seventeen ninety one to the Civil War, six pages on the Path to reconstruction.

One of the most important cases of our generation, a landmark that once and for all clarifies the most controversial of all the amendments to the US Constitution.

The debate is over now we know with the founders under the sway of the Statute of Northampton.

No, they were not, the court rules history teaches us.

Otherwise, the founders would have frowned on the way in New York State tried to regulate handguns.

And we know this because of one man's heroic acquittal.

If you read the brew and ruling, John Knight looms over it like a colossus.

John Knight, John Knight, John Knight.

He pops up again and again like a late seventeenth century whack them all.

I've been really drawn effect this morning.

I was reading over again this stuff about the Rex v.

Knight, the John Knight case.

I call up a second amendment scholar named Patrick Charles.

Before long talk swung to John Knight.

Of course it did.

There's no quitting John Knight.

Once you catch John Knight Fever, But you know that it's a totally fascinating history taken in itself, but in context.

The idea that you know, in the middle of a contemporary debate about how to handle the possess of dangerous weapons in America, that we're spending our time obsessing about a case from the seventeenth century in Bristol and England is hilarious.

Yes, on the one level, you're you're absolutely critic.

Patrick Charles and I agreed that it was hilarious to spend so much time on John Knight.

And then what do we do?

We continue talking about John Knight.

John Knight is the groundhog who emerges from his musty English lair every spring to cast a shadow across twenty first century jurisprudence, the beaver who stealthily builds a legal edifice out of mud and sticks.

The constitutional scholar and a founding member of the John Knight fan Club.

David Copple once combed through the library of an eighteenth century law professor named George Wythe who taught law to a Supreme Court justice, a couple of presidents, some founding fathers, and he found that John Knight's name was all over law books back then.

Surely this is all all the founders were talking about over a good pipe and a bottle of claret in the drawing rooms of colonial Philadelphia.

You were in Bristol not long ago.

I was my wife and I were on vacation, and as we were on our way from Cornwall to Wales, I we did stop at Saint Michael Church in Bristol where all this stuff happened, because I wanted to see it, maybe see if Sir John Knight was buried in that graveyard.

David Copple, on vacation, says to his wife, we cannot quit this storied isle without paying homage to the man whose brave example saved America from the tyranny of restrictive gun laws.

And it was interesting.

It's not a huge cathedral type church.

It's a medium sized church, but it's up on the hill.

As I learned the hard way, because I was driving a stick shift and getting up that very steep hill was quite a challenge.

Yeah.

Yeah, but you're in the area and you couldn't resist to stop by.

And actually I kind of want to see Saint Michael's myself.

Go ahead, tell me why you want to You want to see it too.

Of course I do.

I mean, who wouldn't want to learn of this giant in the place of his birth and death.

But then, just as I was packing my bags for Bristol, I thought, wait, let me check in with a more disinterested historian of that period.

I called around.

Someone recommended a man named Jonathan Barry of the University of Exeter.

When you, as a historian of this period, see the way that John Knight has suddenly popped up in American gun rights discourse, what's your reaction?

Well, I find it bizarre because nobody that's ever heard of him or the case, and it has no implication, you know, as far as I know.

In the English jurist Britain's not the land of Drews.

But you know it's it's of no significance.

Huh, England, John Knight is a nobody, But in the hallowed halls of the Supreme Court three and a half thousand miles away, he's a superstar.

It's a puzzle, and it is for puzzles like these that God invented revisionous history.

One of the problems associated with the coronation of John Knight as the savior of the gun rights movement is that our understanding of the details of his arrest and acquittal was limited.

We had the verdict, but not much else.

After all, it happened in sixteen eighty six.

It's not like there are digital records somewhere in the Bristol courthouse.

What was known about the case came from legal catalogs from the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the kind that a lawyer or a judge might subscribe to that offer brief summaries, news briefings of the goings on in various court houses around England.

That's what Joyce Malcolm found in her Eureka moment, a brief write up from a long ago legal newsletter on a matter of Rex v.

Night.

It was about a paragraph long.

But let's be honest, one paragraph in a legal digest is not exactly the strongest of foundations for completely overturning our understanding of the Second Amendment.

And, perhaps more ominously, the newly inaugurated members of the Sir John Knight Fan Club tended to be lawyers, and lawyers deal in black and white hard facts, the letter of the law, tangible evidence.

But now they had crossed over into the land of history, and history is not like the law at all.

History is a living, organic thing that gets rewritten all the time.

I mean, why do you think we call this podcast revisionist history because historians love to say, wait a minute, I found something new that makes me think we didn't quite realize what we were talking about before.

And in the case of Sir John Knight, that something new was the Newsletter of the Intrepid Roger Morris Rojamoris Roger Morris was a journalist who wrote a private newsletter in the sixteen eighties for a variety of well connected clients.

Roger Morris knew everyone and everything in late seventeenth century England.

He passed on high end gossip.

He told stories no one had ever heard before, about brothels and prostitutes and somebody bearing their breast to the Moroccan ambassador.

He wrote about how the ice was so thick in the long cold winter of sixteen eighty four that people roasted an ox on the River Thames.

He saw the King's baby and air a close and reported and you have to love this little bit of late medieval trolling.

The child was a large, full child in the head and the upper parts, but not suitably proportioned in the lower parts.

Roger Morris was a gold mine, but there were a few problems.

The first was that Roger Morris's reputation did not extend beyond the late seventeenth century.

His newsletters ended up in an obscure library in central London where no one paid attention to them for several hundred years.

Second problem, Roger Morris was incredibly prolific.

The Roger Morris archives extend into the millions of words, so if you wanted to find out what Roger Morris had to say about this or that, you had to make a commitment.

Third, and maybe the biggest problem of all, Roger Morris's entire life work was written in code.

I mean, if you're could have dissed the private parts of the heir to the throne, you have to take some precautions.

There was an attempt by historian called Douglas Lacy to try and to start to work on a volume.

That's the historian Tim Harris.

He did a book in the nineteen fifties.

He couldn't break the shorthand couldn't break the code.

And it's too much for one person's take.

On a cryptographer from Oxford had to get involved.

Teams of historians volunteered, passing the job down from one generation to the next, until finally there it was a full shelf of encyclopedia sized volumes offering hitherto unknown insights into one of the most complex eras in British history.

And Roger Morris, it turns out, had a lot to say about Sir John Knight.

It's a seven volume edition and there was a team of us who did it, and now it's widely available.

And because it's widely available, people are looking at it more and say, oh, there's not more we can find out about this is John Knight case.

It's an incredible source.

It has lots of very valuable information, and it's clearly well informed and if you could check his information against other sources, it's clearly accurate.

But he also gives you additional information which you won't get elsewhere.

So much additional information.

Oh my god.

So he was a Bristol merchant.

He was from quite an important Bristol mercantile family.

Jonathan Berry, historian at the University of Exeter.

The Knights ran sugar refineries, They had plantations in the Caribbean.

They were politically well connected and their sympathies did not lie with the Catholic King of England, James the second, John Knight hated Catholics.

One day he learns that a group of Irish Catholics are holding a secret mass in a house in he arranges to have the priest arrested.

So he gets the Lord Mayor and other magistrates to raid this Catholic chapel.

A couple of weeks later, there's an anti Catholic ritual in Bristol which the government suspects the magistrates to Bristol and maybe Sir John Knight were involved in encouraging.

Where they parade through the city scoffing the mass.

They hold a piece of bread up in the air, and they have someone dressed as a Virgin Mary and someone dressed as a monk, and the monk is fundeling the Virgin Mary.

The monk is fondling the Virgin Mary.

So the government is upset about this.

The King of England is a Catholic, remember.

And after that, Sir John Knight claims that he's threatened and he is beaten up by a couple of irishmen.

So Sir John Knight was advised to retire to a house in the country, but because he was in fear of beaten up, he was quite They beat him and kicked him when they attacked him.

When he came into Bristol subsequently, he came with a company of people carrying swords and muscus in front before him, but he left these at the walls of the city, because you're not allowed to carry arms into the city Bristol.

Bristol had its own bylaws.

Yes, you heard that correctly.

He checks his guns at the gate.

Now this is worth a slight digression.

We tend to forget how violent and militaristic seventeenth century England in general, and a place like Bristol in particular were.

Jonathan Barry Again.

One reflection of the fact is that Bristol was a leading place for private tiering, where basically you capture the ships of your rival traders, as it were, so you load yourself up.

Bristol is just beginning at this period to get involved in the slave trade with Africa, which of course both involved the use of military force, but also, as you may know, the chief one of the chief products that you actually took there to trade with was arms.

And one of the things that Bristol and places around it were producing, in fact, were lots of arms.

But also they needed weapons, cannons for their ships and so on.

So we have to imagine the society in which there are a lot of people that are used to using weapons.

So why would the nightcase represent some kind of turning point in British attitudes towards guns.

Bristol was a washing guns, so much so that they were forced to put gun control measures in place that put anything in America today to shame.

I mean, I think it's absurd to think that the crucial issue here was about whether a man was bearing arms or not because of lots of people wandering around bearing arms.

Anyway, back to our story with Tim Herris.

And then on one day he goes to church, and he does go with his attendant and goes with a gun and sort, but he leaves these.

He says, he leaves these the porch with his attendant.

The church is Saint Michael's on the hill, his church, the one overlooking Bristol.

He gets off his horse, checks his weapons at the door.

It's not enormously significant here.

So here we have a case that Second Amendment types are claiming, is this enormously important precedent for the right of an individual to bear arms?

But the individual in question checks his arms at the door of the church.

I mean, it's like this is nothing to do.

He's not even he's not waving his gun around or claiming he can wave his gun around.

He he quite willingly adheres to local norms about where guns should and shouldn't be carried.

Yes, that seems to be the case.

Okay, So Night enters the church and he shouts out, the Catholics are trying to kill me, and they're going to try and kill you too.

Another quick digression.

I asked Jonathan Barry about that moment.

One question before we go on with the story, I want to go back how Catholic was Bristol in this era?

So if almost almost non existent?

Oh wait wait, so wait, So John Knight is going into this parish church and saying we're all in danger of being God freed by the Catholics.

Somebody, and the number of Catholics in Bristol to have conducted such a plot was minuscule.

So he goes into this church and he says he tries to kind of whip the church up into a frenzy about the Irish threat, and the government says, you've gone too far.

He's implying that the Catholic king is somehow conspiring against his own people, and that's when he gets in trouble with the law.

Yes, he doesn't sound very likable, Sir John Knight.

Nobody appears to have liked Sir John Knight.

No, the government goes out after John Knight because he's a jackass.

He's running around conjuring up ridiculous conspiracy theories about Catholics.

So the charge.

All the newsletter accounts I've read emphasize that it's the words that he spoke in the church, which and therefore this was proof of his disloyalty.

That was a key issue for why they wanted to arrest him.

That I decide to get him on the Statute of Northampton, which is a statute from thirteen twenty eight, saying it's a breach of the peace, and he pleaded not guilty.

He claims that he didn't take the gun or the sword into the church, he left it outside.

And the church is actually just outside the wars of the city of Bristol, as it was back then.

It's Protestant church obviously, and he leaves the gun and the sword outside, and the jury said, he's got a proven track record of being loyal to the government, and so they found him not guilty.

Because he didn't brandish a gun in church.

The jury didn't find him disloyal because they knew he'd been loyal to the previous Protestant king.

He wasn't armed, so they couldn't get him on that.

He just didn't like Catholics.

And so what this is Bristol in sixteen eighty six.

No one in Bristol in sixteen eighty six likes Catholics.

The case against him is dead on arrival.

And by the way, no one knows this better than the government.

So they actually don't want to prosecute Knights.

They actually want Knight to apologize, and then they try and bury the case.

That seems to be what's implied in the newsletter accounts I've read.

That doesn't happen.

They would have preferred if he'd apologized, and they could have said, okay, we'll let it go.

So to recap John Knight's episode in the Church of Saint Michael has become a heroic moment to the American gun rights movement, even though John Knight wasn't actually carrying a gun when he entered the Church of Saint Michael, even though the case against him had nothing to do with guns, even though Bristol in fact had gun control ordinances that puts every gun control ordinance in America today to shame, And even though the whole brew was just about him being a bigot who was terrified of a Catholic conspiracy taking over Bristol, even though there were hardly any Catholics in Bristol, and even though the whole case was dead on arrival, and Knight could have apologized and made it all go away, and just didn't feel like it.

But the only way you would know all this is if you were willing to wade to the seven volumes of Roger Morris's coded newsletters.

And who has time for that?

I was reading the did you read there's a the historian Tim Harris essay on I was amused to see there was that.

In his he talks about the Sir John Knight case, about how when he goes to the church, the Protestant church, to speak to what he thought of was the threat being posed by the Catholics and Bristol.

He insists that he checks his weapons at the front of the church, and he also says that when he goes into Bristol, he abided by the bylaws of Bristol and didn't carry his weapons into the past the city's limits.

I wondered how Joyce Malcolm made sense of all these new facts.

The Roger Morris newsletters were finally decoded more than ten years after she wrote her opus to keep him bare arms.

So I'm just curious, think, how do those sort of two facts fit into this story.

So even if we have if the Sir John Knight case represents kind of affirmation of the individual right to peace, will carry So John Knight himself is complying with some pretty strict gun control laws, isn't he.

I think, to be honest that I think that Professor Harris is wrong.

First of all, because there was such a There was all of these duties and requirements to protect yourself.

And in the in the judge's opinion in the in there Sir John Knight case, he says that the law allows gentlemen to go about with arms as long as they're not you know, unusual and the dangerous weapons.

So the judge seems at odds with Professor Harris.

But what do you what do you make of Sir John Knight's claim that he checked his weapons at the front of the church and didn't carry his weapons into the city of Bristol.

I find that pery odd because if that were the case, if there was a law that he couldn't carry his weapons into the city of Bristol at all, that the whole city was what we would now call a sensitive place that no one could wear.

It goes against your right to protect yourself.

That I was against your right to protect yourself in your house.

It goes against the judges ruling.

And to be honest, Professor Harris is British.

They don't think much of the right to be armed.

The homicide rate in the United States, if you're wondering, is four and a half times higher than the United Kingdom.

When I explored that right and told my British friends about it, most of them didn't even realize they ever had had a right to be armed.

There's this whole history and that they haven't looked at.

And I think it was because I said earlier, I asked an American question we were interested in that.

They weren't particularly interest in a right to be armed, and so it wasn't something that they had studied or been even very curious about until I started to write about it.

Yeah.

Yeah, But if the British are interested in a right to bear arms, then why are we drawing on British Why is the British tradition relevant to the discussion of American individual gun rights.

I think this was a history that was lost to them.

I think modern British people have a different view of it.

They're much more dependent on the state taking care of them, particularly since World War Two.

This is earlier British history is the history that they really were not that familiar with, you know, they were looking at other things, and I think that one of I guess the contribution I made was that I was an American that looked at British history in English history with American questions, with the things we were interested in.

Yeah, and what is the Supreme Court?

How did the highest legal body in the land, in the landmark ruling of New York State Pistol and Rifle Association v.

Bruin handle the fact that their hero has feet of clay.

I know, I had a summarized summer.

See, I think that is it.

Yes, I asked Patrick Charles to read me the relevant section.

To the extent that there are multiple plausible interpretations of Sir John Knight's case, we will favor the one that is more consistent with the Second Amendments command.

Which, in other words, there's a whole long list of ways we can make sense of this.

We're going to pick the one we like the most.

Okay, that's exactly.

That's the one that makes our life easiest.

And arguing the case we've already decided we want to argue.

It's like, it's like history is cherry.

Oh, it's so chery picked.

The Supreme Court decides to clear up the ambiguity over the Second Amendment.

Let us leave the verdict to history, they declare.

But then their hero turns out to have feet of clay.

So they shrug and go on with the things that they had already made up their mind to do before they tried to convince us that they wanted to play historian and go to England and make their pilgrimage to Saint Michael on the Hill and pretend that the man whom they have chosen to symbolize the grand tradition of American gun rights is something other than a jackass.

And after a far too many hours reconstructing the history of this jackass, I realized that I had fallen into the same trap that we've all fallen into in his country when it comes to gun violence.

We're talking about the wrong things, telling irrelevant stories.

And over the course of the next five episodes of Revision's History, I want to try and change that conversation.

I'm going to take you to North Carolina to shoot guns, Visit an old man in Alabama with a crazy story to tell, Revisit the assassination of Robert Kennedy on a one but no more John Knight.

I promise we've all had it with John Knight.

What kind of person was he?

Not sort of person I want to have a drink with.

It was a nasty piece of work.

Really, he was vindictive and spiteful.

He's a biggot, He's a trouble maker.

He's obviously deliberately going out to try and provoke trouble.

In April sixteen eighty six, when he gets his priests arrested because he's staring things up.

So yeah, not a nice piece of work.

That's my basic view of him.

He's involved in the slave traders, sugar refiner.

I would hardly say that he was the sort of hero figure the champions of American liberty who wants to celebrate, although maybe that's not the point.

Oh.

Our revisionist history Gun series was produced by Jacob Smith, bend A DApp Haffrey, Kiara Powell, Tally Emlin, and Liam Gistoo.

We were edited by Peter Clowney and Julia Barton.

Fact checking by Arthur Gomperts and Kashelle Williams.

Original scoring by Luis Garra, with vocals in this episode by the Magnificent Ethan Herschenfeld.

Mastering by Flon Williams.

Engineering by Nina Lawrence.

I'm Malcolm Gladwins.