About the Repository
Welcome to the Repository of Historical Gun Laws, a searchable database of gun laws from the Middle Ages to 1776 in England and from the colonial era to the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. This Repository is intended as a resource for scholars, practitioners, and the general public interested in historical laws concerning firearms and other similar weapons. Although the Repository seeks to be substantial, it is by no means comprehensive. Laws have generally been chosen to provide samples from as broad a geographic, temporal, and jurisdictional landscape as possible; however, the absence of a certain type of law in the Repository does not necessarily mean that such a law did not exist.
Some historical laws contain racist or otherwise offensive language. We preserve such texts verbatim for historical accuracy.
Conscientious users of this Repository should supplement their results with further legal and historical research.
If you have questions or comments about the Repository, or would like to request underlying PDFs for any laws in the Repository, please contact Ethan Margolis at: ethan.margolis@law.duke.edu.
To browse the full archive of laws in our Repository, please click here.
How to interpret results
The Repository is a significant but not comprehensive collection of historical gun regulations. Search results must be interpreted with that limitation in mind. Moreover, because it only includes the text of gun regulations, the Repository does not contain all of the information necessary to measure the significance of those regulations.
Among the most important omissions are:
Reenactment, revision, and repeal. Legislatures frequently reenact, revise, and repeal laws, and the Repository does not comprehensively reflect these changes. Reasonable effort has been made to obtain and cite the earliest enactment of any given law.
Court decisions. The Repository does not contain case law. Some of the regulations listed here have been the subject of judicial interpretation or abrogation.
Enforcement. The Repository does not reflect the degree to which laws were actively enforced, nor does it capture executive actions that may have altered their impact.
Context and cross-references. Some gun regulations are themselves referenced by other laws, which may provide elaborations of the regulations, or exceptions to them. The Repository does not, and cannot, fully provide the context necessary to accurately interpret a regulation’s significance.
The Repository is intended to be a tool for lawyers, scholars, and anyone interested in learning more about the history of gun rights and regulation. Given the limitations of this text-only resource, we urge users to supplement their results with further legal and historical research.
How the Repository was Constructed
The Repository of Historical Gun Laws was constructed using search terms likely to identify gun laws, in databases likely to contain such laws, and in time periods likely to be of interest to researchers. It is not comprehensive, but is rather designed to provide a broad, deep, and representative sample of the kinds of gun laws that have existed throughout English and American history. The Repository does not include information concerning the repeal, amendment, interpretation, or enforcement of any of the laws included in the database and makes no representation about the past or current effectiveness of these laws.
The Repository was initially constructed using records in the HeinOnline Session Laws Library, and the Making of Modern Law Primary Sources Database. Other sources included Yale Law School’s Avalon Project as well as session laws digitized through state archives, archive.org, the HeinOnline State Statutes Historical Archive and Google Books.
The HeinOnline Session Law Library was searched using the term “gun” and searches were done from the earliest date available until the session encompassing 1934. This search term provided results including the words “gunpowder”, “shotgun”, “punt-gun”, “machine-gun” and “gun.” The search term also resulted in an enormous number of irrelevant results, especially for the word “begun” and a surprising number of place names including the word “gun” or “gunpowder.” For the period from the earliest available session laws until 1900, a separate keyword search was conducted for each year for each state, for example, a search for the term “gun” limited to the year 1834 in the state of Massachusetts. For the period from 1901-1934 a single search for each state was done, with a single, collective review conducted of the results for that entire time period. The substantive review remained unchanged.
The Making of Modern Law database was searched using the search: “gun or pi*tol or rifle” with the date range “1600-1900.” Results were then reviewed for relevance. Excluded results included militia and police firearm purchasing records, speeches, and historical articles including the search terms. For the Making of Modern Law database a single search was conducted for the entire time period and results were then sorted chronologically and reviewed in that manner. Other sources including the Avalon Project, archive.org, Google Books and the HeinOnline State Statutes were reviewed using keyword searches closely following those used to search the Making Modern Law database.
After the initial search and data entry a second level review of every statute in the database was conducted, by a law student research assistant, paralegal, or attorney. The reviewers compared the text of the statute included in the database with a PDF or JPG of the session law to make sure it was accurately represented. The reviewer also ensured the statute was accurately categorized by law type, location and date, and that the citation was correct.
Later Changes
For the first several hundred law entries, spelling was modernized and standardized to ensure ease of reading and search. These changes adjusted for the non-standard spellings of the very early laws (i.e., pistole) as well as the historical use of the long s (the letter "s" appearing as an "f" when not at the end of a word) in many early sources. These changes were not intended to impact the meaning of any of the materials. Editorial practice then changed to keeping the exact spelling (and as close to the exact formatting as possible) as the original document. This includes typos that existed in the original document. The search algorithm is aware of the alternate spellings that have resulted from strictly adhering to the original text, and users can successfully search using normal spellings by keeping the "Include Related Terms?" box checked at the time of their search.
Laws that were entered into the Repository at its earliest stages may omit some bibliographic details or lack a PDF of the law itself. Users who have questions about a given entry or require a PDF copy of the text in an entry can contact the Repository Manager, Ethan Margolis, at ethan.margolis@law.duke.edu. More recent editorial standards require all entries to include complete bibliographic information and PDFs of the entirety of the law in question to ensure any excerpts can easily be seen in their full context. The most recent (and likely final) editorial practice with respect to typos and unusual spellings is to modernize them and provide a footnote with the original spelling or typo (though, documents published prior to 1750 are transcribed exactly as written).
Because this database is intended to be representative rather than comprehensive, not every statute dealing with firearms and other weapons regulation is included. Militia regulations and statutes, ordinances, and laws dealing with gunpowder storage, regulations on hunting, and laws against firing weapons were so prevalent that it was not realistic to include them all. Also excluded are statutes that were re-enacted in essentially the same form within the same historical period. When a regulation appeared in more than one historical period, reasonable effort was made to include an example of such enactment or codification in each historical period in which it appeared.
The Repository is an ongoing project. It is constantly updated to include additional information, fill in English regulatory history, add newly discovered historical statutes and ordinances, and correct errors or omissions.
This project benefited from research support from Duke University and Everytown for Gun Safety.