Concise history of gun control in Britain

See the beginning of this post from gunbancon.com/lostarms.html:

Significant restrictions began in 1920 with the 1920 Firearms Act, which was introduced because the government feared a communist revolution along the lines of the Bolshevik Revolution that was occuring in Russia at the time, not to mention the Easter Rising of 1916. They also feared the fact that unions all over the country were calling for a general strike and becoming increasingly militant. Clearly, the 1920 Firearms Act had nothing to do with crime; in fact, it is yet another textbook example of why gun control is only ever about power and control. By allowing the government to get its foot in the door in an area it had no right to interfere with, the British people had dropped a serious clanger: the door was now wide open for progressively more severe assaults on the right to keep and bear arms, culminating in the 1997 Firearms Amendment Acts, which were very much the final nail in the coffin.

And boy did those draconian gun laws come, one after the other: 1937 (ban on short-barreled shotguns and fully automatic rifles), 1946 (the year the government adopted the position that self-defence would no longer be deemed an adequate reason for being granted a firearms certificate), 1953 (Prevention of Crime Act outlawed the carrying of an "offensive weapon" and put the burden of proof on anyone found with an "offensive weapon" such as a knife, to prove that he had a reasonable excuse), 1967 (the Criminal Justice Act's shotgun controls), 1982 (replica guns that could be converted to fire live ammunition), 1988 (ban on semi-automatic centre-fire rifles and pump-action rifles and even stricter shotgun controls), 1997 (ban on all handguns except for antique and muzzle-loading black powder guns, firearms of historic interest whose ammunition is no longer available and firearms of historic interest with current calibres). . . .

Useful article on the slippery slope.