Several days after a failed assassination attempt on the life of the Russian Tsar on 2 April 1879, a new regime of ‘permission to exercise the right to purchase and carry weapons’ was introduced in St. Petersburg. Despite the fact that the first attempt on Alexander II's life occurred in 1866 (also in St. Petersburg), it took 13 years to make a radical departure from the previously unrestricted regime of access to arms in the capital of the Russian Empire. In this article, I analyse archival materials documenting how this new regime of weapons ownership was implemented. In particular, I am interested in the dimensions of locality and temporality in the practices by which imperial legislation introduced gun control in St. Petersburg and Warsaw, the Russian Empire's most cosmopolitan cities. The archival documents that I rely on show that the gun control regulations that were intended to be a repressive act of the authorities in reality unfolded as a process of negotiations and merciful exclusions. The intermediaries of the imperial legal order reacted to the international challenges that were posed by emergent revolutionary movements, including the negotiation of the permissible restriction of subjects’ rights. As a result, new practices of ‘public safety’ were implemented as exceptional measures – both locally and temporally. This article sheds light on the imperial legal regime of gun control as a practice of ‘exception’.

在 1879 年 4 月 2 日暗杀俄罗斯沙皇的企图失败后几天，圣彼得堡引入了“允许行使购买和携带武器的权利”的新制度。尽管对亚历山大二世生命的第一次尝试发生在 1866 年（也在圣彼得堡），但它花了 13 年的时间才彻底改变了俄罗斯帝国首都以前不受限制地获取武器的制度。在本文中，我分析了记录这种新的武器所有权制度是如何实施的档案材料。特别是，我对局部性和时间性的维度感兴趣在俄罗斯帝国最国际化的城市圣彼得堡和华沙，帝国立法引入枪支管制的做法。我所依赖的档案文件表明，旨在成为当局镇压行为的枪支管制法规实际上是作为谈判和仁慈排斥的过程展开的。帝国法律秩序的中介对新兴革命运动带来的国际挑战做出了反应，包括对允许限制臣民权利的谈判。因此，“公共安全”的新做法作为例外措施在当地和临时实施。本文阐明了作为“例外”实践的枪支管制的帝国法律制度。