The proprietor of the London Evening Standard has asked for his journalists to be armed. The thinking man's oligarch, debonair billionaire and ex-spy Alexander Lebedev, this week demanded that his old bosses in Russia's security service issue ﬁrearms to reporters at his other newspaper, Moscow-based Novaya Gazeta.

His request follows the death of journalist Anastasia Baburova, his paper's fourth Russian employee to have been killed since 2000.

Perhaps we should not be surprised. The wheel has simply turned full circle. After all, the notion that reporters should not be armed is a self-imposed one – and relatively recent. In South Africa, the young Winston Churchill carried a Mauser pistol while covering the Boer War as a correspondent.

Across the world, journalists are being slaughtered. The Committee to Protect Journalists says 49 of the 722 journalists killed since 1992 have been in Russia, making it the third deadliest country overall for reporters. Iraq tops the chart as the place where the most reporters have been killed, with 136 deaths since 1992 – nearly all of them in the last six years.

Despite the deadly risks, journalists with guns are seen as a taboo in the world of respectable reporting. Controversialist TV personality Geraldo Rivera made an arse of himself in Afghanistan in 2001, while "reporting" for Fox. Rivera was prone to perform pieces to camera in totally safe areas while waving a pistol and saying things like: "If they're going to get us, it's going to be in a gunﬁght."

Vaughan Smith ran Frontline News, an agency whose members often worked in war zones. He has never been in favour of arming journalists, but did note:

Certainly there have been a couple of times I was robbed of my equipment that I wondered whether it would not have happened had I had a gun. And if you are working in Iraq at the moment, people do discuss whether carrying a gun in the glove compartment would at least give you a chance if you were stopped by a gang intent on sawing your head off.

A decade ago, the issue seemed clear-cut. Carlos Mavroleon, a wealthy ex-Etonian who fought with the Afghan mujahideen against the Russians before becoming a news cameraman, was kept out of the agency partly because of his tendency to go on assignment while armed.

Many at Frontline felt there was something disturbing about the way Mavroleon liked to be photographed with guns. We thought it was both bad form, and unnecessary.

Certainly there is a debate to be had here. Is it, for example, any better to hire armed guards? Large organisations like the BBC tend to hire ex-military types who are essentially mercenaries and they usually travel in your vehicle. Independent journalists make other arrangements: journalists in Somalia traditionally hire large numbers of gunmen.

But what might happen if Russian journalists start to shoot back? What, for example, will the public think if a journalist kills someone? Specifically, has Lebedev made it safer, or more dangerous for his staff?

"Personally, I think it's rather a cool idea", says Smith. "I don't imagine it's going to happen, nor that Lebedev thinks his journalists are actually going to be allowed to carry weapons. But perhaps merely asking is a way of drawing attention to the fact that they are sitting ducks. So many Russian journalists have been killed, perhaps by elements of their own state, that maybe they do deserve to be armed."