st060496

Sean Gabb, Letter to the Editor: More guns, less crime, The Sunday Telegraph, London, 6^th April 1997

I was astonished to read John Simpson's article 'An antidote to the Kalashnikov's power is overdue' (March 30).

Mr Simpson's main point is the usual one - that the world is a better place when the only people allowed to have guns are also wearing government uniforms. Whenever common people get hold of weapons, anarchy results. This is an inaccuracy so often and comprehensively refuted that it is almost worth being called a lie.

In this country before 1920 there were no controls on the civilian possession of firearms. There was very little armed crime. In modern Switzerland every able-bodied male must keep an 'assault rifle' in his home, and train in its use. The market in handguns is almost unregulated. Switzerland has very little armed crime.

Armed men in uniform have killed about a hundred million people this century, many of them women and children. Mr Simpson makes a reference to Auschwitz that in the context is astonishingly tasteless. The Holocaust happened in societies where the people had been comprehensively disarmed by their rulers.

The same point can be made about the Armenians, the Kulaks, the 50 million Chinese murdered by the communists - and the Albanians Mr Simpson affects such pity for. Every despotic government disarms its victims. It oppresses them itself, or it leaves them so incapable of resistance that other criminals can wander among them like a fox through chickens. Sean Gabb London SE7