From Free Life No 15, November 1991

When I was a boy, I read about the old Malay custom of running amok. A man would lose his all at gambling, or suffer some other reverse, and then, having inflamed himself with drugs, would run about stabbing people until he fell down or was cut down. How quaint, I thought, filing the Malays in my mind along with the Kallatioi who ate their dead parents, and the Mingrelians who ate their children. Each custom seemed to me as unlikely as the others, but might one day come in useful to impress an examiner.

But there is nothing quaint or unlikely about an insane gunman. When one of these runs amok, he usually kills a lot of people - quite often people rather like me and in the sort of places I frequent. George Hennard, for example, of Killeen in Texas, has just shot 22 people in a cafeteria. Our own Michael Ryan shot 16 in Hungerford High Street. I fully share the alarm raised by these massacres.

What I do not share, however, is the common English opinion regarding the best means of their prevention. Hennard's Congressman is calling for gun control. "Restricting lethal assault weapons" he says, "is just a reasonable step towards saving some lives".[1] His call will, I am sure, be ignored. The National Rifle Association will see to that. Here, it would be immediately taken up. The Ryan shootings in 1987 produced the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1988, the intention of which was to complete the disarming of the British public. The chief debate was over whether it went far enough. It was simply taken for granted that the fewer the people with legal access to guns, the less frequently guns would be abused.

Now, this is not true. Gun control is no guarantee against our being shot at as we go about our everyday business. Despite all opposing claims, what evidence can be found suggests that control does far less good than harm. Consider the two following points:

First, there is no simple correlation between guns and crime. We hear endlessly about America, where guns can be had nearly on demand, and where the murder rate per capita is 11.3 times our own.[2] We hear little about the trends behind these statistics - how between 1900 and 1930, the possession of handguns remained stable, and the murder rate rose tenfold;[3] how between 1937 and 1963, handgun ownership rose by 250 per cent, and the murder rate fell by 35.7 per cent;[4] how between 1968 and 1985 handgun ownership rose by another 250 per cent, and the murder rate fell by another 10 per cent.[5]

Nor do we hear that the American murder rate per capita with knives alone is far higher than our own from all causes together - and, as any schoolboy just back from France will agree, we have no effective knife control.[6] It seems that what keeps York a safer place than New York is not a difference in the law regarding gun ownership, but the facts of national character. We are less violent than Americans, and this is reflected in the criminal statistics

This is, I grant, a purely negative point. Free access to guns and soaring armed crime rates are not necessarily connected. But it can still be claimed that control may have some reducing effect from any level. It might have made an already peaceful England still more peaceful, and might make America less violent. But this brings me to my second consideration - that gun control does not work.

Take the level of professional armed crime in England. If control worked, we should expect to see some connection here between it and choice of weapon. We should expect, therefore, to see little use of fully automatic weapons, these having been wholly prohibited since 1937. Use of handguns, these having been merely controlled since 1920, we might see more often. But shotguns, not controlled at all before 1967, we ought to see as the commonest firearm.

We see nothing of the kind. Choice of weapon is determined more by fitness for the job in hand than by theoretical availability. In 1967, shotguns were used in 21.3 per cent of armed robberies, handguns in 45.6 per cent.[7] 20 years later, these proportions had hardly changed: by 1985, the use of shotguns had risen by 5.5 percentage points.[8]

These figures are not surprising. The law can only control those guns the Police know to exist. How many others there are no one knows. But during the four amnesties held between 1946 and 1968, more than 200,000 unlicenced weapons were handed in.[9] During the 1988 amnesty, 45,000 more were handed in.[10] It is generally agreed that these form only a fraction of what remains available for potentially criminal use.

If the use of guns in professional crime is increasing, the speed of the increase is almost wholly determined by fashions within the criminal classes. Control may raise the opportunity costs of purchase. But anyone who wants a gun, and is ready to accept those costs in order to get one, will not be affected by the most rigid scheme of paper control.

Nor is it the case that gun control reduces the number of domestic murders. The kind of people in America who shoot their spouses fall into two categories: those who kill with the first weapon that comes to hand - and knives are more deadly than guns; and those who are criminals already, and so, where fashion dictates, will have guns regardless of control.[11]

All this applies equally well to the unbalanced. Gun massacres are never committed by ordinary members of the public who just happen one day to snap. These people are always funny in the head long before they run amok. They are overwhelmingly likely to have had - and satisfied - a pre- existing interest in guns. Michael Ryan, for example, was so obsessed by them that he gathered up a whole armoury. To be sure, many of them were held legally. But many of them were held illegally. The Firearms Act 1968 did not prevent his acquiring an AK47. Texas has no gun control. But George Hennard had been a prey to paranoid delusions for so long that he would sooner or later have bought a gun regardless of the law.[12]

It is, therefore, unlikely that gun control prevents, or can prevent, a single massacre.

What it does achieve is to disarm the respectable public. It is argued on both sides of the Atlantic that this is desirable; that people are safer on the whole not to fight back when faced with an armed thief or rapist than to reach for guns of their own. I find this "submission theory" incredible. It may convince the white, middle-class males who tend most often to hold it. Standing so little chance of being attacked, they can afford to hold it. Women, blacks, the aged, anyone who lives in the inner cities - these know better.[13] American feminists and civil rights leaders have repeatedly opposed any moves toward gun control.[14]

But, whatever success one may have with an armed criminal, there is no standing and reasoning with an armed maniac. There is no turning away his wrath with soft words or submission - no running away. The only defence is to have a gun of one's own and to shoot first. In an armed society, Michael Ryan might hardly have had time to aim at his first victim before being cut down. So too might George Hennard had any of his victims exercised their rights under Texan law and been carrying arms for their self-defence.

The Israelis know this. In March 1984, three Palestinians opened fire with machine guns at a crowded cafe in Jerusalem. Their intention was to go round a succession of crowded places, killing and then escaping before the authorities could arrive. They killed one person. Nearly everyone at the cafe was armed. Only one of the attackers survived to be arrested.[15]

I am not saying that without gun control, and with a high rate of gun ownership, there would be no armed crime and no massacres. That would be silly. So long as there are violent criminals and people with a grudge against the world, we shall always be at risk. The world will never be perfect. But I do say that if people wish to draw a true lesson from the Killeen shootings - and they seem pathetically eager to draw a false one - it is this: that a citizenry is like any nation state: unarmed is unprotected. There is good reason, continuing the analogy, for collective security - to set up an agency for the common protection. But there will always be occasions when the only help is self help. And it shows ignorance, or stupidity, or dishonesty to use such occasions to make any other point.

NOTES

1. The Daily Telegraph, 18th October 1991.

2. From a table compiled by Don B. Kates Jr, in his Guns, Murders, and the Constitution, Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, California, 1991, p. 42. For the 1980s, he gives the following intentional homicide rates per hundred thousand: United States, 7.59; France, 4.36; Canada, 2.6, Australia, 1.95, Switzerland, 1.13; England and Wales, 0.67.

3. D. Lunde, Murder and Madness, San Francisco Book Co, California, 1976, p. 1.

4. Don B. Kates Jr, Why Handgun Bans Can't Work, Second Amendment Foundation, Washington, 1982, p. 23. Kates, I should mention, does believe in some gun control.

5. Kates (1991), p. 40.

6. In 1981, 19.4 per cent of intentional homicides in the United States were committed with knives (Statistical Absract of the United States, 1982-82, Washington DC, 1982, Table 298). A little arithmetic gives a rate of 1.47 per capita - still more than twice the total English rate.

7. Colin Greenwood, Firearms Control: A Study of Armed Crime and Firearms Control in England and Wales, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972, p. 244.

8. I can give no better source for this figure than a telephone conversation with the Secretary of the Shooters' Rights Association.

9. Greenwood, op. cit., p. 236.

10. The Daily Telegraph, 25th October 1988.

11. Take the evidence of those who favour control:

(Marvin E. Wolfgang, Patterns of Homicide in America, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1958, p. 82 - quoted Greenwood, op. cit., p. 130).