There are broadly two ways of keeping the peace. The first is to wait until someone breaches it, then catch and punish him. The intention is to frighten or prevent him from repeating his offence, his example a warning to others. The second is to make people obey the law by limiting their means of breaking it. The first, though harsh, is a very limited method. It involves a known use of power, bearing only on criminals and leaving the rest of us free to go about our business. The second, though apparently more humane, needs the most constant and unwelcome State supervision.
Now, gun controls are firmly in this second category. They represent the most utter disbelief in individual responsibility. Machine guns and fully automatic weapons are banned outright. Everything else, except most shotguns which are less restrictively controlled, and very feeble airguns, needs a Firearms Certificate. This is granted at discretion by the local Police, and must be renewed every three years. On it must be recorded all transactions in weapons and ammunition. Applicants must satisfy the Police of their "good reason" for possessing any certifiable weapon, and that they can be trusted with it "without danger to the public safety or to the peace"[1]. "Good reason" is normally held to be membership of an approved shooting club, or use of land not open to the public - but not, at least since 1946, self defence[2].
There are more than a million Certificate holders in the country. They are nearly all peaceful and responsible citizens. Every one is treated as a potential criminal. Those who take out Certificates open themselves to any amount of legal harrying. Forfeit of a Certificate can mean loss of all certifiable weapons held[3]. Those who prefer not to, though perhaps without the least aggressive intent against life or property, are automatically criminals - to be punished if caught. Unauthorised possession is a serious offence, carrying three years in prison, or unlimited fine, or both[4].
Prior restraint applies to other weapons. Some, like flick-knives and stunguns, are simply banned. But carrying any weapon is an offence; and a person can be stopped in the street and searched on suspicion of carrying one. Putting a rope about someone's neck, or taking the flesh off his back may seem a barbarous thing to do. But is it so bad as trying to govern an entire nation as though it were a school or a prison?
To most, the answer is "yes" - especially after the Hungerford Massacre. Declared a senior policeman just after: "There are too many guns in circulation and a lot of people who have gun. clearly should not be in possession of them"[5]. Stephen Waldorf, perhaps, might agree with this. So might the relatives of Cherry Groce. But he was taken quite seriously. One of our age's great unspoken assumptions is that more guns equal more crime, and that tight controls are the only answer. "Weapons" says The Times, "should be kept under conditions so secure as to exclude most householders from keeping them"[6]. A Gallup poll taken six months after Hungerford shows 75% public support for banning all guns from private ownership[7].
On a casual glance, the assumption does look true. Properly examined, though, it falls completely apart. There is no evidence that the amount of gun crime in a country is determined by the legal availability of guns.
Look at America, the example of which invariably dominates all talk of gun control. There, despite some controls, guns are to be had virtually on demand. The murder rate is regularly almost ten times that of England and Wales, and three fifths of all murders are committed with guns[6]. Three Presidents have been shot this century, two of them fatally. These facts are well known, and are produced with great frequency and confidence. They are, however, not the only ones.
First, there is no simple statistical correlation between guns and crime.
In the first 30 years of this century, US per capita handgun ownership remained stable, but the homicide rate rose tenfold. Subsequently, between 1937 and 1963, handgun ownership rose by 250 percent, but the homicide rate fell by 35.7 percent[9].
Second, the American murder rate with knives alone is far higher than our own from all causes together[10]; and, as any schoolboy just back from Calais knows, our knife controls are a dead letter. If we are less violent than Americans even where no barriers exist to parity, it hardly seems likely that our gun controls are all that keeps the rate of shooting homicide in York below that of New York. It seems rather that with different national characters go different propensities to violence.
Look, then, at Switzerland. It has very moderate controls. Firearms are available to any adult without a criminal record or evident mental defect. and every man there of military age is legally obliged to possess them. Yet the Swiss murder rate is always lower than our own[11]. Guns are seldom used as a weapon of assault[12].
Best of all, look at the English past. Ninety years' ago, guns were no more controlled than televisions are today. Since no effort was made to count the guns in circulation, numbers are uncertain. But over 4,000 imported pistols and revolvers were submitted for proof at the Birmingham Proof House in 1889; and 37,000 British pistols were submitted in 1902[13]. True, there was Section 4 of the Vagrancy Act 1824, which penalised the carrying of offensive weapons with felonious intent. There was the Gun Licences act 1870 - despite its name a revenue measure requiring a 10/. licence to be taken out before any kind of firearm could be carried or used outside of a private dwelling. Licences were available without question at all Post Offices. This was all.
Yet, according, to the Coroners' reports, in the three years from 1890, there was a total of 32 shooting homicides[14]. As for accidental deaths, in 1892, these were just three more than those due to misuse of perambulators[15].
In the nine years to 1887, 13 police officers were wounded by armed burglars in the Metropolitan Police District. During the next five years, three were so wounded in the whole of England and Wales, an area with a population five times larger. In the earlier period, 16 burglars escaped by using firearms in the Metropolitan Police District; in the later period, in England and Wales, the number was still 18[16]. These were not unusually peaceful years. There was a Fenian bombing campaign in London, and the Jack the Ripper killings. Even so, aggressive use of guns was very rare.
When control began, it was not in response to any obvious need for it. The Pistols act 1903, for example, required the production of a Game or Gun Licence before buying certain kinds of pistol. There being no crime wave, supporters of the Bill in Parliament were reduced to swapping anecdotal tales of shooting accidents involving children[17].
Next came the Firearms act 1920. Still guns were little used in crime. Between 1911 and 1917, there was a yearly average of 24 instances in London[18]. But, with civil war in Ireland, fears in England of a Bolshevist coup, and the prospect of millions of demobilised weapons coming on the home market, it was agreed that something ought to be done. Precedent sanctioned temporary measures. The Government chose permanent ones; and its Act was substantially the modern scheme of control.
During the next twenty years, the rate of nearly every type of crime fell. Looking at the eighteen months to the end of 1937, for example, only seven people arrested in the Metropolitan Police District were found in possession of firearms[19]. More controls, however, came in 1937, making sawn-off shotguns and smooth bore pistols certifiable weapons, and prohibiting automatic weapons.
Shotgun controls date from 1967, and were the direct response to the killing of two policemen by criminals armed with pistols. Much was said about a trebling since 1961 of indictable offences involving shotguns. Probably there was an increasing use of shotguns. But, for every year since 1961, the figures showing this increase had been collected on a different basis; and the phrase "indictable of fences involving shotguns" covered every crime from armed robbery to the theft of unusable antiques[20]. Controls on the more powerful sort of airgun followed in 1969, though not one instance was produced of their having featured in a crime or accident [21]
British gun control, then, was not the product of any specific unhappy circumstances. There is hardly a shred of good evidence that it was needed on the grounds of public safety. Like drug control - the history of which it very closely parallels - it is one more product of the general loss of interest in being free which has been the mark of this country in the period of its decline.
What has, of courses been so far made is a purely negative point. Free access to guns and soaring armed crime rates are not necessarily connected. It still remains open to claim that control may have some reducing effect from any level. It might make even Switzerland more peaceful a What might be is by its nature impossible to say. Such evidence as there is, however, indicates that control has virtually no effect.
Take the incidence of professional armed crime, which is normally the main object of public concern. If controls had any substantial effect here, we might expect to see some reflection of it in the statistical tables. We should see, that is, little use of fully automatic weapons, these being prohibited. Use of handguns, having been controlled nearly seventy years, we might see rather more of. But shotguns and powerful airguns, subject to control only these past twenty years, we ought to see as almost the general firearm. We see, of course, nothing of the kind. Choice of firearm seems determined far more by preference than theoretical availability. In 1967, shotguns, though just controlled, were used in only 21.3% of armed robberies. Pistols, however, were used in 45.6%[22]. Twenty years later, the proportions have not greatly changed the 1965 figure for shotguns was 26.8%[23]. For the obvious reasons of convenience and firepower, most criminals who wish to carry a gun will prefer to carry a handgun - this in spite of the written law.
But the law can regulate possession only of what the Police know to exist. How many uncertified weapons there are no one knows. There might easily be millions of them in the country, held either since before the 1920 Act or since the War, when many controls were practically annulled by circumstances. Certainly, in the four amnesties between 1946 and 1966, weapons handed into the Police exceeded 200,000[24]. We had another amnesty in the September of this year, and 45,000 more old service revolvers and examples of strange memorabilia were handed in. But it seems very unlikely that many of the weapons handed in were or had been owned for criminal purposes. The number is, however, vast; and it may be wondered how many others have found their way into the pool of uncertified guns available for criminal use.
Otherwise, if demand for guns exceeded the domestic supply, imports could never be kept out. The record of our drug laws illustrates how difficult it is to control the movement of small but greatly desired items. Opposed even by one of the best anti-terrorist forces in the world, the IRA has no shortage of personal weapons, only of the men to fire them.
Otherwise again, guns and ammunition are wonderfully easy things to make. It needs only the tools and components available in any DIY store. and "a zip gun can be made from tubing, tape, a pin, a key, whittle wood, and rubber bands"[25].
For these reasons, if the use of guns in professional crime is increasing - and it almost certainly is - the speed of the increase seems almost wholly determined by fashions within the criminal classes.
Take next domestic violence. Writing of homicides in general, says one pro-control researcher:
"More than the availability of a shooting weapon is involved in homicide.... The type of weapons used appears to be, in part, the culmination of assault intentions or events and is only superficially related to causality[26].
Moreover, a Kansas City report of 1977 by the pro-control Police Foundation
revealed that in 65 percent of homicides among family members, the police had been called in before to break up violence. In half the cases, the police had been called in five or more times. Thus, the average person who kills a family member is not a non-violent solid citizen who reaches for a weapon in a moment of temporary insanity. Instead, he has a past record of illegal violence and trouble with the law. Such people on the fringes of society are unlikely to be affected by gun control laws. [27]
And this is in America, which, as said, seems inherently more violent that England. It may easily be that gun controls keep down the number of domestic murders by shooting, but do so largely in those cases where murders are committed anyway, though by other means. They may do little more than force a substitution for handguns of shotguns, crossbows or other, less convenient weapons.
Control may have some slight damping effect on the rate of criminal use. Making phone calls, and waiting in public houses, after all, does require more effort than just walking into a gun shop with a pocketful of cash. It may likewise lower the rate of domestic killing. In the absence of any significant reductions here, its net effect is almost certainly to increase the number of victims of violent crime.
Michael Ryan killed 16 people, with 14 wounded. How far would he have got had those victims been carrying guns of their own? He is said to have been obsessed by guns, and there are few obsession not stronger than the law. Even if public opinion had had its way years ago, and civilian access to weapons been absolutely closed, he might still have gathered an armoury quite as impressive as the one he had by legal means alone. What control did at Hungerford was clearly to leave the respectable public defenceless. Nothing opposed Ryan until armed police could be brought in from outside.
And his massacre was exceptional in that his victims were a random sample of Hungerford society. The normal victims of gun control are from specific groups. White middle clams able bodied males have little chance of being attacked. They mostly live and work in safe areas. If attacked they can mostly take care of themselves without needing weapons. Women and ethnic minority groups often lack these advantages.
Look again at America.
In 1966 the police in Orlando, Florida responded to a rape epidemic by embarking on a highly publicized program to train 2,500 woman in firearm use. The next year rape fell by 68 percent in Orlando... burglary fell by 25 percent.
Not one of these women fired her gun. But
five years later Orlando's rape rate was still 13 percent below the pre-program level, whereas the surrounding standard metropolitan area had suffered a 308 percent increase[28].
Said radical feminist Nikki Craft: "Men and Women Were Created Equal...and Smith & Wesson Makes Damn Sure It Stays That Way"[29].
Martin Luther King may have been killed with a gun. But said Professor John Salter, a civil rights leader:
No one knows what kind of massive racist retaliation Would have been directed against grass-roots black people had the black community not had a healthy measure of firearms within it[30].
He learned this from his own encounters with the Ku Klux Klan. He is still alive. More than a hundred of his pacifist friends are not.
In the Liverpool slums, violent crime is driving Asian shop keepers bankrupt or out of the area. The Police are unable or unwilling to protect them. Insurance companies refuse to give cover. Guns are cheap. Guns are colour-blind.
Finally, there is the State to consider. Whether or not it can ever be a useful servant is an open question. Beyond doubt, it makes a really awful master. Democracy and written constitutions may for a while keep it in some kind of order. But nothing checks like an armed public. Charles I discovered this in a rather spectacular way. Dionysus, the Caesars, Frederick the Great, Fidel Castro, Ferdinand Marcos - these showed more sense: they disarmed their victims.
The normal conclusion to this kind of essay is to call for the dismantling of controls, and discuss the ways in which it might be done. This would be premature. A lot is said about the liberal rebirth in this country during the past ten years or so. Certainly, the economic role of the State has diminished, and this is reason to be glad. But it should not be mistaken for more than it currently is. Some Tory rhetoric may sound taken straight out of Murray Rothbard or Ayn Rand. Actual policy is different. Markets have been deregulated for the sake not of Freedom in its larger sense, but simply of preserving or enhancing a certain national status. Outside the immediate needs of economic efficiency, we have exactly what the Opposition claims - the most authoritarian peacetime ministry in 300 years. It is reversing the burden of proof in criminal law, and withdrawing the right to silence. It is openly censoring the media. It will sooner or later force an identity card scheme on us. Expecting it to repeal the Firearms Acts would show the most incredible optimism.
From this Government we can expect nothing. The one after next is another matter. By then, the shuffling half-heartedness of the Thatcher years may seem as foreign to us as the Callaghan years do now. The fact remains that liberalism did reach its ebb tide some ten or fifteen years' ago, and has ever since been coming back in. It has submerged few landmarks yet. Its flood may not be seen in our lifetimes. At times, indeed, looking only at the individual waves, it still seems to be going out. But coming in it is. Perhaps in the short term civilian gun ownership may be still further restricted. Perhaps serious efforts may even be made to abolish it. In the long term the case for guns is not at all lost.
NOTES
1. Firearms act 1966, 27(1).
2. Colin Greenwood, Firearms Control: A Study of Armed Crime and Firearms Control in England and Wales, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1972, p.92.
3. F.A. 1968, ss51 & 52.
4. Ibid, ss 3(3), 51(1), (2) & Schedule 6, Part 1.
5. The Times, 22nd August 1987. It was the General Secretary of the Police Superintendents' Association. 6. The Times, 16th October 1987.
7. The Daily Telegraph, 10th February 1988. It should be noted that the poll was commissioned by the League Against Cruel Sports, and that none of the questions asked was published in my source. 8.
MURDER RATES PER 100,000 - VARIOUS COUNTRIES
1976 1977 1978 1979 1980
U.S. 9.1 9.2 9.4 NA NA ENG. & WALES 1.1 0.9 1.2 1.1 0.8 SWITZERLAND 0.9 0.9 0.7 0.9 NA
Source: Statistical abstract of the United States, 1962-3, Washington D.C. 1962, Table 297)
MURDERS IN US - % RATE GUNS AND KNIVES
YEAR MURDERS GUNS % KNIVES %
1970 13,649 66.2 17.8
1975 18,642 65.8 17.4
1980 21,860 62.4 19.3
1981 20,053 62.4 19.4
Source. Ibid, Table 296.
9. David B. Kopel, Trust the People. The Case
against Gun Control, Cato Policy Analysis, Cato
Institute, Washington D.C., no. 109, July 11, 1988, p.2.
10. See Table above.
11. See Table above.
12. M.B. Clinnard, Cities Without Crime. the Case of Switzerland, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1976, pp.114-5.
13. Greenwood, op. cit., p.26.
14. Ibid, p.22.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid, Table 2.
17. Ibid, p.29.
18. Ibid, Table 5.
19. Ibid, p.70. A further 12 had airguns, and one a toy pistol.
20. Ibid, Chapter 6.
21. Ibid, p.69.
22. Ibid, p.244.
23. From official figures (quoted by the Shooters' Rights Association).
24. Greenwood, op. cit., p.236.
25. Kopel, op. cit., p.5.
26. Marvin E. Wolfgang, Patterns of Homicide in America, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1956, p.62 (quoted Greenwood, op. cit., p.130). 27. Kopel, op. cit., pp.6-7.
26. Ibid, p.3.
29. Ibid, pp.17-16.
30. Ibid, p.15.