Guns & Violence

If you think guns are dangerous you might care have a look at Gunshot Wounds and also the Armed Citizen; he or she makes criminals nervous and, thus the world a safer place.

Guns & Violence
Richard Munday and Jan A. Stevenson (editors)
Piedmont Publishing, Seychelles House, Brightlingsea, Essex CO7 0NN, 1996, 367pp, no price given (pbk)
(ISBN 1 871134 11 0)

The publication in 1972 of Firearms Control, by Chief Inspector (later Superintendent) Colin Greenwood, of the West Yorkshire Constabulary, was a landmark in the study of the law relating to firearms and its effects in England and Wales. Based on his research at Cambridge University, Superintendent Greenwood, who is now editor of Guns Review, demonstrated for the first time how the right of the individual to own firearms was firmly embedded in British law, and that the level of armed crime was far lower before the restrictions imposed by the Firearms Act 1920 and subsequent legislation than it was afterwards.

It has taken the aftermath of the bloodbath at Dunblane, in which 16 children and their teacher were shot dead by Thomas Hamilton with four legally-owned handguns, to produce a full-length study of British firearms law which can be compared with Superintendent Greenwood's classic in terms of breadth, depth and quality of scholarship. Richard Munday is both a farmer and one of Britain's leading experts on firearms law; Jan Stevenson, an American authority on small arms, was a senior investigator for Pinkerton's National Detective Agency before moving to the United Kingdom, where he publishes two firearms magazines. Both editors have already written numerous books and articles in their specialist area.

This book reproduces selections from the evidence to Lord Cullen's inquiry into the Dunblane massacre submitted by the Home Office together with the Scottish Office, and the Labour Party, both of which attempt to demonstrate a correlation between the level of armed crime and the level of lawful private ownership of firearms, based on international comparisons, and the refutation of these claims by Mr Munday, Mr Stevenson and other firearms specialists. These authors demonstrate that the Home Office scoured the world for precisely the most shoddy, politically-slanted research on the gun question, and "seem to want to discuss every jurisdiction known to cartography except the United Kingdom" (Stevenson, page 307) for the simple reason that studies of the question in the UK have unambiguously demonstrated a strong inverse relationship between the level of armed crime and the number of legally-owned guns.

Although British gun controls (at least since the 1960s) have been by far the most stringent of any Western country, the criminal use of firearms has dramatically risen after every further legislative restriction. In 1954, firearms were used in four robberies in London; by 1991, the number of firearms robberies in the capital had risen to over 1600 cases. In 1904, before any gun control laws, firearms were used in 15 murders; for the years 1988-92 the average number of firearms homicides was 48.

Indeed, in a 1992 study at Exeter University, Detective Inspector Adrian Maybanks found "that present police policies and enforcement of the firearms legislation is serving to increase the number of unlicensed firearms in circulation. This in turn may help to feed the illegal supply of firearms to criminals"(quoted in Stevenson, page 117). In an interview with Detective Inspector Maybanks, Commander John O'Connor of the Metropolitan Police said that "the general case is that people who belong to gun clubs do not use their weapons for illegal purposes; the legislation has the effect of punishing these people. It is not going to have any impact on those people who use weapons for criminal purposes" (quoted in ibid, page 118). The same opinions opinions were expressed in oral evidence from representatives of both the Association of Chief Police Officers and (surprisingly) the Home Office given to the Select Committee on Home Affairs on 8th May 1996, which Mr Stevenson summarises on pages 135 to 141.

An honest examination of the evidence from other countries, too, demonstrates similar conclusions. In the United States, for instance,

The survey of 16 nations carried out by the Swiss anti-gun criminologist Martin Killias, on which the Home Office primarily bases its case, is subjected to a statistical analysis by Professor A. Richard Horrocks, dean of the faculty of technology at the Bolton Institute, who concludes that "the stated correlation coefficients for the Killias homicide rate data are too low to indicate with any degree of confidence that the homicide and firearms-related homicides rates are related to the level of gun ownership within each of the 16 countries" (page 274). Indeed, in comparing statistics from all 16 countries, James A.G. Hawkins, who holds an MSc in Computation from Oxford University, demonstrates that "The correlation between firearms homicide and car ownership is greater than that between firearms homicide and firearms ownership" (page 278).

Released Cabinet papers, and the diaries of the then Cabinet secretary, reveal that although the government of the day claimed to be introducing the Firearms Act 1920 as a measure to control armed crime, the Cabinet's real purpose was to prevent the workers from obtaining firearms in what it believed was an imminent Bolshevik uprising. Before 1920, the right of the individual to own firearms was firmly established in law, reaffirmed in such documents as the Bill of Rights of 1689 and Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765), and successfully defended by members of Parliament throughout the 19th century. During the "Tottenham outrage" of 1909, for instance, two Russian socialist-anarchists carried out a wages robbery, shot dead a policeman and a 10-year-old boy, and were pursued by armed citizens and the police, who borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by. (One robber shot himself, the other hid in a cottage where he either shot himself or was killed by the police.) Even under the 1920 Act, and in the 1937 Home Office Memorandum of Guidance on the Implementation of the Firearms Act, personal protection was recognised as a "good reason" for the issuance of a firearms certificate. Although in 1946 the Home Secretary, James Chuter Ede, stated that self-defence was no longer an acceptable reason, as recently as 1979, Clement Freud, Liberal MP, told the Commons that

In addition, civilian marksmanship is recognised as an invaluable defensive resource for both the armed forces and the police, in statements by Lieutenant General Sir Peter Duffell, General Sir Roger Wheeler and John Warner, formerly Chief Instructor of the special firearms operations and training unit of the Metropolitan Police, which appear on pages 245-248. In recognition of this resource, Her Majesty the Queen is Patron of the National Rifle Association, and His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales is its President.

Gun control laws have merely created a huge pool of illegally-owned firearms, which was estimated by Dr A.B. Bailey of Oxford, a former Ministry of Defence scientist, and Michael Yardley, a former Army officer and research psychologist, to be at least four million in the UK. Professional criminals obtain their firearms from this vast illegal pool, and not from the far smaller number of lawfully owned guns, which are almost never used in crime. Out of 200,000 lawfully-owned handguns in England and Wales, the chances of criminal misuse of a handgun in any given year is one in 100,000, or two cases per year. Figures for Scotland in 1993 showed that not a single lawfully-owned handgun was used in crime. The horror of Dunblane has obscured the fact that death by shooting is extremely rare in this country. In England and Wales, far more people die through choking on their food (398 a year) than through shooting (156 suicides, 72 homicides and 17 accidents a year, a total of 245 deaths by shooting). As Superintendent Greenwood comments,

The Dunblane massacre was an example of the category of homicide known as "spree killing" or "amok killing", which no gun control law can prevent. In the words of John Douglas, recently retired chief of criminal profiling for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, "You could deprive Hamilton of his guns. But someone like him is mission-oriented and where there is a will, there is a way, even with strict gun laws" (page 284).Mr Stevenson suggests that it is to the problem of development of mass murderers to which our attention should be directed, and not to the further restriction of lawfully-owned firearms.

Altogether, the editors have produced the most thorough, cogent, well-informed - and iconoclastic - book about British firearms law to appear in a quarter of a century. Its only significant fault is the lack of an index, which makes it difficult to quickly look up information. The inclusion of illustrations and basic technical details about the firearms under discussion would also have helped the non-specialist reader.

Unfortunately, such is the hysteria which the media and irresponsible politicians have whipped up about the gun issue that the facts and analyses presented in this book have been completely ignored in the government's proposed law to outlaw all handguns of greater than .22 calibre, a measure which goes far beyond both the recommendations of the Home Affairs Select Committee and Lord Cullen's report. The Labour and "Liberal" Democratic Parties are demanding a ban even on .22 calibre pistols. The advocates of this outrage against individual liberty have no answer to the thoroughly documented facts contained in this book. The Sunday Times, which is actively campaigning for a handgun ban, does not attempt to challenge these facts, but instead attempts to smear Mr Stevenson:

Libertarians have repeatedly urged the restoration of the principle in British law that individuals have the right to possess and use firearms for their own defence, as well as for sporting purposes, although the exact nature of the process by which the right to self-defence can be re-established in practice is open to debate. The "mainstream" gun lobby, by dismissing the self-defence argument, have played into the hands of the gun prohibitionists and are now faced with the confiscation of their pistols and the closure of many manufacturers, dealers and gun clubs. It is to be hoped that, faced with this catastrophe, they will reassess their position and join with libertarians in arguing, in the most responsible fashion, for the right to own firearms for self-defence. Indeed, grounds for cautious optimism on the subject is given by the courage of Walter Sweeney, Conservative MP for the Vale of Glamorgan, who recently called for householders to be allowed to shoot burglars. Mr Sweeney said:

At a time when the political climate is less than entirely favourable to the reassertion of the right demanded by Mr Sweeney, the contributors to Guns and Violence deserve the commendation of everybody who values truth over falsehood and freedom over slavery.

David Botsford