Gns David Botsford1

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WHY THE RIGHT TOARMED SELF-DEFENCE

AGAINST CRIMINALS

AND AGAINST TYRANTS

SHOULD NOT HAVEBEEN SUPPRESSED IN

BRITAIN AND HOW IT

MIGHT GRADUALLY BE

RE-ESTABLISHED:

AN EXPANDED VERSION OF A TALK

GIVEN TO THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY

FREE SOCIETY NOVEMBER 5TH1996

DAVID BOTSFORD

Political Notes No. 133ISSN 0267-7059 ISBN 1 85637 371 1An occasional publication of the Libertarian Alliance,

25 Chapter Chambers, Esterbrooke Street, London SW1P 4NNwww.libertarian.co.uk email: [email protected]

1997: Libertarian Alliance; David Botsford.

David Botsford is a freelance writer and therapist.

The views expressed in this publication are those of its author, and not necessarilythose of the Libertarian Alliance, its Committee, Advisory Council or subscribers.

Director: Dr Chris R. TameEditorial Director: Brian Micklethwait

Webmaster: Dr Sean Gabb

FOR LIFE, LIBERTY AND PROPERTY


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On 13th March, 1996, Thomas Hamilton walked into the gym at

Dunblane Primary School carrying four legally-owned heavy-calibre handguns and several hundred rounds of ammunition.He proceeded to shoot dead 16 children, aged five and six, andtheir teacher. He also shot and wounded another 13 children

and another teacher. Only one boy, trapped under the dead andwounded bodies of his classmates, escaped injury. Hamiltonthen committed suicide.

The initial reaction to this atrocity throughout the nation wasone of profound shock. Gradually, however, this shock turnedto anger anger directed not so much against the dead perpe-trator of the deed, but against all owners of handguns. A groupof parents in Dunblane, some of whom had lost children in thebloodbath, organised the nationally-circulated Snowdrop peti-

tion, which demanded the outlawing of all handguns. Much ofthe media, and especially the tabloid press, whipped up a frenzyof hysteria in support of the Dunblane parents. Those whodefended the right of law-abiding individuals to manufacture,

own and sell firearms were subjected to a torrent of abuse un-precedented against a group of individuals who had not brokenthe law. The implication was that legal handgun owners were atbest indifferent or callous towards, or at worse somehow impli-

cated in, the foul murders at Dunblane.

Indeed, the medias condemnation of the IRA itself after suchatrocities as the Enniskillen massacre of 1986, when 11 peoplewere killed and 63 injured by an IRA bomb while attending aRemembrance Day religious service, was less severe than the

abuse heaped upon the so-called gun lobby by newspaperssuch as the Sun, the Star, the Daily Mail and even the SundayTimes and the Independent since Dunblane. Law-abidingfirearms owners who have committed no crime are, it seems,lower on the scale of humanity than the IRA, whose terroristcampaign has murdered thousands of civilians, including policeofficers, as well as soldiers, since 1969. It is worth pointing outthat when the IRA announced its temporary cease-fire in 1994,

the British government was prepared to sit down at the negotiat-ing table with Sinn Fein without the requirement that they handover the firearms, explosives and other military hardware thatthey had used to carry out their killings. I will accept the credi-

bility of the Snowdrop campaign when I see definite evidencethat each and every one of its members protested against thegovernments willingness to negotiate with Sinn Fein on thoseterms. Until I see that evidence, I do not accept their right to

attack law-abiding firearms owners who have committed nocrime, and would certainly have done everything they could toprevent the Dunblane massacre had they known Hamiltons in-tentions.

LEGAL GUNS ARE SELDOM USED IN CRIME

This ferocious assault on lawful firearms owners has nothing to

do with the real problems of armed crime. The fact is that the200,000 handguns in lawful private ownership are, for all practi-cal purposes, not used at all in criminal activity. Of 5.5 millionnotifiable offences recorded by the police in 1993, 0.01% (606cases) were homicides. Firearms were involved in 72 of them.

Of these, perhaps six may have been at some time subject tocertificate. The criminal misuse of legally-owned handguns in

England and Wales amounts to a grand total of two cases per

year. In Scotland, in 1993, the last year for which figures areavailable, not a single lawfully-owned handgun was used incrime at all, despite the fact that the Scottish murder rate isdouble that of England and Wales.1 Even the criminal use of

firearms to commit homicide is not exactly an epidemic of gunviolence. In England and Wales, far more people die throughchoking on their food (398 a year) or falling on the stairs athome (531 a year) than through shooting (156 suicides, 72 ho-

micides and 17 accidents a year, a total of 245 deaths by shoot-

ing).2 The Dunblane massacre was an example of that categoryof homicide known as a spree killing or amok killing. Mostsuch murderers do not use firearms, and no act of legislation can

prevent them from wanting to carry out the deed. In the wordsof John Douglas, recently retired head of criminal profiling forthe US Federal Bureau of Investigation, You could deprive Ha-milton of his guns. But someone like him is mission-orientedand where there is a will, there is a way, even with strict gunlaws.3 This does not make the tragedy any less appalling, butit demonstrates the limitations of focusing on the weapon ratherthat the individual.

The Firearms (Amendment) Bill currently before Parliament

proposes to outlaw all handguns of greater than .22 calibre, and

impose the requirement that .22 pistols be stored in licensed gunclubs. There is not even the pretence that this will address theproblem of armed crime. The only effect that the present bill is

likely to have is to drive a proportion of those who currentlyown lawful guns to acquire illegal weapons on the black market,and to participate in illegal shooting events. It will also lead tothe closure of gun clubs, manufacturers and retailers, and theloss of some 2,000 jobs. Nobody has demonstrated or evenattempted to demonstrate that the present bill will have anybeneficial effect whatsoever on armed crime. Indeed, both theCommons Home Affairs Select Committee and Lord Cullens

report of the public inquiry into the Dunblane killings rejectedthe idea of banning any category of handgun, and proposed in-stead improved methods for screening applicants for a firearms

certificate.

Since the 1960s, Britain has had the strictest gun control in the

Western world. Under the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1988,which followed the 1987 Hungerford massacre, in which Mi-chael Ryan killed 16 people with a legally-owned assault rifleand handgun, the law was made stricter still. The 1988 Act out-

lawed all semi-automatic rifles, among other weapons. (Oppo-nents of the ban argued for special exemption for disabledpeople, since semi-automatics have low recoil and are thus ea-sier for persons with less upper body strength to shoot. In the

Lords debate on the bill, one member replied that a handicappedperson would probably have a harder job to hold on to the riflethan an able bodied person if someone wanted to steal it. Lord

Attlee worried about the possibility of a disabled person whowas also mentally unstable.4) Under the present law, a personowning or wishing to own a firearm must apply for a firearmcertificate from the local chief officer of police. He must con-vince the chief officer both that he has a good reason for owning

a firearm, and that he is a fit person to be entrusted with one,before the chief officer will issue a firearm certificate. In prac-

WHY THE RIGHT TO ARMED SELF-DEFENCE AGAINST CRIMINALS AND

AGAINST TYRANTS SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN SUPPRESSED IN BRITAIN

AND HOW IT MIGHT GRADUALLY BE RE-ESTABLISHED:

AN EXPANDED VERSION OF A TALK GIVEN TO THE

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY FREE SOCIETY NOVEMBER 5TH 1996

DAVID BOTSFORD

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tice, this means that the applicant must be a member of a regis-tered gun club, where he intends to use his weapon for targetshooting. Self-defence is almost never considered to be a good

reason for the issue of a certificate, although a number of UlsterUnionist MPs possess certificated firearms for self-defence pur-poses. The law is enforced stringently: for instance, a formermilitary policeman who was recently caught with two uncertifi-cated heavy-calibre handguns and ammunition was given twoyears imprisonment, even though he had committed no other

offence.

THREE CATEGORIES OF ILLEGAL GUNS

Armed criminals use illegal firearms from the black market, anddo not fill in application forms for a firearm certificate at thelocal police station. The illegal pool is certainly many timesthan the number of legal guns.

These illegal guns can be classified into three categories. First,there is the large pool of firearms which are owned by individ-uals who are otherwise entirely law-abiding. This pool includesguns which were already around before the Firearms Act 1920,

which for the first time required individuals who possessed orwanted to buy a firearm to obtain a certificate. A large propor-

tion of the firearms already in private ownership were simplynever registered under the Act. Other guns were brought back

as souvenirs from the second world war and other conflicts.Every few years since 1933, the police have held firearms am-nesties, in which people are encouraged to hand in illegallyowned guns with no questions asked. Dr A. B. Bailey, a formerMinistry of Defence scientist, and Michael Yardley, a formerArmy officer who is now a firearms consultant, have used thefigures on the number of weapons handed in during these am-nesties, and have calculated that there are at least four million

illegal guns in circulation in this category.

The second category of illegal firearms is the pool of guns avail-able on the criminal black market. These is large and growing.In recent years, gangsters from places as far apart as Sicily, Rus-sia, Jamaica, Japan, Columbia and Turkey criminals have been

arriving in the UK, attracted largely by the profits to be made bythe sale of illegal drugs. These people have developed the habitof carrying guns routinely. The exceptionally violent Jamaicangangsters known as the Yardies are notorious for their display offirearms and willingness to use them. Partly as a result of thisfeature of the Yardies way of life, foreign and native-borncriminals alike are carrying firearms routinely. Nevertheless, it isstill comparatively rare for these people to actually use their

guns to kill people. Professional criminals generally use theirguns to intimidate victims of, say, an armed robbery or a protec-tion racket, and prefer not to commit murder unless absolutelynecessary.

The third category of illegal firearms in the UK is the arsenalunder the control of the Provisional IRA. The IRA uses its gunsand explosives to carry out both terrorist activities and to run alarge criminal empire in both Northern Ireland and the Britishmainland. The IRA has murdered over 2,000 people since theTroubles began in 1969. It has also set itself up as a combinedpolice forces, justice system and punishment squad in thoseRoman Catholic parts of Northern Ireland where the Queenswrit does not run. The IRA imports its weapons, including its

characteristic US Armalite AR10 assault rifles, which are smug-gled in on ships, boats and aeroplanes. It has no problem withobtaining enough guns, only with recruiting the men to firethem. The fact that the IRA has successfully carried out its ter-

rorist activities for nearly 30 years in spite of the best efforts ofthe Army and the police is proof of the extreme difficulty incontrolling illegally-owned weapons in an open society.

The only guns which it is possible to confiscate under the pres-ent Firearms (Amendment) Bill are those which are not in anyway involved in crime, and whose owners have passed the strin-gent police procedures for approved firearms owners. The three

categories of illegal firearms I have mentioned will not be af-fected in any way by the legislation, except that it is likely thatmany of the handgun owners whose weapons are to be confis-

cated will go to the illegal black market and obtain unlicensedguns. Other handgun owners, as well as manufacturers, dealersand clubs will be penalised precisely because they wish to keepto the law. It is also likely that illegal shooting competitionswill continue, some of them probably arranged by organisedcrime. After all, the proposed ban is deeply resented by law-

abiding handgun owners, and owners of gun clubs, dealershipsand manufacturers who are being driven out of business by the

proposed ban may well succumb to the temptation to use theirknowledge and contacts to organise the illegal supply offirearms and illegal shooting events. The present bill, in short,is certain to do absolutely nothing to solve the problem of armedcrime, and can only have the effect of increasing the illegal useof firearms. Every minister in the government simply mustknow this to be the case.

CROWD PSYCHOLOGY AND THE DUNBLANE

PARENTS

The only reason why the present bill has been introduced is as aresult of the frenzied hysteria which the media has whipped up

since Dunblane. It is an example of crowd psychology. Opi-nion polls demonstrate that 72% of the population support thebanning of all handguns. In his classic study of crowd psycho-logy, first published in 1897, the French philosopher Gustave Le

Bon recognised that when people act together as a crowd, theirthinking and behaviour becomes totally different from the waythey behave as individuals. In view of the current hysteriaagainst lawful firearms ownership, it is worth examining some

of Le Bons observations, and noting their relevance to the Bri-tain of 1996. Le Bon wrote of a crowd that:

Like a savage, it is not prepared to admit that anything cancome between its desire and the realisation of its desire. Itis the less capable of understanding such an intervention, in

consequence of the feeling of irresistible power given it byits numerical strength. The notion of impossibility disap-pears for the individual in a crowd.5

Crowds respond to challenges which are simple and forceful:

An orator wishing to move a crowd must make an abusiveuse of violent affirmations. To exaggerate, to affirm, to re-

sort to repetitions, and never to attempt to prove anythingthrough reason are methods of argument well known tospeakers at public meetings. ... [B]y the mere fact that anindividual forms part of a crowd, his intellectual standard is

immediately and considerably lowered. ... Crowds are onlycognisant of simple and extreme sentiments; the opinions,ideas and beliefs suggested to them are accepted or rejected

as a whole, and considered as absolute truths or as not lessabsolute errors. This is always the case with beliefs in-duced by a process of suggestion instead of engendered byreasoning.6

They deal with symbols rather than with rational chains ofthought:

The inferior reasoning of crowds is based, just as is reason-

ing of a high order, on the association of ideas, but betweenthe ideas associated by crowds there are only apparentbonds of analogy or succession. The mode of reasoning ofcrowds resembles that of the Esquimaux who, knowingfrom experience that ice, a transparent body, melts in themouth, concludes that glass, also a transparent body, should

also melt in the mouth; or that of the savage who imaginesthat by eating the heart of a courageous foe he acquires his

bravery; or of the workman who, having been exploited byone employer of labour, immediately concludes that all em-ployers exploit their men. ... When an affirmation has beensufficiently repeated and there is unanimity in this repetition

... what is called a current of opinion is formed and the

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powerful mechanism of contagion intervenes. Ideas, senti-ments, emotions, and beliefs possess in crowds a contagiouspower as intense as that of microbes. This phenomenon is

very natural, since it is observed even in animals when theyare together in number. Should a horse in a stable take tobiting his manger the other horses in the stable will imitatehim. A panic that has seized on a few sheep will soon ex-tend to the whole flock. In the case of men collected in acrowd all emotions are very rapidly contagious, which ex-

plains the suddenness of panics. Brain disorders, like mad-ness, are themselves contagious. The frequency of madness

among doctors who are specialists for the mad is notorious.7

In moments of great emotional intensity, people typically revertfrom the processes of logical thinking according to the laws oflogic first promulgated by Aristotle to the far more primevalway of representing reality described by Le Bon. This is the

basis for animistic religions in which such items as rocks, trees,tools and buildings are considered to be possessed by or toactually be spirits capable of thought and action. Of courseit was a profound emotional trauma when those Dunblane par-

ents learned that their children had been shot dead or woundedby Hamiltons bullets. Hamilton himself, of course, was dead.

Had he lived, the situation would have been different. We canbe sure that the nations anger would be directed against him

personally, and that the demand for the restoration of capitalpunishment for murder especially for the murder of children would have achieved a national force that the governmentcould not have withstood. But because Hamilton did not sur-vive to face the peoples desire for revenge, that desire wastransferred to a symbol the four handguns which Hamiltonhad used to carry out the crime. As far as those Dunblane par-ents were concerned, it was the gun, and not the individual, that

was responsible for the deed. So the demand came out to banall handguns, a demand which reflected the intensity of thoseparents feelings. This demand was transmitted through themedia to infect a large proportion of the population with the

same demand. In Scotland, in particular, the failure of, for in-stance, the Home Affairs Select Committee to call for a handgunban was considered to be an insult to the people of Scotland,where the intensity of anti-gun feeling reached its peak. In

Scotland, we were told, the sense of community is far greaterthan in England, and the shooting of those children was con-sidered to be an attack on every family north of the border. Onesimply cannot argue rationally with individuals in such a state of

mind, especially when that state of mind is supported by themajority of the population and by the media. This is becausethis way of representing reality is stuck in a pre-rational orsymbolic form. It engages the nervous system rather than thebrain.

OBJECTS AND ANIMALS ON TRIAL

There is nothing new about this. As the American lawyer David

B. Kopel explains:

... the scapegoat object has a long tradition in Anglo-Ameri-can law. For many centuries, if a criminal killed someonewith a sword, the sword would be forfeited. If a boy used achain to hang himself, the chain would be destroyed. This

punishment of physical objects was paralleled in medievaland early-modern European law by the legal punishment ofanimals. If a pig killed a baby, or if a swarm of locusts atea crop, the animals would be charged with legal offences,defended by a court-appointed lawyer, and usually con-victed. Animal defendants whom the court could appre-

hend, like domestic pigs, would be tortured to death, just aswere human criminals.

Some scholars suggest that the people who punished swords

or pigs were not so stupid as to believe that swords or pigscould form criminal intent, or could be deterred by the pun-ishment of their fellows. Rather, suggests one scholar of

the phenomena, people were terrified by the seemingly ran-dom nature of bad events that befell others, events whichimplied there was no order to the universe. Thus, the pur-

pose of punishing objects and animals

was to establish cognitive control ... the job of the courtswas to domesticate chaos, and to impose order on a worldof accidents and specifically to make sense of certainseemingly inexplicable events by redefining them as crimes... the childs death became explicable. The child had diedas an act of calculated wickedness, and however awful thatstill was, at least it made some kind of sense.8

Here, I suggest, we have an exact description of the nature ofthe hostility of the Dunblane parents towards the handgun as anobject, as well as to their fanaticism in demanding a total ban onit.

The Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein recognised that thisconcept of pars par toto is central both to artistic repre-sentations, which affect the individual in a fundamental emo-

tional way, and to the representations of reality made byprimitive tribal communities. He wrote that

if you receive an ornament made of a bears tooth, it sig-

nifies that the whole bear has been given to you, or, what inthese conditions signifies the same thing, the strength of the

bear as a whole. In the conditions of modern practice sucha proceeding would be absurd. No one, having received abutton off a suit, would imagine himself to be dressed in thecomplete suit. But as soon even as we move over into thesphere in which sensual and image constructions play thedecisive role, into the sphere of artistic constructions, thesame pars par toto begins immediately to play a tremendouspart for us as well. ...

When a girl to whom you have been unfaithful, tears your

photo into fragments in anger, thus destroying the wickedbetrayer, for a moment she re-enacts the magical operationof destroying a man by the destruction of his image (basedon the early identification of image and object). By her

momentary regression the girl returns herself, in a tempor-ary aberration, to that stage of development in which suchan action appeared fully normal and productive of real con-sequences. Relatively not so very long ago, on the verge ofan epoch that already knew minds such as Leonardo andGalileo, so brilliant a politician as Catherine de Medici,aided by her court magician, wished ill to her foes by stick-ing pins into their miniature wax images.

In addition to this we know also not just momentary but

(temporarily!) irrevocable manifestations of precisely thissame psychological retrogression, when a whole social sys-tem is in regress. Then the phenomenon is termed reaction,

and the most brilliant light on the question is thrown by theflames of the national-fascist auto-da-fe of books and port-raits of unwanted authors in the squares of Berlin!9

While it is, to say the least, somewhat hypocritical for a Sovietcommunist to set himself up as a defender of liberalism and ra-tionality against the German National Socialists, Eisenstein

nevertheless correctly recognises that this rejection of Aristote-lian logic leads directly to the mentality of the National Social-ists who threw the books of undesirable authors onto publicbonfires in Berlin in 1933. When a society moves towards this

way of making its laws, the consequences for liberty in generalare extremely harmful. And now we hear that the government isplanning to outlaw the sale of combat knives of the sort which a

16-year-old boy used to stab the headmaster, Philip Lawrence, todeath last year. Is there no end to the assault on our basic free-doms which the anti-weapons hysteria is bringing about? Or tothe stupidity and venality of politicians who imagine that theyare not simply creating an illegal black market in every type ofweapon they ban, and thus increasing, rather that reducingcriminal involvement with such items?

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WEAPONS: THE SYMBOL OF FREEDOM

Let us take this opportunity to explore the question of firearmsownership from a libertarian perspective, one which entirely re- jects the illusions which are currently being circulated on the

subject. In the various political formations which characterisedboth the Graeco-Roman civilisation and our own Western civili-sation, one of the most fundamental distinctions between a freeman and a slave was that the former had the right to own wea-pons, while the latter did not. In Anglo-Saxon England, wherethe common people were considered to be ceorls, or freemen,and feudal bondage had not yet been introduced, the individualhad both the right to possess weapons on an individual basis and

the obligation to hold them for the purposes of law enforcementand defence in case of invasion. After the conquest, the Nor-mans continued this system, which remained the method of lawenforcement and national defence until the formation of standing

armies and professional police forces. For many centuries be-fore the development of gunpowder, of course, weapons weresuch items as swords, pikes, longbows and axes. Gunpowderwas first used to fire projectiles in Europe at some time in the

14th century, although early artillery were notoriously prone toexplode, and were often more dangerous to the side using them

than to the enemy. At the siege of Roxburgh in 1460, for in-stance, a cannon exploded and killed James II, king of Scotland.

I will avoid a detailed survey of the history of firearms technol-

ogy, many of which are available.10 Suffice it to say that as thecenturies went on, inventors used the power of gunpowder topropel projectiles to create an extraordinary range of weapons.A breastplate was fitted with nineteen pistols so that the wearer

became a one-man barrage. The first machine-gun, the Pucklegun, was named after its inventor James Puckle, who patented itin 1718. The Puckle gun could fire 63 shots in seven minutes,and had alternative cylindrical magazines, one for firing round

bullets at Christians, the other for square bullets to be usedagainst Turks. Combination weapons were common in the 19thcentury. These included various knuckle-duster guns; the Elgincutlass pistol, a combined pistol and sword invented in 1837

which was used by the US Navy for a South Seas expedition;squeezer pistols, which could be concealed in the hand and firedby clenching the fist; and the French Dolne or Apache pistol,which was a combined pistol, knife and knuckle-duster. Somefirearms turned out to be blind alleys. The Gyrojet, for instance,fired tiny rockets from a lightweight pistol, and was very inac-curate. With the turret revolver, unfired chambers would pointback at the shooter and if detonated by accident could kill him.

This actually happened to P. W. Porter, inventor of a turret re-volver, during a US military trial.

From the 19th century, guns were manufactured en masse, andwere available to the ordinary person at reasonable cost. In

1889, when the British government was considering introducingfirearms legislation, Lord Salisbury wrote to British ambassa-dors across Europe and asked them for information about thecarrying of firearms by private persons in populous places. Thereplies were represented in the Commons. In Montenegro, Nor-way and Sweden (then a single nation), Denmark, Serbia andSwitzerland there were no restrictions on the carrying of arms,and in Hungary restrictions were imposed only on convictedpersons and the insane. Concealed firearms were prohibited in

Coburg, Hesse, Saxony and Wertemberg, as they were in France,which also had complicated regulations about the manufactureand sale of many types of weapon. In Baden and Germany thecarrying of firearms at public meetings was prohibited and in

the Netherlands the carrying of firearms on roads or in publicplaces was forbidden with some exceptions. In Bulgaria, Bel-gium, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain a permit was required tocarry any type of firearm, while the same restrictions, with some

exceptions, applied to Austria, Romania, Russia and Turkey.Many of these laws were not well enforced. The ambassador toBelgium reported:

I am informed that the existing regulations, even about thecarrying of pocket pistols, are rarely, if ever, enforced; andno serious effort has yet been made to check the growing

use of cheap pocket pistols.11

The ambassador to Montenegro reported that

The Montenegrin practice is very different from that inother countries, but then it must be borne in mind that everyadult male is a soldier. Generally, we see some restrictions

placed on the carrying of arms, but here, every man goesarmed to the teeth. A revolver or pistol forms really part ofa Montenegrins dress and every man who can afford to buyone wears his weapon prominently in his belt ... I cannotsay that this indiscriminate display of arms really tends toincrease crime. There is none of that carrying of concealedweapons which is so common in Greece and Italy (Both, itwill be noted countries where the carrying of weapons with-out a permit was prohibited) and indeed in other countries.

If a Montenegrin has a six barrelled revolver in his belt, heknows that his neighbour is similarly provided. Conse-quently, it may be said that all start fair.12

In his classic study of firearms controls carried out here at Cam-bridge University in the early 1970s, Superintendent Colin

Greenwood comments:

The Montenegrin revolver was made in Belgium to the spe-cifications of the Montenegrin government and was the lar-gest revolver ever made on a commercial scale. It weighedno less than five pounds and fired a huge 11.75 mm car-tridge much longer than most other large calibre cartridges.The picture conjured up, of a rough bewhiskered Montene-grin peasant, in breeches, colourful tunic and bolero, with awide sash or belt supporting one of these huge pistols is

something which must surely leave the cowboy of the wildwest very much in the shade!13

Or indeed a wimp like Dirty Harry, with his .44 Smith & Wes-son Magnum Model 29, weighing a mere 2lb 14 oz, which heclaimed to be the most powerful handgun in the world, that can

blow your head clean off in the film Dirty Harry (US, 1971),directed by Don Siegel, and its sequels.

LOW ARMED CRIME WHEN GUNS FREELY

AVAILABLE

In Britain at that time there were no restrictions on the sale orownership of firearms. In the words of Superintendent Green-wood:

England entered the twentieth century with no controls over

the purchasing or keeping of any type of firearm, and theonly measure which related to the carrying of guns was theGun Licence Act, requiring the purchase of a ten shilling

gun licence from a Post Office. Anyone, be he convictedcriminal, lunatic, drunkard or child, could legally acquireany type of firearm and the presence of pistols and revolv-ers in households all over the country was fairly wide-spread. ... England at that time was a country where guns ofevery type were familiar instruments and where anyonewho felt the need or desire to own a gun could obtain one.The cheaper guns were very cheap and well within thereach of all but the very poor. ... The right of the English-

man to keep arms for his own defence was still completelyaccepted and all attempts at placing this under restraint hadfailed.14

Indeed, the right to bear arms was recognised in the Bill of

Rights of 1688 and in Sir William Blackstones Commentarieson the Laws of England(1765). It was actively and successfullydefended by Parliament throughout the 19th century. The extentof private firearms ownership in Edwardian Britain was demon-strated during the Tottenham outrage of 1909, in which twoRussian terrorists attempted a wages robbery, shot dead a police-man and a 10-year-old boy, and were pursued by the police,

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who borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by, and armedcitizens who joined in the chase with their own firearms. (Onerobber shot himself, the other hid in a cottage where he either

shot himself or was killed by the police as they fired blindinto the cottage.15) Neither was the ownership and carrying offirearms by any means a male preserve. In 1909, Dorothy Le-vitt, Britains first woman racing driver, published a book en-titled The Woman and the Car, in which she advised lonewomen motorists to carry a revolver with them. I myself carry

an automatic Colt, she wrote.16 Manifestations of road ragewith this Edwardian lady would definitely not have been ad-

vised, I suggest.

It ought to be said, however, that some of the cheaper gunsavailable at this time were not especially powerful. In 1898, a13-year-old boy shot an 18-year-old youth in the arm, the victimnot realising that he had been shot until he had chased and

caught the younger boy. In 1908, a 16-year-old boy stood trialin London for wounding his 16-year-old girlfriend with a re-volver. The girl only suffered a superficial wound, and policereports said that she was fortunately wearing a large quantity of

underclothing which, no doubt, prevented a more seriouswound.17 Either the young lady was wearing some formidable

Edwardian corsetry or the pistol was not exactly in the class ofthe Montenegrin revolvers mentioned above. Even after this

conviction, the boy was able to simply walk into a barbers shopand purchase a five-chamber revolver.

Although firearms were lawfully available virtually without re-striction, the level of armed crime was exceptionally low by thestandards of today. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner re-

ported that during the three years 1911-13, there had been anaverage of 41 cases per year in which firearms had been used incrime or found in the possession of individuals whom the policehad arrested. For the years 1915-17, when of course a large

proportion of young men were in the armed forces, the averageannual figure had fallen to 15.6 cases.18 This should be com-pared with over 1,600 armed robberies in London alone in 1991,under the strictest firearms control in the Western world.19 In

1904, firearms figured in 15 murders; for the years 1988-92 theaverage number of firearms homicides was 48.20 SuperintendentGreenwood concluded that

the use of firearms in crime was very much less when therewere no controls of any sort and when anyone, convicted

criminal or lunatic, could buy any type of firearm withoutrestriction. Half a century of strict controls on pistols hasended, perversely, with a far greater use of this class ofweapon in crime than ever before. We do not know how

much worse this would have been if there had been no con-trols, but it is possible to get some indication by looking atthe position in relation to shotguns. Despite the fact that

they were unrestricted until 1968, shotguns were used inonly a relatively low proportion of robberies in the periodsimmediately before and after the imposition of controls.21

THE NOT SO WILD WEST

Even the American wild west, where guns were so central apart of the way of life, was not as violent as is often assumedfrom the images presented in Western novels and films. TheAmerican historian Roger McGrath studied the 19th-century

Sierra Nevada mining towns of Aurora and Bodie and publishedhis findings in a book entitled Gunfighters, Highwaymen andVigilantes. Its conclusions are summarised by the Americanlawyer David B. Kopel as follows:

The population was mainly young transient males subject tofew social controls. There was one saloon for everytwenty-five men; brothels and gambling houses were alsocommon. Governmental law enforcement was ineffectual,and sometime the sheriff was himself the head of a criminalgang. Nearly everyone carried a gun. (Aurorans usuallycarried a Colt Navy .36 six-shot revolver, while Boedites

sported the Colt Double Action Model known as the Light-ning.)

Was the homicide rate in those towns high? Yes. The badmen who hung out in saloons shot each other at a fear-

some rate, although Auroras rate was less than the rate inmodern Washington, D.C. The presence of guns turnedmany petty drunken quarrels into fatalities.

But other crime was virtually nil. The per capita annual

robbery rate was 7 percent of modern New Yorks. Theburglary rate 1 percent. Rape was unknown. The old, theweak, the female, the innocent, and those unwilling to fightwere rarely the targets of attacks, McGrath found. Oneresident of Bodie did not recall ever hearing of a respect-able women [sic] or girl in any manner insulted or evenaccosted by the hundreds of dissolute characters that wereeverywhere. In part this was due to the respect depravitypays to decency; in part to the knowledge that sudden death

would follow any other course.

Everyone carried a gun and, except for young men wholiked to drink and fight with each other, everyone as farmore secure than todays residents of cities with gun pro-hibitions. ... The experience of Aurora and Bodie was re-

peated throughout the West. ... A study of the Texas frontierfrom 1875 to 1890 found that burglaries and robberies (ex-cept for bank, train and stagecoach robberies) were essen-tially nonexistent. People did not bother locking doors, and

murder was rare, except of course for young men shootingeach other in fair fights that they voluntarily engaged in.... In sum, historian W. Eugene Hollon found the Westernfrontier was a far more civilized, more peaceful, and safer

place than American society is today.22

This historical evidence from Continental Europe, Britain andthe American West, then, indicates that the widespread lawfulownership of firearms does not necessarily lead to the orgy ofbloodshed that the anti-gun campaigners would have us believe

it does. In Switzerland, there are guns in virtually every home,both as part of their national defence system and as privateproperty, and the level of armed crime is extremely low. It isoften claimed that in the United States, where the level of lawful

firearm ownership is very high, and so is the homicide rate, thatthe one causes the other. But the facts do not bear out thisclaim. In 1974, the US homicide rate was 9.8 per 100,000, ofwhich 54% was committed with handguns; in 1994, the rate was

9.0, of which the handgun component was 54.8%. The nationalstockpile of handguns, meanwhile, had more than doubled, from just under 40 million to over 82 million.23 The United Stateshas always been a much more violent society than Britain, andeven when firearms were lawfully available in both countrieswithout restriction, the US rate of murder and other violentcrimes was much higher than ours.

Indeed, contrary to popular opinion, strict firearms controls wereactually legislated in some jurisdictions of the United States be-

fore they were introduced in Britain. In the aftermath of theconflict of 1861-65 which is variously known as the Americancivil war, the war between the states and the Southern war forindependence, depending on ones interpretation of the issues in-

volved, white supremacist governments introduced firearms con-trols on former black slaves as a means of subordinating them towhite rule. In 1911, the Sullivan Act, a measure for the excep-tionally strict control of handguns, was introduced in New YorkCity. According to Superintendent Greenwood, for the years1911-20,

New York, with its strict controls on the private ownershipof pistols, suffered infintely more from the criminal use offirearms of all types than did London in a period when all

firearms were freely available.24

The rate of murder and other violent crimes for the Big Appleover the next three years was far higher than it was in London,

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where firearms were available without restriction until theDefence of the Realm regulations of the first world war, and theFirearms Act 1920, which first introduced the requirement for

gun owners to obtain a firearm certificate from the police.

DO WE WANT AN ARMED SOCIETY?

There is, therefore, no evidence that the proposed partial ban onhandguns will have the slightest beneficial effect on the level ofarmed crime. And certainly firearms controls, which have

become ever stricter in the decades since the 1920 Act, havedone nothing to prevent a dramatic increase in the level of

armed crime. Those who hold lawful, certificated firearms arethe most law-abiding group of people in the country. Does thismean, however, that one would wish to abolish all gun controllaws in Britain overnight, so that every kind of military hard-ware would be freely available at every street corner without theneed for any kind of a licence? There is no historical exampleof a nation which has moved immediately from the very strictgun control Britain currently has to the complete abolition of

firearms legislation, and I would reject such a sudden approach,which could well be disastrous.

A firearm is an extremely powerful tool which must be under-

stood and respected. The fact is that the large majority of Brit-ish people know virtually nothing about them, and regard them

with suspicion or fear. It would be likely, if firearms were sud-denly available without restriction, that the worst elements insociety would be the first to obtain them, and impose a reign ofterror on the rest of the population. For example, over 100 mur-ders are carried out every year by violent former psychiatric pa-tients who have been released into care in the community. Ifsuch individuals were suddenly able to obtain sub-machine gunsand automatic rifles without restriction, it is not inconceivable

that the result would be a bloodbath. A few months after theDunblane massacre, a man in Wolverhampton went berserk at aschool with a machete, injuring several children and adults.Fortunately nobody was killed, but it is likely that they would

have been if he had stocked up with guns and ammunition enroute to the school. Given that both Ryan and Hamilton hadsuccessfully obtained police approval for the lawful ownershipof the weapons they used in their massacres, one cannot dismiss

the possibility that they may be other similarly disturbed peoplewho would not pass the police tests, and who might conceivablypurchase guns and make events such as the Hungerford andDunblane massacres into daily occurrences. It is not a violation

of individual liberty to take every reasonable precaution to pre-vent such events from taking place.

In addition, there are many young people carrying out such gra-tuitous acts of violence as dropping flagstones from motorwaybridges onto the windscreens of cars. There are examples of

road rage where drivers have stabbed other motorists to deathon the roads. In London, there have been example of ethnicviolence between whites and Asians in which gangs have carriedout random assaults and killings on members of the other ethnic

group. There is also drunken violence when people come out ofpubs and clubs and closing time, and smash bottles and beerglasses in peoples faces. The violence then spills over into hos-pitals, where patients frequently attack staff. The consequences

of suddenly unleashing unlimited weaponry into such situationsand numerous others would not necessarily be conducive to up-holding the Queens peace. It would be true, of course, thatlaw-abiding people would also be able to arm, but without theknowledge that necessarily goes with firearms ownership, sucharms would in all likelihood be misused.

If the immediate proliferation of firearms did in fact cause abloodbath that turned the cities of Britain into Beirut and wedo not know whether this would happen or not there would

be no way of reversing the situation once the guns were outthere and being used to kill. For this reason, the maximum de-gree of caution, gradualness and the checking of theory against

reality should be applied to any measure to increase the lawfulprivate ownership of firearms. There are significant potentialproblems in bringing about such a change which cannot be

lightly dismissed.

AMERICAN OPPOSITION TO GUN CONTROL

The situation in Britain is very different from that in, for in-stance, the United States or Switzerland, where a very wide-spread gun culture exists. Knowledge and skills relating to

firearms are handed down from generation to generation. Peopleunderstand and respect guns. In the US, opposition to increased

firearms control is much more militant than it is in the UK. In1989, for instance, after Patrick Purdy massacred five childrenin Stockton, California, with a legally-owned Kalashnikov semi-automatic rifle, a radical libertarian group called the Companyof Freemen distributed a militant defence of the right to ownfirearms:

How can people who work for or worship the State stat-ists point to the murder of five children in a schoolyardor twenty people in a restaurant and claim that as sufficient

reason to disarm tens of millions of Americans? Are they sopresumptuous as to suggest that we are capable of such vi-

olent madness? Perhaps there is a degree of psychologicalprojection going on here: statists feel within themselves the

urge to kill and project it onto the people they fear the most us, the victims of the State. For while tens of millionsof people own guns, only a miniscule fraction ever usethose guns to aggress against others. Every State, howeverhas guns and even more powerful and terrifying weapons inits clutches and every State has used them, will use them,and are using them to murder hundreds, thousands, and mil-lions of innocent, unarmed people.

How can the insane mind of a Patrick Purdy even dream of

matching the death toll of the most minor skirmish in thesmallest of wars or police actions? The murder of fiveinnocent children is heart-rendingly tragic, but how manythousands of innocent children were roasted in Hiroshima

and Nagasaki? How many unarmed, peaceful young peoplewere slaughtered in Tien An Men Square? How manywomen, children, and old people have been shot by the bul-lets of their own government in Vietnam, Cambodia, An-gola, Nicaragua, El Salvador, India, Israel, Afghanistan,Tibet, Argentina, Libya, Ireland, Russia, South Africa,Chile, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Iran, and on and on and on forevery State you can name, even our United States. For

statists to use the mass murder of a few people as an ex-cuse to disarm Americans when the State is the largest,bloodiest, longest-lived institution of mass-murder in all ofhistory is appallingly hypocritical. So we owe allegiance to

the apologists for such atrocities? NEVER!Private ownership of weaponry is the last defense againstall tyranny, foreign and domestic. The thought that theremight come a time when peaceable gun owners ... must takearms against an American Li Peng commanding the localpolice and the US military is anathema to nearly everyone.The possibility, however, must be faced. A lot of Americancolonists were horrified at the thought of defending them-selves against their kings army, too. ...

THE RIGHT TO OWN GUNS IS A CIVIL RIGHT, WITH-

OUT WHICH ALL OTHER RIGHTS ARE IMPOSSIBLETO DEFEND.

THE RIGHT TO OWN GUNS IS THE RIGHT TO OWN AND PROTECT YOUR BODY AND YOURPROPERTY.

THE RIGHT TO OWN GUNS IS THE RIGHT TO RESIST

TYRANNY.

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ANY WHO SEIZE GUNS ARE THIEVES OR TY-RANTS.25

Such a message would probably be the most extreme heresy onecould utter in the Britain of today. Yet exactly the same view of

the right of the people to arm themselves against tyranny indefence of freedom was once as much a part of the British as ofthe American legal and political tradition. It was through armed

force that the barons of England compelled King John to signMagna Carta in 1215. The right to bear arms for the defence offreedom against tyranny was upheld in the Bill of Rights of1688 and in Sir William Blackstones Commentaries on theLaws of England(1765). It was defended by Parliament againstencroachments on that freedom throughout the 19th century. In-deed, when one thinks about other countries in the world, it istaken for granted that they have the right to defend themselvesagainst oppression. When, for instance, the Soviet Union in-

vaded Hungary and Afghanistan, most people outside the ranksof Soviet apologists accepted that the Hungarians and Afghanswere justified in taking up arms to resist the imposition of ty-ranny, even against the puppet governments which the Sovietshad installed. The resistance movements against National So-

cialist Germany and Japan during the second world war are alsogenerally accepted as being entitled to take up arms to resistoppression. In both the United States and the Republic of Ire-

land, those who took up arms to overthrow British rule in theirwars of independence (1775-81 and 1916-21) are revered as na-tional heroes. And much of the political left, of course, used toloudly express support for Marxist-led armed struggle in

countries as far apart as South Africa, Vietnam, El Salvador andeven Northern Ireland, although it is true that one does not hearmuch along these lines from New Labour. It seems that Bri-tain is the only country in the world where the suggestion that

the people might conceivably be entitled to take up arms indefence of freedom at some time in the distant future is strengverboten.

Such a fact is not entirely encouraging at a time when the Brit-ish peoples freedom is being comprehensively extirpated by the

super-state in Brussels to which Heath transferred the rule ofthis country in 1972. It is not out of the question that the Euro-pean Union could one day produce a tyranny on the scale of theSoviet Union or National Socialist Germany. After all, the Eu-

ropean Commission is bound by no law or constitutional limita-tion, the people do not have the power to vote on either itsleadership or its directives, and no individual has any defensiblerights whatsoever under its rule. It is, in short, already a dicta-

torship in the full sense of the term. Of course we shall andmust use every peaceful and constitutional measure to withdrawthe United Kingdom immediately, permanently and irreversibly

from the EU at the earliest possible moment, and to restorecomplete national sovereignty, so that no individual or institu-tion in the United Kingdom is in any way or under any circum-stances subjected to its laws, directives or judgements. Ihardly need to elaborate on the reasons for that to supporters ofindividual liberty and the free market.

The question is whether it would be feasible, if such peacefuland constitutional methods to re-establish freedom were unsuc-cessful, to take measures for the preparation of armed struggleagainst tyranny. In recent years, the armed militia movement in

the United States has organised itself to defend freedom againstthe US Federal government, which has already begun to mas-sacre the citizenry at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas. Such

measures would certainly be illegal in the UK,26

and in any casewould not gain the support of the British people, even the largeproportion who already support British withdrawal from the EU.Such methods therefore have to be completely discounted. (Itis, however, worth pointing out, in passing, that, contrary tomedia smears, all the major American militia movements are en-tirely law-abiding and broadly libertarian in their outlook, and

have members from all Americas ethnic groups. Indeed, theyexclude members of the Ku Kux Klan and other racist groupsfrom membership.) The only hope for freedom in such circum-

stances would be that members of the British armed forces andthe police, each of whom has taken an oath of loyalty to HerMajesty the Queen, and not to the government of the day or tothe European Union, might conceivably take armed action, as alast resort and in the most extreme circumstances, to resist thesubjugation of the British people to tyranny, and to restore lib-

erty and sovereignty.

GUN CONTROL IN NAZI GERMANY

It is relevant to this point that hostility towards private firearmsownership was a feature of German life in the Weimar Republic.In the United States there is a group called Jews for the Preser-vation of Firearms Ownership, which is led by Aaron Zelman, aformer German citizen, who was imprisoned in the National So-cialist concentration camp at Dachau. Mr Zelman recalls that

Before Adolf Hitler came to power, there was a black mar-ket for firearms, but the German people had been so condi-

tioned to be law abiding that they would never consider bu-ying an unregistered gun. The German people really be-

lieved that only hoodlums own such guns. What fools wewere. It truly frightens me to see how the government,

media and some police groups in America are pushing forthe same mindset. In my opinion, the people of Americahad better start asking and demanding answers to some hardquestions about firearms ownership, especially, if the gov-ernment does not trust me to own firearms, why or how canthe people be expected to trust the government?

There is no doubt in my mind that millions of lives couldhave been saved if the people were not brainwashedabout gun ownership and had been well armed. Hitlers

thugs and goons were not very brave when confronted by agun. Gun haters always want to forget the Warsaw Ghettouprising, which is a perfect example of how a ragtag, half-starved group of Jews took up 10 handguns and made asses

out of the Nazis.

He says of American opponents of private firearms ownership:

Anti-gun-ownership politicians are very dangerous to a freesociety. Liberty and freedom can only be preserved by anarmed citizenry. I see creeping fascism in America, just asin Germany, a drip at a time; a law here, a law there, all

supposedly passed to protect the public. Soon you havetotal enslavement. Too many Americans have forgotten thattyranny often masquerades as doing good. ...

Their ignorance is pitiful - their lives have been too easy.Had they experienced Dachau, they would have a better

idea of how precious freedom is. These leftists should livein the tradition of America or they should leave America.These Sarah Brady types must be educated to understandthat because we have an armed citizenry, that a dictatorship

has not yet happened in America. These anti-gun fools aremore dangerous to Liberty than street criminals or foreignspies.27

IMPLICIT KNOWLEDGE

There can be no doubt that the lawful, responsible and safe pri-vate ownership of firearms has a deterrent effect on armedcrime. Although most categories of crime are far higher in theUS than in Britain, the rate of burglaries in England and Walesis double that of the US, for the simple reason that American

burglars fear that they might be shot, while this risk hardlyexists at all over here. In addition, American burglars ensure that

their victims are out, while British burglars do not care whethertheir victims are at home or not. The level of robberies in Eng-land and Wales, too, has now reached 80% of US levels. In re-cent years, several American states have begun issuing permits

to allow people to carry concealed firearms, subject to police

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approval. Those states which have introduced these measureshave experienced a reduction in armed crime, while the othershave experienced an increase. In 1966, following a major in-

crease in rapes in Orlando, Florida, the local police began awell-publicised training course for 2,500 women in firearms use.The next year, rape fell by 88% in Orlando (the only largeAmerican city to experience a decrease that year) and burglaryfell by 25%, even though none of the trained women actuallyfired their weapons: the deterrent effect was enough. Five years

later Orlandos rape rate was still 13% lower than it had beenbefore the training, while the surrounding standard metropolitan

area had undergone a 308% increase.28

The question before us is how we might conceivably achieve thebenefits of the deterrent effect in Britain while at the same timeensuring that firearms are, as far as possible, not misused. Cer-tainly the right of the individual to self-defence must be re- es-

tablished, and we should legalise both the ownership and use ofsuch non-lethal devices as Mace and CS gas sprays, electric stunguns, pepper sprays and telescopic coshes. These can be effec-tive in stopping an attacker without doing him permanent harm.

With firearms, which are of course potentially far more lethal, amore gradual approach is required. Some people might say that,

while it would be wrong to confiscate the certificated guns ofexisting law-abiding owners, the last thing we want is a massive

expansion of the number of legal guns in peoples homes and onthe streets. It is one thing to oppose further restrictions onfirearms ownership, quite another to support a proliferation ofweapons, especially when most British people do not want topossess a gun.

The problem with this point of view is that where there is de-mand for a product which is illegal or, as in the case of firearmsin the UK, heavily restricted in law, the market is simply drivenunderground. There is already a large black market in firearms,

to which criminals have access. In addition, many otherwiselaw-abiding people own illegal firearms, and are reluctant toapply to the police for a certificate because they know howstringent the police controls are. In 1972, Superintendent Green-

wood concluded

that legislation has failed to bring under control substantialnumbers of firearms, and it certainly cannot be claimed thatstrict controls have reduced the use of firearms in crime.On the basis of these facts it might be argued that firearms

controls have had little effect and do not justify the amountof police time involved. Indeed, it is possible to build up asound case for abolishing or substantially reducing controls.... It might be claimed that a tradition of restricted owner-

ship of firearms has been built up, and that controls havehelped to establish a state of public opinion in whichfirearms are regarded as potentially dangerous items which

should be restricted as far as possible to responsible people.... The system of registering all firearms to which Section 1applies as well as licensing the individual takes up a largepart of the police time involved and causes a great deal oftrouble and inconvenience. The voluminous records so pro-duced appear to serve no useful purpose. In none of thecases examined in this study was the existence of these rec-ords of any assistance in detecting a crime and no one ques-tioned during the course of this study could offer any evi-

dence to establish the value of the system of registeringweapons. ... In the light of these facts, it should surely befor the proponents of the system of registration to establishits value. If they fail to do so, the system should be aban-

doned. ... It is evident that the firearms at present in thehands of legitimate users who hold certificates present vir-tually no problem to the community. The strict policieswhich have been applied since 1967 ... have not affected the

numbers of illegal weapons in circulation. ... The policiesmay, indeed, have been counter-productive. Having regardto the large numbers of illegal weapons in circulation,

otherwise respectable persons denied a firearm certificatemight well be tempted to obtain a weapon illegally and thussupport the black market. ... To continue with the process of

attempting to deal with the criminal use of firearms by plac-ing more restrictions on legitimate users is not likely toachieve anything. ... Whilst this mistaken belief persists, thereal problem will not receive the attention and action whichit clearly and urgently requires.29

In 1979, Professor Richard Harding, visiting fellow at the Centrefor Criminological Research at Oxford University, studied thesame issues and concluded that

the passage and attempted enforcement of laws prohibitingthe private ownership either of firearms generally or of anyparticular kind of firearm would be unlikely to affect theuse of guns in crime, and could moreover be counter-pro-ductive.30

It is worth pointing out that Professor Harding is Australiasleading academic advocate of strict firearms control.

A similar conclusion was drawn by Detective Inspector Adrian

Maybanks, in his 1992 study of firearms controls at ExeterUniversity. He found

that present police policies and enforcement of the firearmslegislation is serving to increase the number of unlicensedfirearms in circulation. This in turn may help to feed the

illegal supply of firearms to criminals.

He also concluded that

almost certainly, legislation is causing a contribution to, asopposed to reducing, the unlicensed pool of weapons.31

A central problem is the fact that the police are actively hostileto lawful private gun ownership, and put every obstacle in theway of individuals who want to obtain a firearm certificate. In

the words of Jan A. Stevenson, formerly an American police of-ficer and private detective, and now a publisher of firearms-re-lated material in the UK:

For many years, the rumoured hostility of the police hasdeterred untold thousands of people from coming forward

to seek certification, just as it has driven hundreds of thou-sands of firearms underground. Only by a perverse logiccan this be regarded as sound policy. ... Practically the en-tire weight of the regulatory system and of the resources

committed to its enforcement bear on the legitimate shoot-ing community: upon people who have come forward, seek-ing to obey the law. If their firearms do not significantlyfigure in crime, then most of these resources are misdi-

rected.

Worse than the misdirection of resources is the misdirectionof attention. For as long as the police can be assured ofsupport in tormenting this segment of the law abiding com-munity, the more they will find it the path of least resist-

ance, and much easier than dealing with the intractablequestion of real crime. Moreover, human nature being whatit is, they soon invest what they are doing with an import-ance which, objectively, it does not merit, so that certificate

holders in effect become proxy villains as far as the policeare concerned. ... Certificate holders are the most deter-mined of the law abiding. They have come forth, seekingto comply with the law, in the knowledge that they were

likely to encounter obstruction from the police. The factthat comparatively few are refused testifies to the fact thatthose who come forward have confidence in their ability to

withstand any scrutiny. The falling number of certificateholders is a measure of those who fold up under the press-ure of official hostility.32

Because so many otherwise law-abiding people own illegalguns, that is to say that they are exercising market demand, apossible way forward that might conceivably be acceptable to

public opinion and politicians would be to announce to such

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owners that they will be granted a firearm certificate providedthey come forward to the police and are willing to go throughcertain tests as to their fitness to lawfully possess firearms. The

late Professor F. A. Hayek drew attention to the concept of im-plicit knowledge. In societies such as the US or Switzerland, orindeed Britain before the 1920 Act, where knowledge aboutfirearms is widespread, this implicit knowledge can be left to thefree market. In todays Britain, however, that knowledge existsmainly within the armed forces, as well as to some extent in the

police forces and gun clubs. The Adam Smith Insitute sets agood example of how one can make free-market orientated

changes in the real world, working with the authorites, ratherthan against them. Although I have not always agreed withevery detail of the ASIs proposals over the years, that admirablebody has enjoyed remarkable success in at least partially deregu-lating and privatising large areas of the economy, in accordancewith the immediate practical situation rather than abstract phil-osophical ideals. While I do not claim in any way that the ASIwould endorse what I am about to say, in the stye of the ASI, let

us examine how the right to own firearms for self-defence mightconceivably be re-established in Britain.

Now the British Army is the worlds leading military training

organisation, and its experts train armed forces throughout theworld. It would be an invaluable source of knowledge about the

safe and responsible use of civilian firearms. I would thereforesuggest that the Army could then take applicantsa for a firearmcertificate these into a military camp for a week, where they canbe subjected to both professional firearms training and syste-matic psychological and safety tests to determine their suitabilityto be a firearms owner. The applicants would also be trainedand tested on the law relating to the use of firearms in self-defence, and on lawful and effective procedures for challenging

and threatening and as a last resort, in an extreme emergency shooting an intruder or assailant in an act of self- defence.There could be combat simulations of different situations wherea firearm could be lawfully used in self- defence, and the appli-

cants tested on their ability to respond appropriately in eachsuch situation. The whole style of such training, I suggest,would be to emphasise caution and restraint and to discourage ashoot first, ask questions later attitude. The goal of these

trainings and tests would be ensure that all those possessinglegal firearms are a definite benefit to, and not problem for, thepeace of the realm.

If they pass these tests, they can be given a firearm certificate.If they fail, they will be required to surrender their illegally-

weapons in return for financial compensation at current marketprices. By this means, large numbers of people who are curren-tly at risk of being imprisoned for unlawful firearms ownershipcan be brought within the legal certificate system. The law

could be changed to allow all individuals over the age of 50 toacquire firearms, subject to similar Army training and tests. TheArmy have centuries of experience in training soldiers to becool under fire, and to handle firearms in a responsible manner,

and they can tell who has the qualities required for this and whodoes not. In such a system, the Army would have the power toaccept or reject applicants for a firearms certificate, giving rea-sons based on what they have observed. This system could then

be given several years to be tested in the real world. If it can beclearly demonstrated that those who have been granted firearmscertificates are not using their guns in an illegal manner on anylarge scale, then one can proceed to gradually extend the right toown legal firearms to other age groups, in a similar way, until itbecomes legally possible for all law-abiding individuals to law-

fully and safely possess firearms when they have passed theArmys tests. The whole procedure must take place in an unhur-

ried, calm and sober manner, with careful checks along the wayto ensure that a bloodbath does not occur. We all want to avoidanother Hungerford or Dunblane. There would even be a casefor reversing this policy at any stage if it was clearly and con-clusively demonstrated that it led to an increase in armed crime.

Certainly cases where legal firearms owners use their weaponsin self-defence should be carefully studied, and the Armystraining an be changed where necessary in the light of what is

learned.

An individual who uses his firearm in an irresponsible or crimi-nal manner, or for whom there is reason to believe he is un-suited to own a firearm, would have his firearm certificaterevoked and be required to surrender his weapon. Neverthelessthe certificate holder would still enjoy the right of appeal to thecourts against revocation which exists under current firearmslegislation. Since the Dunblane massacre, the Central ScotlandPolice have been criticised for failing to revoke Hamiltons

firearms certificates, indeed for granting him more certificates,in spite of written and oral representations from members of thepublic who complained about his activities at boys clubs. Yethad they revoked those certificates, Hamilton could have ap-

pealed in the courts and might well have won. Removing theprotection of the right of appeal against police decisions wouldopen the door to vindictive slanders against individuals beingused to deprive them of the right to own guns without any legal

defence.

NEW ZEALAND DEREGULATES FIREARMS

The general trend throughout the world since the first world war

has been for ever greater legal restrictions on firearms owner-ship. The exception has been New Zealand. Under the ArmsAct 1920, every gun in New Zealand had to registered with thepolice. Carrying a handgun without a licence was outlawed. Inthe early 1980s, the police thought that gun registration require-ments were taking up too much of their time. Senior-SergeantJones, a police spokesman, said that Whatever law you have, ifcriminals want to commit a crime with a gun, they will get a

gun.33 An official police report stated that It is unlikely thatfirearms registration controls firearms use in domestic vi-olence.34 The police found no correlation between the numberof guns and the number of crimes. After employing Superin-

tendent Greenwood as a consultant, the police therefore lobbiedthe government for a change in the law in the direction of thederegulation of firearms. This is the opposite approach fromthat of the British police, whose organisations have continually

lobbied for ever stricter firearms control since the ShepherdsBush massacre of 1966, in which three policemen were mur-dered by a criminal gang using illegally-owned handguns.

Under the Arms Act 1983, New Zealanders who wished to pur-chase rifles or shotguns had to apply for a licence and pass a

safety test. Once granted the licence, these persons could buyunlimited numbers of rifles and shotguns for the rest of theirlives; none of the gun purchases needed to be registered. Allowners of long guns had to obtain a certificate. Under the 1983

Act, licences shall be issued to any person over sixteen yearsof age who, at the discretion of the police, is considered a fitand proper person to be in possession of a firearm or airgun.The police have the power to revoke the license of any person

they no longer consider to be fit and proper.35 Private transfersof firearms are legal. It is the sellers responsibility to ensurethat the buyer is legally qualified. Under the act, no longerwould an individual permit be required to buy a box of car-

tridges. The same act re-legalised the ownership of semi-auto-matic handguns. Licences for handguns were only granted togun club members and collectors. One pro-gun leader rejoicedat a significant advance, and stated that, despite certain restric-tions, New Zealanders had greater freedom now than manyU.S. states.36 Handguns, however, are still heavily restricted,

and represent only one percent of the total gun stock. InspectorJohn Meads, national firearms co-ordinator at police headquar-

ters in Wellington, praised the system of one-time licensing offirearms as enlightened legislation and superior to that in otherWestern countries.36 In 1989, after a US ban on the import ofcertain self-loading rifles, and the banning of semi-automatic

rifles in the UK, the New Zealand police banned the import of

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some semi-automatics and limited the import of some others tofive-unit lots. Inspector Meads said that

Semi-automatic weapons have been on sale in New Zealandfor many years. Their owners are generally responsible

people whose fitness to purchase firearms has been estab-lished by the police.37

Unfortunately, in 1989, David Gray, who owned a total of sevenlegal guns, including two semi-automatic rifles, went berserk in

Aramoana, on the South Island. First he burned down hisneighbours house, killing two 11-year-old girls. When theneighbour returned, Gray shot him dead and wounded the neigh-bours nine-year-old daughter. Then he shot dead a six-year-oldchild, as well as a man and wife and their six-year-old daughter,and wounded the couples four-year-old daughter in the ab-domen. Then he killed a police sergeant who arrived on thescene, as well as others who arrived on the scene. Gray wasthen besieged in his home by armed police officers, and shot

dead as he bolted from the house with a Norinco 84(s) 5.56mmsemi-automatic rifle. All told, 13 people were killed. As in Bri-tain after the Hungerford massacre, there were demands for theprohibition of semi-automatic rifles as a result. Nevertheless,even after the Aramoana massacre, the government did not com-

pletely ban semi-automatic rifles, but simply introduced the re-quirement for a special licence for owning one which hadmilitary configuration. Asked why the law did not provide for

the confiscation of legally-owned military semi-automatics,the minister of police said, I take my advice from the police. 38

The New Zealand police knew that the simplistic solution ofbanning semi-automatic military rifles would not solve anyproblems. Superintendent Greenwood had clearly demonstrated

to them that such a measure would simply fuel the black market.Unfortunately, massacres do happen. But they are caused by themind of the individual concerned, not by the weapon he orsometimes she uses. Most serial killers do not use firearms,and outlawing the weapon they use would not make any dif-

ference. When, for instance, Dennis Nilsen, the StockwellStrangler murdered some 16 young men by strangling them todeath with steel wires, there was no demand for the banning of

steel wires. Such a measure would have entirely missed thepoint. Of course one has to take reasonable precautions to pre-vent this type of person from obtaining firearms. But in Britainthere seems to be a collective national determination to refuse to

face facts and consider such enlightened policies.

Almost certainly the Firearms (Amendment) Act will becomelaw. Partly as a result, the criminal ownership and use offirearms will increase. Nothing will be achieved except for thevirtual destruction of an ancient freedom. And it is highly un-likely that once gone, the freedom to own heavy-calibre hand-guns will be restored in the foreseeable future.

A PLATONIC APPROACH TO LIBERTARIANISM

In The Republic, that founding work in the field of politicalphilosophy, Plato described what he considered to be the philos-ophical ideal of the city-state, the sort of society which onecould achieve with ideal people in ideal conditions. He also

wrote The Laws, a sequel in which he described the bestpossible form of political organisation that was available withthe limitations of real people in the real world. As every readerof the first volume of the late Sir Karl Poppers The Open So-

ciety and Its Enemies will be aware, Platos legacy to posterityhas been less than entirely advantageous towards individual lib-erty. Nevertheless, nobody would dispute that the old fellow

knew a thing or two about philosophy. We can at least borrowthis philosophical method from the Master, and allow ourselvestwo different approaches to the questions of firearms ownershipfor libertarians.

The first is that in an ideal society, with individuals of the high-est character, weapons of all sorts could be freely bought and

sold. Of course, the existence of private property rights in such

a society would mean that owners of, say, roads, shoppingcentres and bars would be entitled to forbid people from carry-ing guns on their property. You might also have private housing

estates where one of the rules is that those buying property theremay not keep firearms in their homes. This abstract philosophi-cal ideal would be a pure anarcho-capitalist society, in which thestate had entirely disappeared and even defence, courts andpolice forces would exist on a free-market basis. It is a per-fectly legitimate philosophical exercise to discuss how such a

system might conceivably work in ideal conditions, and to hopethat possibly at some time in the remote future, it is not entirely

out of the question that this philosophical ideal might actuallybe realised in the real world in some place or other.

The second approach is to propose the best available method ofenhancing freedom within the actual political circumstances ofthe day, which may be far from ideal from the libertarian point

of view. In such a context, one has to propose policies thatmight conceivably gain acceptance from politicians, the publicand the police, and have a demonstrable net benefit. This is thereason why I have advocated a gradual and unhurried approach,

the first aim of which is to get as many as possible of the illegalguns owned by otherwise law-abiding people to be accepted

legally within the existing certificate system, the second ofwhich is to extend the right to own non-lethal weapons for self-

defence purposes, and finally to allow the phased extension ofthe right to possess firearms for self-defence purposes, in themost cautious manner, having regard to legitimate concernsabout the problem of undesirable people getting firearms andmisusing them. I would like to see more, rather than less, dis-cussion as to how this might be achieved, and the possiblebenefits and problems inherent in it. We have to win the co-operation of the authorities, public opinion, the police and the

media, and to work entirely within the law, while reserving theright to express disagreement with the law. Strategies based ondisobeying the law, which are advocated in the United States bysome of the more militant defenders of the right to bear arms,

would be entirely counter-productive in the different climate inBritain, and must be rejected. I would like to see careful studiesof the actual results in the real world of a policy of gradual de-regulation before proceeding further. One might regard the right

to own a gun as to be one which is conditional on the proof ofthe persons capacity for safe, responsible and lawful use of it.There might even be a law prohibiting people from taking theirguns out of their homes, except with special permission, or for a

sporting event. Automatic weapons, such as sub-machine guns,might still be classified as prohibited weapons and excludedfrom civilian ownership.

Indeed, this dual approach to achieving libertarian goals mayhave many applications in areas other than firearms law. For

example, the welfare state is of course a clear breach of thelibertarian approach to individualism and private property rights.Nevertheless, the immediate abolition of all state welfare wouldarguably be a greater violation of individual rights than its main-

tenance. After all, we have all paid high taxes and national in-surance contributions in order to finance the welfare state, andmany elderly people, for instance, are dependent upon the statewelfare services they have already paid for several times over

through their taxes. To simply eliminate all state welfare over-night would be a massive confiscation of their private propertyrights. The way to proceed with the welfare state, I suggest,should be a gradual process of reform aimed at giving individ-uals greater control over its institutions, and setting up privateand voluntary welfare provision side-by-side with the state sys-

tem. Finally you could phase out most or all of the welfarestate, and ensure that nobody suffers at any point through ab-

sence of welfare provision.

Similarly, with immigration, a literal application of abstractlibertarian principles would be the abolition of all immigrationcontrols. Yet this could conceivably prove more harmful to lib-

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erty than the maintenance of such controls. For example, thereare large numbers of Muslim fundamentalists in Britain who areextremely hostile to the concept of individual liberty, who want

to turn Britain into a Muslim fundamentalist state and who, forexample, have aggressively demanded and promised to carryout the execution of Salman Rushdie for writing a novel ofwhich the Ayatollah Khomeini disapproved. Now theres a manwho might find a gun for self-defence rather useful. Some ofthe more extreme Muslim fundamentalists openly advocate the

killing of Jews. A strong case could be made for keeping suchpeople out of the UK, and confining immigration to those indi-

viduals, regardless of ethnic or national origin or personal relig-ious belief, who are prepared to live according to the traditionsof individual liberty and tolerance which have always been afeature of British life. Those who wish to live in a Muslim fun-damentalist state are free to apply to emigrate to Iran, SaudiArabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan or some other country more totheir taste. That is a more realistic interpretation of individualfreedom of choice than the right of millions of organised Mus-

lim fundamentalists to emigrate to the UK with the intention ofestablishing an Islamic state by sheer force of numbers. Insofaras immigration can have a valuable role in adding to the numberof entrepreneurs, inventors and others who have something

beneficial to offer the UK, and are willing to live according toBritish traditions, it can be defended. Otherwise, it may have aharmful effect on freedom to the point of destroying it.

The point is that, much as Objectivists and others might dis-agree, that there is a distinction between abstract libertarianprinciples and how those principles might be introduced in prac-tical application in the immediate political situation. I am awarethat the approach to firearms law which I have proposed islikely to cause outrage both among the most extreme liberta-

rians, who would like to see the immediate legal availability ofsub-machine guns, exploding bullets, flame-throwers and ba-zookas to every discharged psychopath and teenage hoodlumwithout a licence at every street corner 24 hours a day, and even

more to the advocates of a handgun ban or even defenders of thepresent restrictive legislation under the Firearms (Amendment)Act 1988 and subsequent laws and regulations. Unfortunately,there are genuine problems with both these points of view. One

wishes to protect the right of innocent people such as thosechildren and their teacher at Dunblane not to be shot. That is areasonable and legitimate concern which must be adequately ad-dressed. One also needs to protect the rights of law-abiding

people to protect themselves against violent crime. One is re-minded of a case several years ago when three men broke intothe home of a 54-year-old Greek Cypriot lady living in London.Her life savings of 900 were hidden in her brassiere. The mentortured her for several hours in the most horrifying ways, oneof which was the firing of an air pistol up her nostril, causingthe loss of the sight of one eye. Nevertheless, she never revealedthe location of the money, which was all she had in the world.

I for one refuse to reject the restoration of the principle of the

right of such individuals as this lady to lawfully own a firearmfor self-defence, although as I have indicated above, I wouldfavour the most cautious, gradual and responsible approach tothe implementation of that principle. The problem with the

mainstream gun lobby is that they have entirely repudiated theself-defence argument, and as a result are now losing the right toown heavy-calibre handguns as a result. The next step will bethe demand to ban .22 calibre pistols, which the Labour opposi-tion have promised to do if they win the forthcoming generalelection. Some of the anti-gun campaigners are quite open

about their demand to eventually outlaw even rifles and shot-guns. Thus an ancient freedom will have been completely extin-

guished. The prospects are not good for a nation which destroysits freedoms in this way.

NOTES

1. Richard Munday and Jan A. Stevenson (editors), Guns and Violence,Piedmont Publishing, Brightlingsea, Essex, 1996, pp. 353, 354, 357.

2. Ibid, pp. 296-297.

3. Ibid, p. 284.

4. David B. Kopel, The Samurai, the Mountie and the Cowboy,Prometheus Books/Cato Institute, Buffalo, New York, 1992, p. 123,n201.

5. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd, first published 1897, 1903 translation,

unnamed translator, T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1903, p. 42.

6. Ibid, p. 59.

7. Ibid, pp. 74, 143.

8. Kopel, op cit, pp. 388-389. The quotation is from NicholasHumphreys foreword to E. P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution andPunishment of Animals, first published 1906, Faber and Faber, London,1988, p. xxvi.

9. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form, translated by Jay Leyda, Harcourt, Braceand World, New York, 1949, pp. 132, 143, 144.

10. For example, Frederick Wilkinson, Guns, Hamlyn Publishing, London,1973; Ian V. Hogg and John Batchelor, The Complete Handgun, firstpublished 1979, Peerage Books, London, 1984; and Robert Adam,

Modern Handguns, Apple Press/Quintet, London, 1989, from each ofwhich the following examples are taken.

11. Quoted in Colin Greenwood, Firearms Control, Routledge and KeganPaul, London, 1972, p. 20.

12. Quoted in ibid, pp. 20-21.

13. Ibid, p. 21.

14. Ibid, pp. 27-28.

15. Munday and Stevenson (editors), op cit, p. 235, and Duncan Campbell,The Underworld, BBC Books, London, 1994, pp. 19-20.

16. Quoted in Times, Car 96 section, 9th September 1996, p. 7.

17. Quoted in Geoffrey Pearson,Hooligan, Macmillan Education, London,1983, pp. 103-104.

18. Munday and Stevenson (editors), op cit, p. 58.

19. Ibid, p. 133.

20. Ibid, p. 133, n100.

21. Greenwood, op cit, pp. 243-244.22. Kopel, op cit, pp. 327-328.

23. Munday and Stevenson, op cit, p. 51.

24. Greenwood, op cit, p. 4.

25. Company of Freemen, The Real Reason for Gun Ownership, leafletreproduced in Loompanics Unlimited, Loompanics Greatest Hits,Loompanics Unlimited, Port Townsend, Washington, 1990, pp. 188-190.

26. In the early 1960s, some members of the National Socialist Movementwho included John Tyndall, who became chairman of the NationalFront in the 1970s and is now leader of the British National Party, wereimprisoned when they formed the paramilitary Spearhead group, eventhough the organisation had not actually used violence. Their purposeswere, of course, irreconcilably opposed, at the most fundamentalphilosophical level, to those of libertarianism.

27. Interview with Aaron Zelman inAmerican Survival Guide, November1990, reproduced in Michael Hoy (editor), Loompanics Golden

Records, Loompanics Unlimited, Port Townsend, Washington, 1993,pp. 35, 37.

28. David B. Kopel, Trust the People, Cato Institute Policy Analysis 109,Washington, DC, 1988, p. 18.

29. Greenwood, op cit, pp. 246-248, 253-254.

30. Quoted in Munday and Stevenson (editors), op cit, p. 117.

31. Ibid, pp. 121, 123.

32. Quoted in Kopel, The Samurai, the Mountie and the Cowboy, op cit,p. 238.

33. Quoted in ibid, p. 238.






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Documents

Gns David Botsford1