Op-ed from London Daily Telegraph, Tuesday.
Gunmen are criminal – not guns Philip Johnston
Consider this. A madman with a grudge against society deliberately drives his high-powered car into a bus queue, killing a dozen people and himself in the process. Would you ban all cars? Would you, perhaps, prohibit the make of car with which he carried out the atrocity? Would you shut down
orts associated with the car and put the shops that sell it out If business, compensating the owners with a sum less than the value of the stock?
The answer to each of these propositions; one would guess, no. But that is precisely what .happened to thousands of gun owners and shooting businesses after the appalling murders perpetrated by Thomas Hamilton in Dunblane eight ears ago.
In the aftermath of that ghastly event, the political climate made restrictions on handguns impossible to resist. Oddly, answering questions in the Commons last week, Tony Blair imagined that it was all his doing, telling MPs: Introducing that ban was one of the first things this government did. We did it with a great deal of opposition from the [Conservatives].â€
In fact, a ban on high-calibre handguns was implemented by Michael Howard when he was Home Secretary before Mr Blair took office, though Labour extended its scope to cover low calibre weapons, making prohibition total.
The consequences of the ban were that hundreds of thousands of legally held weapons were outlawed and had to be handed over to the police. Target shooters lost their sport and those competing in this summer's Olympics must practise abroad. Small businesses went to the wall and a lengthy wrangle took place over compensation, with owners complaining to this day that they did not receive the amount due for the executive seizure of their possessions.
The gun lobby in Britain, unlike that in America, has few friends. Only a minority owns guns for sport. To most people, weapons are anathema and there was, undoubtedly, popular support for a ban. Yet, in a democracy, the liberties of minorities are not to be lightly discarded nor their opinions to be gratuitously traduced.
Last week, Patrick Mercer, a Conservative MP, discovered just how intolerant anti-gun campaigners can be when he ventured to suggest that if the intention of banning handguns was to reduce the number of weapons in criminal hands then it had patently failed. Since Dunblane, the number of offences involving illegally held handguns has doubled in England and Wales. The most recent Home Office figures show that in 1996, there were 3,347 crimes in which a handgun was used. The numbers fell in 1997 to 2,636 but rose to 5,871: by March 2002. In England and Wales, handgun crime is now higher than at any. time for 10 years, though there has been a fall in Scotland.
On the basis of this evidence, Mr Mercer observed, not unreasonably, that the ban had ."no effect on gun crime." He also suggested that children in rural communities should be taught, as he had been as a youngster, how to use "non lethal" weapons such as air rifles as a prelude to the safe use of shotguns - which remain legal, after all- in later life.
The response to these fairly innocuous musings was truly breathtaking. Mr Mercer's comments were denounced as "offensive, crass and appalling" by a group called Mothers Against Murder and Aggression, as though the MP were advocating either. Others demanded that he be sacked from the Tory front bench and have the party whip withdrawn. For good measure, he was pilloried for the insensitive timing of his remarks, just ahead of last Saturday's anniversary of the Dunblane massacre.
What became clear from this reaction was that some people are not going to rest until all remaining guns are removed from private hands, and gun owners fear there are some in . the Government who feel the same way.
Almost without fanfare, a new law came into force in January banning unlicensed ownership of a gas-powered airgun known as a Brocock, owned perfectly' legally for many years by around 75,000 people. If they remain in possession of this gun by May 1 without having obtained a firearms licence, they will face a mandatory five years in jail.
Shooting groups say the Home Office has done little to publicise the existence of this law; the British Association for Shooting and Conservation received two posters with which to remind its 120,000 members. Owners who remain ignorant of this new law could find themselves locked away.
The reason for the restriction is that the Brocock can be converted to fire live ammunition, something criminals will no doubt continue to do even when those who would never dream of using the weapon for any nefarious purpose have been incarcerated.
Furthermore, the Home Office is about to embark on another review of firearms legislation, presumably with the intention of tightening the law still further on possession of air rifles and shotguns. We have yet to see any proposals but a consultation paper is due to be published shortly.
The shooting community fears that the Home Office intends to force 600,000 shotgun owners to obtain a firearms licence whose provisions are far more restrictive and require a positive case to be' made out for ownership.
The recent, and largely. unsung, abolition of the Firearms Consultative Committee, which advised the Home Office on legislation, has left shooters without any forum in which to argue their case and they fear another assault on their sport and way of life in order that the Government can be seen to be "doing something" about guns to cover up its failure to curb violent crime.
When all is said and done, it is not the gun, any more than the car, that is capable of an evil act; it is the user.
Those who criticised Mr Mercer for failing to understand the difference between a gun and a car, should ask themselves this question: do, they know the difference, between a criminal and a law-abiding citizen?
philip
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