UK: An opinion piece in the Sunday Telegraph today:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/...xml&sSheet=/opinion/2006/02/19/ixopinion.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/...xml&sSheet=/opinion/2006/02/19/ixopinion.html
Outlaw arms and you arm outlaws
(Filed: 19/02/2006)
Strangely enough, no one seems to feel any safer. When the laws on gun ownership were tightened after the Dunblane tragedy in 1996, we kept being told that the whole idea was to prevent such things happening again.
How meaningless those assurances must seem to the family of Rachael Bown, the conscientious police officer whose first words, after being shot by a gangster in -Nottingham last week, were of self-reproach: "I've let everyone down and I didn't get him."
When the Firearms Bill was passing through Parliament, the Sunday Telegraph was a lonely voice railing against the proposed restrictions. A ban, we argued, would have done nothing to prevent the atrocity.
We protested that proscribing guns would affect peaceable citizens, not villains. Indeed, its main effect would be to ensure that criminals came to enjoy a monopoly of firepower.
In the aftermath of the massacre, no one was much minded to listen. Tony Blair made a disgraceful speech, telling Labour activists that opponents of a total ban on pistols somehow cared less than he did about the murdered children.
The tabloids took up the same theme, running a nasty campaign against the few MPs brave enough to argue that pistol-shooting should be allowed to continue in safe, licensed premises.
Gun-owners, who had waited patiently to give evidence to the official inquiry, found that they had been forestalled: by the time Lord Cullen produced his eminently sensible report, all three parties had pledged to go beyond it.
Nearly nine years on, opponents of the ban have been comprehensively vindicated. Gun crime, far from falling, has increased. The only people who have been affected by the legislation are law-abiding shooters.
Handguns have been outlawed, and our Olympic pistol-shooters have been forced to train abroad. Meanwhile, owners of shotguns have found themselves having to wade through a good deal of extra paperwork.
As so often, the full force of the law has fallen upon the respectable bourgeoisie, not upon the villains.
It is easier to go after a parking offender than a money-launderer; easier to prosecute your Auntie Jean for losing her ID card than to stop the suspicious foreigner (who will, in any case, be exempt from having to carry a card if he has been in the UK for less than six months); easier to arrest the farmer who is late renewing his shot-gun licence than to tackle the Yardie - as the horrible case of WPc Bown reminds us.
The Firearms Act was passed for the worst possible reason - not in order to secure a specific objective, but do show how strongly MPs felt about something. Alas, it was only the beginning.
A frightening array of Bills has since been passed on the same premise: laws on religious hatred, police powers, detention without trial and, most recently, identity cards. In each case, the chief purpose is to look tough rather than to achieve anything.
Will we never learn?
'em. If they don't want freedom, fine. We'll take those liberty starved from the UK who want for a better life. But there is a lesson here I believe for everyone in America who believes in liberty.