From: VTGUNS@
To: VTGUNS@
Subject: Dunblane gun law has been failure
Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2001 14:43:02 EST

Gun laws that are directed at honest citizens do not work. Any fool that believes that outlawing handguns will end crime is kidding only those dumber than them.
Criminals will always get what they need and it only takes five minutes with a
hacksaw to turn a rifle or shotgun into a most devastating handgun.

THE TELEGRAPH
Dunblane gun law has been failure, says marksman
By Stephen Robinson
(Filed: 28/12/2001)

PISTOL shooters can recall precisely where they were and what they were
doing when the first news bulletins came through of the Dunblane massacre on
March 13, 1996. They went through phases of shock and horror, then bafflement,
then rage. Rage that a man with a gun licence – one of their own – could have
shot dead 16 children and their teacher.

Just not the same: Michael Gault practises with an airgun
Then the mood changed and competitive shooters, many of them reliable
winners of medals for Britain in international meetings, found they were the
target of tabloid newspaper attacks on Britain’s “gun culture”.

Even when it became clear that Thomas Hamilton had acquired his guns
because of imperfect enforcement of gun laws, rather than inadequate
legislation, the assault on legal gun ownership was redoubled. In the final
inglorious months of the Major administration and with an election looming,
ministers buckled in the face of demands that “something must be done”.

Hamilton, a maniac with paedophile tendencies who lied to the police to
get his gun certificate, was hung around the neck of Britain’s 54,000 pistol
owners, and historic rights to gun ownership were ripped up.

“When Dunblane happened, you just could not argue the case,” says Michael
Gault, a maintenance engineer with the RAF who is also one of Britain’s finest
shooters. “In truth we were sucker-punched: we couldn’t argue with the parents
over the bodies of those children.”

Mr Gault is not bitter, partly because he knows that even his beloved
sport pales into insignificance against the horrors of Dunblane. But the
knee-jerk legislation that followed that tragedy has virtually destroyed a
popular sport as Britain’s competitive shooters begin training for this
summer’s Commonwealth Games.

Since the post-Dunblane handgun bans were enforced, British shooters have
not been allowed to fire a single round in training, even in secure,
meticulously inspected gun clubs.

To train for the Manchester Commonwealth Games shooting events, which are
to be held at Bisley, British competitors must either bear the cost and
inconvenience of going to Switzerland, or practise in Britain with air pistols
that cannot match the feel of a pistol.

Mr Gault, who won four gold medals in the Kuala Lumpur Commonwealth Games,
cuts a rather forlorn figure in the shooting range he has built in the garden
of his Norfolk home as he practises with his airgun. A friendly Swiss dealer
keeps a proper pistol for him, but Mr Gault’s job maintaining Tornado jets
does not lend itself to regular training abroad.

Mr Gault says 90 per cent of competitive shooting is mental strength, and
using the wrong sort of gun does not really help him develop that. But he
practises the deep breathing routines and concentration exercises that
top-level shooters must perfect, meticulously firing lead slugs into the
bull’s-eyes of paper targets.

For British shooters, the final insult has been the Home Office’s refusal
to relax the blanket handgun ban that would enable Mr Gault and others to
train in the months leading up to the summer championship.

Should Mr Gault or any other British shooter triumph at the Games this
summer, the chances are they will be ignored by the media, which tends to
portray competitive shooters as “gun nuts”. This slur is grossly unfair, as
competitive shooters are scrupulous about safety and intolerant of people who
misuse guns in any way.

When Mr Gault came home from Kuala Lumpur in 1998 carrying his four gold
medals, easily the best individual British performance in any sport, his
triumph passed unacknowledged, except for a modest wooden plaque from Dereham
council in Norfolk.

After the horrors of Dunblane, many people might accept the argument for a
ban on handguns if it appeared to work, but the evidence suggests strongly
that it does not.

Colin Greenwood, a retired police officer and leading expert on firearms
law, has argued persuasively that gun control legislation has been an abject
failure.

As Mr Greenwood notes, in the past 20 years, the number of robbery cases
involving shotguns has remained roughly constant, but the use of pistols has
increased fivefold, from around 500 to 2,561.

As the police in any British city acknowledge, handguns have never been
cheaper or easier to obtain on the streets, and the flow of illegal guns has
increased most rapidly since the ban was introduced.

Successive governments have moved inexorably to restrict gun ownership by
law-abiding people while failing to restrict the flow of illegally-held
weapons. Until the 1960s, ownership of shotguns was entirely unregulated. Now,
farmers and sportsmen must often wait for months for shotgun certificates from
police authorities that seem philosophically opposed to gun ownership.

Though it is undeclared, official policy is clearly for back-door banning
of weapons, and it is always easier to punish the law-abiding than curtail the
activities of criminals on the streets.

As Mr Greenwood argues, if Britain’s strict gun laws are designed to
protect the public, a simple glance at gun crime proves they are a “complete
failure”. However, if they are part of a deliberate pattern of “disarming
law-abiding people for motives which remain less than clear, they can be said
to be working well”.

Mr Gault is determined to press on with his training to succeed at the
Manchester Commonwealth Games, despite a touch of arthritis in his shoulder,
and the obstacles his own government has put up for him.

“I take the view that if I press on and keep winning medals,” he said,
“then I chip away a little each time at the government’s ban on my sport.”