Outside gun country

By Herb Greer

I have lived in the United Kingdom for some decades –
the whole of my adult life. As an American from Santa
Fe, I have often been involved in what might be called
heated discussions about the “gun problem” in the United
States.

My British friends are bemused and sometimes quite
upset at my insistence on defending the private
possession of guns. I grew up in a house where weapons
were taboo, but spent much of my childhood next door,
where my grandfather — once mayor of Santa Fe — kept
a small arsenal in his bedroom: a Colt .45, several
shotguns of various gauges, a Springfield rifle and a
couple of .22 pistols. By the time I was nine, I had fired
the Colt, and knew how to use the other weapons with
some accuracy. A major part of my family education
involved respect for weapons and what they could do.

Andrew Nagorski, writing in Newsweek with a tad of
sanctimony recently, wrote a little polemic against
weapons in private hands, saying that “the perspective
from abroad” (he had just returned to the U.S.) might
have “twisted his perspective.” The context made this
seem disingenuous.

The European and especially the British “perspective” is
simply that all guns are bad in private hands. In Britain
handguns and all weapons except shotguns are banned
absolutely. Special permits are needed for shotguns, and
these are not easy to obtain. Unlike America, a private
citizen who defends himself and his property with
seemingly justified deadly force can be tried for murder
and sent down for life, as happened recently — even
though the victim was a career criminal invading the
“killer’s” property at night — a property which had been
burgled before in an area where even the police admit
prevention of such crimes is all but nil.

But there are in fact plenty of guns about. In Britain
criminals now use armed force as a matter of routine. In
Manchester where I live, there have been drive-by
shootings in the “black” ghetto area called Moss Side,
where teenagers have been known to deploy Uzi
submachine guns. This in a country that has some of the
strictest gun-control laws in the world, and in which the
citizen does not have the constitutional right to bear arms.

In Britain as in America, there have been people who
went off the mental rails and committed massacres
(violating existing gun laws in the process). One of these
psychotic episodes led to the total ban on handguns.
Such killings have moved anti-gun activists in the United
States to demand more “action” on guns. But of course –
I say again — those who committed these killings violated
laws that were already in place. There are two lessons in
this which activists have failed to learn, totally: first, laws
do not prevent the sort of killings which have led to cries
for the heavier control of guns or their ban. Such laws
are, furthermore, an insult to the private citizen because
they effectively brand him as a madman who may at any
moment run amok and slaughter his neighbors. Anyone,
and I stress, anyone who is seriously motivated to
commit mass murder with a firearm will not find it difficult
to obtain that weapon, whatever laws are in place; in
Britain and on the continent this has been shown time and
again to be the case.

The real purpose of stricter laws is to create an illusion –
and it is no more than that — of greater safety for the
“innocent” — i.e., those whom the activists wish to bar
(and in Britain, have barred) from possessing weapons at
all. Outside that illusion, in the real world, the innocent
have been deprived of any effective defense against
armed force. The effect of these supposedly life-saving
laws is, then, to control and expose the innocent — not
the criminals who should be controlled. That is the
American perspective that arouses Mr. Nagorski’s
sanctimony. It is based on a common-sense perception
which activists and certain “liberal” politicians are
prepared to ignore — at our peril, not theirs. That is why
these proposed laws are a bad idea.

The second lesson is a simple but sound nostrum from
the legal world: Hard cases make bad law — something
which the more self-righteous activists and play-to-the
gallery politicians in Britain have wiped out of their minds,
and which too many in the United States are happy to
forget. These people are using hard cases — e.g. the
massacres in Dunblane in Britain and Columbine School
in America — to promote laws which are bad for the
simple reason already stated, and make the citizen fair
game for any armed criminal who wants to attack him.

Many Americans like to believe that the British police are
not armed. This is not true. While the ordinary street-beat
constable does not pack heat — except in Ulster, where
Republican terrorism makes it necessary — Special
Response Units are not only heavily armed but willing to
fire on anyone who seems to be using deadly force. Like
all such forces, they make the occasional mistake. But no
one here is stupid enough to demand that their guns be
taken away because of that.

But there is a softer target for the activists: The ordinary
citizen. The most draconian gun-control laws have never
protected him or her from either mad or determined
killers and criminals. And what is the activists’ answer to
that? More of the same draconian laws. As the British
satirical magazine Private Eye might say, “Shome
mishtake, shurely.” In logic and in deadly effect, these
people have been wrong in Britain and they are wrong in
the United States — where, thank God, the ordinary
citizen is, so far, protected from their asininity by the
Constitution.

Herb Greer is a freelance writer and playwright
living in the United Kingdom.