The British Gun Closet

“The National Review”
May 14, 2003, 10:20 a.m.
“The British Gun Closet” by David Kopel
Slowly, the country is learning the hard way.

LONDON – When I arrived in London, I expected to find a very depressing
situation for gun rights,
as the formerly robust British right-to-arms is nearing extinction. Yet
there are signs that the public is
waking up to the failure of gun prohibition.

To be sure, the present circumstances in Britain are awful. A world-class
British rifle shooter
explained to me that he never tells ordinary people that he is a marksman,
for fear of their
reaction. British shooters today, like homosexuals in Oklahoma in 1950,
feel so intimidated by
the hostility of the surrounding culture that they must be careful not to
expose themselves,
except to known members of their minority group.

The British government is more abusive than ever to people who use force
for lawful protection,
and as accommodating as ever to violent criminals. The news that two
Britons carried out a terror bombing in Israel has not resulted in calls from
the government or from the “posh,” non-tabloid press for cracking down on the
clerics who incite terrorism. The tabloid Express takes a harder line. The
bombers grew
up in England in a secular, English-speaking, integrated environment, but
then fell under the
influence of hateful clerics in England, so the connection between
terrorist incitement and
terrorist action is clear enough. The civil-liberties merits of tolerating
terrorist clerics is far
outweighed by the massive loss of liberty for non-terrorist citizens that
would follow the nearly
inevitable advent of jihad bombings in Great Britain.

Non-terrorist criminals also continue to get an easy ride from the
government. Some teenagers
who perpetrated an unarmed gang homicide on a random stranger were last
week sentenced to
terms of 2-4 years. The same week, reports the Evening Standard (4/29),
“An evil young killer
who stabbed a complete stranger through the ear with a hunting knife” was
sentenced to seven
years in prison. Meanwhile, the government is introducing a five-year
mandatory minimum for
carrying a gun illegally. So, merely carrying a gun merits a sentence in
the same range as murdering
someone.

Using force to resist a crime seems to trouble the government a great
deal. A businessman who
hit a pair of burglars with a brick was prosecuted and called “an
unmitigated thug” by the
government (Daily Mail, 5/1). Yet the jury acquitted the victim, since
British jurors do retain the right to acquit a morally innocent defendant who
has technically violated the law.

A masked man with a cape and a mask who was on his way to a costume party
intervened to save
someone who was being beaten by a gang of thugs. The local police
spokesman was very
unhappy with the man’s altruism, since only the police are supposed to
resist
criminals (Daily Mail, 5/3).

A gun “amnesty” has resulted in the surrender of about 25,000 arms, and
was proclaimed a great
triumph by the government. Civil-libertarian Stephen Robinson noted in the
Telegraph: “The
police were strangely reluctant to specify how many of the guns were
handed over in inner city
areas, fueling the suspicion that many of the weapons were family
heirlooms. . . . Many appear to
have been handed in by the elderly and law-abiding who fear becoming
criminalized in a society
in which private gun ownership is slowly being outlawed.”

The gun-prohibition lobbies and their many government and media allies,
not sated by the
near-destruction of mainstream firearms sports, are now setting their
sights on air guns and
replica firearms. Home Minister David Blunkett wants to ban public
possession, whereas
London mayor Ken Livingston is pushing total prohibition of replica guns.
A teacher was fired
for allowing a student to bring a replica gun to school as part of a
science exhibit.

Overall, Britain now suffers from a higher violent crime rate than the
U.S., and has reverted to
its medieval status of being substantially more dangerous than most of the
European continent.
(Continental gun laws are generally more repressive than in the U.S., but
moreliberal than in England.)
The lesson: More gun bans, more violent crime.

The 1997 extermination of Britain’s pitiful minority of handgun target
shooters did not directly increase crime, since existing laws made it
impossible for a lawful handgun owner (or any other lawful gun
owner) to use a firearm for self-defense. Rather, the handgun confiscation
of 1997 was the continuation
of a trend that began in the 1950s that has resulted in the destruction of
the law-abiding gun
culture, and the suppression of every form of non-government use of force
against criminals. As a result, criminal violence and a criminal gun
culture are 50 times more prevalent than they were in the early
20th century, when there were no antigun laws, and no laws against the use
of reasonable force against violent criminals.

And yet there are signs that the public is finally awakening to the fact
that the gun-prohibition
movement can deliver hatred and repression, but comes up very short on
public safety.
The 1997 handgun ban is perceived by many as a failure, as gun crime has
risen substantially
since then.

An April 29 poll in the Birmingham Post reported that 68 percent of
Britons believe it should
be legal for householders to shoot a burglar or other criminal invader.
Twenty-two percent of Britons
said that they would carry a handgun for protection, if they legally
could. Only 7 percent of Londoners would exercise that choice compared with 55
percent in Yorkshire.

Although many recognize the failure of gun control, this does not mean
that they are against licensing, registration, and background checks. But it
does mean that Britons are beginning to understand that a nation
without legal guns is a nation at the mercy of gangs and criminals.

Peter Hitchens has just come out with a major new book, A Brief History of
Crime: The Decline of Order, Justice, and Liberty in England. Hitchens, a
columnist for the Sunday Mail, argues that British governments have helped
cause the tremendous increase in crime over past decades by refusing to
punish criminals strictly, and by making excuses for criminals. As crime has
soared, the government has responded by cracking down on the law-abiding
population and on civil liberties. The right to silence has been abolished,
the right to jury trial has been restricted, surveillance cameras are
pervasive, and wiretaps and e-mail intercepts are skyrocketing. Hitchens devotes a
chapter to the failed campaign against guns, explaining how the
deprivation of the means of self-defense causes more crime.

Of course, there’s a long way to go between the beginning of popular
recognition of a problem and the repeal of the government policies that caused
the problem. But the British do appear to be making the
tentative first steps in the right direction, and that’s a notable change
from last decade.