From: meyers@leonardo.rtp.dg.com (Bill Meyers)
Subject: Re: DATELINE: Bush fucks up!
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 92 19:17:14 GMT
Organization: N/I

In article <1992Aug29.174944.20114@CSD-NewsHost.Stanford.EDU> andy@SAIL.Stanford.EDU (Andy Freeman) writes:
[ ... ]
>Remember, out of every 100 guns in the US, one or two are owned/used
>by criminals.  Getting rid of 90 of those guns is unlikely to provide
>any benefit, because it will get rid of the wrong guns.  That's why
>this approach to gun control has NEVER worked in the US or anywhere
>else.

BTW, "getting rid of 90" out of 100 would be wildly successful, even
compared to law-abiding Europe.  (Not to mention Kalifornia or N.J.)
Cf. the section entitled "Firearms Control" in the following old post:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
>Path: dg-rtp!rock!mcnc!gatech!ncar!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!linac!att!cbfsb!cbnewsc!rats
>From: rats@cbnewsc.cb.att.com (Morris the Cat)
>Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns
>Subject: Civilian Possession of Military Firearms
>Keywords: Repost of Ipser article
>Message-ID: <1991Jul22.185301.16240@cbnewsc.cb.att.com>
>Date: 22 Jul 91 18:53:01 GMT
>Distribution: usa
>Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
>Lines: 305
>
>
>                Civilian Possession of Military Firearms
>                        by Richard A. I. Munday
>                           UK Handgunner
>                           Jan-Feb 1988
>
>      In the wake of the Hungerford killings, there have been repeated demands
>   in the press for a revision of British gun laws, and attention has been
>   particularly focused on the private possession of "military-type" weapons.
>   It has been variously asserted that semi-automatic rifles are "particularly
>   deadly" and should therefore be banned, that guns "designed for killing
>   people" are (on an unstated theoretical basis of material determinism) a
>   threat to society; that one can and should distinguish the "legitimate
>   sporting" use of firearms from marksmanship with military weapons; that
>   military firearms should be banned regardless of sporting use, because
>   "it is hard to see that any good at all is served" in allowing anyone
>   to possess them.
>      I shall address the first of the above points only briefly, as it is
>   simply a technical question for which the necessary facts are readily
>   available elsewhere, and concentrate on the further issues as they have
>   been illuminated through my historical research and comparative studies
>   in Europe and the United States.
>
>                        Firearms Technical Aspects
>      The scale of the Hungerford killings, combined with the imposing 
>   cosmetics of the Kalashnikov, have directed media attention to a firepower
>   question which was of dubious moral validity and of no practical relevance.
>   It was a matter of hours before armed police arrived in Hungerford and 
>   actually "contained" Ryan: in that period he could have caused havoc with
>   any weapon.  Armed with a single shot rifle from the Zulu wars, he could
>   have fired in excess of twelve shots a minute, and more still had he chosen
>   an ordinary double-barrelled shotgun.  The higher theoretical rate of fire
>   of a semi-automatic rifle could only have been of any practical relevance
>   in the military context of short-range combat against multiple armed
>   opponents; directed against unarmed civilians it was immaterial.
>
>                   The Target Shooting Movement in Britain
>      From their inception, the target shooting sports in Britain were geared
>   specifically to the use of military small arms, and to this day the prime
>   constitutional aim of the national associations and Home Office approved
>   rifle clubs remains service to the defence of the realm.  The Secretary
>   of State for War became the first president of the National Rifle
>   Associaton in 1859, and he declared that its object was to channel sporting
>   enthusiasm to train and maintain a nation of riflemen.  For the next half
>   century, a quater of a million Rifle Volunteers were under arms even from
>   former Chartist strongholds, just eleven years after the 1848 uprising,
>   and though later Victorian Britain experienced a series of industrial and
>   social disturbances in which even the Household Calvary were called on 
>   to charge rioters in London, the possession of arms by the rifle movement
>   occassioned no problems.  The private ownership of firearms retained
>   unrestricted by law, and in 1900 the Conservative Prime Minister, Lord
>   Salisbury, said that he would laud the day when there was a rifle in every
>   cottage in England.
>      It was the goal of universal civilian training in marksmanship which 
>   also inspired the subsequent smallbre shooting movement.  The .22 rifle,
>   protrayed recently in the press as the archtypal "purely sporting" firearm,
>   was seen in urban Edwardian Britain as the prime tool of military training.
>   At the same time, NRA service rifle marksmanship was directed by Lord
>   Roberts towards the modern concept of "combat shooting": rapid and snap
>   shooting on moving and disappearing targets.  In the years before World
>   War I, every town, and villages of any size, had a rifle club.  The final
>   military success of the movement may be guaged from the effectiveness of 
>   the Territorial Force in 1914.
>      The concept of target shooting as a pure sport does not begin to emerge
>   until after the First World War; indeed, Britain held aloof from the early
>   development of international shooting competition because it was considered
>   to be too abstracted from the military function of marksmanship.  But after
>   the Great War, the military and civilian domains were segregated.  The 
>   militia was allowed to lapse and Britain retained only a small Regular
>   Army and a professionalized Territorial Army; and with demobilization and
>   the example of the European revolutions of 1917-19, the concept of an
>   armed citizenry was regarded for the first time as a potential threat to
>   the security of the state, rather than as a contribution to its strength
>   and stability.  The possession of firearms was restricted by legislation
>   in 1920.
>      In the 1930's the government recognized the need once again for a third-
>   line defensive force, but failed to build upon the civilian sporting
>   enthusiams which had rightly been recognized becore World War I.  The 
>   "Royal Defence Corps" (whose terms of service were akin to the present 
>   government's Home Service Force) was introduced in 1934 but failed to
>   recruit, as did its 1936 successor, the "National Defence Companies,
>   Territorial Army".  At the same time, instead of reviving the military
>   tradition of the shooting sports around which the old Volunteer movement
>   had revolved, the government held a series of amnesties for the surrender
>   of privately held firearms.  Some 39,000 rifles and pistols were turned
>   in; the only measurable result was in 1940, when there were that number
>   fewer guns in circulation with which to arm the Home Guard.  Unable to meet
>   the wartime demand for small arms, the government was forced to advertise
>   in American newspapers for the donation of privately owned firearms.  It 
>   was helped in this by a variety of ad hoc anglophile organisations and
>   the NRA of America, which alone collected more than 7,000 guns for shipment
>   to Britain.  At home, the Secretary of State for Wars was still asking 
>   owners of automatic pistols to donate or sell their weapons for military
>   service as late as March, 1945.
>      Postwar, the Home Guard was dissolved, and civilian marksmanship 
>   disregarded from a military standpoint.  Shooting was justified simply on
>   the grounds of being a "legitimate sport," which was measured against an
>   assumed liability of such firearms ownership to public security.
>
>                        Recent Military Considerations
>      A combination of pressures on the organization of defence have recently
>   renewed interest in the exploitation of military resources latent within
>   civil society, particularly in terms of personnel.  On the one hand there
>   has been increasing pressure to reallocate the major "static" element of 
>   the defence budget, that devoted to manpower, towards the rapidly escalating
>   costs of military hardware or face material obsolescence.  On the other
>   hand, increased NATO emphasis on conventional forces has put a premium on
>   troop strength.
>      In Britain, a group chaired since 1981 by Lord Hill-Norton has urged the
>   formation of a nationwide home guard, patterned after the present Danish
>   model.  The new home guard would take over security and administrative 
>   duties at a time of mobilization, releasing Regular and TA forces for 
>   combat service, and would provide a national "watch and ward".
>      Over the past five years, the government has acknowledged the threat to
>   home security posed by Spetsnaz sabotage, but Hill-Norton's attempts to
>   increase home forces have been totally inadequate in scale.  Home defence
>   personnel remain fewer than the police, and necessrily limited to the
>   protection of a small number of "key points".  The whole concept of "key
>   point" defence has been criticized as being outmoded: a country so 
>   technoligically dependent as modern Britain could be disrupted by striking
>   at a myriad of secondary, unprotected targets.
>      Providing a comprehensive national guard is unicersally recognized as
>   beyond the scope of Britain's present force structures.  The high level
>   for the training commitment required by the TA has already produced
>   personnel retention problems: in some units turnover is as high as 40%.
>   In part, the government's Home Service Force scheme has just made good
>   TA losses; but even the HSF also remained prohibitively expensive.
>      The Defence Begins at Home group advocated the creation of a 700,000-
>   strong home guard, which in 1983, was calculated to cost L120 million
>   (as opposed to an increase in the TA of only 11,000 announced at that time,
>   costing L410 million).  Proportionally, this home guard would have been
>   of equivalent strength to the old Rifle Volunteers, and the rifle clubs
>   were seen once again as the natural recruiting ground where the training
>   burden could be translated into the cultivation of sporting enthusiam.
>
>              Service Weapons and Civilian Marksmanship Abroad
>      Whilst the possession of firearms in the Soviet Union is severly 
>   regulated (I have not yet attempted to access illegal ownership of arms 
>   there), civilian marksmanship is lavashly funded by the state, principally
>   throgh the paramilitary sports organizations, DOSAAF.  Similar arrangements
>   exist in other Warsaw Pact countries, e.g. the Gellschaft fur Sport und
>   Technik in East Germany, modelled on the paramilitary sports organization
>   of the Third Reich SA.
>      In the United States, civilian marksmanship with military small arms
>   has been directly sponsored by the government since the formation of the
>   National Board for the Promotion of Rifle Practice in 1903.  In 1965, the
>   U.S. Department of the Army commissioned the industrial and management 
>   research firm, Arthur D. Little, Incorporated, to study whether continued
>   funding of the NBPRP was justified.  The Little Report subsequently
>   recommended not only its maintenance, but that the scale of its programs
>   should be extended.
>      Through its implementing agency, the Directorate of Civilian 
>   Marksmanship, the NBPRP supplies military small arms to rifle clubs, and
>   sells surplus M1 semi-automatic service rifles directly to individuals.
>   Formerly these sales were restricted to members of the NRA (currently
>   some three million strong), but the terms were subsequently redefined
>   to encompass any shooter active in high-power rifle competition.  The
>   Little Report stated that its enquiries with the government, FBI and police
>   agencies had "failed to uncover a single incident where DCM arms have
>   been used in crimes of violence."
>      In Western Europe, the Scandanavian countries and Switzerland most
>   closely represent today the old service-oriented shooting tradition of
>   Britain:
>      Denmark has a higher level of private firearms ownerhip than the
>   United States.  It also maintains a 75,200-strong Home Guard, which was
>   formerly established in 1948 on the British model.  Like Lord Hill-Norton's
>   committee in Britain, the Danish government asserted that "key point"
>   defence was no longer adequate, and they further considered a Home Guard
>   to be politically a stabilizing influence.
>      The Home Guard has to provide cover during Denmark's mobilization, and
>   its members are expected to be ready for service within an hour: the 
>   principal arms are a semi-automatic version of the German G3 assault rifle,
>   and 9mm submachine guns.  In twenty-five years, a total of thirteen
>   homicides have been attributed to the 60,000 Home Guard weapons in
>   circulation.
>      Norway has a Home Guard strength of 79,700.  Arms and ammunition are
>   once again kept at home, and the standard weapon is a version of the
>   G3 assult rifle capable of fully automatic fire.  Criminal and other 
>   misuse of these firearms is reported to be negligable.
>      A national rifle association in Sweden was formed in 1860 with the
>   same military objectives as its contemporary in Britain, and the Swedish
>   government has continued actively to promote the shooting organizations
>   through to the present day, when their membership is around a quarter-
>   million.  Sweden also has a 120,000-strong Home Guard, whose members
>   keep their service rifles and submachine guns, together with ammunition,
>   at home.  Once again, Sweden reports that misuse of these privately
>   stored weapons is negligable.
>      It was the example of the rifle movement in Switzerland to which the
>   British NRA looked in 1859, and Switzerland remains today the most
>   complete paradigm of the integration of civilian marksmanship into the
>   structure of national defence.  Outside of military service, members
>   of the Swiss militia have to complete an annual obligatory target shooting
>   programme as members of rifle clubs, and there are target ranges
>   maintained in every locality.  The successful cultivation of military
>   rifle shooting as a national sport is witnessed each year at the 
>   Feldschiessen weekend, when 200,000 Swiss turn out in a national 
>   demonstration of marksmanship prowess.  Exclusive of military training,
>   the Swiss fire upwards of 80 million service rifle cartridges a year.
>      Members of the 625,000-strong Swiss militia keep their service
>   weapons and ammunition at home.  There are 600,000 assault rifles
>   capable of fully automatic fire in circulation, and military rifles of
>   all kinds total around two million: Switzerland has the highest level
>   of private firearms possession in the world.  Semi-automatic rifles like
>   the Kalashnikov used in Hungerford may be bought from gunshops with
>   a purchase permit routinely obtained much in the mannerof TV or dog
>   licenses [TV licenses?] in Britain: subsequent sales between individuals
>   are not subject to permit, and there is no general licensing of the
>   actual ownership of firearms.  In short, the system is akin to that
>   operated in Britain until 1920.  Armed crime in Switzerland remains
>   minimall: firearms homicides have not increased since records were
>   first kept in 1931, and the overall rate of firearms abuse is so low that
>   it has not been deemed to merit statistical breakdown at a national level.
>      
>                              Firearms Control
>      A sharp contrast with the situation in Switzerland is presented by 
>   West Germany, where an exceedingly restrictive regime of firearms regulation
>   was introduced in 1973 in the course of the legislative campaign with which
>   the Federal Republic sought to respond to terrorism.  The West German
>   firearms regulations have become a model of severity; they are also, 
>   however, amongst the most demonstratably ineffective of gun laws.  There
>   were calculated to be between 17 and 20 million firearms in private hands
>   in Germany in 1973, of which by 1976 only 3.2 million had been logged
>   under the new system of gun registration.  More than 80% of the firearms
>   in circulation in Germany today are illegally held.  A series of police
>   raids to find these weapons has been a complete failure.  Such a result
>   was predicted half a century ago, when the Weimar regime, recalling the
>   total ineffectiveness of the Allied controls in 1919, rejected gun 
>   registration on the grounds that an unenforceable regulation did the law
>   no credit.
>      The German experience is not exceptional: it is mirrored in Britain.
>   Despite strict regulation and registration since 1920, it may be
>   confidently asserted that there are still more illegally held pistols
>   in Britain than legal ones.  There are some 50,000 licenses for pistols;
>   since the Second World War more than six times that number of illegally
>   held handguns have been surrendered.  The guns were voluntarily given
>   up in amnesties, it might be arged, are of limited relevance to criminal
>   use; but their sheer volume does underline why Britain's present regime
>   of firearms laws has failed to make any statistically measurable impact
>   on the level of the most serious type of armed crime.  The possibility
>   of legal access to firearms appears to have been academic even in the
>   case of Michael Ryan: I am told that inaddition to his legally held guns,
>   he was in the illegal possession of a Thompson submachine gun and a
>   Mauser automatic pistol.
>      In the course of my research, I have found that, at best, firearms laws
>   have been an oblique response to the criminal use of guns and at worst,
>   a visibly irrelevant sop to public opinion.  In the latter category, one
>   might consider the Labour government's introduction of shotgun controls
>   in Britain in 1967, immediately after a Home Office study had concluded
>   that such regulations would not be justified.  The volte face appears to
>   have been occasioned by the press outcry over firearms control following
>   the murder of three London policemen--all of whom, it should be noted,
>   were killed with illegally held pistols, despite the strict regulation of
>   handguns since 1920.
>      In no case, in my comparative studies, have i actually found evidence
>   of firearms laws having any enduring effect on armed crime.  In the United
>   States, contrary to popular representation, there are in excess of 20,000
>   federal, state and local laws regulating the acquisition, possession and
>   use of firearms.  New York, Washington, Detroit and Chicago, with only
>   6% of the U.S. population but nearly a quarter of the country's firarm
>   homicides, all have firearm regulations stricter than Britain's.  In 
>   New York, there has effectively been a ban on the possession of handguns
>   since 1911.
>      After 75 years in New York and nearly seventy in Britain, there is still
>   no evidence to bear out even the modest hope that gun laws will have some
>   long term attritional effect on the criminal pool of firearms; and recent
>   experience in Germany suggests that any such expectation is essentially
>   false.  Between 1972 and 1978 the following weapons were stolen from the
>   armouries of the German police, border police, German army and NATO
>   stores:
>      34 machine guns
>      198 submachine guns
>      363 fully automatic or semi-automatic rifles
>      1,142 pistols
>      Though the concept of "secure armouries" has gained a good deal of 
>   currency in the British press recently, the German experience of the 
>   vulnerability of armoury storage to serious criminal organizations appears
>   to be the international norm.  Both Switzerland and Sweden have suffered
>   raids on central military stores, and whilst the primary object of the
>   Swiss and Scandinavian practice of keeping military small arms and
>   ammunition at home is to speed mobilization, decentralized storage also
>   reduces the security liability.  In Britain, Lord Hill-Norton's committee
>   had proposed to follow these home storage modesl (and British precedent),
>   but were advised by the chief constables that a future home guard would
>   have to store its weapons centrally.  The merit of this advice, from a
>   security as well as a military standpoint, is highly questionable.
>
>                          Concluding Remarks
>      It has been the purpose of this paper to indicate the inadequacy
>   of the terms in which the present firearms question in Britain has been
>   discussed.  Civilian marksmanship has been measured exclusively in terms
>   of liability rather than asset: there has been seemingly no awareness of
>   the functions  of national defence for which the target shooting movement
>   in Britain was developed, nore of the present military considerations which
>   have led to the continuing public subvention of such movements abroad.  The
>   civilian use of military small arms has instead been falsely represented
>   as an aberration from a pure sport, and depicted as a threat to public
>   safety on grounds which have been spurious technically, and which are
>   not sustained by experience in countries where modern military firearms
>   are in widespread or universal circulation.  On the further dubious
>   assumption that firearms legislation is an effective means of protecting
>   society, calls have been made for further restrictive legislation beginning
>   with a ban on self-loading service rifles.  It is the contention of this
>   report that the only consequence of such legislation would be to end the
>   practice of civilian marksmanship with the very weapons which it is most
>   in the national interst to promote.
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