From: lvc@cbnews.cb.att.com (Larry Cipriani)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns
Subject: The Case Against Gun Control by David Botsford (part 2 of 2)
Keywords: libertarian perspective, uk, part 2
Date: 23 Dec 92 21:45:28 GMT
Organization: Ideology Busters, Inc.


needs the right to protection.  Even more important is self-defence
against the state and its actual or potential violence.  Throughout
the world, tyranny is more common than freedom.  In our century, tens
of millions of human beings have been murdered by oppressive regimes
which believed that their victims stood in the way of creating some
utopia or other by violence.  Hundreds of millions - if not billions
- - more have had to live under totalitarian tyrannies, deprived of
the most basic freedoms that we in Britain take for granted.  In every
case, the one distinctive difference between the agents of the regime
and their victims was the fact that the former had a monopoly of weapons.
Before coming to power, Adolf Hitler wrote:

   "The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would
   be to allow the subject races to possess arms.  History shows that
   all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms
   have prepared their own downfall by doing so."40

In 1937 the Nazi regime introduced a Firearms Act which stipulated
that no civilian was to have a firearm without a permit, which would
not, according to a contemporary commentary, be issued to those "suspected
of acting against the state.  For Jews this permission will not be
granted.  Those people who do not require permission to purchase or
carry weapons [include] the whole S.S. and S.A., including the Death's
Head group" and Hitler Youth Officers.41

Would it not have been better if the Jewish and other victims of the
Nazis had been armed and able to resist being dragged to concentration
camps?  The fact that the victims could not effectively resist and
overthrow these regimes made mass murder and tyranny possible.  Dictators
as diverse as Ferdinand Marcos, Fidel Castro, Idi Amin and the Bulgarian
communists have ordered firearms confiscations immediately on taking
power, for good reasons.  The current suppression of the democracy
movement in China, for instance, would be impossible without a state
monopoly on weapons.

Totalitarian regimes know that disarming the people must be an early
step in consolidating their tyranny.  In the early days of communist
rule in both Russia and China, the private ownership of firearms was
prohibited, and spies and informers in the villages were rewarded
for revealing the names of those who defied the regime's decrees.  These
measures were preludes to the seizure of the peasants' land in both
countries, accompanied by the extermination by artificial famine of
millions, along with the deportation to slave-labour camps of millions
more who attempted to resist.

Such events seem, thankfully, to be a remote possibility in Britain
today, but how do we know what might happen a hundred, two hundred
or five hundred years in the future?  Might the British people one
day face a situation where they have to use force to resist a domestic
tyranny?  Indeed, it makes a decisive difference in the relationship
between the state and the people if the latter is known to be armed.  The
fact that the people are armed creates a "bottom line" of
oppression below which the government may be resisted, if all else
fails, by force.  If the people cannot defend their rights directly,
then any freedoms they are permitted by the state are, strictly speaking,
temporary privileges which can in practice be removed by the one institution
which has a monopoly of legal violence in society.  Soon after the
Hungerford massacre, one regional English Chief Constable publicly
urged that it be made illegal for members of the public to own bullet-proof
vests and similar equipment, so that it will be easier for the police
to shoot them!  He was, of course, talking in reference to events
like Hungerford, but the totalitarian implications are obvious.  Any
political authority seeking to remove basic human rights will tread
very warily if it knows its subjects to be armed.  In its measures
it will always seek to err on the side of caution, not wishing to
provoke resistance.  A disarmed people, however, is ultimately at
the mercy of those in power, dependent on their goodwill for their
own survival.

Some indication of the degree of totalitarian pressure that can already
be applied in our supposedly free society was given by the notorious
events in Cleveland, County Durham, in 1987.  Certain paediatricians
working for the Cleveland Social Services Department (who happened,
not coincidentally, to be socialists) engaged in a piece of empire-building
by alleging that an epidemic of child sexual abuse was taking place
in Cleveland.  As a result hundreds of children were - apparently
at random - forcibly taken away from their parents, and a totalitarian
atmosphere imposed on the town.  With none of the normal protections
of the law, such as the presumption of innocence, parents were accused
of abusing their own children, and attempts were made to blackmail
them into confessing.  Attempts were also made to threaten and trick
the kidnapped children into denouncing their parents.  As a result
of the trauma involved, many parents had nervous breakdowns, others
split up, and others attempted suicide.  After several months, the
scandal was exposed, the children returned and the whole exercise
proved to be completely fraudulent, although the psychological damage
had been done.

It is here that the private ownership of firearms for self-defence
becomes relevant.  Hundreds of innocent parents had to undergo the
smarting humiliation and shame of their own children being kidnapped
from them and turned against them by individuals whose salaries they
- - the parents - were paying through taxes on their earnings.  One
just has to imagine the ordeal of neighbours, colleagues, relatives
and friends knowing about the appalling accusations made against these
parents, and perhaps wondering for years afterwards if there might
have been something in it.  Had the falsely accused parents, however,
been armed, and had the legal right to defend their children against
kidnapping by anybody, regardless of whether the latter were state
employees or not (after it was established in court that the intervention
was groundless), I submit that the bureaucrats would have kept their
ghastly fantasies to themselves.  If they had been so foolhardy as
to proceed under these circumstances, they would have done so entirely
at their own risk.

Many people are horrified at the idea that the individual should resist
the intervention of the state by force, even in cases such as the
Cleveland outrage.  Yet most of the people who express this horror
are more sympathetic to the right of parents to resist kidnappers
who seize children for their own private gain.  There is surely little
moral difference between the two; indeed, the professional kidnapper
is arguably preferable: he acts purely selfishly, and wants nothing
more than the money he can extract from the parents, at which point
he has no reason not to return the child.  The "altruistic"
Cleveland paediatricians had little interest in personal financial
gain, and, probably convinced of the righteousness of what they were
doing, were prepared to use the coercive power of the state to destroy
families and reduce their victims to nervous wrecks in order to enhance
their power.  Why is it less moral for the individual to resist the
latter than the former?  And why should the law deny him or her the
means to do so?


INTERNATIONAL AND REGIONAL COMPARISONS

A comparison of international and regional policies on firearms control
gives no evidence to suggest that legal restrictions on firearms have
any effect in reducing either crime, or the criminal use of firearms,
while by definition prohibiting or restricting the ownership of firearms
by law-abiding citizens.  Within the UK, the Channel Islands, with
their wide degree of self-government, have very moderate gun controls,
and the private ownership of firearms, including sub-machine guns
and other automatic weapons, is widespread.  It also has a very low
rate of violent crime, and the use of firearms in crime is negligible
compared to the mainland.  In Northern Ireland, on the other hand,
and also in the Irish Republic, gun controls even more draconian than
those on the mainland have been imposed as a result of the terrorist
situation there, and even air pistols and rifles are subject to the
most severe controls.  Yet the IRA and other terrorist groups have
no difficult in obtaining effective military weapons, whether from
abroad or on the black market, only in finding the men to use them.  No
comment is needed on the murder rate using firearms in Northern Ireland.
Indeed, individuals in the province, whether Protestant or Roman Catholic,
are at much greater risk of being murdered in "retaliation"
attacks, in which a paramilitary group will target a law-abiding person
of the other religion virtually at random, than people on the mainland.
Their need for personal protection is much greater, and one can envisage
that if a few cases took place in which terrorist gunmen were shot
by their civilian victims, the deterrent effect would be enough
substantially to reduce the terrorism in the province.

Switzerland has the highest level of private firearms ownership in
the world, with pistols freely purchasable by adults from gunshops
on presentation of a permit obtainable as easily as a television licence
here.  Retail sales of rifles and shotguns, and private sales of pistols
between individuals are completely unregulated.  Despite, or rather
because of, the fact that several firearms are held in almost every
home, the criminal use of firearms is so low that it is not even recorded
separately in police statistics.42  Denmark has a similarly high
rate of firearms ownership, with small-calibre guns completely unregulated
and an easily-obtained permit needed for larger ones.  In Belgium
private citizens can buy hunting and sporting guns with a readily-granted
permit, with a stricter licensing system for more powerful guns.  West
Germany and France have found strict gun controls, introduced as a
response to terrorism, impossible to enforce.  In 1973, following
the Baader-Meinhof, Middle Eastern and other terrorist campaigns,
the West German government imposed severe firearms control, including
registration of all guns.43  In 1973 there were between 17 and 20
million privately-owned guns in West Germany; by 1976 only 3.2 million
had been registered.  Over 80% of firearms in West Germany are illegally
held, the large majority by otherwise law-abiding people who have
been criminalised by this action, and a series of police raids to
find them has, fortunately, been a failure.44  The French government
introduced strict gun control in 1983 after violence inside France
by Middle Eastern terrorists; again, the laws have been defied on
a massive scale by French people who do not regard their freedoms
as subject to bureaucratic removal as a result of somebody else's
terrorism.45

It is well-known that Malaysia has the death penalty for drug traffickers;
the same penalty exists for illegal firearms ownership.  Recently
a Thai salesman visiting Malaysia was found with a .22 calibre pistol
and ammunition: simply for possessing these, he was hanged.  So much
for the argument that strict gun control prevents unnecessary deaths!
Japan has much stricter gun control than most parts of the USA, yet
Japanese-Americans, who have much easier access to firearms, have
much lower violence rates than Japanese in Japan.  Mexico has more
restrictive gun control than the USA, and also a much higher murder
and armed crime rate.  In Taiwan, like Malaysia, the death penalty
can be imposed for illegal ownership of guns, and gun control is stricter
than Japan.  Yet the murder rate in Taiwan is four times higher than
that of Japan, and 30% higher than in the USA.  South Africa has much
stricter firearms control than the USA, yet has twice the murder rate.46
Before independence in 1962, Jamaica had a tolerable level of crime,
and permitted private ownership of guns, subject to having a police
permit.  From 1962 to 1973 the homicide rate rose by 450% and violent
crimes, including armed robberies, rose even more sharply.  In 1973
(after an incident to which four businessmen were murdered by shooting)
a total ban on the private ownership of all types of guns and ammunition
was imposed.  Police seized all legal firearms and were given the
power to search any vehicle or house they believed to contain guns
or ammunition, arresting without warrant any violators.  These were
taken to a "gun court", with no bail allowed, and, after a
delay of perhaps weeks, arraigned in secret courts without representation,
and those convicted were imprisoned in a "gun stockade" for
an indeterminate period.  For three months after the introduction
of this system the rate of armed crime dropped, and then it grew completely
out of control.  Any political activity was accompanied by armed men
roaming the streets, and armed troops had to preserve order during
elections.  Murders by shooting, armed robberies and other crimes
set new world records, and spread throughout society.  Later the Commissioner
of Corrections admitted that the ban had not affected the hard core
criminals, and the worst excesses of the system were corrected.47

The example of the USA is usually cited in arguments against the relaxation
of British firearms control.  It is alleged that the high rate of
murder and other violent crimes in the USA is caused by the wide legal
availability of firearms, and this would occur in Britain if firearms
controls were removed.  Many anecdotes, perhaps true, perhaps apocryphal,
are put forward to support this proposition: a man in Kentucky shot
his brother for using too much toilet paper; a dispute between two
men in a New York City cinema over who would have the last bag of
popcorn became a gunfight in which one of them was shot dead.  The
defence by many Americans of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution,
which guarantees the right to keep and bear arms, is cited with feigned
horror by some British observers, who are ignorant of the fact that
this was a fundamental principle of English law which was carried
over from the unwritten British constitution, and which, as it has
never been formally removed by parliament, and no court has ever ruled
that it no longer exists, can be still said, legally speaking, to
exist in England.

In the first place, the US has over 20,000 laws at Federal, state
and local level which restrict firearms ownership and use.  The cities
with the highest levels of violence and criminal use of firearms,
including New York City, Washington DC, Detroit and Chicago, have
gun control even stricter than that of the UK.  20% of murders in
the USA take place in these cities, which have only 6% of the population.
Firearms bans are widely defied in cities where in some areas the police are
effectively losing control of the streets.  New York City, for instance,
has had a virtual ban on handguns since the 1911 Sullivan Act, yet
has an estimated 2 million illegal pistols (including those used in
the anecdote mentioned above).  If it is replied that guns can easily
be brought in illegally from other states with less gun control, one
can reply that surely the same would be true of, for instance, Minneapolis,
which has no gun ban and a murder rate of 2.9 per 100,000, compared
to 17.5 in New York.  As in Britain, no correlation has ever been
shown between the legal availability of firearms and armed crime.48  The
fact is that the USA has a higher rate of murder without firearms
(i.e. using knives, poisons, blunt instruments, etc.) than any western
European country: quite apart from the huge illegal markets in guns,
murderers could simply substitute other weapons if guns were further
restricted, while knowing that they victims would be disarmed.  It
is in the USA, more than any other country, that firearms control
is a hotly-contested political issue, and the media, the bureaucracy,
academia and most politicians are almost unanimous in seeking to disarm
law-abiding citizens, who have had to fight a defensive political
action against repressive legislation seeking to remove their freedom.
The Bureau of Tobacco, Alcohol and Firearms uses every possible legal
and illegal device to make life difficult for law-abiding American
gun owners.  Only one side of this debate - no need to say which one
- - ever gets heard in the British media.


NATIONAL DEFENCE

The private ownership and civilian use of firearms can also play an
important role in defence.  The best known example is that of Switzerland,
where every adult male is required to be a member of the militia (which
numbers 625,000), to store a fully-automatic rifle and ammunition
at home and to practise with it regularly.  Separately from these
government weapons, Switzerland has the world's highest level of private
firearms ownership.  Firearms, including semi-automatic rifles, can
be bought freely from gunshops on presentation of a purchase permit
which is issued without question to any adult (except those with certain
criminal convictions or records of mental instability).  Yet armed
crime is negligible: firearms homicides have not increased since records
began in 1931, and armed robberies are so few that they are not even
recorded separately.

Denmark is second only to Switzerland in its level of private firearms
ownership, and considerably ahead of the USA.  It has a Home Guard
of 75,200 the members of which store semi-automatic rifles and sub-machine
guns at home and can be mobilised in one hour.  In 25 years, only
13 homicides have been attributed to the 60,000 of these Home Guard
weapons.  Norway and Sweden also have Home Guards which store military
weapons and ammunition at home: the misuse of these weapons is almost
non-existent.  The US government's Directorate of Civilian Marksmanship
has sponsored civilian military arms to rifle clubs and semi-automatic
rifles to individuals.  In 1965, the Little Report, sponsored by the
US Department of the Army, "failed to uncover a single incident
where DCM arms have been used in crimes of violence".49

Before its present official attitudes to civilian firearms use developed,
Britain used to have a similar system.  From 1859 until the end of
the First World War the government kept a quarter of a million Rifle
Volunteers under arms; in 1900 Lord Salisbury, the Prime Minister,
said that he would laud the day when there was a rifle in every cottage
in England.50  Our present system, in which nearly all peaceful
citizens are both disarmed and ignorant about firearms as a result
of government policy, would lead to a disastrous situation if Britain
should ever be faced with invasion.  The people would be virtually
incapable of organising effective guerrilla resistance to an invader,
or of providing auxiliary forces to the regular army, because of the
resources and time needed to train people in the use of weapons, quite
apart from the availability of these weapons themselves.  Should the
regular military forces be defeated, the people would be completely
at the mercy of an invader.

(One of the most fraudulent aspects of the position of the Campaign
for Nuclear Disarmament is their claim that they support the possibility
of guerrilla warfare as a major aspect of Britain's defence after
the unilateral nuclear disarmament and withdrawal from NATO which
they propose.  I have often discussed the issue with CND supporters,
and when I press for details of how this guerrilla force is to be
organised, these are either vague or non-existent.  When I ask whether
they would encourage the widespread civilian ownership and use of
military firearms, and the training of individuals in guerrilla warfare
by official and private sponsorship, they react in a hostile manner
to the very proposals they were arguing for - in a vague and offhand
way - only minutes before!)

The private ownership of firearms by civilians can be remarkably effective
in resisting even a modern technological invader.  For centuries the
Afghans and Pakistanis have been skilled both with using firearms
and making copies of standard models in primitive workshops with simple
tools and materials.  When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in
1979, the Afghans, despite their enormous technological inferiority,
were able to offer immediate effective resistance and quickly developed
rifles that could fire the same ammunition as the Soviet AK47.  While
their eventual success in forcing the Soviet forces to withdraw was
due to the later availability of sophisticated modern weapons such
as the Stinger missile, this would have been impossible without the
early stages of military resistance made possible by the widespread
knowledge and ownership of firearms.


WOMEN AND GUNS

                        "Be not afraid of man,
                        No matter what his size;
                        When danger threatens, call on me
                        And I will equalise."

            (motto engraved on a 19th century Winchester rifle)51


Although capitalism has succeeded in giving women throughout society
a wide degree of independence, for example through labour-saving devices,
it cannot alter the biological fact that the average man is some 50%
physically stronger than the average woman, nor that the average attacker,
burglar or rapist is probably rather stronger than this average.  And
there is no doubt that the threat of attack is very real in Britain
today, and poses a major restriction on the effective freedom which
women enjoy.

But women are not permitted to take any measures for their own protection.
In 1981 in Yorkshire, at the height of the murderous rampage of Peter
Sutcliffe through the county (that is, before he had been caught),
one woman who carried a small clasp knife in her handbag as a protection
against the "Yorkshire Ripper" was convicted and fined for
carrying an offensive weapon!

This situation could be transformed by the introduction of the legal
right to own and use firearms and other weapons for self-defence.  The
possession of firearms by women would provide a virtual revolution
in introducing real equality between the sexes in this area.  In 1966,
following a major increase in rapes in Orlando, Florida, USA, the
local police began a well-publicised training course for 2,500 women
in firearms.  The next year rape fell by 88% in Orlando (the only
large American city to experience a decrease that year) and burglary
fell by 25%, although none of the trained women actually fired their
weapons: the deterrent effect was enough.  Five years later Orlando's
rape rate was still 13% lower than it had been before the training,
while the surrounding standard metropolitan area had undergone a 308%
increase.52

If the authorities here are unlikely to take such an enlightened attitude,
at least they can remove the legal impediments for groups of women,
private entrepreneurs, or others to organise such training, and for
the purchase of weapons to supplement it.  If they refuse to do so,
at least victims of assault, robbery and rape will know who is partly
to blame through the denial of the legal means of self-defence.
Indeed, if the authorities would hesitate immediately to abolish all
laws restricting the ownership of weapons, a more "Fabian"
approach suggests itself.  On a provisional basis, the legal right
to possess firearms and other weapons could be given to one group
which even the authorities must agree is both particularly vulnerable
and particularly unlikely to use weapons for criminal purposes: old
age pensioners.  If after, say, two years, this resulted (as the reader
will agree it doubtless would) in a decrease in the number of attacks
on pensioners, the same right could then be extended to all women.  Again,
if after a two year experimental period attacks on women were reduced,
the political atmosphere would surely be improved for the restoration
of everyone's right to provide for their own defence.


THE GUN CONTROL DEBATE NOW

British firearms legislation, then, has not been based on either reason
or evidence.  So how have such strict controls, which have effectively
removed what was once regarded as a fundamental right of every individual,
achieved the status of law with the almost unanimous approval of all
major political parties, the police, the media and (taking their cue
from them) public opinion?  This is not an area which can be addressed
with anything like scientific precision, but I believe it can be largely
summed up, first, by a 20th-century official British attitude one
might describe as "political fetishism".  Britain has for
centuries been, on the whole, a "law-abiding" and deferential
country in the sense that the bulk of the population will go along
with virtually anything the authorities demand; many, indeed, will
go beyond that.  This therefore creates in the authorities a fallacious
assumption that the act of removing or restricting by law an object,
or tool, that is used for something they disapprove of, will of itself
remove the intention of and ability to perform the unapproved act.  Even
if only a small minority are committing the unapproved act, the large
majority must be punished in advance for the actions of the few -
must, in short, be punished for doing something that they as individuals
have not done.  That this is a peculiarly British attitude is demonstrated
by a comparison with France.

France is by no means a free country - the absence of individual civil
rights against the police and the criminal justice system would rightly
appall any informed Englishman, as would the bureaucratic interference
which, for instance, requires parents to name their children only
from a state list of approved names - but this "fetishistic"
attitude is largely absent.  There is a liquid which can be used to
remove the ink stamps on official documents, season tickets, and so
on, without damaging the design of the paper underneath.  Freely available
at any stationers' in France, it is banned in Britain.  In Britain,
the taxation on alcoholic drink is continually increased to discourage
its consumption, and the hours at which it can be bought still restricted,
yet the incidence of drunken violence continues to rise, a phenomenon
almost unknown in France, where alcoholic drinks are much cheaper
(and which has diminished drastically in Scotland, where licensing
hours are almost unrestricted).  Again, France has no film censorship
and most television channels regularly show "pornographic"
material that would be unthinkable on British television, yet the
believed link between pornography and sexual crimes, taken for granted
here, hardly exists in France (which has a much lower rate of sexual
crime): at rape trials in Britain, for instance, the defendant usually
attributes partial blame to having seen a pornographic film; this
is a rare defence in French rape trials.  This sharp difference is
clearly visible in weapon control.  In any knife shop in France,
the visitor can find freely available for sale all manner of "offensive
weapons" that it is a criminal offence to buy or possess in Britain,
from flick-knives (known as switchblades in America, where they are
banned in every state but Oregon) to Mace and nunchakas and other
Kung Fu weapons.  Yet France has a rather lower rate of violent crime
than Britain.

Another broad characteristic, specific to British socialism since
at least the First World War, is a belief that the common people whom
socialism was supposed to help were purely an object, not a subject.  The
experience of the "working class" under capitalism, as (incorrectly)
interpreted by the early 20th-century socialists, led them to believe
that they were not capable of spontaneously organising themselves,
and had to have their lives completely reorganised for them by bureaucrats
and "experts".  The "slums" in which the working class
lived could not be improved and had to be destroyed and replaced by
high-rise, concrete-jungle council estates.  The masses were incapable
of acting as informed customers in health, education and welfare,
and the "welfare state" therefore gave very little individual
choice or control to the people who were made dependent on it and
whose taxes financed most of it.

It is this general attitude, now recognised as disastrous in so many
areas (surviving 19th-century "slum" houses in east London
are selling for UKP 200,000 long after high-rise blocks from the
1960s have either collapsed or been demolished), which has helped
to introduce such harsh firearms control in Britain.  In his excellent
Libertarian Alliance essay /Gun Control in Britain/ (1988), Sean
Gabb, after demonstrating the absurdities of firearms restrictions,
concluded on a pessimistic note:

   "The Firearms Bill will become law, and after a decent
   interval will be followed by another, and then by another, until guns
   are in theory outlawed among the civilian population.  There is no
   opposing the general will on this point.  There is no place for fantastical
   schemes of deregulation.  All that can usefully be done is to observe
   and record the progress of folly - and hope that its worst consequences
   will be felt by a later generation than our own."53

Surely, however, one cannot allow such ill-informed, ill-thought out,
irrational, repressive and unjust laws to continue to oppress the
people without challenge.  History provides many examples of repressive
state actions, such as the witch mania of the 16th and 17th centuries,
which commanded general approval in spite of their appalling consequences.
They should always be opposed, however difficult the odds may seem to be.

Firearms control in Britain is one of those areas where a rigidly
statist regime has been introduced which has become almost universal
orthodoxy without being introduced on behalf of some ideology or other.
As we saw above, firearms legislation was introduced on the basis of
unclear thinking, ignorance about the purposes and results of previous
legislation, political trade-offs and temporary hysteria.  It is precisely
for this reason that it is a difficult area to reform.  With other
areas of statism, such as the nationalisation of industries, or the
development of council estates in the form they took, the measures
were carried out in accordance with a specific ideology and with specific
ends in mind, such as to make industry more efficient and accountable,
or to creat an ideal urban living environment.  At least when the
measures fail to produce the ends for which they were introduced,
this can be demonstrated, and the policies altered, as has happened
to some extent in recent years.  With firearms control, however, no
such objective standards by which it can be judged were ever proposed,
yet firearms control commands more general political support than
nationalisation or council estates ever did.

It also encourages the most officious and bloody-minded forms of policing,
which undermine civil liberties.  Several years ago a 16-year-old
boy who habitually dressed in top hat and tails and carried a long
walking cane with a large spherical handle was, as I remember reading,
arrested by the police and charged with "carrying an offensive
weapon".  On 30 June 1989 Robert Manning, aged 31, was lawfully
shooting pigeons with a shotgun in a field near Coventry when he saw
a police helicopter overhead, which contained three policemen, one
of them filming him with a video camera.  He put the gun down and
made querying gestures to the policemen, who told him through a loudhailer
to walk to a clearing, remove his jacket and shirt and turn round.  He
did this, and found himself facing 20 to 25 policemen with police
dogs and two with Armalite rifles.  One of them told him to march
towards them and lie down, whereupon they handcuffed him and removed
his boots.  The helicopter landed, and he was taken in it to a police
cell despite explaining what he had been doing.  The police contacted
the farmer who owned the field and confirmed that Mr Manning had had
permission to shoot there.  The police then allowed Mr Manning to
leave the station, but refused to return his shotgun, even though
he was licensed and had not used it unlawfully.  He refused to leave,
and returned to the cells until the police finally agreed to let him
take the gun.54

It might be objected that if the right of the individual to own weapons
is conceded, where does it stop?  Are we to accept the right of individuals
to have private armies, for example?  I would reply that it does indeed
follow, while accepting that in tactical political terms the climate
is not yet right to put that forward as an immediate demand.  Those
who express horror at the idea of private armies seem unaware that
there already is a legal standing private army, fully equipped and
trained as a fighting force with sophisticated, modern weapons and
other equipment.  Comparatively small though it is, it belongs to
the Duke of Argyll, who is the only individual in the United Kingdom
legally allowed to keep a private army (the privilege was granted
by the Crown to one of his ancestors).  Yet I have never heard any
report of this army creating any kind of danger to the public peace,
or indeed, of anybody making any political objection to it.  Given
that His Grace's right to maintain an army is given such universal
acceptance, if only by default, one could envisage a "Fabian"
political process whereby it is extended, over a period of years,
first, to all hereditary peers above the rank of baronet, then to
the lesser aristocracy, and finally to us common folks, in a process
analogous to the progress of the 19th-century Reform Acts and subsequent
legislation extending the franchise.


LET US ASK THE QUESTION

That, I accept, lies in the future.  But right now the newspapers
are full of tragedies in which the availability of a firearm would
have saved lives or enabled people to defend themselves.  In two cases
in 1989 families living on crime-ridden council estates have been
burned to death because they have installed such heavy security, including
locked steel bars at the windows and multiple-locked steel doors,
that they were unable to escape form their own homes when fires broke
out.  If they have been allowed to possess firearms for the defence
of their home from burglars and attackers, such precautions would
have been less necessary.  Not content with herding people into the
violent, inhuman environments of so many council estates, the state
removes even their right to defend themselves with weapons against
the crime it has exposed them to.  Every week, many shocking cases
of violent crime are reported, but I was particularly appalled by
a recent case in which three men broke into the home of a 54-year-old
Cypriot woman in south London, trying to obtain her life savings of
UKP 900, which were hidden in her brassiere.  They tortured her for
several hours in the most horrifying ways, one of which was thrusting
an air pistol up her nostril and firing it, as a result of which she
lost the sight of one eye.  Nonetheless she never revealed the location
of the money, which was all she had in the world.  It was reported
that the police had no clue as to the attackers' identity.

Who could doubt that the outcome would have been different if the
victim herself had been armed - with a firearm?  By what right do
those who make our laws deny such people as this woman the natural
right to self-defence?  Let us ask this question of our political
masters, and put the onus on them to explain why they are denying
us the most fundamental human right of all, without which any others
are not rights at all but merely temporary privileges granted by the
powerful on their sufferance and removeable at will - the right of
the individual to arm against all aggression.



Type of firearms used in robberies in England and Wales, 1966-1969

                 Sawn-off shotguns

 Shotguns        Pistols (S1 firearm)    Others  Total

Year      No.     %       No.     %       No.     %       No.     %       No.
- -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

1966      53      15.5                    18      5.2     269     79.3    340

1967      59      21.3    126     45.6    11      3.9     80      29.2    276

1968      98      25.3    140     36.1    37      9.5     112     29.1    387

1969      100     20.6    173     35.7    30      10.3    161     33.4    464

[From C. Greenwood, /Firearms Control/, Routledge
and Kegan Paul, London, 1972, p. 244.] 25



Robberies in England and Wales in which firearms were used

      Total Firearms      Cases involving      Cases involving
        Robberies             Pistols              Shotguns

Year                          No.     %          No.     %
- ---------------------------------------------------------------

1970       475              163     34.3         88     18.5

1971       572              203     35.4        133     25.2

1972       533              175     32.8        116     21.7

1973       484              181     37.3        112     23.1

1974       645              258     40.0        129     20.0

1975       949              365     38.4        184     19.3


[Extracted from C. Greenwood, "Comparative Statistics",
in D. B. Kates, /Restricting Handguns/, North River Press, np, 1979]
(26)



NOTES

1. W. Marina, "Weapons, Technology and Legitimacy",
in D. B. Kates, /Firearms and Violence/, Pacific Institute for
Public Policy Research, San Francisco, 1984, p. 429.

2. /Daily Telegraph/, 7 April 1987.

3. See D. B. Kopel, "Trust the People", Cato Institute
Policy Analysis 109, 11 July 1988.

4. /Evening Standard/, 10 July 1989.

5. C. Greenwood, /Firearms Control/, Routledge and Kegan Paul,
London, 1972, p. 7.

6. /Ibid/., p. 9.

7. /Ibid/., p. 11.

8. /Ibid/., p. 13.

9. /Ibid/., p. 14.

10. /Ibid./, p. 15.

11. /Ibid./, p. 15.

12. /Ibid./, p. 16.

13. /Daily Telegraph/, 5 November 1988.

14. Greenwood,/ op. cit./, p. 23.

15. /Ibid./, p. 25.

16. /Ibid./, p. 25-26.

17. /Ibid/., p. 38.

18. /Times/, 15 September 1988.

19. Greenwood, op. cit., p. 46.

20. /Ibid/., p. 54.

21. /Ibid./, p. 72.

22. /Ibid./, p. 86-87.

23. /Ibid./, p. 243.

24. /Ibid./, p. 243-244.

25. /Ibid/., p. 244.

26. Extracted from C. Greenwood, "Comparative Statistics",
in Don B. Kates, ed., /Restricting Handguns: The Liberal Skeptics
Speak Out/, North River Press, np, 1979, p. 54.

27. Greenwood, /Firearms Control/, op. cit., p. 246.

28. T. Jackson, /Legitimate Pursuit/, Ashford Press, Southampton,
1988.

29. /Times/, 26 August 1987.

30. /Times/, 7 January 1988.

31. Combined from data in Greenwood, /Firearms Control/,
op. cit., p. 235, 236 and /Times/, 3 November 1988.

32. Greenwood, /Firearms Control/, op. cit., p. 237.

33. M. Bateman, /This England/, Penguin, London, 1969, p.
112.

34. /Times/, 15 September 1988

35. Jackson, op. cit., p. 45.

36. /Daily Telegraph/, 27 July 1989, p. 1.

37. Greenwood, /Firearms Control/, op. cit., p. 173.

38. Kopel, op. cit., p. 2-3.

39. /Ibid./, p. 3.

40. Quoted in Kates, /Restricting Handguns/, op. cit., p. 185.

41. /Ibid./, p. 185.

42. R. A. I. Munday, "Civilian Possession of Military Firearms",
/Salisbury Review/, March 1988, p. 45-49.

43. /Times/, 26 August 1988, p. 3.

44. Munday, op. cit.

45. /Times/, 26 August 1988, p. 3.

46. /USA Today/, 18 April 1984.

47. Greenwood, "Comparative Statistics", op. cit., p. 37-38.

48. /Ibid./, p. 35-36.

49. Munday, op. cit., /passim./

50. /Ibid./

51. Kopel,/ op. cit./, p. 18.

52. /Ibid/., p. 3.

53. S. Gabb, /Gun Control in Britain/, Political Notes No. 33,
Libertarian Alliance, London, 1988, p. 4.

54. /Sunday Telegraph/, 30 July 1989, p. 20.


FURTHER READING

C. Greenwood, /Firearms Control/, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London,
1972.  The definitive academic study of the problem; a comprehensive 
historical, legal, statistical, criminological and practical survey 
of firearms control in England and Wales.  Written by a former senior 
police officer who now edits /Guns Review/, the leading firearms
journal in the country and is a voice of reason on the subject.
Iconoclastic and indispensable to any understanding of the subject.

Don B. Kates, ed., /Firearms and Violence/, Pacific Institute
for Public Policy Research, San Fransisco, 1984.  An encyclopaedic 
collection of studies by 17 academics and lawyers, covering every 
area of the issue from a perspective sympathetic to gun ownership.  Some 
of these scholars, including Professor James D. Wright, former president 
of the American Sociological Association, began their studies advocating 
stricter firearms control, and became convinced of the opposite case 
as a result of their researches.  A complete demolition of the case 
for totalitarianism in firearms.

Don B. Kates, ed., /Restricting Handguns: The Liberal Skeptics
Speak Out/, North River Press, np, 1979.  Essays by eight experts
on the subject of legal controls on pistols and other firearms.  Most 
of the authors are American "liberals" in law and academe
who dissent here from the gun-control orthodoxy of US "liberalism",
and explain why.

T. Jackson, /Legitimate Pursuit/, Ashford Press, Southampton,
1988.  Sponsored by the British Association for Shooting and Conservation 
as a response to the 1988 Firearms (Amendment) Bill, and covering 
only sporting guns, this short book, by one of Britain's leading experts 
on the subject, gives useful technical information about different 
guns and solid arguments, based on facts, against further firearms 
restrictions, while being rather defensive and not challenging the 
basic principles of British gun control.  The use of guns for sporting 
purposes has hardly been mentioned in my essay, which emphasises the 
use of firearms for self-defence.

/Law and Policy Quarterly/, volume 5, number 3, July 1983.  An
interdisciplinary American academic journal with contributions by 
eight experts from a viewpoint critical of further restrictions.  Some 
of the essays were later included in /Firearms and Violence/
in extended forms.

D. B. Kopel, "Trust the People", Cato Institute Policy Analysis
No. 109, 11 July 1988.  A short pamphlet by an American lawyer that 
contains most of the relevant facts and arguments in an easily digested 
form.

S. Gabb, /Gun Control in Britain/, Political Notes No. 33, Libertarian
Alliance, London, 1988.  A short and useful critique of gun control 
from a libertarian perspective. 


- ---------------------------------------------------------------
Political Notes No. 47

ISSN  0267 7059     ISBN  1 870614 74 7

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Copyright 1990: Libertarian Alliance; David Botsford

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