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Unilateral Armament
Libertarians: What are They On?
Libertarians: Why They Have it All Wrong
The American Dream™
Politics in Little England
Ban it or Make it Compulsory: Isn't There Any Middle Way?
The Civilized States of America and Jesusland
The Dark at the Bottom: Guns, Education and the Criminal-Corrections Industrial Complex
The Right to Bare Arms
The Defence of Liberty
War: what is it good for?
The Second Amendment
Never forget that Britain is a nation that does not even routinely arm its police officers. There has never been a culture of owning, carrying or using guns in Britain.
British people have not expressed any desires to see large numbers of its people armed, no political party has ever found it worthwhile using guns as a campaigning issue, except to ban them. Certainly there have been some people who have kept guns in contravention of the law, but they have not been willing to mount a significant campaign for greater freedom to own weapons. Many people like the idea of being armed in a disarmed society, it gives them an edge they could never have in a free-for-all. In a country with no legal guns the gun fetishist can play his secret fantasies at home with his illegal gun. He can draw the curtains and waggle his revolver in front of the mirror and pretend to be Clint Eastwood or James Bond, any gun will do, any gun will make him feel big and hard. In a nation full of guns a cheap revolver and ten rounds of ammunition could not slake that thirst, because the local librarian has that, he needs more, much more.
Gun ownership has been controlled by law for many years in Britain. These laws prevented the growth of a gun culture and a gun based vigilantism. Guns were never freely available for use for “home defence” or “personal protection” or any other euphemisms for using guns as a lethal security blanket. Guns were kept for target shooting and for collecting as interesting objects. Guns in private hands did not contribute to the deterrence or prevention of crime to any significant degree. There was no large market for weapons and therefore no commercial interest in feeding the illusion of a widespread threat to the unarmed and the illusion of security offered by their latest hardware. The circulation of Guns and Ammo magazine was low, and men would be likely to hide it inside a pornographic magazine to maintain the illusion that they were not sad and dangerous obsessives. In the USA things were very different, guns were widespread enough to have some deterrent effects on certain crimes. Guns were common enough that it was possible for people to maintain the illusion that it was normal to want to own a machine capable of slaying a bus full of people, a machine with no other legitimate function than the threat or reality of lethal force.
The principle objection used in the US is that guns are a legitimate form of self defence. This was not the case in Britain. Only a tiny number of people owned guns, most managed perfectly well without their supposed protective benefits. British society was built up without a role for personal weaponry. If an owner of a gun ever brandished it, even at a burglar, they would be likely to be charged with an offence. This was normality. Guns were owned by a small minority of people that the general public were tolerant of.
Something changed. There were two mass killings involving legally owned weapons. The public mood changed from tolerance to resolution. We asked ourselves what was the point of allowing people to carry weapons. The answer was clear, the benefits did not outweigh the risks. The vast majority of people were not armed and could see no benefit in being armed. The idea that guns were a basic human right was considered to be farcical. Guns were seen as a public nuisance, a potential threat to the law-abiding majority who had no need or desire to own them. The subject was debated publicly and in parliament and the majority supported an outright ban on the private ownership of handguns. Nobody expected this to reduce general crime levels any more than they expected it to improve the weather. Nobody expected it to make mass killings impossible, it was obvious that guns could still be obtained illegally. However, it was quite clear that a ban would lead to a significant reduction in the number of people with guns in their possession and that if there were any future mass shootings then we, the people, could not be accused of complicity. That might seem like a small gain for a major change in the law but that is only if you think that previously guns were bringing huge amounts of pleasure or security to their owners. The public weighed up the issue and came to their own conclusion: gun ownership was not a basic human right, it was a privilege and it could and should be withdrawn. The right to own a handgun was put into the same historic category as the right to rape your wife and trade in slaves bought in good faith.
Since the ban on legally owned handguns was implemented British society has not changed much. Before the ban there were practically no guns on the streets to deter muggers so muggers never gave them a thought, this did not change. Before the ban only a tiny minority of houses had any guns in them and so again the thought that they might face a gun did not cross the mind of any burglar, again this was unchanged. If you have read British newspapers you may be aware of an increase in violent crime and burglary, because in newspapers there is ALWAYS an increase in crime or there is no crime news. Nobody in Britain has associated this increase in crime with the gun law. It would be as sensible to blame it on global warming. In Britain rising crime is seen as a social problem, a symptom of a moral breakdown, a side effect of changes in the economy or an indictment of poor policing. Why are we so naive? Because we do not have a significant number of ideologically empowered gun wielding libertarians to tell us what our rights are. We don't have a vast retail gun sales industry telling us we need weapons. We don't have a large number of people who own guns; most people in Britain were unable to say “I have a neighbour who has a gun and he is normal”. I did not know anybody who owned a pistol, I could not point out any house in which I thought a gun might be kept. People who owned guns did not advertise the fact to deter burglars, quite the opposite, they did not want to attract burglars to steal their guns. Gun owners were statistics, not people you knew, and at least two of them made entirely the wrong kind of statistics.
Today in Britain you would have to look long and hard to find anybody bothered by the handgun ban. In contrast in the USA there are millions of people who are wringing their hands over our plight because they want to believe that because we have banned guns we are now buried in crime and under the jackboot of a fascist government. Since the ban I have not seen a single poster, placard, T-shirt, or graffito about guns. I have seen a couple of amateurish websites and no more than a handful of bumper stickers, in nearly five years. On the web the outcry from America is huge, the outcry from Britain is tiny. Guns are a non-issue in this country. Legally they are banned. Criminals still own them of course, just as criminals still trade drugs and rob people, activities that have been illegal for much longer. Only a feeble-minded person would expect criminals to obey a law they did not want to obey.
US libertarians condemn us for usurping fundamental human rights. Which right is that? We still have the right to use force in self-defence, including lethal force. That is a fundamental right. The ownership of any particular artefact capable of killing is not a fundamental right, it is a matter that is quite legitimately the concern of the whole community. If the US wants to learn any lessons from Britain I think the best lesson is that Britain is very different from the USA. The ban on handguns went smoothly and did not cause any major breakdown in law and order or the legitimacy of government. This is not evidence that the same would be true in America.
The USA has a major problem with guns that cannot be easily solved. Handgun availability contributes to the murder rate, which is much higher than in any vaguely comparable country (as if there could be one) and at the same time handgun availability contributes to the gun culture that makes rational thought on the subject so hard. America has a big problem with guns and it is polarizing the community. I wish I could offer some constructive help but I cannot. All I can say is don't believe what you read about Britain in Guns and Ammo magazine. We banned guns, we have almost totally forgotten about it now, it is not an issue for 95% of the British people.
At the next General Election there will be no demand for the restoration of the British people's “fundamental human rights” to own guns. I have just logged onto the Conservatives' website, the British opposition party you would expect to be championing the cause of gun rights if any party did. On the first page there was a banner declaring that street crime was 31% up under the Labour Party government but a search on the site for “guns” or “handguns” revealed nothing about any demand for a change in the law. Handguns and crime prevention are simply not linked in the British mind, except by a tiny minority of ideologically inspired libertarians or gun enthusiasts who take their cues from America.
We are broadly happy with, although not smug about, our gun laws.
The rise of gun ownership by British criminals has absolutely nothing to do with the handgun ban. It is all down to drugs and criminal gangs. If you are a member of a drug gang you cannot get protection for your business interests from the police, the only way you can have security is by arming yourself. This has no relationship at all to the ownership of handguns by a few dozen overgrown boy scouts or idiots who think owning a pistol will stop the Communists invading. Gun ownership among criminals has escalated because, well, because gun ownership among criminals has escalated: it is an arms race. The criminals use their guns mostly for protection and deterrence against other criminals, few guns are ever used to intimidate or harm non-gang members. When people are shot it is usually because they are members of rival gangs, or less often they are victims of mistaken identity or other forms of “collateral damage”.
Two teenage girls accidentally shot dead by gun gang. A Mac 10 is significantly less accurate than squirting water out of a hosepipe with your finger over the end, or the pissing of a man who gets out of bed at 4 am after drinking ten pints.
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