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Might
it be
possible
for a nation to go from
wide-open freedom for the right
to arms to almost complete gun
prohibition in just a few
decades? The answer is yes. The
destruction of gun rights in
Great Britain during the 20th
Century offers an object lesson
for American gun owners. If we
repeat the mistakes of our
British cousins, we too will find
ourselves disarmed sooner than we
had imagined possible. So let's
look carefully at how British gun
owners lost their rights and
investigate a story with ominous
parallels for the United
States.
The
Late 19th Century
In the final
decades of the19th Century, Great
Britain was much like the United
States in the 1950s. There were
almost no gun laws and almost no
gun crime. The homicide rate per
100,000 population per year was
between 1.0 and 1.5, declining as
the century wore on.
Two
technological developments,
however, began to work together
to create in some minds the need
for gun control. The first of
these was the revolver. Revolvers
had begun to achieve mass
popularity when Col. Samuel Colt
showed off his models at the
Great Exhibition in London in
1851.
Technology
advanced rapidly, and as
revolvers got cheaper and better,
concern arose regarding the
increase in "firepower" available
to the public. Compared to the
seemingly more benign single-shot
muzzle-loaders of the past, the
revolver, to some, seemed a
frightening
innovation.
As revolvers
became more affordable, concerns
began to grow about the
availability to criminals of
cheap German sidearms. Cheap guns
were, in some eyes, associated
with hated minority groups. For
example, in the late 1860s, the
London Lloyd's Newspaper had
blamed a crime wave on "foreign
refuse" with their guns and
knives. "The revolver's
appearance . . . we owe to the
importation of reckless
characters from America. . . .
The Fenian [Irish-
American] desperadoes have
sown weapons of violence in our
poorer districts."
All of these
developments have their parallels
in modern America. The popularity
of semi-automatic pistols with
their larger-capacity magazines
frightens some people who view
the old six-shooter as a harmless
traditional weapon. The fact that
semi-automatics were invented
more then 100 years ago does not
stop the press from portraying
them as dangerous new guns, just
as the revolvers of the 1850s
were portrayed as dangerous new
guns in the 1880s.
Prejudice and
discrimination against ethnic
groups persists. While American
gun control advocates don't
complain much about Irish
immigrants with guns, they do
warn about the dangers of Blacks
armed with "ghetto guns."
Journalist and gun control
advocate Robert Sherrill writes,
"The Gun Control Act of 1968 was
passed not to control guns but to
control blacks." Historian B.
Bruce-Briggs notes, "It is
difficult to escape the
conclusion that the `Saturday
Night Special' is emphasized
because it is cheap and is being
sold to a particular class of
people. "1 Bruce-Briggs writes
that the very term `Saturday
Night Special' is racist in
lineage.
After
showing his revolvers at
London's Great Exhibition
in 1851, Col. Samuel Colt
opened a factory in London.
British and American flags
wave together in Thames
river breezes in this 1853
engraving. Novelist Charles
Dickens wrote of touring
the facility.
Revolvers were
one technological development
that began to make Britons
rethink the desirability of the
right to bear arms. The second
development was the growth of the
mass circulation press.
Newspapers, like guns, had been
around for quite a while, but the
late 19th Century witnessed
several printing innovations that
made printing of vast quantities
of newspapers extremely
cheap.
The Walter
press, patented in England in
1866, introduced stereotype
plates. Printers discovered ways
to make sheets of any desired
length, thereby allowing rolls of
paper to be fed into cylinder
presses, and greatly accelerating
printing speed. Machines for
folding newspapers were brought
on-line; and by the late 19th
Century, typesetting machines
were coming into use.
All of these
developments made possible the
production of low-cost newspapers
that even poor people could buy
every day. As audiences expanded,
papers became increasingly
sensationalist, and the "yellow
journalism" of publishers such as
America's William Randolph Hearst
was born.
Hearst's
British counterparts were
fervently devoted to sensation,
and especially loved lurid crime
stories. In 1883, a pair of armed
burglaries in the London suburbs
set off a round of press hysteria
about armed criminals. The press
notwithstanding, crime with
firearms was rare.
Also in 1883,
British Parliament saw the first
serious attempt at gun control in
many decades. Parliament
considered and rejected a bill to
ban the "unreasonable" carrying
of a concealed firearm. In 1895,
strong pistol controls were
rejected by a 2-1 margin in the
House of Commons.
Queen
Victoria fired the opening
shot at the British NRA's
first meeting at Wimbledon
on July 1, 1860. The
British group preceded
birth of the National Rifle
Association of America by
11 years.
The
developments of the British press
and its attitude toward crime and
guns in the late 19th Century
have parallels in 20th Century
America. Television news is
cutting loose its last ties to
traditional standards imposed
from the days of print
journalism. In the "infotainment"
produced by organizations such as
NBC News, depiction of reality is
less important than the
production of entertaining,
compelling "news"
pieces.
Thus, when the
"assault weapon" panic of 1989
broke out, television journalists
paid little attention to whether
"assault weapons" actually were
the "weapon of choice" of
criminals. (Police statistics
show that they're used in about
1% of gun crime.) The focus was
not on the reality of gun crime,
but on the sensational footage of
guns firing full automatic, while
the newscaster decried the
availability of
semi-automatics.
 
Rudyard
Kipling (l.) and Arthur
Conan Doyle each witnessed
the lethal fire that Boer
farmer-riflemen rained on
British troops in 1899.
They returned home to
promote civilian
marksmanship through the
expansion of rifle clubs in
England.
But in Britain
as the 19th Century came to a
close, the press had not as yet
persuaded the public to adopt gun
controls. Indeed, the only
significant firearms law was the
1870 Gun License Act, which
required a prospective buyer to
purchase a 10-shilling gun
license at the local post office.
The bill was strictly a revenue
measure.
Buyers of any
type of gun, from derringers to
Gatling guns faced no background
check, no need for police
permission to purchase and no
registration. As criminologist
Colin Greenwood writes, "anyone,
be he convicted criminal,
lunatic, drunkard or child, could
legally acquire any type of
firearm." And anyone could carry
any gun anywhere. The gun crime
rate was at its all time
low.
The official
attitude about guns was summed up
by Prime Minister Robert Gascoyne
Cecil, the Marquess of Salisbury,
who in 1900 said he would "laud
the day when there is a rifle in
every cottage in
England."
Led by the
Duke of Norfolk and the mayors of
London and of Liverpool, a number
of gentlemen formed a cooperative
association that year to promote
the creation of rifle clubs for
working men. The Prime Minister
and the rest of the aristocracy
viewed the widespread ownership
of rifles by the working classes
as an asset to national security.
Similar views were held by men of
letters such as Rudyard Kipling
and Arthur Conan Doyle, both of
whom founded rifle clubs after
service in the Boer
War.
Sherlock
Holmes' creator favored
"Miniature Club" .22
rimfire or .297/.230
center-fire rifles for
training, because
requirements for ranges
were more easily met
than for highpower
rifles.
But within a
century, the right to bear arms
in Britain would be well on the
road to extinction, for reasons
that would have little to do with
gun ownership itself, but which
instead related to the British
government's growing mistrust of
the British people, and to the
apathetic attitude of British gun
owners.
The
Early 20th Century
In 1903,
Parliament enacted a gun control
law that appeared eminently
reasonable. The Pistols Act of
1903 forbade pistol sales to
minors and felons and dictated
that sales be made only to buyers
with a gun license. The license
itself could be obtained at the
post office, the only requirement
being payment of a fee. Those who
intended to keep the pistol
solely in their houses didn't
even need to get the postal
license.
Attracting
only slight opposition, the
Pistols Act passed easily. The
law had no discernible
statistical effect on crime or
accidents. Firearms suicides did
fall, but the decline was more
than matched by an increase in
suicide by poisons and knives.
Since the bill defined pistols as
guns having a barrel of 9" or
less, pistols with 91/2" barrels
were soon popular.
While the Act
was in the short run harmless to
gun owners and useless in
reducing gun misuse, it was of
considerable long-term
importance. By allowing the Act
to pass, British gun owners had
accepted the proposition that the
government could set the terms
and conditions for gun ownership
by law-abiding
subjects.
The early
years of the 20th Century saw an
increasingly bitter series of
confrontations between capital
and labor throughout the
English-speaking world. In
Britain, the rising militancy of
the working class was beginning
to make the aristocracy doubt
whether the people could be
trusted with arms. When American
journalist Lincoln Steffens
visited London in 1910, he met
leaders of Parliament who
interpreted the current bitter
labor strikes as a harbinger of
impending revolution. The next
set of gun control initiatives
reflected fears about immigrant
anarchists and other
subversives.
As the
coronation of George V
approached, one American
newspaper, the Boston Advertiser,
warned about the difficulty of
protecting the coronation march
"so long as there is a generous
scattering of automatic pistols
among the 70,000 aliens in the
Whitechapel district." The paper
fretted about aliens in the
United States and Britain with
their "automatic pistols" which
were "far more dangerous" than
the bomb. The Advertiser defined
an "automatic pistol" as a
"quick-firing revolver," and
called for gun registration,
restrictions on ammunition sales,
and a ban on carrying any
concealed gun, all with the goal
of "disarming alien
criminals."2
What was the
"automatic pistol/quick-firing
revolver" that so concerned the
newspaper? In 1901, the British
company of Webley & Scott
began production of the Webley
Fosbery "automatic revolver." The
Webley-Fosbery, which used the
recoil of the fired cartridge to
cock the hammer and rotate the
cylinder, failed to attract much
interest in either the British or
American military, and production
was short-lived. In fact, it may
be best known today for a brief
appearance as the murder weapon
of Sam Spade's partner in
Dashiell Hammett's Maltese
Falcon.
Despite
alarmist media claims,
the Webley-Fosbery was a
dead-end in firearms
development.
It has been
said that the "more dangerous
than the bomb" automatic revolver
worked best on paper. There it
couldÐlike the non-existent
"plastic gun" of todayÐtake
on mythic qualities in the minds
of overheated newspaper
editorialists.
Whatever the
actual dangers of the automatic
revolver, immigrants scared
authorities on both sides of the
Atlantic. Crime by Jewish and
Italian immigrants spurred New
York State to enact the Sullivan
Law in 1911, requiring a license
for handgun buying and carrying,
and making carry licenses very
difficult to obtain. (Sullivan
had promised homicides would
decline drastically. But instead,
homicides increased, and the New
York Times found criminals "as
well armed as ever."3)
As in modern
America, sensational police
confrontations with extremists
also helped build support for gun
control. In December 1910, three
London policemen investigating a
burglary at a Houndsditch jewelry
shop were murdered by rifle fire.
A furious search began for "Peter
the Painter," the Russian
anarchist believed responsible.
The police uncovered one cache of
arms in London: a pistol, 150
bullets, and some dangerous
chemicals. The discovery led to
front-page newspaper stories
about (non-existent) anarchist
arsenals all over London's East
End.
The police
caught up with London's anarchist
network on Jan. 3, 1911, at 100
Sidney Street. The police threw
stones through the windows, and
the anarchists inside responded
with rifle fire. Supplemented by
a Scots Guardsman unit, 750
policemen besieged Sidney
Street.
Home Secretary
Winston Churchill arrived on the
scene as the police were firing
artillery and preparing to deploy
mines. Banner headlines
throughout the British Empire
were already detailing the
dramatic police confrontation
with the anarchist
nest.
Churchill,
accompanied by a police inspector
and a Scots Guardsman with a
hunting gun, strode up to the
door of 100 Sidney Street; the
inspector kicked the door down.
Inside were the dead bodies of
two anarchists. Peter the Painter
was nowhere in sight. London's
three-man anarchist network was
destroyed. The "Siege of Sidney
Street" turned out to have been
vastly overplayed by both the
police and the press.
While the
Siege of Sidney Street did
convince New Zealand to tighten
its gun laws, the British
Parliament rejected new controls.
Parliament turned down the Aliens
(Prevention of Crime) Bill, that
would have barred aliens from
possessing firearms without
permission of the local Chief
Officer of Police.
World War I and Its
Aftermath
British
resistance to gun controls
finally cracked in 1914, when
Great Britain entered The Great
War. The government imposed
comprehensive, stringent controls
as "temporary" measures to
protect national security during
the war. Similar controls have
been proposed, and in many cases
implemented, as part of modern
America's drug war.
When the war
ended, most Britons expected that
the government would give them
back their gun rights, as many
Americans perhaps expect that gun
controls will be relaxed if the
"drug war" is ever won. The
British were wrong to trust their
government.
"War is the
health of the state" observed
historian Randolph Bourne, and it
was World War I that set in
motion the growth of the British
government to the size where it
could begin to destroy the right
to arms that Britons had enjoyed
with little hindrance for more
than two centuries.
After World
War I broke out in August 1914,
the British government began
assuming "emergency" powers for
itself. "Defense of the Realm
Regulations" were enacted which
required a license to buy
pistols, rifles, or ammunition at
retail.
As the war
came to a conclusion in 1918,
many British gun owners no doubt
expected that the wartime
regulations would be soon
repealed, and Britons would again
enjoy the right to purchase the
firearms of their choice without
government permission. The
government had other
ideas.
The disaster
of World War I had bred the
Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.
Armies of the new Soviet state
swept into Poland, and more and
more workers of the world joined
strikes called by radical labor
leaders who predicted the
overthrow of capitalism. Many
Communists and other radicals
thought the Revolution was at
hand; all over the
English-speaking world
governments feared the
end.
The reaction
was fierce. In America, Attorney
General A. Mitchell Palmer
launched the "Palmer raids."
Aliens were deported without
hearings, and American citizens
were searched and arrested
without warrants and held without
bail. While America was torn by
strikes and race riots, Canada
witnessed the government massacre
of peaceful demonstrators at the
Winnipeg General Strike of
1919.
In Britain,
the government worried about what
would happen when the war ended
and the gun controls expired. A
secret government committee on
arms traffic warned of danger
from two sources: the "savage or
semi-civilized tribesmen in
outlying parts of the British
Empire" who might obtain surplus
war arms, and "the anarchist or
`intellectual' malcontent of the
great cities, whose weapon is the
bomb and the automatic
pistol."
At a Cabinet
meeting on Jan. 17, 1919, the
Chief of the Imperial General
Staff raised the threat of "Red
Revolution and blood and war at
home and abroad." He suggested
that the government make sure of
its arms. The next month, the
Prime Minister was asking which
parts of the army would remain
loyal. The Cabinet discussed
arming university men,
stockbrokers and clerks to fight
any revolution.
The Minister
of Transport, Sir Eric Geddes,
predicted "a revolutionary
outbreak in Glasgow, Liverpool or
London in the early spring, when
a definite attempt may be made to
seize the reins of government."
"It is not inconceivable," Geddes
warned, "that a dramatic and
successful coup d'etat in some
large center of population might
win the support of the unthinking
mass of labour." Using the Irish
gun licensing system as a model,
the Cabinet made plans to disarm
enemies of the state and to
prepare arms for distribution "to
friends of the
Government."
Although
popular revolution was the
motive, the Home Secretary
presented the government's 1920
gun bill to Parliament as
strictly a measure "to prevent
criminals and persons of that
description from being able to
have revolvers and to use them."
In fact, the problem of criminal,
non-political misuse of firearms
remained minuscule.
Of course 1920
would not be the last time a
government lied in order to
promote gun control. In 1989 in
the United States, various police
administrators and drug
enforcement bureaucrats set off a
national panic about "assault
weapons" by claiming that
semi-automatic rifles were the
"weapon of choice" of drug
dealers and other criminals.
Actually, police statistics
regarding gun seizures showed
that the guns accounted for only
about 1% of gun crime.
Most Americans
swallowed the 1989 lie about
"assault weapon" crime, and most
Britons in 1920 swallowed the lie
about handgun crime. Indeed, the
carnage of World War I (in part
the result of the outdated
tactics of the British and French
general staffs) had produced a
general revulsion against
anything associated with the
military, including rifles and
handguns.
Thus the
Firearms Act of 1920 sailed
through Parliament. Britons who
had formerly enjoyed a right to
bear arms were now allowed to
possess pistols and rifles only
if they proved they had "good
reason" for receiving a police
permit. Shotguns and airguns,
which were perceived as
"sporting" arms, remained exempt
from control.
In the early
years of the Firearms Act, the
law was not enforced with
particular stringency, except in
Ireland, where revolutionary
agitators were demanding
independence from British rule.
Within Great Britain, a "firearms
certificate" for possession of
rifles or handguns was readily
obtainable. Wanting to possess a
firearm for self-defense was
considered a "good reason" for
being granted a firearms
certificate.
The threat of
Bolshevik revolutionÐthe
impetus for the Firearms
ActÐhad faded quickly as the
Communist government of the
Soviet Union was spending its
energy gaining full control over
its own people, rather than
exporting revolution. Ordinary
firearms crime in BritainÐthe
pretext for the Firearms
ActÐremained minimal. Despite
the pacific state of affairs, the
government did not move to repeal
the unneeded gun controls, but
instead began to expand the
controls further.
The
1930s
In 1934, a
government task force, the Bodkin
Committee, was formed to study
the Firearms Act. The Committee
collected statistics on misuse of
the guns that were not currently
regulated (shotguns and airguns)
and collected no statistics on
the guns under control (rifles
and handguns). The Committee
concluded that there was no
persuasive evidence for repeal of
any part of the Firearms Act.
Since the Bodkin Committee had
avoided looking for evidence
about how the Firearms Act was
actually working, it was not
surprising that the Committee
found no evidence in favor of
decontrol.
In 1973 and
1988, when the government was
attempting to expand controls
still further, gun control
advocates claimed that the Bodkin
Committee report was clear proof
of how well the Firearms Act of
1920 was working, and why its
controls should be extended to
other guns.
Spurred by the
Bodkin Committee, the British
government in 1934 enacted new
legislation to completely outlaw
(with a few minor exceptions)
possession of short shotguns and
automatic firearms. The law was
partly patterned after the
National Firearms Act in the
United States (with taxed and
registered, but did not prohibit,
such guns).
As a result of
alcohol prohibition, America in
the 1920s and early 1930s did
have a problem with criminal
abuse of automatic weapons,
particularly by the organized
crime gangsters who earned
lucrative incomes supplying
illegal alcohol. The repeal of
Prohibition in 1933 had sent the
American murder rate into a
nosedive, but Congress went ahead
and enacted the NFA in 1934
anyway.
In Britain,
there had been no alcohol
prohibition, and hence no crime
problem with automatics (or other
guns). Yet the guns were banned
anyway, since, as the government
explained, automatics were crime
guns in the United States, and
there was no legitimate reason
for civilians to possess
them.
The same
rationale is used today in the
drive to outlaw semi-automatic
firearms in the United States.
Since some government officials
believe that people do not "need"
semi-automatic firearms for
hunting, they believe that such
guns should be prohibited,
whether or not the guns are
frequently used in
crime.
Starting in
1936, the British police began
adding a requirement to Firearms
Certificates requiring that the
guns be stored securely. As
shotguns were not licensed, there
was no such requirement for
them.
While the safe
storage requirement might, in the
abstract seem reasonable, it was
eventually enforced in a highly
unreasonable manner by a police
bureaucracy determined to make
firearms owners suffer as much
harassment as possible. In one
l990s case, a person traveling
from a range to his home left
ammunition in a locked car for an
hour. When the ammunition was
stolen, the man was convicted of
not keeping the ammunition in a
secure place.
World
War II
After the fall
of France and the Dunkirk
evacuation in 1940, Britain found
itself short of arms for island
defense. The Home Guard was
forced to drill with canes,
umbrellas, spears, pikes, and
clubs. When citizens could find a
gun, it was generally a sporting
shotgun Ð ill suited for
military use because of its short
range and bulky
ammunition.
Prime
Minister Winston
Churchill inspecting
a No. 4 Enfield which
the British adopted
after Dunkirk,
because the rifle
could be mass
produced.
British
government advertisements in
American newspapers and in
magazines such as The American
Rifleman begged Americans to
"Send A Gun to Defend a British
HomeÐBritish civilians, faced
with threat of invasion.
desperately need arms for the
defense of their homes." The ads
pleaded for "Pistols, Rifles,
Revolvers, Shotguns and
Binoculars from American
civilians who wish to answer the
call and aid in defense of
British homes."
Pro-Allied
organizations in the United
States collected weapons; the
National Rifle Association
shipped 7,000 guns to Britain.
Britain also purchased surplus
World War I Enfield rifles from
America's Department of
War.
Prime Minister
Winston Churchill's book Their
Finest Hour details the
arrival of shipments of .300
caliber rifles and .75 caliber
artillery pieces from the U.S.
government in July 1940.
Churchill personally supervised
the deliveries to ensure that
they were sent on fast ships and
distributed first to Home Guard
members in coastal zones.
Churchill thought that the
American donations were "entirely
on a different level from
anything we have transported
across the Atlantic except for
the Canadian division itself."
Churchill warned his First Lord
that "the loss of these rifles
and field-guns would be a
disaster of the first
order."
"When the
ships from America approached our
shores with their priceless arms
special trains were waiting in
all the ports to receive their
cargoes," Churchill recalled.
"The Home Guard in every county,
in every town, in every village,
sat up all through the night to
receive them.... By the end of
July we were an armed nation....
a lot of our men and some women
had weapons in their
hands."
At
his New York City shop,
Maj. Anthony Fiala (l.), of
the American Committee For
Defense of British Homes,
crates .45-70 trapdoor
carbines, as chairman
Cutting watches. Committee
efforts led to more than
25,000 guns and two million
rounds of ammunition being
sent to defend Britain
against Nazi
invasion.
Before the
war, British authorities had
refused to allow domestic
manufacture of the Thompson
submachine gun because it was "a
gangster gun." When the war broke
out, large numbers of
American-made Thompsons were
shipped to Britain, where they
were dubbed "Tommy
guns."
As World War
II ended, the British government
did what it could to prevent the
men who had risked their lives in
defense of freedom and Britain
from holding onto guns acquired
during the war. Troop ships
returning to England were
searched for souvenir or captured
rifles, and men caught attempting
to bring firearms home were
punished. Guns that had been
donated by American civilians
were collected from the Home
Guard and destroyed by the
British government.
And yet, large
quantities of firearms slipped
into Britain, where many of them
remain to this today in attics
and under floor boards. At least
some British gun owners, like
their counterparts in today's
gun-confiscating jurisdictions
such as New Jersey and New York
City, were beginning to conclude
that their government did not
trust them, and that their
government could not be trusted
to deal with them
fairly.
The
1950s and 1960s
Having
implemented a licensing system
for handguns and rifles in the
1920s, and having banned
automatic weapons entirely in the
1930s, and having confiscated
guns which Americans had donated
to the British Home Guard in the
1940s, the British government in
the 1950s left the subject of gun
control alone. Crime was still
quite low, and issues such as
national health care and the Cold
War dominated the political
dialogue.
As in most of
the Western world, the late 1960s
in Great Britain was a time of
rising crime and civil disorder.
In 1965, capital punishment was
abolished, except for treason and
piracy.
Gun crime did
not seem to be a problem.
Scotland Yard stated "with some
confidence" that the objectives
of eliminating "the improper and
careless custody and use of
firearms.... and making it
difficult for criminals to obtain
them.... are effectively
achieved." In June 1966, Home
Secretary Roy Jenkins told
Parliament that after consulting
with the Chief Constables and the
Home Office, he had concluded
that shotgun controls were not
worth the trouble. Yet six weeks
later, Jenkins announced that new
shotgun controls were necessary,
because shotguns were too easily
available to
criminals.
Had there been
a sudden surge in shotgun crime
in the six-week period? Not at
all. What had happened was that
three policemen at Shephard's
Bush had been murdered with
illegal revolvers. Popular outcry
for capital punishment was
fervent, and Jenkins, an
abolitionist, responded by
announcing new shotgun controls,
in an attempt to divert attention
from the noose.
Jenkins'
shotgun controls made no logical
sense. Regulating shotguns would
obviously have no impact on
criminal use of unlicensed
revolvers, the guns used to
murder the three
policemen.
Jenkins
claimed that "criminal use of
shotguns is increasing rapidly,
still more rapidly than that of
other weapons." But the "rapidly"
increasing crime associated with
shotguns involved mostly poaching
or property damage, rather than
armed robberies or
murders.
Nevertheless,
by showing that he was "doing
something" about crime by
proposing shotgun controls,
Jenkins effectively achieved his
main goal, which was to divert
public attention from the death
penalty. The Jenkins tactic has
been used by many other
politicians since then, including
former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo,
a proponent of gun prohibition
and an opponent of the death
penalty.
At Jenkins'
request the British government
began drafting the legislation
that became the Criminal Justice
Act of 1967. The new act required
a license for the purchase of
shotguns.
Like the Gun
Control Act of 1968 in the United
States, Britain's 1967 Act was
part of a comprehensive crime
package that included a variety
of infringements on civil
liberties. The British Act
abolished the necessity for
unanimous jury verdicts in
criminal trials, eliminated the
requirement for a full hearing of
evidence at committal hearings,
and restricted press coverage of
those hearings.
Under the 1967
system, which is mostly still in
force, a person wishing to obtain
his first shotgun would obtain a
"shotgun certificate." The local
police could reject an applicant
if they believed that his
"possession of a shotgun would
endanger public safety." The
police were required to grant the
certificate unless the applicant
had a particular defect in his
background such as a criminal
record or history of mental
illness.
An applicant
was required to supply a counter
signatory, a person who would
attest to the accuracy of the
information in the application.
During an investigation period,
which might last several weeks,
the police might visit the
applicant's home. In the first
decades of the system, about 98%
of all applications were
granted.
Once the
£12 shotgun certificate was
granted, the law allowed a
citizen to purchase as many
shotguns as he wished. Private
transfers among certificate
holders were legal and
uncontrolled.
Administrative
Abuse
As is typical
with many gun control laws, the
shotgun certificate system was
enforced in a moderate and
reasonable way by the government
in its first years.
Similarly, the
rifle and handgun licensing
system, introduced in 1921, had
been enforced in a generally
moderate way in the 1920s and
1930s. But as the public grew
accustomed to the idea of rifles
and handguns being licensed, it
became possible to begin to
enforce the licensing
requirements with greater and
greater stringency.
Severe
enforcement of the rifle and
handgun licensing system would
not have worked in 1922. Too many
gun owners would have been
outraged by the rapid move from a
free society to one of repressive
controls. By enforcing the 1921
system with moderation, at first,
and then with gradually
increasing severity, the British
government acclimated British gun
owners to higher and higher
levels of control.
The British
government used the same
principle as do people who are
cooking frogs. Throw a frog in a
pot of boiling water, he'll jump
out. But put him in a pot of
moderately warm water, and
gradually raise the temperature,
he'll slowly lose consciousness,
and be unable to escape by the
time the water gets to a
boil.
The
frog-cooking principle helps
explain why Handgun Control,
Inc., and the other anti- gun
lobbies are so desperate to pass
any kind of gun control, even
controls that most observers
agree will accomplish very
little. By enacting, for example,
the Brady Act, HCI establishes
the principle of a national gun
licensing system. Once a lenient
national handgun licensing system
is established, the licensing
system can gradually be
tightened, so that, as in New
York City today, only wealthy or
extremely persistent people are
as a practical matter able to
obtain handgun
licenses.
The British
"firearms certificate" system of
1921 had required that a person
who wished to possess a rifle or
handgun prove he had "a good
reason." (In Great Britain,
"firearms" refers only to rifles
and handguns, and not to
shotguns, but this booklet
follows American usage, in which
shotguns are also considered
"firearms.") In the early years
of the system, self-defense had
been considered "a good reason."
But by the 1960s, it was well
established police practice that
only "sporting" purposes, and not
self-defense could justify
issuance of a rifle or handgun
license.
In practice,
being a certified member of an
approved target shooting club was
the only way a person could
legally obtain a pistol. The
shooting clubs, being jealous
guardians of their
government-granted "privilege,"
usually required a person to
become a probationary member of
six months, and regularly attend
club matches during that period,
before being accepted into full
membership (and thus becoming
eligible for a handgun
license).
Having,
through administrative
interpretation, delegitimized gun
ownership for self defense, the
British government was able to
enact a variety of other laws,
which met with little opposition,
outlawing other defensive items.
For example, non-lethal chemical
defense sprays, such as Mace, are
illegal, as are electric stun
devices.
Having control
over rifle and handgun owners
through a licensing system, the
police began inventing their own
conditions to put on licenses.
The police practice was not
entirely legal, but it was
generally accepted by a compliant
public. Similar practices occur
in American jurisdictions such as
New York, where licensing
authorities sometimes add their
own, extralegal, restrictions to
handgun licenses.
When the safe
storage requirement was
introduced for rifles and
handguns in the 1930s, it was
enforced in a reasonable manner
by the police. Leaving your
handgun on the front porch wasn't
acceptable, but keeping it on a
dark closet shelf was perfectly
fine. Similarly, in the few
American jurisdictions that have
imposed storage requirements in
recent years, the law is usually
enforced in a reasonable
mannerÐat least for
now.
But the safe
storage law that British gun
owners once accepted as
"reasonable" (and whose extension
to shotguns was generally
supported by gun owners in the
1989 gun control law), is now
being interpreted in a highly
unreasonable manner.
In many
jurisdictions, police will not
issue or renew a shotgun
certificate or a firearms
certificate (necessary for rifles
and handguns, before the 1997
handgun ban) without an in home
visit to ensure that police
standards for safe storage are
being met. The police have no
legal authority to require such
home inspections, yet when a
homeowner refuses the police
entry, the certificate
application or renewal will be
denied.
The actual law
does not specify detailed
standards of how guns are to be
stored. And the actual law
clearly does not mandate that
putting a gun in a hardened safe
is the only acceptable storage
method. But that is what the
police in many jurisdictions
require anyway. In fact, many gun
owners who bought safes that the
police said were acceptable are
now being forced to buy new
safes, because the local police
have arbitrarily changed the
standards. In many districts, an
acceptable safe is now one that
can withstand a half-hour attack
by a burglar who arrives with a
full set of safe-opening tools,
and who even has time to take a
short rest if his first efforts
to pry open the safe do not
succeed.
The police
decision to require such safes is
completely unlawful. But
Parliament has no interest in
investigating police abuses of
the gun licensing laws, and the
courts are submissive to police
"discretion." The only practical
way that British gun owners could
have avoided such ridiculous
storage requirements would have
been to resist the first proposed
laws that allowed the police to
determine who could get a gun
license. But the gun owners never
would have dreamed of resisting,
because such a law seemed so
"reasonable."
Sometimes the
police require the purchase of
two safes, the second one for
separate storage of
ammunition.
A man buying a
low-powered, £5 rimfire
rifle may have to spend £100
on a safe. A person with five
handguns (before the 1997 ban)
might be ordered to add a
£1000 electronic security
system. The net effect of the
heavy security costs is to reduce
legal gun ownership by the less
wealthy classes.
Police abuses
appear in every aspect of gun
licensing. Police departments
have told hunters, incorrectly,
that certain legal restrictions
on hunting with semi-automatics
also apply to hunting with
pump-action guns. A certificate
for rifle possession often
includes "territorial conditions"
specifying exactly where the
person may hunt. Persons who do
not like the territorial
conditions have no practical
redress.
Today,
even expensive,
single-shot .22 target
pistols like those that
are used in the Olympics
are banned in
Britain.
While it is
not legally necessary for
shooters to have written
permission to hunt on a
particular piece of land, police
have been stopping shooters,
demanding written proof, and
threatening to confiscate guns
from persons who cannot produce
the proof. And the police have,
again without legal authority,
required applicants for shotguns
capable of holding more than two
shells to prove a special need
for the gun.
Without legal
authority, the police have begun
to phase out firearms collections
by refusing new applications. Gun
licensing fees have been
repeatedly raised far above the
actual cost of administering the
licensing system and have been
used as a mechanism to discourage
gun ownership.
If a policeman
has a personal interest in the
shooting sports, that interest
will generally disqualify him
from being assigned to any role
in the police gun licensing
program. Policemen who know
virtually nothing about guns, but
who can be counted on to have a
hostile attitude toward gun
owners, are often picked for the
gun licensing jobs.
As a technical
matter, applicants may appeal
police denials of permit
application, but the courts are
generally deferential to police
decisions. Hearsay evidence is
admissible against the applicant.
An appellant does not have a
right to present evidence on his
own behalf.
Having meekly
accepted the wishes of the police
and the ruling party for
"reasonable" controls, British
rifle and handgun owners by the
early 1970s found themselves in a
boiling pot of severe controls
from which escape was no longer
possible. British shotgun owners,
ignoring the fate of their rifle
and handgun-owning brethren,
jumped into their own pot of then
lukewarm water when they accepted
the 1966 shotgun licensing
proposals.
Momentum
for Prohibition
Although gun
crime is not as common as in the
United States, gun crime
incidents inevitably attract
sensational media attention that
becomes the basis for further
tightening of controls. In the
fall of 1989, for example, a
person who had been rejected for
membership in a firearms club
stole a handgun from the locked
trunk of a club member and shot a
Manchester policeman. A
probationary member of a
different firearms club, learning
that he had a fatal disease,
killed one club member, stole a
gun from the club, and shot a
personal enemy. The Home
Secretary, at the urging of the
Manchester police department,
issued a new set of restrictions
on new firearms clubs, the most
severe being that members would
no longer be able to bring guests
to the firing range to shoot a
firearm.
Under new
"safety" regulations regarding
explosives, persons who possess
modern gunpowder or blackpowder
are now subject to unannounced,
warrantless inspections of their
home at any time, to make sure
that the powder is properly
stored. The government, of
course, promises (for now) that
its inspections will not be
unreasonable.
The police
leadership has made it clear that
it views civilian gun ownership
as something that should be
abolished. One method of
abolition is to prevent the entry
of new generations into the world
of shooting sports. Hence, it is
illegal for a father to give even
an airgun as a gift to his
13-year-old son.
And thanks to
decades of such restrictions
aimed at constricting entry into
the shooting sports, the vast
majority of the public has no
familiarity with guns, other than
what media propagandists choose
to let them learn. Legal British
gun owners now constitute only 4%
of total households (with perhaps
another 4% possessing illegal,
unregistered guns).
Given that
many Britons have no personal
acquaintance with anyone whom
they know is to be a sporting
shooter, it is not surprising
that 76% of the population
supports banning all
guns.
Thus, the men
who used long guns in the field
sportsÐwho confidently
expected that whatever controls
government imposed on the rabble
in the cities who wanted
handguns, genteel deer rifles and
hand-made shotguns would be left
aloneÐhave been proven
disastrously wrong.
On the morning
of Aug. 19, 1987, a licensed gun
owner named Michael Ryan dressed
up like Rambo and shot a woman 13
times with a handgun at the
Savernake Forest. After killing a
filling station attendant, he
drove to his home in the small
market town of Hungerford, where
he killed his mother and his dog.
In the next hour, he went into
town and slaughtered 15
peopleÐseven with his
handgun, and eight with his
Chinese-made Kalashnikov rifle.
Ryan disappeared for a few hours,
reappeared at 4 p.m. in a school,
and killed himself three hours
later. A few days later, another
mass murder took place at
Bristol, this one with a
shotgun.
The media's
reaction, especially the print
media's, was intense. The tabloid
press ran editorials instructing
the public how to spot potential
mass murderersÐadvising
suspicion of anyone who was a
loner, who lived alone, who lived
with his mother, or who was a bit
quiet. The tabloid press and the
respectable press both pushed
heavily for stringent gun laws.
Pressure also mounted for tighter
censorship of violent
television.
Semi-automatic
center-fire rifles, which had
been legally owned for nearly a
century, are now completely
banned. Pump-action rifles are
banned as well, since it was
argued that these guns could be
substituted for semi-automatics.
Practical Rifle Shooting, the
fastest growing sport in Britain,
vanished. Shotguns that can hold
more than two shells at once now
require a "firearms license." All
shotguns must now be registered.
Shotgun sales between private
parties must be reported to the
police. Buyers of shot shells
must produce a shotgun
certificate. Applicants for a
shotgun certificate must obtain a
countersignature by a person who
has known the applicant for two
years and is "a member of
Parliament, justice of the peace,
minister of religion, doctor,
lawyer, established civil
servant, bank officer or person
of similar standing." Most
important, an applicant for a
shotgun certificate must
demonstrate to the police that he
has a "good reason" for wanting a
gun. Self-defense is not a good
reason. As a technical matter,
the police have the burden of
showing that the applicant does
not have a good reason. In
practice, the police have already
been requiring the applicant
prove that he has a good reason,
such as membership in a shooting
organization.
On March 13,
1996, a pederast used handguns to
murder a kindergarten class and
its teachers in Dunblane. The
man, well known as mentally
unstable, had been refused
membership in several gun clubs.
Citizens had written to the
police asking them to revoke the
man's gun license. Under Great
Britain's very restrictive gun
laws, the police easily could
have taken away this man's guns.
Instead, they did nothing, and a
mass murder resulted.
As has been
the case in Great Britain since
the days of the witch hunts,
innocent people became the target
of a raging mob. Great Britain's
law-abiding, severely regulated
handgun owners were among the
most law-abiding people on earth.
But that fact meant nothing to
politicians and
hate-mongers.
The tabloid
press went wild with angry
stories about gun owners,
portraying anyone who would own a
gun as sexually inadequate and
mentally ill.
The Tory
government, headed by John Major,
convened a Dunblane Enquiry
Commission. The Commission
received presentations on
firearms policy from groups and
experts on all sides of the gun
issue. But the most powerful
submissionÐbased on what the
report concludedÐcame from
the British Home Office. The Home
Office presented fabricated
information which claimed that
high gun ownership ratesÐeven
legal, regulated gun
ownershipÐ caused high rates
of criminal violence. This claim
was completely false. From region
to region within Great Britain,
within the United States, within
Australia, and within continental
Europe, those with the highest
rates of legal gun ownership tend
to have the lowest violence
rates.
But the
Dunblane Commission, misled by
the Home Office, came back with a
report that recommended dozens of
ways to tighten the
already-restrictive gun licensing
system, and impose more controls
on licensed gun
owners.
The Commission
did not, however, recommend
banning all handguns. Prime
Minister John Major, with one eye
on the polls, accepted the
Commission's recommendation to
make the licensing laws more
severe, but insisted that there
also be a handgun ban. He allowed
an exception for single-shot .22
handguns which were stored at
licensed shooting ranges. The new
gun laws went into effect in
February 1997.
A few months
later, Labour Party leader Tony
Blair was swept into office in a
landslide. One of his first acts
was to complete the handgun ban,
by removing the exemption for
single shot .22s. Since 1921, all
lawfully-owned handguns in Great
Britain have been registered with
the government, so handgun owners
have little choice but to
surrender their guns, in exchange
for payment according to
government schedule.
The handgun
ban by no means has satisfied the
anti-gun lobbies in Great
Britain. While British gun owners
gracefully gave away the right to
own guns for protection, they are
now finding that their privilege
to own guns for sports is under
greater attack than ever.
Britain's leading anti-hunting
group, the League Against Cruel
Sports, points to the "hundreds"
of people killed by guns and
"thousands" of guns used in
robberies and demands a ban on
all guns.
Nor will a ban
on all guns satiate the
prohibitionist
appetite.
Many British
gun owners now own deactivated
"replica" guns that cannot be
fired. For some gun owners,
deactivation was the only way
they could retain possession of a
prized semi automatic. Other gun
owners simply found the hassles
of the police licensing system
too much to overcome, and had
their family heirloom guns
deactivated. With deactivation,
at least, the family could retain
the non-firing gun without need
to spend vast sums on police
security requirements.
But this last
"loophole" in the British gun
laws may be closed in a few
years, as the police are now
lobbying to require that owners
of deactivated or replica guns
get the same license that would
be required for guns that can
fire bullets.
The
Campaign Against
Self-Defense
Have all these
controls and abusive enforcement
of controls actually made Britain
safer? Armed crime in Britain is
higher than it has been in at
least two centuries. Armed crime
is literally a hundred times more
common than at the turn of the
century, when Britain had no
weapons controls.
Yet even as
the government increasingly fails
in its duty to protect the
populace, the government puts
increasing effort into punishing
persons who dare to protect
themselves. Syndicated newspaper
columnist Sam Francis, commenting
on the same phenomenon in the
United States, dubbed the
governmental policy
"anarcho-tyranny."
With gun
ownership for self-protection now
completely illegal (unless you
work for the government), Britons
have begun switching to other
forms of protection, which the
government considers an
intolerable affront.
For example,
some citizens are turning to
guard dogs. Unfortunately, dogs
(unlike guns and knives) have a
will of their own and sometimes
attack innocent people on their
own volition. The number of
people injured by dogs has been
rising, and the press is calling
for bans on Rottweilers,
Dobermans, and other "devil
dogs." Under 1991 1egislation,
all pit bulls must be neutered or
put to death.
Other citizens
choose to protect themselves with
knives. But carrying a knife for
defensive protection is
considered illegal possession of
an "offensive weapon." One
American tourist from Arizona
found this out the hard way.
After she used a pen knife to
stab some men who were attacking
her, a British court convicted
her of carrying an offensive
weapon. Her intention to use the
pen knife for lawful defensive
purposes converted the pen knife,
under British law, into an
illegal "offensive
weapon."
Early one
evening in March 1987, Eric
Butler, a 56-year-old executive
with B.P. Chemicals, was attacked
while riding the London subway.
Two men came after Butler and, as
one witness described, began
"strangling him and smashing his
head against the door; his face
was red and his eyes were popping
out." No passenger on the subway
moved to help him.
"My air supply
was being cut off," Butler later
testified, "my eyes became
blurred and I feared for my
life." Concealed inside Butler's
walking stick was a 3-ft. blade.
Butler unsheathed the blade. "I
lunged at the man wildly with my
swordstick. I resorted to it as
my last means of defense." He
stabbed an attacker's
stomach.
The attackers
were charged with unlawful
wounding. Butler was tried and
convicted of carrying an
offensive weapon. The Court gave
him a suspended sentence, but
denounced the "breach of the law
which has become so prevalent in
London in recent months that one
has to look for a deterrent." The
government immediately outlawed
possession of
swordsticks.
Martial arts
weapons have also been banned.
And now police administrators are
lobbying to bring crossbows under
the same "reasonable" licensing
system that currently applies to
firearms.
No prosecution
for defending oneself is too
absurd. Consider a report from
the Evening Standard newspaper in
London, dated Oct. 31,
1996:
"A man who
uses a knife as a tool of his
trade was jailed today after
police found him carrying three
of them in his car.
"Dean Payne,
26, is the first person to be
jailed under a new law making the
carrying of a knife punishable by
imprisonment.
"Payne told
.... magistrates that he had to
provide his own knife for his job
cutting straps around newspaper
bundles at the distribution plant
where he works ... .
"Police found
the three knivesÐa lock
knife, a small printer's knife,
and a Stanley knifeÐin a
routine search of his car ....
The court agreed he had no
intention of using the knives for
'offensive' purposes but jailed
him for two weeks
anyway.
"[The
magistrate said] 'I have to
view your conduct in light of the
great public fear of people going
around with knives .... I
consider the only proper
punishment is one depriving you
of your liberty.'"
At the dawn of
the 20th Century, Great Britain
was the great exemplar of liberty
to continental Europe. But the
sun has set on Britain's
tradition of civil liberty. The
police search people's cars
routinely. Public hysteria
against weapons is so extreme
that workingmen are sentenced to
jail merely for possessing the
simple tools of their
trade.
The
Causes of British
Decline
The people of
Great Britain fought for their
right to keep and bear arms in
the l7th Century, but let the
right vanish during the course of
the 20th Century. How could a
democratic nation, in less than a
century, "progress" from having
no gun laws, and almost no gun
crime, to having draconian gun
laws and soaring gun crime? What
happened in Britain could easily
occur in the United States, and
many of the same factors that
helped destroy the right to arms
in Britain are at work in the
United States and other
democracies today.
1.
Misunderstanding Nature of Right
-Sports vs.
Freedom
The British
gun owners must accept much of
the blame for their current
predicament, because of their
concession that guns were only
appropriate for
sports.
When the Home
Office in the 1980s began
complaining that some people were
obtaining guns for protection,
the British Shooting Sports
Council joined the complaint:
"This, if it is a fact, is an
alarming trend and reflects sadly
on our society." One hunting
lobby official condemned "the
growing number of weapons being
held in urban areas" for reasons
having nothing to do with sport.
The major hunting lobby, the
British Association for Shooting
and Conservation, defended the
right to bear arms, but only, in
its words, "the freedom to
possess and use sporting
arms."
This may
appear to be a "reasonable"
position, which demonstrates that
gun owners are not bloodthirsty
nuts wanting to shoot people, but
are simply harmless sportsmen.
But in fact, the concession that
guns are only for sports
critically undermines defense of
the right to bear arms. If guns
are not to be owned for defense,
then guns make no positive
contribution to public safety.
And while sportsmen may wish only
to shoot game and clay pigeons,
guns do sometimes fall into the
hands of criminals, who use them
to shoot people.
So as the
public evaluates the issue, it
sees the gun control advocates
talking about public safety and
the gun owners talking about
sports. Given the trade-off, who
wouldn't trade lots of damage to
sports in exchange for even
minimal gains in public
safety?
In the United
States, many gun owners are much
more vocal about the importance
of firearms for protection. But
there is a very large segment of
hunters, clay pigeon shooters,
and even IPSC competitors who
self-righteously insist that they
only want guns for sports. These
sportsmen act as if they are
morally superior to people who
need handguns for protection. The
anti-defense sportsmen are in
some ways more effective at
undermining the right to bear
arms than any gun control
lobbyist could ever
be.
2. Failure
to Organize
Unwilling to
support the right to keep and
bear arms for defenseÐas
opposed to the privilege to use
sporting weaponsÐBritish gun
owners have also been unwilling
to band together for defensive
purposes.
While Britain
has a large number of groups that
promote particular shooting
disciplines, such as the Clay
Pigeon Shooting Association, the
National Small-Bore Rifle
Association, and the U.K.
Practical Shooting Association,
most of these organizations
content themselves simply with
running their own competitions.
Getting involved in legislative
affairs would hardly occur to
them. And they would never dream
of getting involved in
legislative affairs on an issue
that did not affect their own
discipline. The clay pigeon folks
pay no attention to how the
government is restricting
handguns, nor did the handgunners
care much about what the
government was doing to the rifle
shooters. In all of Great
Britain, there are less than half
a dozen people with full-time
jobs resisting the further
expansion of gun control
laws.
Partly as a
result of historical accident,
American shooting sports are more
closely unified, with many
disciplines under the banner of
the National Rifle Association.
And while the majority of NRA's
income is not spent on
legislative affairs, a good
fraction is. That is why the gun
control lobbies and their media
lapdogs are so vituperative
toward NRAÐthe organization
is a major impediment to their
objective of disarming the
American people.
But in a
nation of more than 70 million
gun owners, less than 3 million
belong to NRA. And even some NRA
members are all too willing to
throw other shooters to the
wolves. Some hunters complain
when NRA defends semi-automatic
rifles used by target shooters.
Some target shooters complain
that NRA is too involved fighting
for people who want to carry
handguns for protection. And
almost everybody is willing to
let the already over-regulated
machine gun shooters get
regulated out of
existence.
American
Art Cook won Olympic
gold medal in smallbore
rifle in London in 1948.
Today, British pistol
marksmen can not even
train on home soil due
to the gun laws they and
their countrymen have
allowed to be
passed.
The British
experience should teach Americans
the importance of the NATO
doctrine for gun rights. Adopted
as a resolution at the Gun Rights
Policy Conference every year
since 1988, the NATO Doctrine
affirms that an attack against
one form of gun ownership is
considered an attack against
allÐjust as the original NATO
doctrine affirmed that an attack
on one NATO country would be
considered an attack against all.
Only a self-destructive blindness
would have allowed the United
States or the United Kingdom to
ignore a Soviet invasion of
Turkey or West Germany simply
because Soviet tanks were not
rolling through London or New
York. Even if the Soviets
solemnly had promised that they
only wanted to capture Berlin or
Ankara, and had no interest in
London, diplomatic realists
understood that to allow the
piecemeal conquest of small
democratic nations would
eventually put even the most
powerful democratic nations in
mortal danger.
The people who
own the firearms that are
currently still considered
"politically correct" (such as
bolt or lever-action rifles, and
pump-action shotguns) are making
a tragic miscalculation by their
callous indifference to persons
who want to own small handguns
(so called "junk guns"), or
semi-automatic firearms. Once the
gun control lobby gets done
destroying the more vulnerable
gun owners, the lobby will be all
the stronger to take on the gun
owners that remain.
If you are not
a part of the unified defense of
all shooting disciplines, you are
part of the problem.
3.
Appeasement
Even when
British gun owners have gotten
politically involved, they have
far too often been willing to
assent to ever more restrictive
controls to make the government
happy. When the Home Office
(similar to the U.S. Department
of Justice) imposed stringent new
restrictions on gun clubs, the
Chief Executive of Britain's
National Rifle Association
[no affiliation with the U.S.
NRA] affirmed his assent by
simply noting that "the
Government saw a
need."
The theory of
appeasement is that by making
concessions, pro-gun groups will
prove their reasonableness and
good faith, thereby convincing
the government not to take even
more privileges away from gun
owners.
Just as
British gun owners have attempted
to appease their government, the
British government attempted to
appease the Nazis in the years
before World War II. All that
appeasement accomplished was to
embolden the Nazis. And when the
war finally came, the Allies were
all the weaker because their
appeasement policies had allowed
democratic, pro-Allied
Czechoslovakia and other parts of
central Europe to be swallowed by
the Nazi war machine.
While there
are particular gun control
advocates who might be appeased
for a while with concessions from
the gun rights movement, the gun
control lobby as a whole cannot
be appeased. No concession you
can offer will satisfy them for
longer than it takes them to
digest their gains, and prepare
the next offensive. Although
individual anti-gunners vary in
their motivation, in the long
term the moral imperative of the
anti-gun movement can be
satisfied by nothing less than
the prohibition of all weapons,
all replica weapons and of the
right to self-defense.
4.
Willingness to Stand and
Fight
Almost every
time the British government has
demanded more power, the great
mass of British gun owners
placidly have accepted the
government's action without
protest. (The 1996 97 push for
handgun confiscation saw the
first significant display of
gun-owner solidarity, with tens
of thousands of law-abiding gun
owners and supporters rallying in
the streets.) The result of the
"reasonable" approach of the gun
owners has not been a reasonable
treatment by the British
government. Instead, the
government has pressed down
restriction after restriction
upon the British people, and as
every restriction fails to halt
the rising tide of crime, the
British government invents still
more "reasonable" gun controls to
distract the public from the
government's inept efforts at
crime control.
As armed crime
grows worse and worse, despite
nearly a century of severe
firearms controls, the British
government expends more and more
energy "cracking down" on the
rights of the British people. The
right to arms, the right to jury
trial and the right to grand jury
indictment having been almost
entirely destroyed, and even the
right not to be compelled to
incriminate oneself has
disappeared.
And the
British example is the American
gun control intelligentsia's role
model.
But not all
Americans have considered the
repressive practices of Great
Britain a model for a free
society. The men and women who
fought for American Independence,
and who later placed the right to
bear arms in the Second Amendment
were such people. Are
you?
Will you begin
to stand and fight for your
rights today? Or do you think it
will be easier to defend your gun
rights after you have let
President Clinton, Vice President
Gore and the anti gun lobbyists
have their way for a few more
years? Will defending
your rights be
easier when handguns and
semi-automatics have been
outlawed, or when guns and gun
owners are registered in a
federal computer, or when
carrying a gun for protection has
been made into a federal crime
with a mandatory prison
term?
Patrick
Henry's words from 1775 speak to
us today: "They tell us we are
weakÐunable to cope with so
formidable an adversary. But when
will we be stronger? Will it be
next week, or next year? Will it
be when we are totally
disarmed?"
Handgun
Control, Inc.'s Sarah Brady has
already unveiled her plans for
what she wants to follow the
"Brady Bill" (a proposal which
could easily have been stopped in
Congress, had enough gun owners
cared to speak up). As she told
the New York Times, her ultimate
goal is a "needs-based licensing"
system. Under her plan, all guns,
and all gun transfers would be
registered. And possession of any
gun would require the gun owner
to satisfy the local police chief
that he has a "need" for the
gun.4
What about
people who need a gun for
protection? "To me, the only
reason for guns in civilian hands
is for sporting purposes," says
Brady.5 Her "educational
organization," the Center to
Prevent Handgun Violence (CPHV)
is one of several groups that
belong to the "HELP"
networkÐHandgun Epidemic
Lowering Plan. The stated goal of
the HELP network is to "work
toward changing society's
attitude toward guns so that it
becomes socially unacceptable for
private citizens to have
guns."
Once the
government has confiscated
handguns, and it has disarmed all
the people who think they need
any kind of gun for self-defense,
how long will the shooting sports
survive? What will remain of
target competition, after
draconian taxes on guns and
ammunition have decimated the
ranks of target shooters? What
will remain of hunting, after
animal rights advocates have
confined hunting to a few faraway
preserves, so that the number of
licensed hunters falls further
every year?
What will
remain of gun collectors, if they
must pay hundreds of dollars a
year for an "arsenal" license, as
Handgun Control proposes, and
must "consent" to several
unannounced police inspections of
their home every year? How much
political clout will the
dwindling number of gun owners
have in a few years, if millions
of schoolchildren are subjected
to HCI's political propaganda
against guns and the Second
Amendment as part of their school
curriculum? Who will be the next
generation of shooters, if
teenagers are forbidden to learn
how to use guns even with
parental consent, as is the
current law in Massachusetts and
New York?
How long will
it take, if you wait 5 or 10 or
15 years to begin fighting,
simply to retake the ground that
was lost in the interim while you
sat on the sidelines? Will you
ever regain it?
Or will you
stay forever on the sidelines,
too busy or too self-important to
join the fray?
You cannot
content yourself with a thought
that you will hide your guns if
you have to. Gun detection
technology is advancing very
rapidly. In the not-distant
future, it will not be possible
to hide an illegal gun or
gunpowder in a home.
American gun
owners face the same choice that
Winston Churchill posed to the
British people when they wondered
how to face the Nazis during the
1930s: "If you will not fight for
the right when you can easily win
without bloodshed, if you will
not fight when your victory will
be sure and not so costly, you
may come to the moment when you
will have to fight with all the
odds against you and only a
precarious chance for survival.
There may be a worse case. You
may have to fight when there is
no chance of victory, because it
is better to perish than to live
as slaves."
Today in Great
Britain, the few remaining gun
owners fight alone, with only a
precarious chance of survival.
Will you follow their path of
appeasement, and surrender the
rights which your ancestors gave
their blood, toil, tears, and
sweat in order to preserve for
you? Do you want your children or
grandchildren to face the awful
choice of being brutalized by a
criminal or going to prison for
defending themselves?
Stand idle
like the British, and be
destroyed, or use your rights of
free speech, petition, assembly,
voting, and jury service to
defend your rights, and together
we will prevail. The choice is
yours.
Sources:
1. B. Bruce
Biggs, "The Great American Gun
War," The Public Interest
45 (Fall 1976), p. 50.
2. Reprinted in J.W.G., "The
Menace of the Pistol," 2 American
Institute of Criminal Law 93
(1911).
3. New York Times, May 23,
1913, p.9.
4. Erik Eckhom, "A Little Gun
Control, A Lot of Guns," New
York Times, Aug. 15, 1993,
p.B1.
5. Tom Jackson, "Keeping the
Battle Alive," Tampa
Tribune, Oct. 21,
1993.
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR
The British
history in this booklet is
adapted in part from chapter two
of David B. Kopel's award-winning
book The Samurai, the Mountie,
and the Cowboy: Should America
Adapt the Gun Controls of Other
Democracies? The book was
named Book of the Year by the
American Society of Criminology
Division of International
Criminology.
The author of
numerous magazine, newspaper and
law review articles, Dave Kopel
also is editor the book, Guns:
Who Should Have Them? He
co-wrote with Paul H. Blackman
No More Wacos: What's Wrong
with Federal Law Enforcement and
How to Fix It.
A former
assistant district attorney in
New York City, Kopel presently
serves as an adjunct professor of
law at New York University Law
School and Research Director of
the Independence Institute, a
free-market think tank in Golden,
Colo. The Institute's website is
http://i2i.org.
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