Home | Issues     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