Aug 24 2007
Gun control - neither the US nor the UK model works
In the immediate aftermath of another shocking shooting in the UK the cries will probably go up for stronger gun laws, and stronger laws against violent crime.
It is the easy option. We are all revolted and shocked by what has happened. In the past the easy way out has been to blame the politicians for not putting in place strong enough laws. The politicians responded to the popular mood after past tragedies by amending the criminal law, and by tightening regulation on gun ownership. Politicians will do that, both because we too are disgusted by what has happened and would like to stop it in the future, and because we understand the public mood.
This time it would be better to think more deeply about what is happening. Legal gun ownership in the UK is now very strongly controlled. Past regulations mean that to own a gun a person has to go through an elaborate process of gaining character references, filling in a form, applying for a licence, and demonstrating they have a locked gun cupboard to keep it safe. Each gun and owner is registered and known to the police.
We now know this does not work.The burden of compliance is on the decent and law abiding. The law breakers buy and use illegal guns, traded on the streets. We also know from the USA that little or no regulation does not prevent gun crime either. The truth is that regulating the largely and wholly law abiding cannot stop the law breakers. If someone does not care about breaking the law against murder or assault on someone, they certainly will not worry that they are breaking gun control laws.
We have to accept that well intentioned as regulation is, in all too many cases it does not work. The young murderers and gun shooters on our streets live in a parallel universe where the rule of the gang is more important than the rule of law. There is a deeper indidividual and social malaise at work.
Each one of those young murderers started out in life with a mother and father. Usually both parents are still alive, but often not engaged with their adolescent children. Each one usually has aunts, uncles, grandparents,foster parents or step parents, teachers, vicars and social workers. Somehow all of the adults who know these youths have failed to make any impact, failed to offer them hope of a better life if they turn from crime to more normal pursuits.
Trying to mend a broken society is not easy, and will require many steps by many people. It certainly cannot be mended by one grand gesture by the politicians, by one sweep of the legislative pen urged on by tabloid newspapers. If it could we would all have put party aside and voted it through years ago.
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John Redwood has been the Member of Parliament for Wokingham since 1987. First attending Kent College, Canterbury, he graduated from Magdalen College...
The BBC and other media outlets need to show responsibility in the way they report such incidents. As with football hooliganism, it often seems like the media is adding a spice of glamour to such violence. I have seen programmes on childrens BBC where child actors are gesticulating with their hands in the ‘cocked gun’ gesture, they have clearly been told to do this by those making the programme. The growing trend of TV documentaries about gangs needs to be looked at too. Although these programmes are supposedly meant to be documentaries they in reality serve as a ‘free-ad’ for gang culture and criminality.
John Redwood has courageously written that which our politicians, in general, do not like to admit: i.e. gun laws don’t work. We must qualify that statement though by asking ourselves: ‘What is, or was, the actual purpose of gun laws?’ We are told that the purpose of these laws is to protect the citizenry from violent crime. Back in 1920, when the first serious Firearms Act was enacted, the hidden but documented objective was ‘to ensure that firearms are only available to friends of the Government’ - remember, the Russian Revolution had just taken place and anarchy was rife throughout Europe. In addition, we had large numbers of ex-soldiers, trained in the use of firearms, who were being denied the ‘Land fit for heros to live in’ that they had been promised would be theirs after the First World War. Perhaps our then leaders feared that the revolution might spread here? Our Firearms Laws work quite well in that regard as they certainly control the access to firearms by the law-abiding in this country and it would be hard for large numbers of people to gather together, acquire firearms and start an armed revolt. Obviously, the laws don’t affect the criminals who simply disregard them.
In any event, laws can only ever provide a code of practice for the law-abiding and a schedule of penalties to deter or punsih those who are not law abiding. In other words, if the laws have been disregarded, they can only ever provide a framework for society to ’sweep up’ after the event. Laws ‘control’ nothing and nobody, unless a person is prepared to be so controlled. Firearms law is a classic example of this - I know this because I am a target shooter and have held a Firearm Certificate since 1960 and have made a personal studyover the last 47 years or so. I was directly affected by the infamous ‘handgun ban’ after the Dunblane tragedy in 1996 and strongly object to being classed, by politicians and the police, as a potential murderer just because I have a keen interest in the sport of target shooting with pistols. It is indisputable that Thomas Hamilton murdered all those people at Dunblane Primary School on the 13th March, 1996. It is also indisputable that the Central Scotland Police - who were responsible for issuing Hamilton with a Firearm Certificate when he plainly did not comply with the requirements of the then Firearms Act and who then continued to renew and ‘vary’ his Firearm Certificate over a period of nearly 20 years leading up to the Dunblane murders, despite evidence from within their own ranks that this was not the right thing to do - bear a large part of the responsibility for the fact that Hamilton was able to use firearms that he possessed on a Firearm Certificate to commit his dreadful murders. Similar comments could be made about the other major ’spree killing’ in the UK, when Michael Ryan slaughtered many people at Hungerford in August 1987. We didn’t have the benefit of a Public Enquiry on that occasion, though so we may never know for certain ‘what went wrong’ in his case.
What can be done about this situation? For several decades now, Governments of various political hues have urged us not to ‘take the law into our own hands’. It has even been suggested that parents should not be allowed to use corporal punishment on their erring children. ‘Leave it to the experts’ has been the cry from State agencies - police, social workers etc. Now the nasty stuff has obviously hit the fan and, suddenly, it is all the fault of the parents for failing to discipline their children!
Most of the pronouncements by senior police officers about how they intend to deal with gun crime concentrate on trying to deny the young criminals access to guns and ammunition. Such a course of action is doomed to failure because it does not address the real problem. The real problem is not ‘how do children get hold of guns’ but is why do youngsters - and other criminals - have no qualms about using violence to further their ends? What are their ends anyway? The gun is just a convenient tool to help these people to achieve their objectives and could be replaced by another weapon if, by some miraculous means, all firearms suddenly disappeared from the planet. Efforts to control access to guns are futile as the planet is awash with guns and they cannot be uninvented. In any case, guns can quite easily be made: For evidence of that, just look at the crude but effective firearms made by the Mau Mau in Kenya. (Armed with one of those, a person could easily acquire a god gun and ammunition from a police officer or soldier.)
We blame youngsters for ‘hanging around, in a menacing manner’ in public when, reality, what else is there realistically available for them to do? They don’t all want to play football or any other traditional sport. Our political leaders concentrate on ‘the stick’ - ASBOs, restrictions, coercion etc but never seem to think about ‘the carrot’ - get involved, help these youngsters to find out what they want to do - ask them, even!! - and then make provision for them. It would be cheaper in the long run than trying to ‘contain’ them.
I hope that more politicians will have the courage that John Redwood has shown and publicly recognise that the ‘problem’ of gun violence that we face today is not inadequate gun control laws but inadequate people.
I would be pleased to help with any programme of serious research into these problems.
Reply: Thanks for your excellent contribution to the debate on this issue. We need to constantly remind people that much regulation does not work, or may even achieve the opposite of what the well intentioned legislators wanted when they put it through. Reading the journalism from Liverpool gives a chilling portrait of gang life for children, as older drug dealers manipulate and use the young ones to carry out their evil trade and settle their vendettas. I remember hearing about the gang culture in inner London when I was Conservative candidate in Peckham, spending my evenings and some weekends walking the elevated concrete pavements of Peckham’s vertical villages. Some law abiding tenants caught in that same world lived in permanent fear of the violence outside their doors. The children who get dragged into this murky world have been let down by parents, other family members, teachers.social workers and others who know them. In a beautiful world teeming with opportunity, they see an ugly urban landscape, a dead end at school, easy money from a life a crime and an adrenalin soaked kind of protection and companionship from joining a gang. Stronger policing of these areas is a must, as New York showed, and the re-engagement of some adults to show them there is a better way of life. None of it is going to be easy, and it cannot be done by a few more words scrawled in the bulging book of legislation.
I was born here in England and have recently returned after living in Australia for the last 15 years. In the past few months since I have been living in London, I have been shocked not only with the amount of children (and I do mean children, ranging anywhere from 12 - 18 year olds) committing murders and other violent crimes that I seem to read about almost daily in the newspapers.
I don’t mean to get off the topic but the ones that shock me more than gun crimes are those murders which have been perpetrated by groups of children beating their victim to death, kicking, stomping their heads and so forth. The recent murder of Sophie Lancaster in Lancashire has really rung a chord with me today and it is a clear sign of the depth of this problem. Apparently the incident began with a 15 year old, drunk, delivering a flying kick to the deceased’s boyfriend for no other seeming reason than the way he was dressed. Then, cradling her boyfriend’s head in her arms, the gang of 5 youths turned on her; her injuries were reportedly so severe that the first officials to arrive on the scene could not immediately tell whether she was male or female.
It is clear that the violence being perpetrated by very young people on the streets of England is not going to be solved by retributive justice, imprisonment and condemnation. Regardless of your personal opinion of such perpetrators and their crimes, simple logic demands that if one approach of dealing with this problem has failed, then it is time to try another. It is time. I completely agree with the preceding comment made in response to this story and I have this evening read of a story that bears remarkable resemblance to the tragic story of James Bulger’s murder. What is even more remarkable is the stark contrast of how the perpetrators were dealt with. The link to this story is:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/correspondent/803151.stm
Such an approach would undoubtedly outrage the average person in the UK but I again return to my above point that if people are serious about tackling this problem at its root, it is time to take a different approach and accept that it is going to take time and a concerted effort to rid our young people of the violence that has become so entrenched in their culture.
I will close by saying this: we were all children once, and at one time or another, we all had bad influences around us. Think back to whatever it was in your life that caused you turn from those bad influences, whether you did so immediately or after becoming involved with them to some extent. It is factors like those - being engaged by responsible adult figures as to your interests and aspirations, being able to spend time with friends in healthy social environments, in some cases spiritual nurturing may have been a factor - that are missing in these young people’s lives. Children are not born killers; indeed we know this from the reaction that most of us have to babies or infants - most of us can’t help but crack a smile when we observe a young child because we see the innocence and promise that each new child inherently holds, which similarly is what causes the horror and desire for retributive justice when a child commits a crime as heinous as the ones we read about in our daily newspapers.