From: David O Hunt <[b--o--r] at [CMU.EDU]> Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns Subject: WSJ Article forward Date: Tue, 19 Apr 1994 16:58:14 -0400 [From: [D--Jo--s] at [andrew.cmu.edu]] [Subject: As Gun Crimes Rise, Britain Considers Cutting Legal Arsenal] [Date: Tue, 19 Apr 1994 08:09:57 -0400] Four article segments joined. No changes other than formatting of lines and selected highlighting (marked by ALL CAPS) were made. No sentence in the original post has any words in ALL CAPS. David Hunt ---------- By Kevin Helliker Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal LONDON -- While walking his beat last October, Officer Patrick Dunne came across three drug dealers. They produced guns. The bobby had only a wooden truncheon. They laughed as they killed him. In a nation so restrictive of guns that most police officers don't carry them, more and more criminals do. Incidents of armed robbery have more than doubled since 1983. GUNS ARE BOUGHT ON THE STREET THESE DAYS AS EASILY AS DRUGS. Last month, a motorcyclist, stopped for a routine license check here, shot and seriously wounded two police officers, neither of whom was armed. The attempted holdup of a candy store last month was committed by a gun-toting assailant described as eight years old. A portrait of criminals holding guns on an unarmed populace haunts the halls of every U.S. gun-control debate. And with the recent enactment of legislation requiring a five-day waiting period and background check for handgun purchases -- the so-called Brady bill -- that portrait will be used to argue against further regulation. But in Britain, where criminals increasingly are better armed than anyone else, lawmakers are considering new ways of reducing the country's already minimal legal arsenal. Some members of Parliament, for instance, are arguing that home storage of firearms -- currently illegal without a license -- ought to be banned. THIS GAMBLE IS BASED ON THE PREMISE THAT EVEN CRIMINALS HAVE A SENSE OF FAIR PLAY. AUTHORITIES CONCEDE THAT REGULATION WON'T KEEP GUNS OUT OF THE HANDS OF CRIMINALS. But current gun-control laws have worked fairly well, with 99% of crimes in Britain still involving no firearms. British officials say they want to preserve the sense among most criminals that firearms aren't needed. As long as homeowners, shopkeepers and most police don't carry guns, authorities hope, criminals won't feel the need to own -- or use -- them. "An armed criminal may be less likely to shoot if he knows the police aren't armed," says Fran Edwards, spokeswoman for the Police Federation, a national union. Yet disarming the citizenry isn't popular with everyone, especially at a time of nearly hysterical fear about crime. Britain's crime rate may be smaller than America's, but by local standards the numbers are frightening: IN THE PAST DECADE, REPORTED CRIME HAS DOUBLED, AND IT HAS TRIPLED IN CATEGORIES SUCH AS RAPE AND SERIOUS ASSAULT. Any hint of American-style savagery causes alarm in a country that still prides itself on good behavior. Politicians here frequently point out that the murder rate is one-fifteenth of America's. But a single act of brutality can overshadow that statistic, as when two 11-year-old schoolboys kidnapped and murdered a two-year-old boy last year. With other slayings at the hands of youths occurring more and more frequently -- just last month, police charged a 13-year-old with the fatal stabbing of an 85-year-old woman -- Britain's sense of itself as more civilized than the U.S. is becoming harder to maintain. Some neighborhoods here can be as rough as any street in America, as discovered this year by some Pennsylvania State University students enrolled at Britain's Manchester University. After being held up at knifepoint, then at gunpoint, then beaten up and twice burglarized, they declared in the national press that they felt more vulnerable in Manchester than in New York. Compared with London, New York is downright safe in one category: burglary. In London, where many homes have been burglarized half a dozen times, and where psychologists specialize in treating children traumatized by such thefts, the rate is nearly twice as high as in the Big Apple. AND BURGLARS HERE INCREASINGLY PREFER STRIKING WHEN OCCUPANTS ARE HOME, SINCE ALARMS AND LOCKS TEND TO BE DISENGAGED AND INTRUDERS HAVE LITTLE TO FEAR FROM UNARMED RESIDENTS. Little wonder that there now are serious calls to fight crime with bullets. Under the headline "When Bad Guys Rule, Shotgun is a Powerful Answer," a recent opinion article in the Times of London asked: "Would it not be better if the knife-wielding yobs who are taking over our streets were simply blown away?" A DAILY TELEGRAPH COLUMN TITLED "MORE GUNS, MORE SAFETY" ARGUED THAT GUNS ARE NEEDED FOR PROTECTION BECAUSE "LAW AND ORDER IS BREAKING DOWN." Like U.S. proponents of gun control, gun supporters in Britain must contend with a powerful tradition -- except here it's a tradition of gun control. Enacted in 1920, Britain's first firearms law arose from government fear of a Communist revolution. But it did a fine job of curbing crime: While America experienced armed robberies by the thousands in the 1950s, here the number rarely topped a dozen. The rarity of gun crimes meant that Britain never developed any tolerance for them. After a few robbers brandished shotguns in the 1960s, Parliament added shotguns to the list of firearms needing licensing (previously, just handguns and rifles). Even now, with gun crimes rising, shots here seem to ring more loudly than in the U.S. In England, almost everyone knows the name Michael Ryan: He shot and killed his own mother and a policeman and 14 others, including himself, in Hungerford in 1987. Mr. Ryan's firearms certificate allowed him to own three pistols and two semiautomatic rifles, including the Russian-made Kalashnikov AK-47 that he used in the slaughter. Margaret Thatcher's conservative government responded to the killings by enacting the most draconian firearms act ever adopted in Britain, including outlawing semiautomatic weapons altogether. In comparison, neither then-President Bush -- a member of the National Rifle Association -- nor the Congress considered any regulation in the wake of the worst gun massacre in U.S. history, the killing of 23 at a Luby's restaurant in Killeen, Texas, in 1991. Because local police departments in Britain interpret national firearms laws differently, requirements for obtaining a license differ from region to region. But generally, a person wanting a shotgun license -- the easiest to obtain -- must pay a fee of 17 pounds (about $25) and fill out an application explaining why and where he plans to use the gun (sport is acceptable, self-protection isn't), submit a letter from a doctor or other qualified professional attesting to a sound state of mind and construct a burglar-proof storage cabinet. After all that, a local police superintendent can reject the request. The only recourse, an expensive proposition, is to go to court. After the Thatcher government's rules took effect in 1989, the number of Britons holding certificates for shotguns, handguns or rifles dropped 10% to about 900,000 -- compared with 50 million gun owners in the U.S. As for total guns in Britain, even the bleakest estimates place the number well below five million, most of them legally certified, compared with more than 220 million guns in America. Britain recorded 33 handgun murders in 1992, compared with more than 13,000 in the U.S. STILL, THE NUMBER OF CRIMES INVOLVING FIREARMS ROSE MORE THAN 50% FROM 1982 THROUGH 1992, AND POLICE EXPECT THE INCREASE TO CONTINUE AS INTERNATIONAL DRUG DEALERS DEEPEN THEIR PENETRATION OF THE BRITISH MARKET. IN A RECENT RAID OF A SUSPECTED CRIMINAL DEN IN LIVERPOOL, POLICE FOUND A CACHE THAT INCLUDED THREE KALASHNIKOVS AND ONE ISRAELI-MADE UZI SUBMACHINE GUN, AS WELL AS AMMUNITION. Police say such guns enter the country through the same secretive channels as drugs. But another source of illegal guns in Britain is the theft of licensed ones: Burglars nabbed nearly 2,700 guns in 1992. Convinced that the best way to control illegal weapons is to tighten restrictions on legal ones, some members of Parliament have proposed prohibiting all gun licenses to citizens under 17 (who currently need the approval of a guardian). In a move that could close scores of gun clubs and shooting ranges, the government is attempting to strip them of their charitable status (originally based on the argument that the clubs helped train the populace to "defend the realm"). And following some recent murders and suicides involving licensed guns, there is a proposal to consider banning them from homes, essentially limiting guns to the sport clubs. Gun enthusiasts, as might be expected, are "feeling somewhat besieged," says Lord Swansea, a member of the House of Lords and of Britain's National Rifle Association, a shooting group unconnected to America's NRA. For the first time, British gun groups are banding together to try mustering political clout, in part by threatening to vote against gun opponents in Parliament. But though they echo the favorite argument of America's NRA -- that gun regulation disarms everyone except criminals -- they don't boast its political power. In 1988, for instance, the Thatcher government "didn't even consult with any legitimate users of guns" before tightening curbs, grumbles Christopher Brunker, secretary of the Gun Trade Association. "Instead of the shooting community fighting back, there has been far too much of the gentlemanly, `Oh, we have to make some more concessions,'" says Colin Greenwood, editor of Guns Review magazine and a leader of the effort to strengthen the gun lobby here. Britain's gun industry isn't that strong, either. The number of dealers has fallen 10% in recent years, to 2,400. And while no one will estimate the value of the British gun market, by all accounts it is small and "on a 5% to 10% decline annually," says Paul Roberts, chairman of John Rigby & Co., one of several world-renowned shotgun makers in Britain. The company produces about 50 guns a year, about half of them for overseas customers. The $6,000 price tag in part reflects the high cost of complying with regulations, Mr. Roberts says. Each sale of a firearm "has to be recorded in a certain way," he says, "and every round of ammunition that is bought and sold has to be recorded." Mr. Roberts estimates that such rules have raised his costs 30% in recent years. Despite such complaining, nobody in Britain's gun industry seems to favor deregulation. Lord Swansea, one of the strongest advocates of gun rights, says, "You have to keep some sort of tab on ownership of all guns -- not just handguns." In the same breath that Andrew Young, managing director of Browning/Winchest- er U.K. Ltd., complains about poor sales in Britain, he says he wouldn't favor arming all bobbies -- even though his company has a contract to supply guns to them. Currently, about one in 16 British police officers is trained to use arms, and operates in an elite force that responds to highly dangerous situations. Following the murder of Officer Dunne last October, a Police Review magazine survey found that only 26% of London police officers favored department-wide arming. But since that survey, one officer has been knifed to death and two others shot and wounded. NOW, EVEN TOP ADMINISTRATORS CONCEDE THAT GUNS EVENTUALLY WILL BECOME A PART OF POLICE EQUIPMENT IN BRITAIN, one of three countries -- along with Ireland and New Zealand -- with a mostly unarmed police force. The attitude of the courts may also be changing, as illustrated by the case of Ahmed Muhsen. One night two years ago, three burglars kicked in the door of a grocery that Mr. Muhsen was guarding in Liverpool and, despite his warnings, came toward him wielding clubs. Producing a Browning pistol that he had bought on the street for the equivalent of $45, Mr. Muhsen fired once, killing one intruder and scaring off the other two. At Mr. Muhsen's trial last month on charges of manslaughter and owning an unlicensed pistol, the judge expressed more outrage at Britain's burglars than at Mr. Muhsen. "In my view," the judge told the defendant, "your reaction was one which most people in your position might well have displayed.-" He then sentenced him to a year in prison.