Newsgroups: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh,alt.law-enforcement,alt.politics.british,uk.politics,talk.politics.misc,talk.politics.guns
From: [r--s--l] at [eternity.demon.co.uk] (Russell Earl Whitaker)
Subject: Part 2 of 3: The Case Against Gun Control
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 1993 00:49:06 +0000

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Secretary promised new restrictions on firearms in order to head off
this pressure and avoid restoring the death penalty.  In the important
Criminal Justice Act 1967, which brought about a major overhaul of
the criminal justice system, Mr Jenkins introduced, in Part V, a system
in which, for the first time, persons had to obtain a licence before
acquiring a shotgun.  In the Lords discussion of the bill, Lord Mansfield
described the first parts of the Bill as the "Criminal Justice
(Encouragement of Evildoers) Bill" and Part V as the "Criminal
Injustice (Harassment of Citizens) Bill".  Lord Stonham, Under-Sectretary
of State at the Home Office, admitted that

   "Of course a determined criminal can get one [a shotgun]
   illegally, as he can get a pistol despite the 1937 Firearms Regulations,
   stringent though they are.  Of course he can; and this Bill will not
   stop a determined criminal from getting a shotgun."22

Nonetheless the Bill became law, and all the legislation relating
to firearms was amalgamated into the Firearms Act 1968.  Even the
more powerful air weapons were brought under firearms control legislation
with the Firearms (Dangerous Air Weapons) Rules 1969, although there
was not a single incident in which an air-gun had been used in a crime,
making a mockery of the number of police man-hours required to process
the paperwork relating to them.

In 1972, in the only academic study ever made of British firearms
legislation and its effects, Greenwood showed that none of the legislation
had been based on proper research, and that all if it had been a complete
failure in controlling the criminal use of firearms, which had increased
- - often dramatically - after every act of firearms control.

   "The use of firearms in crime was very much less when
   there were no controls of any sort and when anyone, convicted criminal
   or lunatic, could buy any type of firearm without restriction.  Half
   a century of strict controls on pistols has ended, perversely, with
   a far greater use of this class of weapon in crime than ever before."23

He compared the use of (strictly controlled) firearms with that of
shotguns (uncontrolled until 1968) in robberies in the following tables
and concluded that "despite the fact that they were unrestricted
until 1968, shotguns were used in only a relatively low proportion
in the periods immediately before and after the imposition of controls."24  An
armed robber's choice of weapon for any particular "job", in other words,
is based on what he considers the most appropriate weapon, and not the
legal restrictions on it.

On the elaborate licensing system established by the legislation,
he concluded that

   "The voluminous records so produced appear to serve no
   useful purpose.  In none of the cases examined in this study was the
   existence of these records of any assistance in detecting a crime
   and no one questioned during the course of the study could offer any
   evidence to establish the value of the system of registering weapons
   ...  it should surely be for the proponents of the system of registration
   to establish its value. If they fail to do so, the system should be
   abandoned."27


THE HUNGERFORD MASSACRE

Nonetheless, Greenwood's conclusions had no apparent effect on official
attitudes towards firearms legislation.  In August 1987 Michael Ryan
murdered 16 people and wounded another 14 in a few hours in the town
of Hungerford with a legally-owned semi-automatic rifle, one of five
legally-owned firearms he possessed (along with two illegally-owned,
indeed "prohibited", sub-machine guns), before committing
suicide.  The government's response was to introduce still further
restrictions with the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1988.  An informed
person, however, would make three observations about this appalling
mass murder.

First, it was proof that the most restrictive system of firearms control
and registration in the western world had failed /legally/ to
deprive of firearms exactly the sort of person it was supposed to
deny them to, demonstrating the sheer futility of such restrictions.  As
the government's White Paper, published shortly after the massacre,
admitted:

   "... legislation cannot offer a guarantee against the
   repetition of the tragic events of Hungerford.  It cannot eradicate
   entirely the possibility of the abuse of legitimately held firearms
   by an unstable or criminal individual."27

Second, even if Ryan had been refused firearms certificates, or if
there had been a total ban on the private ownership of firearms, he
could still have carried out the massacre with the two sub-machine
guns he owned, in spite of the fact that they were "prohibited
weapons" and illegal for any private citizen to possess without
written permission from the Home Secretary, which simply is not given.

Third, the restrictiveness of the system deterred the large majority
of law-abiding citizens from seeking to obtain firearms certificates
and thus be allowed to own and become proficient with firearms; a
potential maniac like Ryan who would use guns for mass murder would
persevere through the bureaucracy and obtain a certificate (or else
buy from the huge illegal market in firearms).  The result was that
the people of Hungerford were unilaterally disarmed against Ryan,
who could shoot them down at will.

Had there been a large proportion of law-abiding Hungerford people
who owned guns and knew how to use them, they could have shot down
Ryan at an early stage in his rampage.  As it was, they had to wait
until the police realised what was happening, obtained and deployed
police marksmen, located Ryan and surrounded him - all of which took
several hours in which lives could otherwise have been saved.  This
should be compared with a similar tragedy in a rural area in western
France in July 1989, in which a man armed with a sporting rifle murdered
14 people, again without motive, before being brought down (but not
killed) by police fire.  The ownership and use of long guns is widespread
in rural France, and a local man armed with a rifle succeeded in hitting
and wounding the murderer during the rampage.

The British government, however, learnt none of these lessons.  The
Firearms (Amendment) Act 1988 simply introduced further restrictions
along the lines of previous legislation.  Along with other minor restrictions,
semi-automatic weapons were classified as prohibited weapons, although
for the first time compensation was paid to owners of them when they
were surrendered: this category includes many pump-action and self-loading
rifles, some models dating from 1882.  The more powerful shotguns
were brought to the same rigid level of control as pistols and rifles,
requiring a firearms certificate.  All shotguns had to be individually
registered, ending the practice of holding several on one licence.  The
police were empowered to refuse a shotgun licence if they were not
satisfied that the applicant had "good reason" for possessing
a shotgun.  The practice of converting a weapon to place it in a less
strictly controlled category was outlawed.  The penalties for violating
the new shotgun legislation were increased drastically.  In 1975 Douglas
Hurd, later Home Secretary, was fined UKP 5 for possessing a shotgun
without a certificate (he had forgotten to renew his certificate);
under the 1988 Act the maximum possible penalty was increased to three
years' imprisonment.

Such is the law as it stands at present, and it is interpreted in
a strict manner by the police and Home Office authorities.  It has
been official Home Office policy continually to reduce the number
of legally-owned firearms, and this is reflected in the number of
certificates (on which details of each firearm, and purposes for which
it may be used, are included) held by members of the public: in 1969
there were 216,281 firearms certificates held by private individuals;
in 1986 the figure was 160,285.  A less harsh view was taken of shotgun
certificates during this period (before the 1988 Act): in 1969 637,108
people were licensed shotgun owners (i.e. permitted to own any number
of shotguns); in 1986 there were 840,951.  Virtually all these certificate
holders are either members of gun clubs (for target shooting), people
who engage in hunting game for sport, or farmers (for the control
of vermin).  Government and Home Office policy is that self-defence
is not considered a good reason for requiring a firearm or shotgun
certificate, although this is not written in any law, and is a purely
bureaucratic decision.  The attitude of the police has varied from
one place to another, with some chief officers of police openly taking
the view that the law should prohibit even sporting firearms.  The
following remarkable piece of logic is from Ken Sloan, legal editor
of /Police Review/, in 1987, rather than a Chief Constable, but
is not atypical of some of the opinions of the latter:

   "My personal view of this is that anyone wishing to possess
   an automatic or semi-automatic weapon such as a Kalashnikov or M1
   carbine, must be of unsound mind or unfitted to be entrusted with
   such a firearm."29

How many firearms are in illegal ownership in Britain?  In the /Police
Review/ of 7 January 1988, Michael Yardley, one of Britain's leading
experts on firearms, estimated the figure at a remarkable 4 million.30  Some
indication of the size of the stockpile of illegally-owned weaponry
is given by the number of firearms handed in during amnesties, in
which the police encourage the public to hand in uncertified weapons
for a period of several weeks, with no questions asked.

Firearms surrendered in England and Wales under amnesties
since 1933:

     1933    16,409
     1935     8,469
     1937    14,000
     1946    76,000
     1961    70,000
     1965    41,000
     1968    25,088
     1988    42,725

These figures exclude rounds of ammunition surrendered (795,000 in
1968; 1.5 million in 1988), other "offensive weapons" (4,280
in 1988), and the substantial numbers of firearms handed in other
than during amnesties; 58,006 firearms were handed to the Metropolitan
Police alone from 1946 to 1969, for instance.32  In the 1965 amnesty
a man in Royston, Hertfordshire, handed over an anti-tank gun, four
service rifles, 12,000 rounds of ammunition, several live grenades
and three booby traps.33  In 1988 a man in Windsor surrendered 88
boxes of ammunition, three machine-guns (one with tripod), four rifles,
three revolvers, a flare pistol and an anti-aircraft gun.34  (Weapons
handed in during amnesties, except those of historical interest, are
melted down.)

One must remember that only those law-abiding people who wish to divest
themselves of their firearms would hand them in in this manner, and
the number of firearms involved clearly shows that the supply is not
drying up.  Certainly criminals have no problem in acquiring firearms
for robberies: from 1974 to 1984 the number of robberies using firearms
in England and Wales rose from 650 to 2,098.35  On 26 July 1989,
Donald Kell aged 67, attempted to tackle two men, armed with a pistol,
who had just robbed a security van, and was shot dead.36  Firearms
control has kept guns out of the hands of people like Mr Kell, while
failing to keep them from his murderers.  As Greenwood comments:

   "Criminals have proved to us that firearms controls will
   not deny their small class of people access to firearms whenever they
   want them, but even if it were possible to deny them guns, little
   would have been achieved if they simply turned to other weapons such
   as coshes, ammonia sprays and the like which, in fact, cause more
   injuries than firearms."37

Gun control has, in short, been a complete failure in terms of the
objectives which people normally associate with it.  It has succeeded
in giving a virtual monopoly of privately-owned guns to professional
criminals and those otherwise law-abiding individuals who own illegal
firearms, the number of who can only be guessed at.  Let us now propose
positive arguments against firearms control and for the legal right
of the individual to possess firearms and other weapons for his or
her own protection.


TAKING THE LAW INTO OUR OWN HANDS

Generally speaking, most people would pay at least lip service to
opposition to slavery, in that they would defend the right of the
individual to the ownership and control of his or her own mind and
body.  It follows therefore that the individual also owns the products
of his own mind or body, which he or she is free to use, exchange,
sell or give as he or she wishes.  This is the fundamental justification
for property rights, which are absolute in the sense that nobody has
any right to use violence against anybody else to violate that person's
rights.  Within this context of non-coercion, the individual is free
to obtain whatever items of property he or she chooses without interference
from others, and this includes all forms of weapons.  Following from
the above principles, an individual also has the right to use force
to defend his or her self or property, or someone else's self or property,
when they are subjected to coercive force.  No individual has the
right to initiate force against anybody else or his or her property.
The state, however, makes the claim that we should depend exclusively
on the power of the law and the state monopoly of policing for our
protection, and have no right to "take the law into our own hands".  Yet
the police and the criminal courts spend a large proportion of their
time pursuing people who have violated no property rights, and as
we saw above, only a small proportion of crimes against the individual
and property are solved.  Quite large numbers of people, usually on
low incomes, do not pay their television licence fees; when they are
caught watching without a licence they are charged and fined; unable
to keep up the payments on the fine, a total of about 600 a year are
imprisoned for defaulting on fines.  Yet violent criminals who have
viciously beaten their victims are routinely given a suspended sentence,
which means no real punishment at all.  It is hardly surprising that
violent crime is rising and getting nastier.  In the past, the violent
criminal was generally satisfied with using force sufficient to get
what he wanted; today, horrifying stories about gratuitous torture,
beating, mutilation and rape of robbery victims, evidently for fun
rather than gain, are routine newspaper reading.  Knowing their victims
to be unilaterally disarmed, such is the contempt these people hold
for their victims that they treat them in this manner.  I submit that
the widespread ownership of firearms among ordinary poeple would drastically
reduce these assaults.  In a study of criminals in US prisons, three-fifths
said that a criminal would not attack a potential victim known to
be armed; two-fifths had decided not to commit a crime because they
thought the victim might have a gun.38  In 1982 the small town of
Kennesaw, Georgia, USA, passed a law making it /compulsory/ for
householders to keep a firearm and ammunition on the premises; house
burglaries fell from 65 per year to 26, and to 11 the following year.39  Of
course, the libertarian would not support such a coercive measure
any more than he would, for example, force children to go to school,
but the lesson stands.  If even a small number of victims shot and
killed their attackers, it is reasonable to assume that the message
would get to the other criminals and violent crime would drop.  For
this to happen, though, the legal right to use force - if necessary
lethal - in self-defence would have to be enshrined in law.

But actual crimes of violence are only the tip of the iceberg.  "Kill
one, frighten ten thousand."  For every burglary, robbery, mugging,
rape or other assault, many individuals are frightened to go out at
night, some even by day, and often feel fear even in their own homes.  This
is particularly true of those groups with the smallest degree of real
power in our society: old people, people on low incomes, "working
class" women, residents of council estates, and non-whites.  While
there is never any shortage of hot air merchants in parliament, pressure
groups, local government and the bureaucracy, who are quick to sound
off on behalf of these "underprivileged" people, these latter
always make proposals which will enhance their own power, and avoid
the issues which really concern those whom they claim to represent,
of which violent crime is the most important.  It is hardly surprising
that the police, short of manpower and resources and often not wishing
to strain "community relations" are quicker to respond to
complaints by the better-off, who can kick up a more effective fuss
if they are dissatisfied with the police, than to those of the lower
orders, who are generally cut off from political influence.  (It is
worth pointing out here that some elements of the left have in the
past had more wisdom on the subject than others.  The Banner of the
London School of Economics students' union, made in the 1960s, and
still carried on demonstrations, carries the bold legend "ARM
THE WORKERS AND STUDENTS".  One can only agree.)


GUN CONTROL BY THE STATE, FOR THE STATE

But it is not just the private criminal from whom the ordinary citizen
needs the right to protection.  Even more important is self-defence
against the state and its actual or potential violence.  Throughout
the world, tyranny is more common than freedom.  In our century, tens
of millions of human beings have been murdered by oppressive regimes
which believed that their victims stood in the way of creating some
utopia or other by violence.  Hundreds of millions - if not billions
- - more have had to live under totalitarian tyrannies, deprived of
the most basic freedoms that we in Britain take for granted.  In every
case, the one distinctive difference between the agents of the regime
and their victims was the fact that the former had a monopoly of weapons.
Before coming to power, Adolf Hitler wrote:

   "The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would
   be to allow the subject races to possess arms.  History shows that
   all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms
   have prepared their own downfall by doing so."40

In 1937 the Nazi regime introduced a Firearms Act which stipulated
that no civilian was to have a firearm without a permit, which would
not, according to a contemporary commentary, be issued to those "suspected
of acting against the state.  For Jews this permission will not be
granted.  Those people who do not require permission to purchase or
carry weapons [include] the whole S.S. and S.A., including the Death's
Head group" and Hitler Youth Officers.41

Would it not have been better if the Jewish and other victims of the
Nazis had been armed and able to resist being dragged to concentration
camps?  The fact that the victims could not effectively resist and
overthrow these regimes made mass murder and tyranny possible.  Dictators
as diverse as Ferdinand Marcos, Fidel Castro, Idi Amin and the Bulgarian
communists have ordered firearms confiscations immediately on taking
power, for good reasons.  The current suppression of the democracy
movement in China, for instance, would be impossible without a state
monopoly on weapons.

Totalitarian regimes know that disarming the people must be an early
step in consolidating their tyranny.  In the early days of communist
rule in both Russia and China, the private ownership of firearms was
prohibited, and spies and informers in the villages were rewarded
for revealing the names of those who defied the regime's decrees.  These
measures were preludes to the seizure of the peasants' land in both
countries, accompanied by the extermination by artificial famine of
millions, along with the deportation to slave-labour camps of millions
more who attempted to resist.

Such events seem, thankfully, to be a remote possibility in Britain
today, but how do we know what might happen a hundred, two hundred
or five hundred years in the future?  Might the British people one
day face a situation where they have to use force to resist a domestic
tyranny?  Indeed, it makes a decisive difference in the relationship
between the state and the people if the latter is known to be armed.  The
fact that the people are armed creates a "bottom line" of
oppression below which the government may be resisted, if all else
fails, by force.  If the people cannot defend their rights directly,
then any freedoms they are permitted by the state are, strictly speaking,
temporary privileges which can in practice be removed by the one institution
which has a monopoly of legal violence in society.  Soon after the
Hungerford massacre, one regional English Chief Constable publicly
urged that it be made illegal for members of the public to own bullet-proof
vests and similar equipment, so that it will be easier for the police
to shoot them!  He was, of course, talking in reference to events
like Hungerford, but the totalitarian implications are obvious.  Any
political authority seeking to remove basic human rights will tread
very warily if it knows its subjects to be armed.  In its measures
it will always seek to err on the side of caution, not wishing to
provoke resistance.  A disarmed people, however, is ultimately at
the mercy of those in power, dependent on their goodwill for their
own survival.

Some indication of the degree of totalitarian pressure that can already
be applied in our supposedly free society was given by the notorious
events in Cleveland, County Durham, in 1987.  Certain paediatricians
working for the Cleveland Social Services Department (who happened,
not coincidentally, to be socialists) engaged in a piece of empire-building
by alleging that an epidemic of child sexual abuse was taking place
in Cleveland.  As a result hundreds of children were - apparently
at random - forcibly taken away from their parents, and a totalitarian
atmosphere imposed on the town.  With none of the normal protections
of the law, such as the presumption of innocence, parents were accused
of abusing their own children, and attempts were made to blackmail
them into confessing.  Attempts were also made to threaten and trick
the kidnapped children into denouncing their parents.  As a result
of the trauma involved, many parents had nervous breakdowns, others
split up, and others attempted suicide.  After several months, the
scandal was exposed, the children returned and the whole exercise
proved to be completely fraudulent, although the psychological damage
had been done.

It is here that the private ownership of firearms for self-defence
becomes relevant.  Hundreds of innocent parents had to undergo the
smarting humiliation and shame of their own children being kidnapped
from them and turned against them by individuals whose salaries they
- - the parents - were paying through taxes on their earnings.  One
just has to imagine the ordeal of neighbours, colleagues, relatives
and friends knowing about the appalling accusations made against these
parents, and perhaps wondering for years afterwards if there might
have been something in it.  Had the falsely accused parents, however,
been armed, and had the legal right to defend their children against
kidnapping by anybody, regardless of whether the latter were state
employees or not (after it was established in court that the intervention
was groundless), I submit that the bureaucrats would have kept their
ghastly fantasies to themselves.  If they had been so foolhardy as
to proceed under these circumstances, they would have done so entirely
at their own risk.

Many people are horrified at the idea that the individual should resist
the intervention of the state by force, even in cases such as the
Cleveland outrage.  Yet most of the people who express this horror
are more sympathetic to the right of parents to resist kidnappers
who seize children for their own private gain.  There is surely little
moral difference between the two; indeed, the professional kidnapper
is arguably preferable: he acts purely selfishly, and wants nothing
more than the money he can extract from the parents, at which point
he has no reason not to return the child.  The "altruistic"
Cleveland paediatricians had little interest in personal financial
gain, and, probably convinced of the righteousness of what they were
doing, were prepared to use the coercive power of the state to destroy
families and reduce their victims to nervous wrecks in order to enhance
their power.  Why is it less moral for the individual to resist the
latter than the former?  And why should the law deny him or her the
means to do so?


INTERNATIONAL AND REGIONAL COMPARISONS

A comparison of international and regional policies on firearms control
gives no evidence to suggest that legal restrictions on firearms have
any effect in reducing either crime, or the criminal use of firearms,
while by definition prohibiting or restricting the ownership of firearms
by law-abiding citizens.  Within the UK, the Channel Islands, with
their wide degree of self-government, have very moderate gun controls,
and the private ownership of firearms, including sub-machine guns
and other automatic weapons, is widespread.  It also has a very low
rate of violent crime, and the use of firearms in crime is negligible
compared to the mainland.  In Northern Ireland, on the other hand,
and also in the Irish Republic, gun controls even more draconian than
those on the mainland have been imposed as a result of the terrorist
situation there, and even air pistols and rifles are subject to the
most severe controls.  Yet the IRA and other terrorist groups have
no difficult in obtaining effective military weapons, whether from
abroad or on the black market, only in finding the men to use them.  No
comment is needed on the murder rate using firearms in Northern Ireland.
Indeed, individuals in the province, whether Protestant or Roman Catholic,
are at much greater risk of being murdered in "retaliation"
attacks, in which a paramilitary group will target a law-abiding person
of the other religion virtually at random, than people on the mainland.
Their need for personal protection is much greater, and one can envisage
that if a few cases took place in which terrorist gunmen were shot
by their civilian victims, the deterrent effect would be enough
substantially to reduce the terrorism in the province.

Switzerland has the highest level of private firearms ownership in
the world, with pistols freely purchasable by adults from gunshops
on presentation of a permit obtainable as easily as a television licence
here.  Retail sales of rifles and shotguns, and private sales of pistols
between individuals are completely unregulated.  Despite, or rather
because of, the fact that several firearms are held in almost every
home, the criminal use of firearms is so low that it is not even recorded
separately in police statistics.42  Denmark has a similarly high
rate of firearms ownership, with small-calibre guns completely unregulated
and an easily-obtained permit needed for larger ones.  In Belgium
private citizens can buy hunting and sporting guns with a readily-granted
permit, with a stricter licensing system for more powerful guns.  West
Germany and France have found strict gun controls, introduced as a
response to terrorism, impossible to enforce.  In 1973, following
the Baader-Meinhof, Middle Eastern and other terrorist campaigns,
the West German government imposed severe firearms control, including
registration of all guns.43  In 1973 there were between 17 and 20
million privately-owned guns in West Germany; by 1976 only 3.2 million
had been registered.  Over 80% of firearms in West Germany are illegally
held, the large majority by otherwise law-abiding people who have
been criminalised by this action, and a series of police raids to
find them has, fortunately, been a failure.44  The French government
introduced strict gun control in 1983 after violence inside France
by Middle Eastern terrorists; again, the laws have been defied on
a massive scale by French people who do not regard their freedoms
as subject to bureaucratic removal as a result of somebody else's
terrorism.45

It is well-known that Malaysia has the death penalty for drug traffickers;
the same penalty exists for illegal firearms ownership.  Recently
a Thai salesman visiting Malaysia was found with a .22 calibre pistol
and ammunition: simply for possessing these, he was hanged.  So much
for the argument that strict gun control prevents unnecessary deaths!
Japan has much stricter gun control than most parts of the USA, yet
Japanese-Americans, who have much easier access to firearms, have
much lower violence rates than Japanese in Japan.  Mexico has more
restrictive gun control than the USA, and also a much higher murder
and armed crime rate.  In Taiwan, like Malaysia, the death penalty
can be imposed for illegal ownership of guns, and gun control is stricter
than Japan.  Yet the murder rate in Taiwan is four times higher than
that of Japan, and 30% higher than in the USA.  South Africa has much
stricter firearms control than the USA, yet has twice the murder rate.46
Before independence in 1962, Jamaica had a tolerable level of crime,
and permitted private ownership of guns, subject to having a police
permit.  From 1962 to 1973 the homicide rate rose by 450% and violent
crimes, including armed robberies, rose even more sharply.  In 1973
(after an incident to which four businessmen were murdered by shooting)
a total ban on the private ownership of all types of guns and ammunition
was imposed.  Police seized all legal firearms and were given the
power to search any vehicle or house they believed to contain guns
or ammunition, arresting without warrant any violators.  These were
taken to a "gun court", with no bail allowed, and, after a
delay of perhaps weeks, arraigned in secret courts without representation,
and those convicted were imprisoned in a "gun stockade" for
an indeterminate period.  For three months after the introduction
of this system the rate of armed crime dropped, and then it grew completely
out of control.  Any political activity was accompanied by armed men
roaming the streets, and armed troops had to preserve order during
elections.  Murders by shooting, armed robberies and other crimes
set new world records, and spread throughout society.  Later the Commissioner
of Corrections admitted that the ban had not affected the hard core
criminals, and the worst excesses of the system were corrected.47

The example of the USA is usually cited in arguments against the relaxation
of British firearms control.  It is alleged that the high rate of
murder and other violent crimes in the USA is caused by the wide legal
availability of firearms, and this would occur in Britain if firearms
controls were removed.  Many anecdotes, perhaps true, perhaps apocryphal,
are put forward to support this proposition: a man in Kentucky shot
his brother for using too much toilet paper; a dispute between two
men in a New York City cinema over who would have the last bag of
popcorn became a gunfight in which one of them was shot dead.  The
defence by many Americans of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution,
which guarantees the right to keep and bear arms, is cited with feigned
horror by some British observers, who are ignorant of the fact that
this was a fundamental principle of English law which was carried
over from the unwritten British constitution, and which, as it has
never been formally removed by parliament, and no court has ever ruled
that it no longer exists, can be still said, legally speaking, to
exist in England.

In the first place, the US has over 20,000 laws at Federal, state
and local level which restrict firearms ownership and use.  The cities
with the highest levels of violence and criminal use of firearms,
including New York City, Washington DC, Detroit and Chicago, have
gun control even stricter than that of the UK.  20% of murders in
the USA take place in these cities, which have only 6% of the population.
Firearms bans are widely defied in cities where in some areas the police are
effectively losing control of the streets.  New York City, for instance,
has had a virtual ban on handguns since the 1911 Sullivan Act, yet
has an estimated 2 million illegal pistols (including those used in
the anecdote mentioned above).  If it is replied that guns can easily
be brought in illegally from other states with less gun control, one
can reply that surely the same would be true of, for instance, Minneapolis,
which has no gun ban and a murder rate of 2.9 per 100,000, compared
to 17.5 in New York.  As in Britain, no correlation has ever been
shown between the legal availability of firearms and armed crime.48  The
fact is that the USA has a higher rate of murder without firearms
(i.e. using knives, poisons, blunt instruments, etc.) than any western
European country: quite apart from the huge illegal markets in guns,
murderers could simply substitute other weapons if guns were further
restricted, while knowing that they victims would be disarmed.  It
is in the USA, more than any other country, that firearms control
is a hotly-contested political issue, and the media, the bureaucracy,
academia and most politicians are almost unanimous in seeking to disarm
law-abiding citizens, who have had to fight a defensive political
action against repressive legislation seeking to remove their freedom.
The Bureau of Tobacco, Alcohol and Firearms uses every possible legal
and illegal device to make life difficult for law-abiding American
gun owners.  Only one side of this debate - no need to say which one
- - ever gets heard in the British media.


NATIONAL DEFENCE

The private ownership and civilian use of firearms can also play an
important role in defence.  The best known example is that of Switzerland,
where every adult male is required to be a member of the militia (which
numbers 625,000), to store a fully-automatic rifle and ammunition
at home and to practise with it regularly.  Separately from these
government weapons, Switzerland has the world's highest level of private
firearms ownership.  Firearms, including semi-automatic rifles, can
be bought freely from gunshops on presentation of a purchase permit
which is issued without question to any adult (except those with certain
criminal convictions or records of mental instability).  Yet armed

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Russell Earl Whitaker                   [w--ta--r] at [eternity.demon.co.uk]
Communications Editor                                 AMiX: RWhitaker
EXTROPY: The Journal of Transhumanist Thought
Board member, Extropy Institute (ExI)
    Co-organizer, 1st European Conference on Computers, Freedom and
    Privacy, London, 20 November 1993