The telewag reports that ‘28 gun crimes committed in UK every day’, and has Fibber Chris Huhne quoted as saying ‘”Violent crime - including, most alarmingly, gun crime - is still far higher than 10 years ago and has to be tackled much more vigorously.”
Gosh, that’s not very good, is it? Perhaps we should think about banning handguns. Oh no, wait a minute, they already did, about 10 years ago*
* I am not suggesting that the ban is the cause of the increase in crime. I am suggesting that illegal firearm use, by definition, has little, if any, connection to legal firearm ownership. Thus the ban was unjust.
Filed under: BBC / Nu Labour alliance, idiots
Simon Clarke will be dropping in later to tell you that the ban was the direct cause of the increase in gun crime.
I would suggest that the ban is at least partially responsible for the increase since it adds the cachet of illegality to possesion of firearms.
I’se a gangsta cos I’se got a shoota innit.
In fact, Simon, if he did say that, would have a point in the wider scheme of things. There is nothing criminals like better than gun control and an unarmed population. There is nothing they fear more than an legally armed householder with the legal right to defend his property. This legal right didn’t exist in the UK, so the increase in gun crime may not be attributed to this directly. Robert may have a point about cache, however.
What is clear is that if citizens were allowed to hold and use firearms as a means of defence, rapes, robberies and other crimes against person and property would fall. There is little, if any, real evidence that the UK would become like the ‘wild west’.
Besides, self defence is a human right that the goverment has no business to deny me access to. There is also the issue of balance of power ~ but Simon covered that very eloquently yesterday on his blog, so I won’t go over it here
Thanks Mark but I won’t be saying that
Legal handgun ownership in the UK between 1945 and 1997 would have had virtually zero downward impact on crime because:
i. Only a tiny number of people owned them
ii. They were owned for sport, not self-defence
iii. They couldn’t carry them with them
iv. They had to keep them locked up
v. Firearms ownership was not something that criminals were very aware of
Of course, it would also have had virtually no [i]upward[/i] effect on crime either, seeing as criminals are exactly that.
I nominally support the simple repeal of the 1996 and 1997 amendments to the Firearms Act in that it’s better than nothing, but I’d much rather see a major shake up with the issuing of concealed carry permits, a big reform of certification (making it easier, simpler, cheaper and ’shall issue’), dealer, importer and range rules etc, alongside the removal of pistols, pepper spray and tasers from the prohibited weapons list.