PUBLICATION: Edmonton Journal
DATE:
2004.05.14
EDITION:
Final
SECTION:
Opinion
PAGE:
A18
COLUMN:
Lorne Gunter
BYLINE:
Lorne Gunter
SOURCE:
The Edmonton Journal
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Britain
proves gun control is wrong: Gun crime nearly doubled after law-abiding Brits
surrendered their handguns
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On
March 13, 1996, Thomas Hamilton walked into an elementary school in Dunblane,
Scotland, with three pistols and shot dead 16 young children and one of their
teachers. In the wake of this horrific massacre of innocents, a judicial inquiry
recommended more stringent rules for handgun ownership in Britain, but cautioned
against an outright ban.
Politicians
being politicians, though, they sought to prove they were acting to prevent a
recurrence of such a shooting (as if anyone can prevent lunatics from acting
insanely) by passing a law forbidding ordinary civilians from possessing
handguns. Handgun owners were given until February 1998 to hand in all their
guns.
In
all, about 162,000 handguns and 700 tonnes of ammunition were surrendered to
police. Jack Straw, currently Britain's foreign secretary, but at the time the
home secretary, pronounced the hand-in a "tremendous success" and
predicted it would make England, Scotland and Wales very much safer.
Tuesday,
the gun-crime statistics for the first five years of this experiment in citizen
disarmament were released. And what has been the result? The incidence of gun
crime in England and Wales has nearly doubled from 13,874 in 1998 to 24,070 in
2003. And the incidence of firearms murder, while thankfully still very small,
has risen 65 per cent.
Politicians
being politicians, they of course have not drawn the obvious parallel. When the
statistics were released earlier this week, no official even mentioned the total
handgun ban. (Not even Britain's Olympic sport shooters are permitted to own
handguns for competition.)
It
never even occurred to British politicians and reporters to make a connection.
Banning handguns was an important symbol in the wake of the Dunblane shootings.
It was the right thing to do at the time. Its intended consequences, realized or
not, well, they're secondary.
The
ban was a "then" solution, the spiral in gun crime is a
"now" problem -- different matters entirely to the chattering classes.
It's
not necessarily the case that the stripping of guns from ordinary, law-abiding
gun owners caused the explosion in gun crime by leaving the population
defenceless against armed criminals.
There
is almost surely some cause and effect, though.
Another
report released last year by Britain's Home Office revealed that since the late
1990s, robbery has jumped dramatically, too. It rose by 28 per cent in 2002
alone and, since 1998, there has been an increase in the annual average of
muggings of more than 100,000. England alone has nearly 400,000 robberies each
year, a rate nearly one-quarter higher per capita than that of the United
States.
It
is entirely likely that some of the increase in the past five years has stemmed
from an increased confidence among criminals that ordinary citizens almost
certainly have no guns in their homes.
But
it is unlikely the handgun ban accounts for all or even most of the increase.
France has had a similar upward spike in robberies over the past five years
without banning guns. France, too, now has a violent crime rate at or above the
Americans', with the exception of murder.
For
some reason, no one in the industrialized world murders one another like
Americans. However, in most other categories of violent and property crime, the
rest of us are catching up.
The
likely causes of Britain's crime wave (and France's and Germany's and the
Netherlands' and so on) are illegal immigration, drug wars and extremely lenient
treatment of convicted criminals. Holland is set to deport 30,000 failed refugee
claimants over the coming months in part in hopes of reducing high levels of
crime.
However,
even if confiscating guns from law-abiding citizens does not prompt new heights
of violent crime, it does not follow that seizure is a neutral act.
The
best that can be said of it is that it is totally useless. As such, it is
pointless.
Yet
seizure also amounts to a forfeiture of private property by persons who have
committed no crime (and thus have given the state no legitimate reason to take
their property). So its pointlessness is a deep violation of individual liberty.
If
the seizure of private guns does not prevent crime -- and from the British
example it is clear it does not -- then there is no common good that could
possibly justify seizure.
And
if Britain's mandatory hand-in encouraged even a few hundred robberies and a
handful of murders by emboldening criminals, then the hand-in was a crime by the
state against law-abiding citizens.
Similarly,
the registry forced on Canadian gun owners nearly a decade ago has been totally
useless. If taking guns away is not enough to prevent gun crimes, how could
collecting registrations on guns to fill government databases do any better?
The
problem is criminals with guns, period. Targeting law-abiding owners, whether
through registration or confiscation, is looking in the wrong place for a
solution to gun crime.
There
have been rumours out of Ottawa for months now that the Liberals intend to make
Canada's registry less intrusive and expensive, friendlier to "legitimate
gun owners."
Even
if it is made less harsh and simpler to use, so long as it continues to focus on
lawful owners instead of criminals, it will merely be a kinder, simpler sort of
useless.
lgunter@thejournal.canwest.com