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 un control in action:
Here are some recent headlines from the British press.
Boys
held up at gunpoint for a phone and £25
One
Bullet Kills Two Men at New Year Party
Phone-Snatcher
Shoots Teenage Girl in the Head
Police
Being 'Armed by Stealth' as Gun Use Reaches Record Level
Police
Fear Crime Explosion as School-Age Muggers Graduate to Guns
Stolen
Army Weapons Used by London Drug Gang
In pure logic,
only four possible states of gun ownership in a society are possible:
(1) Everybody
has a gun.
(2) Nobody has a gun.
(3) Criminals have guns but law-abiding people don't.
(4) Law-abiding people have guns but criminals don't.
If you are
a liberal, option (2) is probably your ideal; if you are a conservative,
you probably prefer option (4). Unfortunately neither option (2)
nor option (4) is practically possible in the United States today.
Option (2)
is not possible because, in the first place, the country is full
of guns, which could not be taken from all their owners under any
imaginable scheme of confiscation; and because in the second place,
guns are not particularly difficult to make in a decently well-equipped
home metal-working shop; and because in the third place, guns will
be smuggled in, just as drugs and illegal immigrants are. Unless
you are willing to contemplate social controls at levels an order
of magnitude higher than anything this country has ever known or
contemplated, you will not free American society of guns.
Option (4)
is not possible for the same reason, and an additional one. One
thing criminals like to do is steal things. Once in a while a criminal
will steal a gun from a law-abiding person, until eventually there
is a good supply floating around in the criminal world. (As a sidebar
to this, it is interesting to note that of the 150 or so law enforcement
officers killed every year in the U.S., one in four is shot with
his own weapon. The moral of that is: If you are defending yourself
with a gun against someone bigger than yourself, be much less scrupulous
about shooting him than police officers have to be. As we Second
Amendment defenders like to say: "Better to be tried by twelve
than carried by six.")
The practical
choice is, therefore between options (1) and (3). These are the
only practical choices. You can attain option (3) by passing
laws against gun ownership. Law-abiding people will then, by definition,
not own guns. You can attain option (1) by removing restrictions
on gun ownership.
The United
States, via the Second Amendment, has wisely chosen option (1).
Britain, the U.S.A.'s cousin nation, has decided to give option
(3) a try, and the results of this experiment are coming in.
Following the
elementary-school massacre at Dunblane, Scotland in 1996, an attempt
was made to ban all handguns in Britain. The Conservative government
of the time opposed the attempt, and the attempt failed. However,
when Tony Blair's Labour Party attained power in 1997, they made
a handgun ban one of their first orders of business. A law was drawn
up by Home Secretary (i.e. Attorney General) Jack Straw and passed
the Labour-dominated House of Commons on June 11th 1997, the vote
being 384 to 181. All private ownership of handguns thereupon became
illegal. In a subsequent amnesty, 160,000 handguns were turned in
to the police.
What happened
to gun crime following the ban? It increased dramatically, that's
what. In the two years following that vote in Parliament, the number
of crimes in which a handgun was reported to have been used in Britain
went from 2,648 to 3,685 — a 40 per cent rise.
Since then,
things have gone from bad to worse. On New Year's Day in London,
a 19-year-old woman was shot in the head in a suburban street in
broad daylight because she would not hand over her cell phone to
a mugger. Four days previously, also in London, three boys aged
10, 12, and 16 were robbed at gunpoint in a fast-food establishment.
The use of firearms in London muggings has increased 53 percent
in the past year. There are now two shootings a day in London, with
every kind of firearm up to Uzi submachine guns in play.
The surprising
thing about this is that anyone should be surprised. In his 1998
classic More
Guns, Less Crime, John Lott showed, by a straightforward
analysis of statistics, that the possibility of potential victims
being armed has a dampening effect on crime. Common sense suggests,
and the recent British experience proves, that the converse is also
true: The certainty that a potential victim is unarmed is an encouragement
to armed criminals. Less guns, more crime.
As Jeff
Jacoby noted in the Boston Globe a couple of weeks ago,
these are good times for Second Amendment defenders. We have an
attorney general who actually believes in the darn thing, lawsuits
against gun manufacturers are being tossed out everywhere, and Handgun
Control, Inc. is laying off staff. The conventional wisdom that
the proper strategy when faced with a violent desperado is to comply
passively with his demands has become seriously unfashionable, and
over the last four months Americans have been arming themselves
at unprecedented rates. All this does my heart good, naturally.
There is just one small point I'd like to make.
I've been to
a number of Second
Amendment events, and seen the spirit, the commitment and the
organizing intelligence that participants bring to them. Too often
in conservative politics I find myself confronting the William Butler
Yeats syndrome: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst
are full of a passionate intensity." Second Amendment events
are one area of conservative culture where you never sense that.
Here are conservatives fired up and ready to roll, well organized
under effective leadership.
What I long
to see is for the rest of the conservative movement to be that
well-motivated and that well-organized. When we can fight
the taxers and regulators, the affirmative-action and illegal-immigration
lobbies, the trial lawyers and the public-sector unions, the arts-subsidy
crowd and the multi-culti America-haters, the language police and
the thought police, the aggressive promoters of unrestricted abortion,
homosexual "marriage," bilingual education, slavery reparations,
and all the rest of the Left's project to lead us forward, sheep-like,
into a radiant future of universal harmony — when we can fight
all that with the same energy and intelligence the Second Amendment
folk bring to their particular corner of the battlefield, then we'll
have some chance of rolling back the creeping socialism of the past
30 years. Join a local gun group and see how they do it, even if
you don't care about guns. You might learn something.
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