Beware of the Train

Prompted by the stimulating discussion on my recent post about the Second Amendment, I've been reading up a bit on the history of UK firearms legislation. It's surprisingly chilling stuff. This is all from Wikipedia, so take it with a pinch of salt.

As recently as 1870, there was no restriction on civilian firearm ownership in the UK. Indeed, the right of Protestant subjects to keep arms for self-defence was enshrined in the 1689 Bill of Rights. Sir William Blackstone's 1769 Commentaries on the Laws of England described the right to bear arms for self-defence as one of the five key rights granted by the Common Law. The Wikipedia article also mentions the 1181 Assize of Arms, but that's much more at the "well-regulated militia" end of the scale - it specifies which arms different classes of subjects are required to own so that the King may draw on them for military service.

In 1870, licences were introduced as a revenue-raising measure; a licence (costing 10s, or about £30 in today's money, and available over the counter at post offices) was required to carry a gun outside the home, but not to buy one. The 1903 Pistols Act made it compulsory to obtain a licence before buying a gun with a barrel shorter than nine inches. Gun registration began in 1920, prompted (apparently) by fears of a crime wave and/or civil unrest by the working classes, fuelled by the large number of guns available after World War I. This law applied only to rifled weapons. Fully automatic weapons were effectively banned from private ownership by the 1937 Firearms Act, which also introduced regulation of smooth-bore weapons with barrels shorter than 20 inches. Licensing (though not registration) of long shotguns was introduced in the 1968 Criminal Justice and Firearms Act. According to this page (hardly unbiased, admittedly), this was accompanied by a progressive tightening of the situations under which licences were issued. Initially it was considered a good reason to own a revolver if the applicant "lives in a solitary house, where protection against thieves and burglars is essential, or has been exposed to definite threats to life on account of his performance of some public duty." By 1937 ownership of guns for self-defence was discouraged, and by 1969 it was considered to never be necessary. These criteria, apparently, were changed via Home Office directives to the police, which not only received no Parliamentary scrutiny or debate, but were also kept secret until 1989.

The real crackdown on private gun ownership followed on from the Hungerford and Dunblane massacres (both committed with legal firearms). Hungerford led to a ban on semiautomatic rifles and pump-action shotguns with magazines, among others, and introduced registration of shotguns. Dunblane led to little short of an outright ban on handguns: even the British Olympic shooting team has to train abroad. Incidentally, does anyone else remember the way the politicians all said "We must not have a knee-jerk reaction to this tragedy" for about a week, and then went into a knee-jerk reaction?¹

Now, I'm not overly bothered about gun ownership: while I've enjoyed the shooting I've done, I can live without it, and I feel no need to carry a weapon of any sort in self-defence (US readers: if anyone tells you that the UK is a lawless wasteland, they're crazy). But as someone who cares about civil liberties, this disturbs me greatly. In a little over a century, we've gone from having a cherished right to keep and bear arms to having private gun ownership effectively illegal. And this was accomplished in distinctly grubby ways: via bills passed to stem Bolshevik revolutionaries, secret Home Office instructions, and knee-jerk laws passed in the glare of media hysteria over exceptional events. What's to stop the same happening to other important liberties?²

¹ I observe that the Firearms (Amendment) (No. 2) Act 1997 was introduced as one of the first acts of the government of one T. Blair - another thing I can hate them for.

²One should ask whether these laws have at least made us safer: while Franklin was onto something with his crack about temporary safety, getting chibbed over your wristwatch can really mess up your day. But without doing a lot more research than I have time for right now, I'm going to have to throw my hands up and say "dunno". It's a heavily polarised debate, and I'm sure there's a lot of confirmation and publication bias going on; there are a lot of confounding variables, and most of the key variables are hard to determine accurately. Crimes go unreported (a major claim of the US pro-gun movement is that many attempted crimes are stopped by merely showing a gun, and are never reported), and people tend to lie when you ask them how many guns they own. Criminals that can't obtain guns might well elect to commit the same crimes with different weapons. Comparing US and UK crime statistics should be done with rather more care than is usually applied: it seems that the US was a more violent society than the UK even when we had comparable gun laws. The theory behind UK gun laws is that by restricting the supply of legal guns, we make it harder for criminals to obtain guns (by, for instance, stealing legal guns from people's houses). And the flipside of the maxim that "if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns" is that "if only outlaws have guns, then anyone with a gun is an outlaw, and the police can deal with them accordingly": hence, petty criminals should be unwilling to take the risk of owning illegal guns, which would greatly increase the penalties if they were caught (illegal possession of a firearm is currently punishable by a minimum of five years in prison and an unlimited fine). But I don't know how one would test those assumptions. Crimes involving guns are apparently only 0.5% of all crimes recorded by the police, suggesting that the country is not overflowing with armed thugs (it might, of course, still be overflowing with unarmed thugs). And the total number of crimes involving guns is apparently falling. But Home Office statistics should be treated with the same level of caution as emails from deposed Nigerian dictators. Meanwhile, I can't even find an estimate of the number of guns in the UK: can anyone else do better?