We Cannot Legislate against Lunacy

This is the most difficult article I’ve ever written.  In the face of the appalling tragedy in Connecticut it’s almost impossible to find the right words.  I love words but sometimes they are so inadequate.  Here it might be said that respectful silence is the only response, silence and sorrow in silence. 

But others are speaking and some are shouting, bawling almost.  I raise my voice in a perfect storm, knowing that I’m unlikely to be heard, or if heard I am likely to be misunderstood.  Just about every report I’ve read about the mass shootings last week at Sandy Hook Elementary School in the town of Newton has raised the issue of gun control, the equation being that the Second Amendment right of US citizen to bear arms equals periodic massacres.  Few seem to pause and think.  The Second Amendment has been in place for over two hundred years but rampaging madmen are a feature of the modern age.  Why, why and why again? 

I’m going to push these whys but first I should declare an interest.  The thing is I enjoy shooting, which opens be to an additional accusation - that of selfishness. I have licences for both a .22 rifle and a four-ten shotgun. I enjoy target practice and I enjoy rough shooting. I really do have to stress that all of the people I have met through this sport are sensible, intelligent and well-balanced. I first learned to shoot staying with family friends near Moultrie in Georgia.  I have little doubt that most Americans who are in legal possession of firearms are also sensible, intelligent and well-balanced.

I do have firearms but unlike Americans I have no constitutional right to bear arms.  It wasn’t always the case.  The 1689 English Bill of Rights – upon which the American version was later based – enshrined the right of people to bear arms for defence.  And so it remained, right into the twentieth century.  In his A Brief History of Crime Peter Hitchens points out that when in 1909 the police in the Tottenham district of London came under fire from a gang of foreign anarchists they asked the public for assistance. Not only did they borrow guns from the local citizens but they also appealed to members of the public to help shoot back.

Over the course of the last century gun control in Britain got tighter and tighter, largely because governments started to fear the people, chiefly for political reasons.  But tight gun control did nothing to stop the Dunblane School Massacre in 1996.  Gun control has done nothing to stop more and more firearms getting in to the hands of criminals.  The truth is the tighter the gun laws have become the more prevalent gun crime has become.  It might be said that while we have disarmed honest citizens we have armed dishonest gangsters. 

Looking to Europe there is Norway, which has particularly strong firearms control.  That did not stop Anders Behring Breivik going on a rampage.  Now consider another example altogether; consider Switzerland.  This is a country whose proportion of gun ownership per capita is among the highest in the world, not far behind the United States.  This is a country where almost every adult male is required by law to bear arms.  Yet it’s also a country with a particularly low murder rate.  Such gun crime as there is mostly involves illegally held arms.

Now I turn my eyes back over the Atlantic.  So far as the clamour for gun control is concerned it would be as well to consider the words of Sammy Gravano, one-time mobster.  In a 1999 interview with Vanity Fair he said – “Gun control?  It’s the best thing you can do for crooks and gangsters.  I want you to have nothing.  If I’m a bad guy, I’m always going to have a gun.”  The simple truth is that many types of crimes, as Hitchens pointed out in his book, fall sharply in those districts where normal and law-abiding citizens are allowed to carry concealed weapons. 

It might interest you to know that in England approximately half of all burglaries occur while people are at home.  In America this is as low as one in eight.  In those States which openly licence citizens to use deadly force against intruders burglary is virtually unknown.

What happened in Newton was not normal; it was an obscenity, just as Dunblane was an obscenity.  Adam Lanza – I can barely bring myself to write his name - , a maladjusted twenty-year old, went on a ghastly killing spree.  Why, what was his motive?  Will we ever know with exactness?  Possibly not, but possibly it was no more than a desire for notoriety and fame, that shallow contemporary obsession, the shallow obsession of losers and mediocrities everywhere.

But there is more.  As I noted above, this kind of mass shooting followed by suicide is a feature of our age.  Lanza was not normal; Lanza, as I understand from the Washington Post, had some mental or developmental disorder.  The New York Times reports that it was Asperger’s Syndrome, a high functioning form of autism. Accordingly it seems he was on strong medications. 

Here I can only agree once again with Peter Hitchens.  Writing recently on his Daily Mail blog, he says that it would make sense for the press to explore this route rather than raise a futile wail in favour of gun control.  Is it possible, one has to ask, that there is a correlation between what happened at Newton and the increasing use of modern medications for mental illness?  We badly need answers here.  Instead we are likely to get the usual clichés. 

A world away from Newton there was another murderous rampage last week, though it has attracted far less media attention.  In central China a knife-wielding man stabbed twenty-two children outside a primary (grade) school.  It was less terrible than Sandy Hook because none were killed, though several were taken to hospital, some with severed fingers and ears.  According to police the perpetrator, since detained, is ‘mentally-ill.’  Tight control on firearms means that gun crime is virtually unknown in China.  Instead knives, and sometimes explosives, are used in mass attacks.  The sad truth is we cannot legislate against lunacy.  

The problem is not the weapon

The recent shooting outrage in Cumbria is just too dreadful. Anything I write will almost certainly minimise the depth of the tragedy, an obscene carnival that left twelve people dead and eleven injured, some seriously. I can’t even bring myself to name the perpetrator of this massacre, who finished by killing himself with one of his weapons. Mass shootings are always a horror no matter where they occur. But they are all the more shocking in England precisely because they are so rare.

It’s too soon to make judgements of a general nature but the call has already gone out that our strict gun laws should be made even stricter. At the risk of being misunderstood, or at the risk of being considered insensitive in raising this issue at such I time, I really have to say that this is a serious mistake.

The thing is I enjoy shooting, which opens be to an additional accusation- that of selfishness. I have licences for both a .22 rifle and a four-ten shotgun. I enjoy target practice and I enjoy rough shooting. I really do have to stress that all of the people I have met through this sport are sensible, intelligent and well-balanced. I have no hesitation at all in suggesting that this is true of virtually all of the shooters in this country. It would be wrong to penalise us because of the actions of a single madman.

I was greatly heartened by the comment of David Cameron, our Prime Minister, himself a one-time sports shooter, that it would be a mistake to rush to further gun control. “Of course we should look at the issue”, he said, “but we should not leap to a knee-jerk conclusion on what should be done on the regulatory front. We do have some of the toughest legislation in the world. You can’t legislate to stop a flick switching in someone’s head and for this dreadful sort of action to take place.”

This is just so true. Quick legislation, legislation drafted in the heat of a particular event, is almost always bad legislation; the Dangerous Dog Act of 1991 is a case in point, as the Daily Telegraph said in its Friday leader page. The piece continued with a simple but pertinent truth, the same truth touched on by David;

…one cannot legislate for the actions of madmen, and it is fatuous to try. Nearly three quarters of a million people in this country possess shotgun or firearm licences. We can tighten the restrictions all we want, but in the end the problem is not the weapon, but the wielder.

In that same issue a reader made the point on the letter's page that after the Dunblane Massacre in 1996 the then government passed an act banning the private ownership of all cartridge ammunition handguns, no matter the calibre. Not even the Olympic shooting team was exempted, who ever since have been obliged to train outside the country. Yet now, thirteen years later, there are more illegal weapons in the country than ever before and gun crime has increased steadily. It’s impossible to legislate against this, or if legislation there is it’s all so much whistling in a hurricane.

Civil liberties are already restricted, have been steadily restricted over the years. Now is not the time to turn the light on me or the other three quarter of a million decent and law-binding gun owners.