The New Labo(u)r
by Ted Drane
Australian Shooters Journal
October 1996
The Sporting Shooters Association of Australia succeeded in having accepted in evidence a submission to the Dunblane Enquiry, which is due to report soon. Dunblane is important because it marks an occasion where a random mass murder took place and was not followed immediately by flawed and misdirected legislation, but by an inquiry of some independence. There were many other submissions, also, and one of considerable interest is the English Labour Party's.
The size of the world's anti-firearm push is now beginning to sink into the minds of at least some Australian gun owners. We will continue reporting aspects of it in future issues. This month, we will look at what the Labour Party in England wants for the United Kingdom.
What goes on there can reasonably be expected to be coming here, and all the more so in matters of firearms. It is the centralised rule-from-above approach that Canberra likes, and this is the one that England has long since applied to firearms.
Here are some of the statements
and proposals that the Labour Party put to the Dunblane Enquiry:
All (pistol) target shooting
disciplines in the Olympic Games are restricted to handguns of .22 inch. We
can think of no good reason why a larger calibre handgun should ever lawfully
be held for sporting purposes. Accordingly we recommend that handguns above
.22 inch calibre should certainly be prohibited. We also believe that the
strong case for restricting handguns of .22 calibre and below to those which
need to be reloaded after each shot should carefully be examined... Given
the lethal nature of handguns, we see a strong case for banning them altogether.
The British Labour Party evidently has no interest in the entire spectrum of pistol target shooting carried out with semi-automatic .22s, or all the shooting that is done with centrefires. Alternatively, perhaps it is vitally interested, and this interest is directed towards having pistol shooting as a sport entirely banned in Britain.
It seems unlikely that a group so large and with such resources could be so stupid as not to be fully aware of the variety of target pistol shooting events using other than single-shot rimfire pistols. The submission has this to say about rifles:
The .22 inch rimfire rifle is used for pestcontrol on agricultural land, (and higher calibre rifles are used for the control of a number of species such as deer stalking and control). Apart from these uses there should also be a general prohibition on rifles above .22 inch calibre.
The level of research
in political matters relating to firearms in England seems to be on a par
with that of Australia. Obviously, nobody involved in producing this document
has any wish to look after the interests of English military rifle shooters.
Where would benchrest shooters fit into this scheme? Where would private gun
owners be if they wish to hunt? The answer to that lies in other parts of
the document:
Almost all pistols and
rifles are designed and manufactured to kill human beings. In our judgement
the public are increasingly aware of the view that the risks to the community
from the misuse of firearms far outweigh any "civil liberty" in favour of
the holding of firearms...
What could be clearer? In Britain, according to Labour dogma, there is no right of the citizen to own a firearm. England has traditionally had a high shotgun density; what of shotguns, then?
With almost two million shotguns licensed in the UK there are clearly too many such weapons in circulation. There should be some control over the number of shotguns owned by requiring that each gun be entered separately on the certificate and for the applicants to show good reason, to the satisfaction of the police, for needing an additional weapon or weapons.
Readers are forgiven for
thinking this sounds familiar. 'Showing good reason' is a fine euphemism for
manufacturing bureaucratic and monetary barriers to gun ownership of any sort.
Anyone believing this description is too strong need only read on:
...The onus should always
be on the applicants to prove they satisfy all necessary conditions, that
they have a good reason to own each firearm for which they seek authorisation,
and that they are a fit and proper person to do so... The Chief Constable
(equating to our state police commissioners) for any area should have an absolute
discretion to refuse any application, and should not be required to give reasons
for doing so. ...A right of appeal to a court should not be available. It
would not be inconsistent with the scheme which we propose that there could
be available a review of the Chief Constable's decision conducted by a legally
qualified and judicially qualified individual. But such a review would have
to be held in private, and the information on which the Chief Constable depended
could not be disclosed to the applicant.
We have seen increasing moves to centralism in Australia, and this is clearly an extension of what John Howard's Labor-derived and Labor-formulated gun laws are about.
Can there be any doubt from the above that the intent is to continue clamping down on all forms of gun ownership in the United Kingdom? Calibre restrictions, action style restrictions, no heed being paid to existing forms of sport, overriding of individuals' rights with increased powers of authorities in such areas as proving 'need' for individual firearms... these are all the obsessions of urban political people who have no knowledge of firearms and a firm intention not to become educated about them. Allowing no disclosure of information is anti-democratic to the point of fascism. This document is about the smashing of all firearm ownership.
At present individuals who do not hold a firearms certificate themselves may use a weapon at an authorised gun club. We believe this to be wrong. No civilian should be permitted to use a firearm unless he/she has personal authority to do so.
This is a blatant attempt
to prevent all youth training, and to block all the opportunities that club
members have of bringing new participants into the sport. However, while this
is objectionable enough, it becomes worse when the point of view of this document
is fully understood. A telling statement is this one:
If the aim is --
as it must be -- to reduce the attraction of firearms, to limit the "gun culture"
in the UK, then in our view no person under 18 should be allowed to possess
a handgun or rifle, or make use of a gun club. There might even be a case
for making the minimum age limit 21.
The authors of the document thus lump together all lawful firearm owners with those involved in criminal misuse, and conclude that the more education there is about guns, the more crime there will be. This is a breathtakingly insulting belief, and it pervades the document, made all the worse by the ignorance of its authors about the realities of firearms use and abuse. The 'gun culture' remains undefined, derived no doubt from the urban English Labourite's television viewing. The intellectual provenance of the submission is as poor as Australia's Parliamentary Research Service's documents. For instance, consider this for a completely false premise:
International comparisons suggest that there is a direct relationship between the lawful availability of weapons (presumably this is meant to mean firearms) and their use in criminal offences as well as levels of suicide and accidental deaths.
The document then enters the arena of truly extraordinary polemics, and makes much of a figure, incorrectly derived, which shows firearm deaths per million of population.
If ever there was a nonsense, here it is. It is meaningless information. There are two figures that are salient in discussion of these matters; one is the murder rate, and the other is the armed robbery rate. These are true indicators of criminal activity. Gun-control activists may amuse themselves bandying around figures such as how many people are shot to death rather than bludgeoned, but they beg the question of whether the deaths will still occur if the gun is either not available or illegal.
Serious criminological works say that they will. The means by which a murder victim dies is clearly immaterial to the victim, and the issue thus becomes whether removal of guns from a society produces fewer murders. The fact is that it does not. Murder rates do not fall in response to anti-gun legislation, and this has been thoroughly documented. The authors have made no reference to any of the vast body of evidence showing this.
The Labour Party submission compares firearm homicides per million of population among Switzerland, Japan, the UK and the United States. It ignores -- deliberately? -the fact that the murder rates of the UK, with limited gun availability, Switzerland, with wide and easy access to guns, and Japan, with almost no legal guns, are all virtually identical. It focuses instead on the instrument used to commit the murders, and finds that Switzerland has a higher gun use in this crime.
This amazingly silly approach suggests that people killed by guns are worse off than people killed by other means. How could it be taken seriously? Any intelligent study of the issue would ask for the evidence that suggests when guns are legislated against and removed from the law-abiding, then the murder rate drops. Unfortunately, the Labour Party would be unlikely to do that, because the global evidence shows the opposite.
Does accuracy count in the Labour mind? The homicide figures they quote for England do not add up, arithmetically. The comparisons they make with Switzerland's figures are invalid because the Swiss collect their data in such a way as to include both homicide and attempted homicide together in such a way as the other countries do not, and so no comparison exists.
They look, as Australian gun prohibitionists so often do, at Japan, attributing its low murder rate to lack of legal guns, conveniently forgetting that shootings in that country are on the rise, that criminals there have no trouble in procuring guns, and that the murder rate in that country even though it has only a fraction of the guns is comparable to Switzerland's, which by their logic ought to be the birthplace of mayhem, seeing guns are so widely available there. This is biased, unintelligent policy formulation of the same kind as we have been exposed to here in Australia by both major parties.
There is one other aspect of Britain's Labour Party that should be borne in mind. It is a kissing cousin of the Australian Labor Party. They are one in political philosophy; is anyone under any doubt that in Australia, it will soon be a Labor policy to tighten the firearm control screws further? Howard's firearm resolutions came straight from the Labor Party here, and since the failure of the National Party we now have no mainstream political friends. We must remember this in coming elections, or else we will almost certainly find ourselves with bans on all but single shot .22 rifles and shotguns, before they are all finally confiscated.
When Labor finds itself re-elected as the political wheel swings, then Australian firearm owners should be expecting things to get worse, not better.
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