Arms and the law
The Weekly Telegraph (UK) Issue 324
14 October 1997
From the start of this month, anyone in possession of a handgun will face up to 10 years in prison. Thousands of law-abiding people will be barred from their pastime, dozens of small businesses will close and the United Kingdom will become the first country to ban Olympic pistol-shooting since it was introduced in 1896. For the privilege of expropriating our fellow subjects, the rest of us will be required to stump up between 169 million pounds and 450 million pounds in compensation.
In every democracy, citizens give up some of their liberty in return for greater security, but here there is no such trade-off. The firearms Act will not reduce handgun-related offences: several studies have shown that there is no correlation between the number of legal pistols in a society and the number of violent crimes. Nor would it have stopped Thomas Hamilton, who acquired his guns because the existing law was not enforced.
In the aftermath of Dunblane, however, it was impossible to make these observations. This newspaper was a lonely voice cautioning against the kind of knee-jerk legislation that had produced the War Crimes Act and the Dangerous Dogs Act. While pistol-shooters queued patiently to give evidence to Lord Cullen, a number of tabloid newspapers ran a filthy campaign suggesting that opponents of a disproportionate ban, in some unspecified way, simply did not care about the dead children. Before long, the political parties had honed in. At his party conference in Blackpool last year, Tony Blair made perhaps the worst speech of his career. “Tory MPs complain that the response has been ‘emotional’,” he said. “Well, if they had been in that gym, if they had talked to those parents, sitting on the tiny chairs where once their children sat, they would have been emotional too.” His speech sparked a degrading political auction so that, by the time Lord Cullen produced his eminently sensible report, every party had anticipated it by pledging to go further.
Those who had played by the rules and waited for the Cullen report found that they had been outflanked, while those who had been less scrupulous in their arguments won the day. Worst of all, the Labour Party got a taste for aligning itself with the worst kind of tabloid populism. Concern over freedom and fairness, it seems, can be shouted down if sufficient moral outrage exists: witness Labour’s attitude to hunting, tobacco advertising, Holocaust denial and, it now appears, alcohol limits. There was a time when we were concerned with liberty in the abstract rather than just our own pursuits. Is Labour right in believing that we have wholly lost that sense?
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