Britain’s Handgun Ban
by Colin Greenwood
4 July 2000
The 1997 ban on handguns in Britain is being seen by politicians and anti-gun groups worldwide as a goal. Australian anti-gunners, not satisfied with the ban on self-loading rifles (all but .22 self-loading rifles were banned in Britain ten years ago) will now be demanding a ban on all handguns.
It would be tempting to go into detail about the history of gun control in Britain, starting with the right to keep arms which existed into the 20th century, but in this article we must concentrate our minds on how the handgun ban came into being and what effect it has had.
By the early 1990s the situation in Britain was that the legal ownership of any rifle or pistol required a 'firearm certificate' issued by one of the 43 chief constables in England and Wales and eight in Scotland. Different laws apply in Northern Ireland and some of the British islands. There is no ban in Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man or in the Channel Islands. The Home Office and Scottish Office together issue guidance on the application of firearm laws that police follow when and as it suits them.
Effectively the position about pistols was that before granting a certificate, police were required to check that the person was a full member of an approved club and had served a probationary period of three months during which time he had shot under supervision. They also needed to check that the club used a range approved for the class of pistol. If a person wanted more than one pistol and particularly if he wanted more than one pistol of the same type and calibre, police were required to ensure that he was a serious competitive shooter and really required those additional firearms.
There had been clear statements from chief constables that their objective was to reduce the private ownership of firearms to the absolute minimum and between 1968 and 1996 they had reduced the already very small number of certificates by no less than 32 per cent. Despite that, handgun shooting thrived in its restricted fashion.
Few will need to be reminded of the events of March 13, 1996 when Thomas Hamilton walked into a primary school in Dunblane with three licensed centrefire pistols and shot dead 16 small children and one of their teachers. He wounded ten other children and three adults before killing himself. It was the sort of event that is hard to come to terms with even after the passage of years.
The initial reaction in Parliament was restrained. The responsible Minister, David MacLean, asked politicians to wait for the facts before they jumped to conclusions about what should be done. It was quickly announced that a public inquiry under a senior Scottish Judge, Lord Cullen, would investigate the tragedy.
Media hysteria rose rapidly and there was no prospect of a fair debate. Anyone defending the right to use pistols was branded a child killer and there was a concerted media campaign to ban handguns in particular and all guns in some instances. In the meantime, the Parliamentary Home Affairs Committee decided to conduct its own inquiry into handguns. It tried to cut across the Cullen Inquiry into the tragedy but heard evidence from many sources. A majority decided that there should be no ban on handguns but the Labour group voted for a minority report calling for such a ban. The media attacked the Conservative majority for daring to oppose a ban on handguns and the level of hysteria rose.
Lord Cullen's report was ready for presentation just at the time when the political parties were holding their last party conferences before the 1997 general election. The report was supposedly withheld by agreement among the major parties until after the party conferences to avoid it from becoming a political football. There appeared to be an agreement not to use the tragedy for political gain and the Conservatives did not debate it, but the Labour Party, desperate to win power after long years in opposition, invited one of the main anti-gun campaigners onto their platform and from that moment on, the question of handguns was a political issue in the run-up to an election. Labour gave an undertaking to ban all handguns but the Conservatives kept their counsel.
It is now clear that the Conservatives had decided not to ban any handguns but to impose further restrictions, including a requirement to store them at club ranges. The Government called a confidential press briefing on October 15 and told selected journalists what was to happen. The major daily newspapers all carried the same story on October 16 - no handgun ban, but there was a cabinet meeting on the morning of October 16 at which, after a threat from the Scottish Secretary to resign on this issue immediately before an election, there was a reversal of policy and it was decided to ban all but smallbore handguns and to require the latter to be stored on ranges.
The Cullen Report was presented to Parliament at 3:30pm on October 16, 1996 and within a few minutes the Government announced its proposal to ban centrefire handguns. There was no opportunity to consider or debate the Cullen Report, which was then sidelined.
The ban was rushed through Parliament by limiting the debating time allowed (the guillotine as it is usually called) and by ensuring that the Committee of MPs who would consider parts of the Bill contained no-one able to speak for gun owners. Labour came to power in the 1997 election with a substantial majority and one of its first actions was to extend the ban on handguns to cover smallbore guns.
The ban on handguns had nothing to do with public safety; it was a response to media hysteria and political machinations linked with the view of many politicians that there were votes in it.
Legitimate owners had to hand in their centrefire handguns by September 30, 1997 and their smallbore pistols by the end of February 1998. A flawed compensation scheme was later the subject of serious criticism from the National Audit Commission. More than 162,000 handguns and 700 tonnes of ammunition were surrendered and a total compensation bill in the order of œ90 million. The final total cannot be given because two and a half years later some claims have not been settled.
The compensation bill is only a tiny part of the real cost. Several hundred police officers were employed full-time for four months and small numbers for much longer. The Home Office had to set up a large and specially staffed department to deal with compensation claims. Surrendered guns, ammunition and equipment had to be stored, shipped and later destroyed. The total bill cannot be less than one billion pounds sterling. A sport and an industry valued at some œ60 million per year has been destroyed.
Because of the way the Cullen Report was sidelined, it received little attention but evidence came to light that called into question parts of the report itself and the manner in which it was conducted. Cullen had questioned the final police decision to renew Hamilton's certificate in spite of reservations about his mental suitability. In the course of his inquiry, Lord Cullen used Central Scotland Police (the force concerned) to make all the inquiries and a senior officer from another force to check on firearms licensing matters, but it was later revealed by a Scottish newspaper that when Hamilton applied for his first certificate, he had not been a member of the club he named and, in any event, that club was not approved for fullbore pistols. Further inquiry indicates that the police failed to check Hamiliton's applications during a period of almost 20 years and that Hamilton had lied time and again about his membership of clubs and the nature of the clubs of which he claimed to be a member.
The single incident that Lord Cullen picked out for investigation was perhaps the least important in the catalogue of transactions between the killer and the police and the police failed to investigate any of them correctly. How could a senior judge fail to note the lack of inquiry into this man? How, in quoting Home Office guidance on related matters in a precise and detailed report, could he fail to note the requirement to be a full member of an appropriate club? How could he dismiss those questions by saying that at the time of one renewal, Hamilton was probably a member of one club and perhaps a member of another when in fact neither of the clubs would have qualified him to possess the centrefire pistols he used?
The Government has steadfastly refused to look at this evidence despite its having been made public. The facts seem to be that the killer should never have been licensed to own firearms and, despite ample evidence, the facts were not made known in a judicial inquiry.
And what is the benefit to the community of what has been done? Home Office figures show the extent of the use of shotguns, sawn-off shotguns and pistols in homicide. The total includes rifles and miscellaneous firearms not shown separately in the table.
Firearms were used in only 6.5 per cent of homicides in 1998 and that figure is fairly typical, but within that figure we can see a marked change from the use of shotguns to pistols and the ban on handguns in late 1997 has had no affect at all.
Only after considerable pressure did the Home Office attempt research to show the extent to which legally held firearms were used in homicide. The latest figures cover a six-year period from 1992 to 1998.
The use of legally held firearms is almost entirely limited to those domestic and argument situations in which it is clear that if a firearm was not available, some other weapon would have been substituted but even in domestic homicide, illegally held guns are used far more often than legally held guns.
We can take the matter further by looking at the use of guns in robbery:
The use of all firearms in robbery began to fall after a peak in 1993. The reason has been accepted by the Home Office for a number of years. In 1993 the crime squads, a national unit intent to combat major crime, began to target robbers known to use firearms. In a novel approach for the police in this country, they decided that the way to deal with armed crime was to arrest criminals. It is a process of logic that has not extended beyond that one unit, but it has produced the only reduction in armed crime ever experienced in this country.
The reduction from 1994 cannot be attributed to the ban on handguns that, as the figures show, had no discernible affect. Pistols are used in homicide eight times more often than the much more common and less rigidly controlled shotguns. They are used in robbery 13 times more often than shotguns.
If proof was needed of the truth of the old adage, 'when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns', here it is. Criminals carry on with their lawless ways, robbing and killing, but responsible citizens may not take part in competitive pistol shooting.
Of course, the Home Office has had plenty of time to think up its response. We are now told that they never intended the ban on handguns to have any effect on these classes of crime. Its sole purpose was to prevent further single-incident mass killings. Clearly, we have politicians who believe that if there are no handguns, mass killings with rifles, shotguns, petrol or other means will never occur.
The most serious casualty of all has been democracy. What the politicians did in 1997 demonstrates that nothing is safe from panic legislation designed only to capture votes. Handguns in 1997 but what next?
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