Gunman shoots 18 people.

[Gagglegnash]

Er, no. Not at all concerned about the rule of law and the population at large. Merely concerned about the possibility of their pet hobby being curtailed. And as these two people happen to be good friends of mine, I don't really appreciate them being described in such terms.

Way to totally change the subject.

Sorry- forgot the smiley.

It did seem to me that you were saying that their concenrs were non sequiter to the argument because they had no personal involvement.

My response was rebuttal in absurdium in that people are supposed to be concerned about the law, even when it doesn't directly concern them.

I'm sorry if I offended.

...and to be totally honest, you were the one that brought it up.

Your point was that after this massive step of taking "everybody's" guns away, you would have expected to see some change to suicide and/or crime statistics. My point was that guns were "taken away" from only the very small minority (Darat pegged it as 0.1% of the population) who actually had such guns in the first place. Nowhere near enough change to imagine you'd see any difference in these statistics.

My point is that's how it's being pitched to the populace, over here.

1 out of 5 American adults are gun-owners, with something like 220 million guns in LEGAL circulation, something like 65 million of them handguns. The anti-gun guys say that, if we adopt the current British style of firearms control, then we can expect the current British levels in crime.

Is it too much to point out that the current style of firearms control has had no measurable effect on THEIR firearm-relate crime? If such measures are expected, in the US, to have HUGE results, shouldn't we have seen SOME reaction in British crime?

Though, as it happens, the public discussion at the time was rather to the effect that the ordinary citizens' and their children's right not to be massacred by some crazed gun nut rather trumped anyone's "right" to indulge in a hobby of target shooting.

So, we disarm and rigidly control all Xs when some individual nutjob takes an X and Ys a mess of people to death in a crowd to make Ying more difficult?

Either your nutjobs aren't very inventive (EVERY ONE of these walk-in-start-shooting/classroom/school killings are copycats... An American invented it in 1966), or you just don't have that many kind of nutjobs.

In the US, we have nutjobs aplenty, and, as has already been shown, for some reason we excel at inventing new ways of wrongdoing (oh - for what it's worth: Americans invented train robbery, too).

With a crime with a mean time between occurrences of about 15 years (TWO since it was invented in 1966), you'd be expected to have to wait until about... 1996 + 15 = 2011... 2011 to see if you've even slowed them down.

Yes - I personally honestly believe that taking away ANY individual person's rights because someone has successfully blown smoke up your collective skirts is wrong.

You're a rational fellow: Show me some statistics that show you to be any safer now from some nut grabbing one of those machine guns you can buy in London (for less than I can buy one for legally over here!) and shooting the place up than you were before?

Two occurrences in forty years is pretty sparse data.

How things were working out for us then was that a surprising amount of lattitude was actually allowed in terms of gun ownership and even keeping them at home, so long as they were locked up unloaded, and the ammunition locked up separately. However, gun ownership was still a very minority interest, very few people did indeed keep such guns at home, and (as now) nobody legally walked the streets armed.

Good for you! I admire that you guys can do that to yourselves. Now, you've done imitation samurai swords, and you're working on knives. Scotland's done glasses.

Let me know when you're finished. Won't there ALWAYS be something in the headlines, whose adherents are only a tiny fraction of the population, who don't, "need," whatever it is, that will make people feel safer about random law breaking?

I hope you're finished before you're all wearing the same colored, same cut clothing and shoes (you don't NEED different colors and styles, and if everyone looks alike, no one will now who to murder) (whom to murder) (whatever), driving the same kind of car (Who NEEDS other kinds of cars, and these are so much SAFER), and eating... I don't know... Purina European Chow (for the prevention of obesity, type 2 diabetes and heart disease).

In spite of this, nobody was afraid to go to bed at night, "home invasions" were unheard-of, and there was no lobby demanding any extension of rights to keep weapons.

Rolfe.

That was then. This is now.

Two homes attacked by arsonists
Romanian family's home attacked
Armed thieves beat up businessman
Man has surgery after home attack
Gang attacks man in raid on home
Masked gang attack family in home
Youth jailed for pensioner murder
Son killed father in knife attack Mmm - like the OP, too...
Pair attack man outside own home
Two men charged over attack death
Etc.
Etc.
Etc.

No one's afraid of it over here, either.

We've got GUNS!

 

[Gagglegnash]

Hi

And so did we. They are called the Irish Republican Army. I believe some American gun owners know them quite well.

Yeah. I wouldn't thank they'd need to bury anything.

Make a phone-call to Boston or New York and get a new shipment in a week.

 

[Darat]

My memory of the detail of this isn't perfect. Can you remind me (and perhaps all of us) what actually changed after Hungerford and then after Dunblane?

Your summary is pretty much accurate.

...snip...

But supposing all the 50,000 people you quote as being "affected" were indeed obliged to remove a gun that had previously been in their home. Population of Britain, a bit over 60 million. At a guess, 50 million adults? So, 0.1% of the adult population.

This is the extent of the change that happened in 1997, that Gagglenash seems to think should have been evident in overall crime and suicide statistics.

...snip...

And you have to remember not one of those 50,000 people legally had a loaded gun in their home, not even locked in a cabinet since the law at the time required guns to be kept unloaded and locked up when not required. So there is no way that those 50,000 could have been a "deterrent" to burglars and other criminals prior to 1997. Indeed I wonder if being one of those 50,000 people would have made you more of a target for some criminals since you would have something they would particularly want i.e. a gun!

 

[Architect]

I seem to recall that polls have always shown near-universal support for strict gun control in the UK. Must see if I can find a link.

 

[Darat]

For all that I am for gun control legislation (like most people even in countries like the USA) I have argued many times here that the change in legislation in 1997 was not required and was nothing more than a knee-jerk reaction to a tragic but singular event.

 

[Gagglegnash]

Hi

For all that I am for gun control legislation (like most people even in countries like the USA) I have argued many times here that the change in legislation in 1997 was not required and was nothing more than a knee-jerk reaction to a tragic but singular event.

(MOST people in the USA don't even vote, so they may be for or against this and that, but not enough to go out and DO something about it for a couple of hours, one day every four years.)

 

[Architect]

For all that I am for gun control legislation (like most people even in countries like the USA) I have argued many times here that the change in legislation in 1997 was not required and was nothing more than a knee-jerk reaction to a tragic but singular event.

I could follow the ban on automatic weapons, inasmuch as there seemed to be no reasonable civilian purpose for posessing such firearms, however I would have thought the Thomas Hamilton/Dunblane issue was more to do with a failure to read the warning signs and take steps to remove his licence.

However politicians felt they had to be seen to act in the face of national outrage/shock/disbelief. There is an argument that a precautionary approach, whether proportionate or otherwise, was not an unreasonable way forward.

 

[Gagglegnash]

Hi

... snip ...

This is the extent of the change that happened in 1997, that Gagglenash seems to think should have been evident in overall crime and suicide statistics.

... snip ...

...and, again, which the anti-gun lobby is holding up as the primary reason that the USA should do the same thing. You did see the "crime reduction since 1997," chart, right? You remember, the one that was pretty much nothing like your Home Office crime chart and cherry-picked the declining burglary rate, which was declining BEFORE 1997, and left out the crimes where guns are normally used?

You're a rational guy. If you outlaw blue cars, and the anti-blue-car lobby goes on and on about how much safer you are because there are NO BLUE CAR-RELATED INJURIES AND DEATHS, but the accident and fatal accident rate had nor declined, even a little bit, wouldn't you be suspicious?

I use that as an example because that's what they did with that, "assault weapons," ban a few years back. The definition of said, "assault weapons," was cosmetic in nature, banning things like folding stocks, pistol grips, bayonet lugs, flash suppressors, grenade launchers, where the magazine attached on pistols, barrel shrouds, and weight.

The only thing that was about the way the weapon worked was limits on magazine size, but since 1) magazines are removable, and 2) you could still get 30-round mags as long as you had provenience that the mag was from before the ban, it had little effect on who had large magazines.

After the ban, they were very proud that there were, "significantly fewer crimes committed with these types of weapons," and when confronted by the fact that there were no fewer firearms crimes being committed, responded by saying that the number of crimes being committed with these types of weapons was statistically insignificant BEFORE the ban, so you wouldn't expect to see a change.

Now, I don't know about YOU, but when I buy a medicine, I expect it to work better than a jelly bean on my disease.

Shouldn't I be allowed to extend the same requirements to my laws (which, by the way, cost a whole lot more)?

....

Oh!

My!!

God!!!

That's it, isn't it?

You guys bought a PLACEBO!

You bought it because your newspapers and government sold it to you and sold it HARD, and like wooers everywhere, you'll now defend the purchase to your deaths because it, "made you feel better."

LOL!!

Sorry - just now thought of that.

Law-On: Apply to your entire society!

Law-On: Apply to your entire society!!

Law-On: Apply to your entire society!!!

 

[Rolfe]

I could follow the ban on automatic weapons, inasmuch as there seemed to be no reasonable civilian purpose for posessing such firearms, however I would have thought the Thomas Hamilton/Dunblane issue was more to do with a failure to read the warning signs and take steps to remove his licence.

However politicians felt they had to be seen to act in the face of national outrage/shock/disbelief. There is an argument that a precautionary approach, whether proportionate or otherwise, was not an unreasonable way forward.

I agree very much with Architect's post. The Dunblane thing was more of a failure of existing controls than a deficiency of the controls themselves. Nevertheless there was a huge public outcry for stricter controls at the time, and I think it was probably necessary for the government to be seen to be doing something.

However, that doesn't necessarily mean that the move was a bad thing. What are handguns for? Not hunting, or vermin control, or euthanasia of livestock or whatever legitimate uses of firearms there are. They're for shooting people, and failing that, for target shooting - which is arguably just practice for shooting people. Did they have any real place in British society in the 1990s?

The only legitimate thing you can do with a handgun is shoot at targets. It's a hobby. It was quite a popular hobby in the years following the war, when there are more people who had had military experience with these things and wanted to keep their hand in. Some people were very good at it and Olympic medals were a regular event.

However, is a hobby, however harmless, sufficient reason to argue against a ban on the sort of weapons that were involved at Dunblane? Even if we get Olympic medals out of it? Public opinion seemed to be saying no. Tough luck, pistol shooters, but children's lives are more important. Maybe this was an over-reaction, maybe there wasn't another Thomas Hamilton waiting in the wings or maybe he'd have been stopped by proper enforcement of existing controls, but it was hard to make a compelling case just to protect a minority hobby.

Rolfe.

 

[Drudgewire]

The only legitimate thing you can do with a handgun is shoot at targets

Thankfully, here we consider protecting our lives and livliehoods legitimate.

 

[Rolfe]

Perhaps more interesting is the situation before Hungerford. There's a book on that incident available online which gives quite a lot of background information (note, this was written pre-Dunblane).

Nor was there anything illegal in this arsenal kept in the Ryans’ brick-built, end-of-terrace council house. On the contrary, Ryan had held a shotgun licence since 1978. As his collection had expanded to include other firearms, so his licence had been amended accordingly, as required by law. The Thames Valley Police had, in the twelve months before August 1987, vetted the young gun enthusiast on at least three occasions, once in November 1986 and twice in early 1987. As the storage facilities were found to be in order, there was no good reason for the relevant authorization to be withheld, and it was not.

Under the terms of his firearms certificate Ryan was entitled to own five guns. It was his constant chopping and changing of his weaponry which had prompted the police visits. Constable Ronald Hoyes, the Hungerford community beat officer, was one such official visitor to the Ryan household. He explains: ‘Having worked in Hungerford for thirteen years, I had had no previous dealings with Ryan at all and I knew that he had never been in any trouble with the police, apart from one single speeding offence. He appeared to me to be a fit and responsible person to hold a firearms certificate.’
PC Hoyes’s visit was required because Ryan had again applied for a variation to his certificate in order to include a Smith and Wesson, a .38 pistol, for target shooting. The amendment came through without undue delay. Everything was in accordance with the law.

Another police constable, Trevor Wainwright, also a member of the Hungerford constabulary, took the same view as his colleague on his visits to 4 South View. In fact he lived just around the corner in Macklin Close. These judgements were supported by Ryan’s own doctor, Dr Huigh Pihiens, whose name had been associated with Ryan’s original application. Again, both PC and GP found Ryan to be sane and safe. Additional legal requirements were duly fulfilled by the purchase and installation of a Chubb steel cabinet, which was then bolted to Ryan’s bedroom wall. But in reality the licensee kept the guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition in the garden shed, a flimsy structure which had long been the nerve centre of Ryan’s quasi-military operations, as many neighbours knew.

‘Michael was always fascinated by guns,’ his aunt, Constance Ryan, confirms. ‘It seemed to me as if he felt more important and powerful because of them - perhaps because he wasn’t all that big himself, I don’t really know. But I do remember Michael telling me that once he had met a person while out rabbit shooting and this person had started getting saucy. Michael pulled a revolver out of his pocket and pointed it at the man, and then watched with satisfaction as he ran off. I remember the lesson he drew from this incident very clearly. "That," he said, "shows the power a gun gives you, Auntie."’

Michael Ryan’s fixation with weaponry might have made him something of an exception in Hungerford. But he was by no means unusual in terms of the country as a whole. For in the summer of 1987 Britain’s gun culture was very widespread indeed. Ryan was just one among 160,000 licensed holders of firearms and 840,000 licensed holders of shotguns. However, the number of shotguns in legitimate circulation at that time was estimated at around three times that number, because several could be held on a single licence. And according to an estimate published in the Police Review there were then possibly as many as four million illegally held guns in the country. Gun shops and gun centres were also widespread, with more than two thousand legitimate dealers trading in arms, many extremely successfully, and some eight thousand gun clubs where the enthusiast could hone his skills.

In his love for guns, then, Michael Ryan was not alone. So when he applied to join the Dunmore Shooting Centre at Abingdon in Oxfordshire in September 1986, there was nothing particularly remarkable in his application. For Ryan membership of the Dunmore club was particularly attractive because it incorporated what it claimed was one of the biggest gun shops in the country. Ryan proved to be a good customer, spending £391.50 on a Beretta pistol shortly before Christmas 1986, and then buying a Smith and Wesson for £325, a Browning shotgun, a Bernadelli pistol and two other shotguns during the following year. Ryan borrowed the money to finance these transactions, a Reading finance company handling his repeated applications for funds.

There was more besides to attract the young gun enthusiast, for the Dumnore Centre’s shooting gallery had a 25-metre, fullboard, seven-lane range with television-monitored targets. The Centre, situated not far from Ryan’s home, also had a turning-target system, enabling him to practice rapid fire and combat exercises, an area of gun expertise known as practical shooting. Here, accuracy is tested not on Bisley-style targets where closeness to the bull’s-eye gains the most marks, but under simulated combat conditions, firing at representational figures, usually life-sized depictions of terrorists. The aim here is to kill or maim the ‘enemy’. In the summer of 1987 there were no fewer than forty ‘survival schools’ scattered around Britain, and magazines like Desert Eagle, Combat and Survival, Soldier of Fortune and Survival Weaponry were then enjoying a rapidly rising circulation. Michael Ryan was simply one of the gun-loving crowd.

I think the author exaggerates a bit with the "crowd" reference. If he means, a social group interested in guns then yes, that sort of "crowd". However, even in 1987 gun ownership was an extreme rarity among ordinary middle-class lawabiding people. And even then, the law on gun storage prevented lawabiding people from keeping loaded weapons at home, so owning such a thing to protect property wasn't a legal option.

And yet, it wasn't hard to get hold of the things, and it wasn't hard to flout the law on storage, as Michael Ryan was obviously doing left right and centre. This should have been the nightmare scenario as presented by the US posters. Relatively easy availability of weapons, but no legal way citizens could keep these weapons in such a way as to provide a defence against the sort of attack the Americans seem so concerned about.

But life was normal. Nobody was shaking with fear at the prospect of a "home invasion", nobody was demanding relaxation of the law so as to be allowed either to carry firearms in the street, or to keep a loaded gun on their bedside table.

Then it happened. Michael Ryan, whose attitudes seem eerily familiar in the light of some of the contributions from US posters here, took advantage of the leeway in the legislation to assemble a fair-sized arsenal, and then went on the infamous rampage.

No doubt someone is going to declare that the events of Wednesday 19th August 1987 could have been much ameliorated if there had been armed citizens at hand to gun Ryan down before he finally did the job himself. That debate could go on and on. However, in the aftermath of the incident there was no demand at all for such a development. On the contrary. The entire focus of public concern was to reduce gun availability in order to prevent as far as possible a repetition of the incident. Guns were most emphatically seen as the problem, not as the solution to the problem.

Which approach has been the more successful? This isn't about overall crime. This isn't even about "criminals". This is about apparently ordinary people who embark on a rampage of random killing.

We've had precisely one more incident, Dunblane in 1996. Which, as I said, simply renewed calls for gun restrictions. That was twelve years ago. There haven't been any more.

How many similar incidents have there been in the USA over the past 20 years? The population of Britain is one-sixth of the population of the USA, so on a simplistic population-based score, we would have expected six times as many incidents. I don't know how many there have been but it seems to me to be more than that.

And at the same time, is the cruelly disarmed British population shaking in its collective boots because of all those criminals who (of course) will be able to get guns anyway, and will have a field day attacking the helpless population?

Not last time I looked.

Rolfe.

 

[Darat]

I agree very much with Architect's post. The Dunblane thing was more of a failure of existing controls than a deficiency of the controls themselves. Nevertheless there was a huge public outcry for stricter controls at the time, and I think it was probably necessary for the government to be seen to be doing something.

...snip...

I do hold that "necessary to be seen to be doing something" does not make for a good starting point for well thought out legislation.

However, that doesn't necessarily mean that the move was a bad thing. What are handguns for? Not hunting, or vermin control, or euthanasia of livestock or whatever legitimate uses of firearms there are. They're for shooting people, and failing that, for target shooting - which is arguably just practice for shooting people. Did they have any real place in British society in the 1990s?

...snip...

As a hobby I don't see why not - for instance we still have hobbyist archers and the like. Different folk, different strokes and all that. (Personally guns are one the few things that really unsettle me, not an entirely rational thing and certainly not any reason why other people shouldn't play with them.)

...snip...

However, is a hobby, however harmless, sufficient reason to argue against a ban on the sort of weapons that were involved at Dunblane? Even if we get Olympic medals out of it? Public opinion seemed to be saying no. Tough luck, pistol shooters, but children's lives are more important. Maybe this was an over-reaction, maybe there wasn't another Thomas Hamilton waiting in the wings or maybe he'd have been stopped by proper enforcement of existing controls, but it was hard to make a compelling case just to protect a minority hobby.

...snip...

I see this from the other way wrong: we had no evidence to support the idea that this singular tragic event represented a real and significant danger to children or any one else and plenty to support the idea that it was indeed a quite singular tragic event. So I think for the legislation that was passed it should have been argued for on the grounds of exactly how much safer we were making society, and I don't think anyone ever made a compelling argument for that.

 

[Ranb]

.....What are handguns for? Not hunting, or vermin control, or euthanasia of livestock or whatever legitimate uses of firearms there are. They're for shooting people, and failing that, for target shooting - which is arguably just practice for shooting people. Did they have any real place in British society in the 1990s?.....

Are handguns permitted to be used for hunting or any other legal use typically associated with rifles in Great Britain? I'm guessing it is difficult to find away around the near total ban on handgun ownership in order to use them for sport.

In the USA, handguns are used for the same activities rifles are. That it is more of a challenge to hunt with handguns just adds to the appeal for some, including myself. Thanks.

Ranb

 

[Rolfe]

I do hold that "necessary to be seen to be doing something" does not make for a good starting point for well thought out legislation.

As a hobby I don't see why not - for instance we still have hobbyist archers and the like. Different folk, different strokes and all that. (Personally guns are one the few things that really unsettle me, not an entirely rational thing and certainly not any reason why other people shouldn't play with them.)

I see this from the other way wrong: we had no evidence to support the idea that this singular tragic event represented a real and significant danger to children or any one else and plenty to support the idea that it was indeed a quite singular tragic event. So I think for the legislation that was passed it should have been argued for on the grounds of exactly how much safer we were making society, and I don't think anyone ever made a compelling argument for that.

I think that's a very reasonable argument. It's not one that was easy to get heard at the time though!

I suppose it's a difficult balance to assess. Even if the decrease in risk is tiny, it's difficult to prove it doesn't exist. And to balance that possible decrease in risk, just people continuing with a hobby.

I wouldn't care to call that one either way, but I wouldn't like to be the politician who decided the risk was low, and so the hobby could continue, if there had actually been a repeat incident.

Rolfe.

 

[Architect]

In the USA, handguns are used for the same activities rifles are. That it is more of a challenge to hunt with handguns just adds to the appeal for some, including myself.

To the best of my knowledge, handguns are banned and that's it - saving for Police, etc.

 

[Architect]

Thankfully, here we consider protecting our lives and livliehoods legitimate.

Sorry about the delay in posting, I had to step over the huge pile of bodies gunned down in our streets......no, erm, wait a minute.........that doesn't happen here. Ah well.

 

[Darat]

Are handguns permitted to be used for hunting or any other legal use typically associated with rifles in Great Britain? I'm guessing it is difficult to find away around the near total ban on handgun ownership in order to use them for sport.

In the USA, handguns are used for the same activities rifles are. That it is more of a challenge to hunt with handguns just adds to the appeal for some, including myself. Thanks.

Ranb

Good site for information like this is : http://www.shootinguk.co.uk/

 

[Drudgewire]

Sorry about the delay in posting, I had to step over the huge pile of bodies gunned down in our streets......no, erm, wait a minute.........that doesn't happen here. Ah well.

Yup, so you don't need guns.

Does here, so I do.

 

[Rolfe]

Yup, so you don't need guns.

Does here, so I do.

Does it ever even occur to you that you might have confused cause with effect?

Rolfe.

 

[Drudgewire]

Does it ever even occur to you that you might have confused cause with effect?

Rolfe.

I'm not living in a sociology class. I'm living in a society where bad people have guns and changing the laws to remove them from the hands of people who aren't committing crimes with them only hurts my chances of survival.