Gun Law

Over this week I’ve stayed intentionally quiet about the events at Virginia Tech. There’s a couple of reasons for that, but mainly while I think it’s fairly shocking, in many ways it isn’t. It’s “just” another example of how America handles (or doesn’t)gun laws and disaffected people, as well as the media hype that explodes around such events.
I do find the entire gun legislation issue in the US to be bizarre, though. The oft-reported phrase about “if there’d been more students with guns, this perpetrator would’ve been killed before he could kill 32 other people” is just a marker of how bizarre the attitude is. Not “Hey, this guy – with recorded mental health issues – was allowed to just go to a shop, tick a box saying ‘no mental health problems’ and ta-da, could buy unlimited ammunition, and a semi-auto pistol. What’s wrong with this picture?‘ No, instead they should have more guns, to stop the gun crime. Because that’s an option that’s worked so well in the past.
However, the UK has also made a mistake. (and yes, I know, I’ve written about this before) Now, when people are saying that the US needs to strengthen their gun laws, they can turn round and say “Well hey, UK, you banned all your handguns, and that has worked really well to stop gun crime from exploding, hasn’t it?” It’s the two extremes – America wants Guns For All, and the UK has enforced (legally-speaking, anyway) Guns For None. And both have problems.
In the UK, we banned all ownership of handguns after Dunblane. Again, yes, a shocking event at the time – but the reaction was pure knee-jerk ‘got to do something‘.
Now, before I get started I just want to say that I’m not a particular fan of guns – I most certainly wouldn’t want to own one. I’ve used guns, shot with them (and done pretty well) in target competitions , using both rifles and hand-guns. I’m not pro-gun, but I’m not particularly anti-gun either.
Before Dunblane, people could own guns. The owners had annual checks against police records, (and would now be checked against CRB records etc. too) the firearms themselves were registered and licenced, and had to be kept in a secure area. More importantly, the police had the ability to knock on a registered gun-owners door at pretty much any reasonable time (Nicely slack wording in itself) and check that the guns were on the premises, in their safe, in a secure situation, and check that the firearms listed on the person’s FAC (Firearms Certificate) were the only ones on the premises. If a gun was sold, the sale had to be reported, along with who it’d been sold to.
After Dunblane, pretty much all handguns became illegal. The UK Government offered ‘compensation’ to gun owners that amounted to about £150-250 per gun – a paltry sum, when you worked out what they’d cost initially. And most gun-owners still complied with those new laws. Although, of course, some didn’t. And so a new trade in illegal guns sprang up. Which has contributed massively to where we are now – where gun crime is still increasing at a depressing rate, but there’s no records of what guns are where, who owns them, etc. etc.
Yes, there’s always been a trade in illegal guns – but licensing, and fairly strict gun control was a good system. It meant that what guns were available were generally kept in secure locations by people who had regular checks done on them. And when most handguns are owned by people who have bought them, who are older and perceived as being ‘responsible’, and do boring stuff like target shooting with them, they lose a lot of the ‘glamour’ that they’re now afforded by the media (by which I mean films, music etc., rather than newspapers)
I suspect that a lot of the current ‘gun culture’ has come about because of their very illegality. To own, or have access to, a gun is to have some level of cachet, some perception of ‘cool’ or ‘clever’ or ‘big’. But no-one knows that you have it unless you display that you have that access to guns. And/or a willingness to show off, and use them.
As the US has repeatedly shown, free access to guns doesn’t work. But nor does no access at all. Somewhere in the middle, perhaps there’s an option that will work. Or at least work better than the current methods.