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Outside gun country
By Herb Greer
I have lived in the United Kingdom for some decades -- the whole of my adult life. As an American from Santa Fe, I have often been involved in what might be called heated discussions about the "gun problem" in the United States.
My British friends are bemused and sometimes quite upset at my insistence on defending the private possession of guns. I grew up in a house where weapons were taboo, but spent much of my childhood next door, where my grandfather -- once mayor of Santa Fe -- kept a small arsenal in his bedroom: a Colt .45, several shotguns of various gauges, a Springfield rifle and a couple of .22 pistols. By the time I was nine, I had fired the Colt, and knew how to use the other weapons with some accuracy. A major part of my family education involved respect for weapons and what they could do.
Andrew Nagorski, writing in Newsweek with a tad of sanctimony recently, wrote a little polemic against weapons in private hands, saying that "the perspective from abroad" (he had just returned to the U.S.) might have "twisted his perspective." The context made this seem disingenuous.
The European and especially the British "perspective" is simply that all guns are bad in private hands. In Britain handguns and all weapons except shotguns are banned absolutely. Special permits are needed for shotguns, and these are not easy to obtain. Unlike America, a private citizen who defends himself and his property with seemingly justified deadly force can be tried for murder and sent down for life, as happened recently -- even though the victim was a career criminal invading the "killer's" property at night -- a property which had been burgled before in an area where even the police admit prevention of such crimes is all but nil.
But there are in fact plenty of guns about. In Britain criminals now use armed force as a matter of routine. In Manchester where I live, there have been drive-by shootings in the "black" ghetto area called Moss Side, where teenagers have been known to deploy Uzi submachine guns. This in a country that has some of the strictest gun-control laws in the world, and in which the citizen does not have the constitutional right to bear arms.
In Britain as in America, there have been people who went off the mental rails and committed massacres (violating existing gun laws in the process). One of these psychotic episodes led to the total ban on handguns. Such killings have moved anti-gun activists in the United States to demand more "action" on guns. But of course -- I say again -- those who committed these killings violated laws that were already in place. There are two lessons in this which activists have failed to learn, totally: first, laws do not prevent the sort of killings which have led to cries for the heavier control of guns or their ban. Such laws are, furthermore, an insult to the private citizen because they effectively brand him as a madman who may at any moment run amok and slaughter his neighbors. Anyone, and I stress, anyone who is seriously motivated to commit mass murder with a firearm will not find it difficult to obtain that weapon, whatever laws are in place; in Britain and on the continent this has been shown time and again to be the case.
The real purpose of stricter laws is to create an illusion -- and it is no more than that -- of greater safety for the "innocent" -- i.e., those whom the activists wish to bar (and in Britain, have barred) from possessing weapons at all. Outside that illusion, in the real world, the innocent have been deprived of any effective defense against armed force. The effect of these supposedly life-saving laws is, then, to control and expose the innocent -- not the criminals who should be controlled. That is the American perspective that arouses Mr. Nagorski's sanctimony. It is based on a common-sense perception which activists and certain "liberal" politicians are prepared to ignore -- at our peril, not theirs. That is why these proposed laws are a bad idea.
The second lesson is a simple but sound nostrum from the legal world: Hard cases make bad law -- something which the more self-righteous activists and play-to-the gallery politicians in Britain have wiped out of their minds, and which too many in the United States are happy to forget. These people are using hard cases -- e.g. the massacres in Dunblane in Britain and Columbine School in America -- to promote laws which are bad for the simple reason already stated, and make the citizen fair game for any armed criminal who wants to attack him.
Many Americans like to believe that the British police are not armed. This is not true. While the ordinary street-beat constable does not pack heat -- except in Ulster, where Republican terrorism makes it necessary -- Special Response Units are not only heavily armed but willing to fire on anyone who seems to be using deadly force. Like all such forces, they make the occasional mistake. But no one here is stupid enough to demand that their guns be taken away because of that.
But there is a softer target for the activists: The ordinary citizen. The most draconian gun-control laws have never protected him or her from either mad or determined killers and criminals. And what is the activists' answer to that? More of the same draconian laws. As the British satirical magazine Private Eye might say, "Shome mishtake, shurely." In logic and in deadly effect, these people have been wrong in Britain and they are wrong in the United States -- where, thank God, the ordinary citizen is, so far, protected from their asininity by the Constitution.
Herb Greer is a freelance writer and playwright living in the United Kingdom.
© 2000 Herb Greer
© 2000 WorldNetDaily.com, Inc.
Outside gun country
By Herb Greer
I have lived in the United Kingdom for some decades -- the whole of my adult life. As an American from Santa Fe, I have often been involved in what might be called heated discussions about the "gun problem" in the United States.
My British friends are bemused and sometimes quite upset at my insistence on defending the private possession of guns. I grew up in a house where weapons were taboo, but spent much of my childhood next door, where my grandfather -- once mayor of Santa Fe -- kept a small arsenal in his bedroom: a Colt .45, several shotguns of various gauges, a Springfield rifle and a couple of .22 pistols. By the time I was nine, I had fired the Colt, and knew how to use the other weapons with some accuracy. A major part of my family education involved respect for weapons and what they could do.
Andrew Nagorski, writing in Newsweek with a tad of sanctimony recently, wrote a little polemic against weapons in private hands, saying that "the perspective from abroad" (he had just returned to the U.S.) might have "twisted his perspective." The context made this seem disingenuous.
The European and especially the British "perspective" is simply that all guns are bad in private hands. In Britain handguns and all weapons except shotguns are banned absolutely. Special permits are needed for shotguns, and these are not easy to obtain. Unlike America, a private citizen who defends himself and his property with seemingly justified deadly force can be tried for murder and sent down for life, as happened recently -- even though the victim was a career criminal invading the "killer's" property at night -- a property which had been burgled before in an area where even the police admit prevention of such crimes is all but nil.
But there are in fact plenty of guns about. In Britain criminals now use armed force as a matter of routine. In Manchester where I live, there have been drive-by shootings in the "black" ghetto area called Moss Side, where teenagers have been known to deploy Uzi submachine guns. This in a country that has some of the strictest gun-control laws in the world, and in which the citizen does not have the constitutional right to bear arms.
In Britain as in America, there have been people who went off the mental rails and committed massacres (violating existing gun laws in the process). One of these psychotic episodes led to the total ban on handguns. Such killings have moved anti-gun activists in the United States to demand more "action" on guns. But of course -- I say again -- those who committed these killings violated laws that were already in place. There are two lessons in this which activists have failed to learn, totally: first, laws do not prevent the sort of killings which have led to cries for the heavier control of guns or their ban. Such laws are, furthermore, an insult to the private citizen because they effectively brand him as a madman who may at any moment run amok and slaughter his neighbors. Anyone, and I stress, anyone who is seriously motivated to commit mass murder with a firearm will not find it difficult to obtain that weapon, whatever laws are in place; in Britain and on the continent this has been shown time and again to be the case.
The real purpose of stricter laws is to create an illusion -- and it is no more than that -- of greater safety for the "innocent" -- i.e., those whom the activists wish to bar (and in Britain, have barred) from possessing weapons at all. Outside that illusion, in the real world, the innocent have been deprived of any effective defense against armed force. The effect of these supposedly life-saving laws is, then, to control and expose the innocent -- not the criminals who should be controlled. That is the American perspective that arouses Mr. Nagorski's sanctimony. It is based on a common-sense perception which activists and certain "liberal" politicians are prepared to ignore -- at our peril, not theirs. That is why these proposed laws are a bad idea.
The second lesson is a simple but sound nostrum from the legal world: Hard cases make bad law -- something which the more self-righteous activists and play-to-the gallery politicians in Britain have wiped out of their minds, and which too many in the United States are happy to forget. These people are using hard cases -- e.g. the massacres in Dunblane in Britain and Columbine School in America -- to promote laws which are bad for the simple reason already stated, and make the citizen fair game for any armed criminal who wants to attack him.
Many Americans like to believe that the British police are not armed. This is not true. While the ordinary street-beat constable does not pack heat -- except in Ulster, where Republican terrorism makes it necessary -- Special Response Units are not only heavily armed but willing to fire on anyone who seems to be using deadly force. Like all such forces, they make the occasional mistake. But no one here is stupid enough to demand that their guns be taken away because of that.
But there is a softer target for the activists: The ordinary citizen. The most draconian gun-control laws have never protected him or her from either mad or determined killers and criminals. And what is the activists' answer to that? More of the same draconian laws. As the British satirical magazine Private Eye might say, "Shome mishtake, shurely." In logic and in deadly effect, these people have been wrong in Britain and they are wrong in the United States -- where, thank God, the ordinary citizen is, so far, protected from their asininity by the Constitution.
Herb Greer is a freelance writer and playwright living in the United Kingdom.
© 2000 Herb Greer
© 2000 WorldNetDaily.com, Inc.
