BerettaCougar
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Once in a while, someone says something that shows just how many odd people are out there. 'From my cold, dead hands,' shouted Charlton Heston, brandishing a musket above his head. It was a year after the Columbine massacre and America's National Rifle Association had never seen its membership so high.
Despite Braveheart, Tom Weir and our own fondness for moonshine, the frontier spirit has never burned with quite the same vigour in Scottish veins. As a leak from the Executive proved last week, Jack McConnell would like to see the little that remains diluted further. The anonymous briefing saw him getting tough on airguns.
This is due to the death of Andrew Morton, a toddler hit by an airgun pellet in March. After that horror, Michael Howard, the soon-to-be ex-Tory leader, found himself berated on the steps of the Scottish Conservative conference in Dumfries for suggesting that we shouldn't rush to legislate. Who knows what would have happened if he had set free a howl of defiance like Heston's?
On the other side, the SNP have seen an opportunity. During First Minister's Questions on Thursday, Nicola Sturgeon fired bulletpoints at McConnell with sniperish accuracy. She pointed out that after Morton's death, he had promised to do something about airguns, but now that the Home Office has revealed its Violent Crime Reduction Bill, he has failed to live up to his word. She said he was 'talking tough but acting soft'.
The briefing came later that day. The Executive was going to try to convince London to harden its legislation, but if that failed, it would embark on a 'reverse Sewel motion'. Famously, Sewel motions allow English legislation to be brought as a piece on to the Scottish statute book with one Holyrood vote. Going the other way would be a big step for McConnell, the first time he opted out of a piece of legislation reserved for Westminster.
The story was effective, destroying SNP claims that independence is necessary to deal with a case like this, showing McConnell as tough, and allowing the Executive to deal with a subject people feel pretty unanimous on - that children shouldn't be shot on our streets.
As ever with pretty politicking, there is the small matter of what it all means. While Westminster is content to increase the age requirement for buying airguns, from 17 to 18, the Executive wants a blanket registration of all airguns, with the reasons why the owners wants them. McConnell is in conflict with the police on this, but the source in the story said: 'We hope we can get them on board.'
The reason the police don't want to get involved is simple - it will cost a fortune and drain their resources for very little return. Sensibly, they want the price of airguns increased and sales restricted to licensed dealers.
When asked for her opinion, the Tory justice spokeswoman, Margaret Mitchell MSP, said only that her party concurs with the police. As Howard found out in Dumfries, this is a subject best avoided. Mitchell kept trying to talk about paedophiles instead.
Yet the Tories are right; the police measures are exactly what is needed. Labour and the SNP are goading each other into an expensive restriction that will have little positive effect and which will be very difficult to carry out. The UK government's ludicrously broad estimate that there are between two million and six million airguns in circulation shows just how little idea anyone really has about how many airguns are out there.
Worse still, taking them out of people's hands could lead to more injuries and death. The cry of America's NRA that 'guns don't kill people, people kill people' has always been wrongheaded. Guns do kill people, most commonly when they are in the hands of someone who doesn't know how to use them.
Yet airguns don't kill people, except in a rare circumstances such as the one involving Andrew Morton. It's a tragic story, but surely public policy should emerge from the assumption that most people don't want to shoot toddlers.
Especially when there many guns in circulation that really do kill people. According to the Executive's statistics, there were 63,115 rifles and 129,218 shotguns in Scottish hands last year, most in the possession of those whose first experience of shooting involved an airgun.
A quarter of the rifles were registered with the Northern Constabulary, yet a call to Raigmore hospital in Inverness shows that no one has been admitted to the hospital's A&E in the last year suffering from accidental gunshot wounds. No doubt there were tragedies, but given the number of weapons involved, it is astonishing how few accidents there are.
If the Executive restricts parents' ability to teach their children to shoot with airguns, people will start to get killed. We will be asking people to learn to shoot with weapons where death is just a stumble away. I know a pair of brothers from my childhood in the Highlands, one of whom accidentally shot the other in the head with an airgun. While it was worrying, both are fine. If they had been using a rifle - a rifle that either might be seen with now - then one of them would have certainly been dead.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/gun/Story/0,2763,1504728,00.html
Despite Braveheart, Tom Weir and our own fondness for moonshine, the frontier spirit has never burned with quite the same vigour in Scottish veins. As a leak from the Executive proved last week, Jack McConnell would like to see the little that remains diluted further. The anonymous briefing saw him getting tough on airguns.
This is due to the death of Andrew Morton, a toddler hit by an airgun pellet in March. After that horror, Michael Howard, the soon-to-be ex-Tory leader, found himself berated on the steps of the Scottish Conservative conference in Dumfries for suggesting that we shouldn't rush to legislate. Who knows what would have happened if he had set free a howl of defiance like Heston's?
On the other side, the SNP have seen an opportunity. During First Minister's Questions on Thursday, Nicola Sturgeon fired bulletpoints at McConnell with sniperish accuracy. She pointed out that after Morton's death, he had promised to do something about airguns, but now that the Home Office has revealed its Violent Crime Reduction Bill, he has failed to live up to his word. She said he was 'talking tough but acting soft'.
The briefing came later that day. The Executive was going to try to convince London to harden its legislation, but if that failed, it would embark on a 'reverse Sewel motion'. Famously, Sewel motions allow English legislation to be brought as a piece on to the Scottish statute book with one Holyrood vote. Going the other way would be a big step for McConnell, the first time he opted out of a piece of legislation reserved for Westminster.
The story was effective, destroying SNP claims that independence is necessary to deal with a case like this, showing McConnell as tough, and allowing the Executive to deal with a subject people feel pretty unanimous on - that children shouldn't be shot on our streets.
As ever with pretty politicking, there is the small matter of what it all means. While Westminster is content to increase the age requirement for buying airguns, from 17 to 18, the Executive wants a blanket registration of all airguns, with the reasons why the owners wants them. McConnell is in conflict with the police on this, but the source in the story said: 'We hope we can get them on board.'
The reason the police don't want to get involved is simple - it will cost a fortune and drain their resources for very little return. Sensibly, they want the price of airguns increased and sales restricted to licensed dealers.
When asked for her opinion, the Tory justice spokeswoman, Margaret Mitchell MSP, said only that her party concurs with the police. As Howard found out in Dumfries, this is a subject best avoided. Mitchell kept trying to talk about paedophiles instead.
Yet the Tories are right; the police measures are exactly what is needed. Labour and the SNP are goading each other into an expensive restriction that will have little positive effect and which will be very difficult to carry out. The UK government's ludicrously broad estimate that there are between two million and six million airguns in circulation shows just how little idea anyone really has about how many airguns are out there.
Worse still, taking them out of people's hands could lead to more injuries and death. The cry of America's NRA that 'guns don't kill people, people kill people' has always been wrongheaded. Guns do kill people, most commonly when they are in the hands of someone who doesn't know how to use them.
Yet airguns don't kill people, except in a rare circumstances such as the one involving Andrew Morton. It's a tragic story, but surely public policy should emerge from the assumption that most people don't want to shoot toddlers.
Especially when there many guns in circulation that really do kill people. According to the Executive's statistics, there were 63,115 rifles and 129,218 shotguns in Scottish hands last year, most in the possession of those whose first experience of shooting involved an airgun.
A quarter of the rifles were registered with the Northern Constabulary, yet a call to Raigmore hospital in Inverness shows that no one has been admitted to the hospital's A&E in the last year suffering from accidental gunshot wounds. No doubt there were tragedies, but given the number of weapons involved, it is astonishing how few accidents there are.
If the Executive restricts parents' ability to teach their children to shoot with airguns, people will start to get killed. We will be asking people to learn to shoot with weapons where death is just a stumble away. I know a pair of brothers from my childhood in the Highlands, one of whom accidentally shot the other in the head with an airgun. While it was worrying, both are fine. If they had been using a rifle - a rifle that either might be seen with now - then one of them would have certainly been dead.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/gun/Story/0,2763,1504728,00.html
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