Upon the passage of The Firearms Act (No. 2) in 1997, British Deputy Home Secretary Alun Michael boasted: âBritain now has some of the toughest gun laws in the world.âi The Act was second handgun control measure passed that year, imposed a near-complete ban on private ownership of handguns, capping nearly eighty years of increasing firearms restrictions. Driven by an intense public campaign in the wake of the shooting of schoolchildren in Dunblane, Scotland, Parliament had been so zealous to outlaw all privately-owned handguns that it rejected proposals to exempt Britain‟s Olympic target-shooting team and handicapped target-shooters from the ban. While the government might concede that âchanges to statutory lawâ could not âprevent criminals from gaining access to guns,â the government insisted such legislation would make it more difficult for potential offenders to get guns and would âshift the balance substantially in the interest of public safety.âii Britain now had what was touted as âthe gold standardâ of gun control.
I. RISING VIOLENT CRIME
The result of the ban has been costly. Thousands of weapons were confiscated at great financial cost to the public. Hundreds of thousands of police hours were devoted to the task. But in the six years since the 1997 handgun ban, crimes with the very weapons banned have more than doubled, and firearm crime has increased markedly .iii In 2002, for the fourth consecutive year, gun crime in England and Wales roseâby 35 percent for all firearms, and by a whopping 46 percent for the banned handguns. Nearly 10,000 firearms offences were committed.iv The shootings in a single week in the fall of 2003âof a Liverpool football player and two other men in a bar, of three men in a drive-by attack in Reading, of a 32-year-old builder leaving a health club in Hertfordshire, of a 64-year-old woman trying to protect her daughter during a Nottinghamshire burglaryâprovoked Oliver Letwin, shadow home secretary, to remark: âOne might have thought that this was Baghdad. In fact it‟s Blair‟s Britain.âv
At the annual conference in May, British police chiefs were warned that gun crime in the UK was growing âlike a cancer.âvi They already knew. For the first time in their history some police units are now routinely armed. American policemen have been hired to advise the British police. Clearly since the ban criminals have not found it difficult to get guns and the balance has not shifted in the interest of public safety.
Armed crime is only one part of an increasingly lawless English environment. According to Scotland Yard, in the four years from 1991 to 1995 crimes against the person in England‟s inner cities increased by 91 percent. In the four years from 1997 to 2001 the rate of violent crime more than doubled. The UK murder rate for 2002 was the highest for a century.
The startling crime rate increases are not the result of a low starting point. British crime rates are high compared to those of other developed nations. A recent study of all the countries of western Europe has found that in 2001 Britain had the worst record for killings, violence and burglary, and its citizens had one of the highest risks in the industrialized world of becoming victims of crime.vii Offences of violence in the UK were three times the level of the next worst country in western Europe, burglaries at nearly twice the next-worst level. The results are in line with the findings of a United Nations study of eighteen industrialized countries, including the United States, published in July 2002. The UN study found England and Wales at the
top of the Western world‟s crime league, with the worst record for âvery seriousâ offences and nearly 55 crimes per 100 people.viii The government insists things are improving but, as Letwin pointed out, âOne thing which no amount of statistical manipulation can disguise is that violent crime has doubled in the last six years and continues to rise alarmingly.âix
The comparison with the United States is especially interesting because people who support gun restrictions are fond of contrasting England‟s strict gun laws and low rate of violent crime with America‟s, where there are an estimated 200 million private firearms and where 37 states now have shall issue laws that allow law-abiding residents to carry a concealed weapon. But the old stereotype of England as the peaceable kingdom and America as the violent, cowboy republic no longer holds. By 1995, with the exception of murder and rape, England‟s rate for every type of violent crime had far surpassed America‟s.x The American murder rate has been substantially higher than the English rate for at least 200 years, during most of which neither country had stringent restrictions on firearms.xi But the English and American rates are now converging. While Americans have enjoyed over a decade of sharply declining homicide rates, rates described by the Boston Globe in 1999 as âin startling free-fall,â English rates have risen dramatically. In 1981 the US rate was 8.7 times the English rate; in 1995 it was 5.7 times the English rate, and in 2002 3.5 times the English
