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GCN ARCHIVE
Articles
'Behavioural
science' and firearms:
Zimring and Hawkins on
lethal violence in America
by
Ian Taylor, University of Durham, UK
Review essay on Franklin
E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins, Crime is Not the Problem: Lethal
Violence in America.
New York and Oxford:
Oxford University Press 1997.
xii + 232 pp.
The interest of the
British public in the firearms issue has been on the wane since 1997. If
asked, most British citizens would probably offer the observation that the
new Government's commitment to extend the ban on private ownership of
handguns, as legislated in the Firearms Amendment Act in February 1997, to
weapons of .22 calibre and above, puts an end to this issue, at least for
the time being. The firearms threat-so tragically highlighted at
Dunblane-has now been 'dealt with' and, it is widely assumed, the Home
Office and the police forces of Britain are working in partnership to
effect the process of surrender of handguns. Officials in the Home Office
given formal responsibility for these policy areas point to the overall
reduction in the numbers of offences involving firearms reported to the
police in England and Wales since 1993: the total number of such offences
known to the police has declined from 13,951 in 1993 to 12,304 in 1995.
This widespread mood of satisfaction and reassurance on firearms was
briefly challenged at the end of September-the deadline for the surrender
of handguns under the February legislation-as some sections of the press
momentarily reported on the coverage given to the apparent switch by many
firearms owners into carbines and other, easily portable and shorter
shotguns.1 But, like so many outbursts of anxious news items in
the daily press in the late 1990s, the newsworthiness of the item proved
short-lived, and did not survive long enough to produce any more extended
or 'featured' investigation into the ways in which handgun owners in
Britain were reorganizing their personal arsenals (or not) in the light of
the Firearms Amendment Act.
One
of the most powerful and continuing features of the anxieties which are
evoked in Britain over any well-publicized use of firearms in public
places is, of course, the anxiety that 'we are becoming like America'.
There is an extraordinarily widespread 'commonsense' in Britain-so
generally commonsensical, that is, as to be beyond examination-and it
works to define the idea itself of Britishness (or; more often, in the
dominant framework, 'Englishness') against the idea of America, in
large part around the question of firearms. An absolutely defining
assumption of this commonsense is the radical difference in rates of
firearm crime in the two societies: in 1995, for example, the rate
of 'homicide with firearms' in the United States was officially recorded
as 6.4 per 100,000 people as against only 0.14 in Britain (Department of
Justice, Canada, 1996). In the popular commonsense, these vast differences
in risk and threat in the two societies are generally understood in terms
of the specific history of the American settlement (not least, the legacy
of the rifle and the pistol deriving, no doubt, from the 'Wild West') but
also, in 'little England' of formulations, as an expression of the lack of
development of a civilized form of life in the United States. Deeply
embedded in these widespread forms of common-sense about Englishness are a
number of arguments (some of which would find support among students of
Norbert Elias and his analyses of the civilizing process) focusing on the
restriction of ownership of lethal weapons only to 'responsible' citizens
(the police and the army) or; of course, to gentlemen in duels-all this
effected during the period of the Restoration in l688-as a measure of the
progress of civilization itself.2
The
commonsense that defines firearms as being in some sense un-English has
clearly been far more important in recent debates over firearms control in
this country than any more measured recital of statistics and
trends-except insofar as these statistics confirm taken-for-granted
understandings. So we are all reassured, for example, to read the several
different research reports which suggest that Britain has one of the
lowest rates of private firearms ownership in the world, while the United
States has one of the highest.3 We have all also been prey in
England, however; throughout the post-war period, to that other defining
aspect of the conventional English commonsense about firearms in America,
that is, the assumption that the high rate of ownership and use of private
firearms in that country is a measure of a generally much higher
overall rate of crime. In this well established commonsense, America
is an 'Other' social and cultural formation against which the defining
qualities of 'Englishness' can be understood and valued. We in England may
have our problems-in running an efficient and modern, competitive economy,
for example-but we have avoided America's problems with crime.
Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins' new book was not written as an
examination of any of these questions, though it is one of the curious and
unintended consequences of the text-for an English reader-that it can be
read as a commentary on the quite marked success that 'America' has had in
recent years in combating most forms of non-violent crime, over and above
its quite unparalleled problems with firearms and their use in ‘crimes
against the person’. Crime is Not the Problem is a measured and
careful evaluation, in part, of commonsense that popular in the United
States-once again on the ascendant in that country-which conception the
firearm not only as a constitutional right but also, quite specifically,
as an important instrument in individual and collective avoidance of
crime, that is, the widely held American belief that the carrying of a
weapon acts as a deterrent to crime. So the book constitutes an important
intervention into that commonsense: the latest attempt from a small group
of social scientists in the United States (notably also including Arthur
Kellermann at Emory University in Atlanta and Philip Cook at Duke
University) who are prepared to examine the alternative proposition,
namely the extraordinary and lethal consequence that results from the
existence of a free market in firearms in civil society. Zimring and
Hawkins, however; are decidedly in the camp of the careful evaluators,
guided more by the facts which they choose to identify from officially
generated sets of data, than by any more personal philosophical
commitment. For Franklin Zimring, who has researched the issues of
firearms crime in the United States for the last 30 years, the motivation
in returning to this theme (with his friend and associate, Gordon Hawkins)
seems to have been to bring together as many conclusive, international
sources of data as possible in order to provide an authoritative summary
of a lifetime's endeavour. The outcome is an extensive collection and
assessment of a mass of research evidence - an extended and exhaustive
comparative study of the levels of 'lethal violence' (homicide) in the
United States, linked into an extended examination of the research data on
just about every relevant issue (the importance of the drugs trade, the
issue of race and violence, etc.) that ever gets raised in the
conventional public debate over firearms in the United States.
So
Zimring and Hawkins' text takes the form of a detailed comparative
investigation of a wide range of empirical and statistical material on
crime from the United States and other comparable 'criminal justice
jurisdictions' (for example, of the patterns of victimization by
burglaries and homicides in Los Angeles and Sydney, and New York and
London; a detailed comparison of reported offence rates in different
European member states and much more besides). Underpinning these various
detailed empirical discussions is one distinct theoretical and political
master argument, intended for American consumption, and a series of
connected subsidiary arguments. The master argument is that the problems
of fear and anxiety that are a given feature of everyday travels through
specific areas of particular cities in the United States should be
understood not in terms of the abstract and generalized idea of the 'fear
of crime' but rather in terms of the calculations in which residents of
such cities routinely have to engage over the chances of encountering some
kind of lethal violence. By contrast, Zimring and Hawkins provide a close
analysis in Chapter Three of patterns of non-violent property crime in the
United States which suggests that the rate of property crime in that
country (which has generally been in quite steady decline since the early
1980s) is now generally on a par with Canada, Spain, Italy, Australia and
New Zealand. (About 28 percent of all Americans surveyed during 1988-91 in
the International Victimization Survey reported being the victim during
the previous year of some kind of non-violent property crime, i.e. 72
percent did not [Van Dijk and Mayhew, 1992].) The master argument is, of
course, that what Americans speak of as their 'fear of crime' is actually
an expression of the widespread availability of firearms and the spread in
use of firearms as a weapon in crime: about 40 percent of all robberies
committed in New York City in the 1 990s are committed with firearms
(Zimring and Hawkins, 1997: 44). In 1992, there were 357 'robbery
homicides' in New York City, as against only five in London (p.39). There
were even 194 'lethal burglaries' in New York City in 1992, as against
only two incidents in London which could be so described (p.45). But
Zimring and Hawkins also show that the overall volume of robbery
and burglary, combined, in New York City in 1992 (at 194 reported
victimizations per 100,000 population) was actually lower than that
reported for London (215 per 100,000). That is to say that 'robbery and
burglary', aggregated together; were just as frequent in London as they
were in New York, but, when they did occur in London, they were
potentially and actually far less deadly. By implication, this picture is
true for the United States in general, in comparison not just with Britain
but with other western societies where firearms are not generally
available or in widespread use by private citizens.
Zimring and Hawkins' main thesis is supported by several other connected
arguments-all of vital and pressing importance for the American readership
to whom the text is directed. So, for example, the argument is forcefully
advanced that this widespread 'fear of lethal violence' is a major
contributory factor independently of overall rates of crime (which,
as we have said, have been falling in the United States continuously from
the early 1980s). That is to say that the explosion of the prison
population in the United States over the last two decades (an increase of
400 percent) has occurred in the Californian prison population
between 1979 and 1994 (p.11) should be understood as an attempt to contain
the play of violence in civil society by identifying any and all
individuals suspected of being capable of violent offences and
sequestrating them in different kinds of penal institution. In practice,
in such a generalized and nervous atmosphere of preventative social
defence and of 'exclusion' of potentially troublesome dangerous
individuals, the police, courts and the criminal justice system as a whole
will exponentially widen their use of surveillance, discipline and penal
institutionalization. (In the United States, of course, the most recent
expression of this intensified new regime of surveillance and exclusion is
the 'Three Strikes and You're Out' legislation, first introduced in
California in 1994 and now in effect in over 16 states).4
Zimring and Hawkins make good use of their access to Californian prison
data in order to show how the nervy and explosive expansion in the prison
population in that state has netted-not only 'the violent offender' but
also a much larger number of non-violent offenders (who might previously
not have ended up in penitentiaries). In 1991 only 35 percent of the
429,618 prisoners in Californian penitentiaries (four times larger a
sample than in 1979) had been convicted of any kind of violent offence.
The close empirical analysis that Zimring and Hawkins provide cries out
for some theoretical reflection, as also do the larger questions of the
trends in firearms use in different developed societies. Zimring and
Hawkins are no social theorists, however; and they determinedly limit
themselves to working within the paradigms of American behavioural
science. We will return to these issues later in this review.
The
other two subsidiary arguments in Crime is Not the Problem have to
do with the 'African-American' question in the United States and the issue
of the relation between firearms and the illicit drug markets. Both of
these areas of debate and enquiry have important parallels with recent
public debate around firearms, drugs and crime in Britain in the 1990s-one
has only to mention the signifying terms 'the Yardie' and 'Moss Side' in
order to make the point. On both issues, Zimring and Hawkins want us to
stick closely to 'the facts'. In the first area, Zimring and Hawkins rely
rather heavily on official American police statistics on homicide which
highlight 'the fact' that some 55 percent of all people arrested for
homicide (in 1992) were black. (This statistic has been at the centre of a
fractious debate in public policy journals and editorials in the American
press in recent months, as spokespeople for the radical right
intellectuals (like John Deiulio of Princeton University, 1994) have
attempted to develop new bioanthropological theories of the problem of
the inner city and the underclass). To their credit, Zimring and Hawkins
try to locate their discussion of African-American involvement in lethal
violence in the analysis of the manifold structures of disadvantage that
define the black experience in American cities, and which on many
dimensions appear once again to be accelerating. What they do not do is
introduce much of the data that is available on the extent to which
African-Americans are also the victims of firearms availability and
lethal violence in the United States (and to a quite extraordinary
extent). Over 50 percent of all victims of non-fatal gunshot wounds
reported to the Center for Disease Control by hospital emergency
departments in the US in 1992 were black males (Zawitz, 1996). Other
research had suggested that homicide is now the leading cause of death
among black American men, and that the life-time risk of being murdered is
now six times higher for young black men than it is for young white
Americans (Fingerhut and Kleinman, 1989). Some commentators speak of this
as a new, very contemporary form of genocidal process, resulting from the
long-established impact of institutionalized racism, on the one hand,
coupled with the vastly unequal and socially patterned impact of 'the war
on welfare' that has been in progress in the United States under the last
three administrations, on the other (Raup, 1996). What can surely never be
ignored is the question of how the gun is somehow integral culturally
to the continuing struggles waged by young black men in America to
attain some kind of respect (indeed, of 'rep') in a society in which such
respect is hard to find, outside of certain sports (Bourgois, 1995).
Nor either; surely, can we ignore the extent to which the use of guns
(for example, in neighbour-hoods of high and long-term unemployment which
have been colonized by hidden economies of crime) is, indeed, an
instrument specifically for the defence of market position-a clear
expression of a vigorous competitiveness thought entirely legitimate and
necessary at other levels of the same social formation. The purchase,
ownership and the use of the gun is a matter of cultural and social
process, rather than simply a matter of either malevolent individuals
('bad guys') or naive, constitutionalist-libertarian law making.
The
role of the gun in enforcement of contracts is often thought, by those
police officers and researchers in the United States who have come close
to these hidden economies of crime, to be linked with the growth of the
drug trade, and, in particular; the growth of extraordinary lucrative
markets in cocaine in the 1980s. Zimring and Hawkins' own analysis of the
existing data on patterns of firearms homicide in the United States, on
the one hand, and the data we have on the evolution of the drug trade
itself on the other; presents a rather more complicated picture, and a
picture on which Zimring and Hawkins, ever faithful to the available data
with which they are familiar or on which they are prepared to rely, are
reluctant to generalize. In the aftermath of many years of argument about
the constitutional right of all Americans 'to bear arms', there is no
national system of firearms registration,5 but Zimring and
Hawkins are able to identify a specific pattern to the evolution of
firearms homicide. The long-term data suggest three distinct 'areas of
American homicide'-'a long, downward drift to the century's lowest
sustained homicide rate in the 1950s and early 1960s, a sharp and
sustained increase during the period 1964 to 1974 and variations around
the new high levels ever since' (p.58). Zimring and Hawkins are
reluctant to theorize around these trends, but they clearly believe that
these trend figures would tend to contradict the widely held belief that
the incidence of lethal firearms use in America results from the explosion
of the drugs trade in the 1980s, when the high levels of firearms use was
already quite well established. In their chapter on the relationship
between the drug trade and gun use, Zimring and Hawkins point to a number
of empirical studies which have produced widely different conclusions
(that is, as to whether it is possible to identify a 'causal' or
'etiological' link between the growth of the illicit drug trade and
patterns of lethal firearms violence) and they have to conclude that
future research on this question in the behavioural science tradition
(i.e. looking for causal links between different variables) will have to
decide on a consistent and specific set of theoretical enquiries, over and
above the commonsense positions. They cite some evidence, for example,
that suggests that the development of the illicit drug markets in
Washington, DC in the mid-1980s could be connected with a reduction
in that city in the total number of robbery homicides, consequent on the
development for some local miscreants of a viable alternative career to
street assault and robbery. In the end, Zimring and Hawkins are altogether
agnostic on the relationship between gun violence and the drugs trade, and
therefore also agnostic of the question of legalization of drugs.
The
agnosticism which Zimring and Hawkins embrace in these critical
discussions of data and evidence is a frustration, and is associated with
a curious form of 19th century sociological positivism in which only a
natural science model 'proof' can be seen as a form of argument. (This is
also expressed in a quite extraordinarily eccentric chapter in which the
authors try to weigh up the measurable impact of different initiatives
that could be taken by the Government in order to help reduce the
unnatural premature loss of life of ordinary American citizens-as if it
were as a result of such rational calculations that governments work out
their policy priorities-and therefore advance an argument for giving a
governmental priority to improvements in traffic security.) The authors'
strict behaviouralist epistemology means that what they are unable to
allow in is the sweep of their own imagination and/or their making a
commitment to the education and activation of public opinion, informed by
the overwhelming evidence which this book itself provides. That evidence
overwhelmingly suggests that the taken-for-granted right to bear arms
itself-the Second Amendment of the American Constitution-is an originating
source of the unparalleled levels of lethal violence on which this text
reports, and which determines to treat the banning of such weapons as a
natural experiment in community safety. In reaching for some kind of
conclusion, they observe with resignation that 'the problem with handgun
controls is that they depend on radical changes in citizen behaviour' (p.
201)-an observation that could surely be made about any kind of
far-reaching social reform or; indeed, any kind of peace-making exercise
in a war zone. It is a 'hard choice' from which Zimring and Hawkins, as
strict behaviouralist social scientists, want to excuse themselves. It is
also, we would ourselves want to argue, an unwarrantably cautious
alternative to the swashbuckling research and reportage routinely produced
and disseminated by the libertarian right in America, by the National
Rifle Association and by the 'Second Amendment' apologists who want to
extend firearms ownership among free-thinking Americans, as well as, of
course, by the firearms manufacturers themselves who can clearly see the
potential growth in a market for firearms in a nervous and increasingly
'fortressed' urban America.
Notes
1. This
process of weapon substitution by firearms owners in England and Wales had
already been apparent by the summer of 1996 to many firearms registration
officers working in English and Welsh police forces in England and Wales.
In the event, the overall number of shotguns recorded on firearms
certificates in 1996 increased by 1 percent over 1995 (to a total of
1,335,000) (Barber et al., 1997).
2. The long
practised restriction of firearms ownership to the aristocracy, the army
and to small numbers of sports shooters under specifically regulated
conditions-an effect of the lessons of the Civil War-has been subject only
to short-term challenge in England (most notably, in the years after the
First World War; by soldiers who had brought their weapons home from the
front). So in a civil society which has lived without the presence of
firearms in private ownership, American debates about the constitutional
'right to bear arms' (the Second Amendment of the US Constitution) have
very little purchase. Spokespeople for the National Rifle Association and
similar organizations in Britain generally do not attempt to articulate
any such argument, though they do on occasion attempt to advance a variant
of another discursive strategy-first developed by American firearms
manufacturers in the late 1980s-which locates the carrying of a concealed
firearm (like a rape alarm) for self-defence as a kind of modern-day
feminist realism.
3. According
to an investigation carried our by The Observer newspaper in 1996,
for example; some 48 percent of all households in the United States
contained guns, as against only 4.7 percent in England and Wales (The
Observer 18 August 1996). These figures were generally consistent with
official national statistics on firearms ownership by 100,000 population
collected by the Canadian Department of Justice, though these figures have
been correctly criticized by the British gun lobby as unreliable as the
framework for any strictly 'scientific' comparative analysis.
4. For one
assessment of the initial effects of the Three Strikes and You're Out
regimes in the United Stares, see Schihor and Sechrest (1996).
5. Only
Australia and Canada are currently involved in the establishment of any
such national system of firearms registration. In England and Wales, the
registration of firearms takes place under the aegis of 47 different
police forces, with no national database.
References
Barber;
Ann, Graham Wilkins and Tim Leech (1997) 'Firearms Certificate Statistics
1996', Home Office Statistical Bulletin 17/97.
Bourgois, Philippe (1995)
In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Baveio. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Deiulio, John (1994) 'The Question of Black Crime', The Public Interest
Fall: 3.
Department of Justice, Canada (1996) A Review of Firearms Statistics
and Regulations in Selected Countries. Ottawa: Department of Justice
(Firearms Control Task Force), March, Table 1.1.
Fingerhut, L.A. and J.C. Kleinman (1989) Firearms Mortality Among
Children and Youth. Advanced Centre for Health and Vital Statistics,
National Centre for Health Statistics No.178.
Raup, Ethan (1996) 'Politics, Race and US Penal Strategies', Soundings
2 (Spring): 153-68.
Schihor; David and Dale K. Sechrest (eds) (1996) Three Strikes and
You're Out: Vengeance as Public Policy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Van Dijk, Jan and Mayhew, Pat (1992) Criminal Victimisation in the
Industrial World. The Hague: Ministry of Justice.
Zawitz, Marianne W. (1996) Firearm Injury From Crime. Washington,
DC: US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Selected
Findings, April.
*****
Salford Papers in
Sociology: Firearms Crime - at the time of the Cullen Inquiry
by Ian Taylor
Revised version of a paper presented to
the Scottish Association for the Study of Delinquency
I am very conscious of this
paper being presented as a key point in the process of social response (or
what sociologists call “societal reaction”) to an absolutely tragic event
in the lives of sixteen families in Dunblane last March 13th. I
want to add my own tribute to the courage of those families and the
determination of the spontaneously-generated pressure group, the Snowdrop
petitioners, based in Dunblane, and their sister organisation, the Gun
Control Network, to produce some concrete legislative response from
Government to Dunblane and to the continuing dangers associated with the
increased prevalence of handguns and other lethal weapons in private hands
in Britain. Over the last six months we have witnessed a quite remarkable
story in terms of the history of pressure-group politics, or what
sometimes is called the politics of "moral enterprise" (Becker 1963;
Gusfield 1963). Over this short period, a Government which, remains
sentimentally and ideologically opposed in general terms to the idea of
market-regulation per se, has been forced to present itself,
perhaps rather uneasily, as an activist government, determinedly
intervening in the market in firearms, and doing so with the declared
purpose of protecting a widely-voiced conception of the public interest
(in this instance, the interest that the British people overwhelmingly
declared in the summer of 1996 of living in a gun-free society)1.
In this paper, I have three
connected purposes. Firstly, I want to provide some overview of our
present state of knowledge about the relative prevalence and the
developing trajectories of firearms crime in Britain in the years leading
up to Dunblane. I want then to discuss, very briefly, the various social,
cultural and economic developments which, I will argue, underpin current
anxieties (or even "panic") over the safety and security of everyday
social life in Britain, and the dangers of violent assault or even lethal
violence (for example, with a gun or, in even more recent public debates,
a combat knife). I will not in this paper be entering into the
fast-developing concern over knives, although I am aware that the knife
has been described, in the light of last year's homicide statistics, as
the most "favoured murder weapon", at least in England and Wales2.
Nor will I be dealing here with the larger national panic over "morality"
as a response to fears about the lack of civility and personal safety in
Britain in the 1990s, except only in my abbreviated reference later to the
"crisis of masculinity". This paper is about the issue of the firearm
specifically, and the anxieties which the prevalence and the lethal use
of the firearm has produced.
In the third and final section
of this paper I will offer some provisional assessment of the possible
consequences of the legislation being proposed by the present Government
on the banning of handguns. I will make some comments on the claims of the
so-called “gun lobby” as to the futility of the proposed legislation,
raising some research and other issues about the legal firearms-owners'
response to the legislation. But I will also offer a few speculative
remarks on the situations that may be develop in the so-called “hidden
economy” of professional crime, notably in some of our more stressed urban
areas, especially where no alternative forms of employment appear to be
emerging for “hard” manual working-class men. It is apparent that the
debate about firearms and their availability cannot be confined to the
debate about the claims made by amateur and sporting gun-users to their
rights to shoot.
1. A Gun Free Society
One of the unspoken truths about
Britain or at least about civil life in Britain (which the ongoing debates
of the summer have once again brought to public consciousness) is the
fact that everyday life in this society has been largely free,
historically, from the use of firearms. A closely-connected
taken-for-granted assumption, of course, lies in the fact of an unarmed
police force, and, with that, perhaps, the more deeply engrained
understanding that this is a society which - unlike the United States in
particular - has no standing militia (the National Guard) and in which the
use of State or military violence to resolve social or civic conflict
(notwithstanding the mobilisation of the army during the General Strike)
has a relatively restricted history. The general absence of firearms
amongst the general population in Britain, by comparison with the
widespread ownership of firearms by American households, is reflected in
the relative prevalence of firearms homicides in the two societies, which,
in nearly all studies, is calculated at 150 times higher in the U.S. than
in the U.K. (by comparison with a 3:1 ratio for non-firearm homicides)
(Home Office/Scottish Office 1996).
Data on firearms-ownership in
eight selected countries collected by the Canadian Department of Justice's
Firearms Control Task Group in 1995 further underlines the "conditions of
existence" of this "commonsense" relationship between levels of firearms
ownership, homicide and other lethal outcomes.
Table 1: Firearms ownership:
Selected Countries3
Country Firearms ownership per 100,000 Population
United
States 85,385
Switzerland 42,857
New
Zealand 29,412
Canada 24,138
France 22.6 per cent of
households
Australia 19,444
Britain 3,307
Japan 414
Source:
"A Review of Firearm Statistics and Regulations in Selected Countries".
Firearms Control Task Group, Department of Justice Canada (March 1995):
Table 1.1.
(A
qualifying footnote provided by the Firearms Control Task Group indicates
that “most recent statistics have been provided where available, averages
over several years have been used in some cases, data and sources vary”).
These data were reproduced in the evidence presented by the Home Office
and the Scottish Office to the Cullen Enquiry (Home Office/Scottish Office
1996. Table A.l).
Now it is true that the figures
produced by the Canadian Department of Justice (like the figures produced
by other proponents of gun control) have been subject to vitriolic
criticism by individual spokespeople for the firearms lobby in Britain –
most notably, by Mr Jan A. Stevenson in a volume of personal evidence
presented to the Cullen Enquiry (Stevenson 1996) on the grounds of their
faulty “scholarship” the unreliability of the figures on gun ownership,
and the failure of the Canadian researchers to prove some kind of
causal relationship between levels of firearms ownership and the numbers
of firearms crimes in these particular societies. A curious characteristic
of gun owners and users who have entered the policy debate on firearms
control is the very narrow, nineteenth-century version of social
scientific positivism which they embrace, built around the manipulation of
allegedly value-free statistical facts into specifically causal chains. It
is precisely this version of natural science argumentation, of course,
that has been used by the tobacco industry in its ongoing struggles
against the regulation of advertising and sale of tobacco, denying that
health researchers have demonstrated causal order in the close
relationship they find between tobacco smoking and cancer. From the
perspective of a more disinterested observer as well as from the
perspective of the citizen prioritising issues of personal and community
safety, however, the onus of proof surely lies on the opponents of gun
control to deny the importance of statistics on the high level of
prevalence not only of firearms crime, especially homicides, but also of
suicides and accidents in the home involving firearms in societies with
high levels of ownership of firearms by private individuals.
Table 2: "Homicide with
Firearm" Rate, Selected Countries
Country Position in Firearms Homicide with
Ownership League Firearms Rate
Table (Canadian Dept per 100,000
of Justice review) Population
United
States 1 6.4
France* 5
2.32
Switzerland* 2 1.4
Canada 4 0.67
New
Zealand 3 0.49
Australia 6 0.36
Britain 7 0.14
Japan 8 0.06
*
Includes attempted and completed murder
Source: "A Review of Firearm Statistics and Regulations in Selected
Countries" Firearms Control Task Group Department of Justice Canada (March
l995): Table 1.1.
(A qualifying footnote provided by the Firearms Control Task Group
indicates that "most recent statistics have been provided where available,
averages over several years have been used in some cases, data and sources
vary”).
Suicides with firearms per
100,000 people were calculated by the Canadian Task Force Group, with what
obviously was a very broad brush, at 7.1 in the United States. 5.8 in
Switzerland, 4.9 in France, 3.6 in Canada, 3.5 in Australia and New
Zealand. but at only 0.4 in Britain and 0.14 in Japan. Accidents with
firearms (often involving children) were calculated at the astronomical
rate of 1,441 per 100,000 in the United States, 84 in Switzerland, 63 in
Canada, but only 8 in Britain. For all that the data presented by the
Canadian Task Force have a problematic status (and were never intended as
strictly controlled comparative data, but rather to provide a general
"steer" for use in the process of policy-formation) they do provide
indicative support for the argument, so powerfully voiced by those
American firearms researchers most maligned by the National Rifle
Association, that the very presence of firearms in private
households makes it likely that they will be used, in moments of private
or domestic anger, personal despair or, indeed, in accidents. The research
conducted over recent years by Arthur Kellermann, currently professor of
public health and head of the Centre for Injury Control at Emory
University in Atlanta, Georgia - much despised by the American NRA and by
Mr Jan Stevenson - suggests that "homes where guns are kept are more than
three times more likely to be the scene of a homicide than homes without
guns, even after the independent effects of victim age, sex, age, race,
neighbourhood, previous family violence, anyone using illicit drugs and
any history of previous arrest (have been) taken into consideration" (Kellermann,
1994: 6l5).4
This is not the place to enter
into extended debate with the firearms owners and their spokespeople on
issues of social scientific reasoning or problems of moral philosophy,
though it is noticeable how some of the spokespeople for organisations
like the Sports Shooting Association have felt no qualms in lecturing
others on these topics5 making highly selective reference to
some American studies but not others. This author does not start from the
philosophical position that "the gun" is some kind of culturally-neutral
object: historically, the gun has played an enormously important role as
an instrument of enforcement and power, not only in the world of organised
crime and villainy but also in the subjugation of subordinate populations
(notably, in North America, the aboriginal peoples themselves) by their
owners and users (the colonists). It has been noticeable over the last few
months how even some of the most respectable of gun clubs persist, by
habit or by preference, in the use of human images as targets. The gun is
an instrument of lethal violence which was momentarily (and only
relatively recently) domesticated by a small group of practitioners,
primarily of military backgrounds, as an Olympic sport. In the United
States, a society founded from the earliest days of pioneer settlement on
the use of human violence, especially in the South and mid-West. and
individual firearms ownership has been a taken-for-granted matter (a part
of pioneer American identity, later to he re-designated, in a most curious
re-writing of history, as a right of all American citizens under the
Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution - 'the right to bear arms"
(Wills 1995). This re-writing of the history of the pioneer settlement
(valorising the gun as an instrument of "protection" against a marauding
Other - the Indian6) suppressed the history of firearms during
the later nineteenth century, and specially during Prohibition (cf.
Kennett and Anderson 1975), but is an enormously powerful and
multi-faceted American cultural myth nonetheless, carrying a range of
messages about masculinity, individualistic self-reliance and the
importance of enterprise "on the American frontier" John Wayne, Clint
Eastwood etc) (Wright 1975). It is not at all clear what relevance this
history has for citizens of the older societies of Europe, or for Britain
in particular. As nearly all social historians agree, the last occasion on
which citizens of Britain in general had any general access to, or
experience with, firearms was during the English Civil War. The role
played initially by the landed aristocracy in this disarming of the larger
populace is a fascinating story in English social history (cf Kennett and
Anderson, 1975 c.1). It is not my concern to rehearse that story here:
what is plain is that for three hundred years the culture of everyday life
in Britain, even at moments of extreme social tension, has tended not to
involve the resort to the gun.
In Britain, direct reference in
political or criminological discussion to American experience with guns
used in crime - as if such an experience might be relevant to domestic
circumstances in this country - is very much a recent development. There
have been several different moments in post-war British history when fears
of American-style crime arriving in Britain have been actively expressed.
George Orwell, famously, worried about "the decline of the English murder"
as a result of the press coverage given to some Chicago gangster-style
killings committed by Americans based in Britain during the last years of
the war (Orwell, 1965). There was widespread anxiety during the 1950s over
the impact of American crime and horror comics on the minds of the British
adolescent (Barker, 1984). Social and cultural commentators worried about
the arrival of American style "muggings" in Britain in 1973-4 (Hall et al
1978), and, in the same period - as some recent exemplary archival
research by journalists has reminded us7 - there was evidence
of anxiety over the prevalence of rifles in armed robberies signified in a
double murder of two serving police officers in Shepherd's Bush in London.
What distinguishes the anxiety over the use of firearms in crime in
Britain in the mid-1990s, I would argue, firstly, is the way in which the
use of lethal violence resonates so powerfully the sense of finality or
hopelessness that pervades popular culture (an issue to which I shall
return) and secondly, a set of official statistics on increases in
use of firearms in crime which point to some kind or sea-change taking
place in the routine character of crime, in England, Scotland and Wales.
Table 3 Reported offences
involving firearms, England and Wales 1984-1994
Year Homicides
Attempted Other Robbery Burglary Criminal Other All
Offences
murder & Violence Damage
other acts
endangering
life
1984 67
322 2,330 2,098 93 3,417 49
8,376
1985 45
353 2,652 2,531 125 3,977 59 9,742
1986 51
361 2,015 2,629 96 4,140 89
9,363
1987 77
508 1,944 2,831 109 3,453 69
9,002
1988 36
531 1,816 2,688 107 3,235 80 8,524
1989 45
581 1,914 3,390 133 3,321 111 9,502
1990 60
663 1,855 3,939 154 3,544 118 10,373
1991 55
861 1,795 5,996 176 3,777 169 12,129
1992 56
866 1,893 5,827 182 4,318 163 13,305
1993 74
1,047 1,738 5,918 235 4,682 257 13,951
1994 66
1,044 1,777 4,104 255 5,445 286
12,977
Source: Criminal Statistics (England and Wales) 1994 Cm. 3010 (Table
3.1)
These figures suggest that
there was a 310 per cent increase in the numbers of attempted murders in
England and Wales between 1984 and 1994, a 96 per cent increase in armed
robberies, a 174 per cent increase in robberies with a weapon, and,
overall, an increase of 55 per cent in all offences involving firearms.
Figures released by the Scottish Office in the course of this last summer
suggest a similar, if more pronounced, set of developments:
Table 4 Criminal Offences
involving Firearms, Scotland 1990-1994
1990
435
1991
729
1992
800
1993
738
1994
772
Source: "Crimes and Offences Involving Firearms"
Scottish Office 1996
This set of figures highlights a
77.5 per cent increase in the number of incidents of use of firearms in
crime reported to the Scottish police in just four years. To American
observers, of course, the statistics on homicide and on crimes of violence
involving firearms in Britain are minimal, and, indeed, from the
perspective of many American law enforcement specialists the rates of
firearms crime reported in Britain are "utopian". This is another way, of
course, of saying that the containment of lethal violence within British
society (through whatever combination of culture and regulation) is a
significant achievement. It is also a way of understanding the depth of
current anxieties in Britain about a perceived trend towards the use of
guns in crime - however minimal this trend may appear to other societies
attuned to much higher levels of firearms crime - and the perceived growth
of a "gun culture" in certain parts of certain cities. My general
argument here is that the social response to the Dunblane tragedy must be
understood in relation not just to the fear of solitary psychopaths or
issues of school security (with which large sections of the Cullen Report
are pre-occupied), but in relation to a broader anxiety about issues of
safety and order in everyday life in Britain. Putting the point directly,
the firearms debate has as much to do with local rumours circulating
around our cities (not least in local community newspapers and similar
media) over the use of handguns or sawn-off shotguns in raids by local
villains in raids on the neighbourhood post office as it does with
so-called "spree killers"8 like Thomas Hamilton.
2. Clear and Present Dangers:
popular anxieties over firearms crime
In this paper, I can only point
briefly to five different dimensions of the anxiety which has been
expressed over the use of firearms in crime in Britain in recent years.
First and foremost, of
course, have been the dramatic and unprecedented incidents at Hungerford
in 1987 and Dunblane earlier this year, followed up on our television
screens with reports of other horrendous examples of "spree killing" (in
Vernon, British Columbia and in Tasmania, both in April 1996). The power
of these incidents to act as signifiers (perhaps of events expected only
in the United States) is unmistakable, especially when associated in the
short public memory with other individual incidents, like that in
Monkseaton, Whitley Bay in 1995.
The outbreak of these
incidents, however, is also reinforced, I would argue, by other evidence
received in the public mind as to the growth of firearms availability
and use. The evidence which feeds into the public mind may include the
reports they read in the national newspaper press, with their regular
recital of police-recorded statistics on armed robberies (there was, for
example. quite heavy' coverage in much of the national press of the steep
increases reported in such offences in the early 1990s). It will almost
certainly also draw on the reports of crime incidents in local community
newspapers, which frequently report on the dramatic use of firearms in
local robberies. Police spokespersons insist both in public and in
private communications that there has been a dramatic increase in the
1990’s in the numbers of firearms discovered in the course of their
routine searches of private premises. It may also be confirmed by the
increased visibility of glossy firearms and survivalist magazines on
display in local newsagents stores and railway station bookstalls.9
Obtaining 'evidence' to support or to qualify these popular perceptions
presents considerable difficulties: the existing registration system of
firearms owners does not provide detailed record of the number of firearms
held. There is no British study of the number of illegal firearms in
circulation, and no such study in the earlier post-war period.
Closely associated with this
public perception of there being "more guns around" is the much reported
anxiety of the growth of a “gun culture”, especially amongst
certain sections of British youth. In part, there is a troubled
recognition amongst citizens of the current pre-occupations of popular
commercial culture and its collapse - for example, in the films of Quentin
Tarantino and, more recently, Oliver Stone - into dystopian and nihilist
themes. On another dimension, there is a heavily racialised dimension to
this anxiety, with commentators making a connection between the growing
popularity of Gangsta Rap music in the late 1980s and early 1990s and the
frequently voiced complaint that for some young people, especially young
black men, guns were becoming "a fashion accessory". Closely implicated in
this discursive refrain were images of the Jamaican Yardie gangs, active
in the drug trade and active also in their romance with the gun. Though
this reference to the growth of a gun culture was heavily racialised in
the early 1990s, there is some evidence that the police and mass media
discussion of a "gun culture" was inherently unstable, and that the
anxiety could be displaced onto other populations - especially, perhaps,
the professional criminal fraternity active in certain areas of long-term
unemployment.
It is in this field that the
fourth set of anxieties about firearms crime in Britain begin to surface,
although my argument would be that they are rarely articulated in a
clear-cut and direct fashion in mainstream political and mass media
discussion. I also would recognise that these anxieties have much more
provenance in some regions of the United Kingdom (Liverpool, Manchester,
the East End of London) than in others. The anxiety here is that the
increased use of guns, especially in inner city crime - but also the use
of combat knives for example, in the murder of headmaster Philip Lawrence
are expressions inter alia of what many social commentators
identify as a rather desperate "crisis of masculinity", most
marked in conditions of continuing and long-term poverty born of the
crisis of mass manufacturing industry ("Fordism") in the 1980s. A form of
what Bob Connell (1996) has called "protest masculinity" is in evidence in
these areas, in which young and middle aged men, -deprived of their
cultural destiny as hard working skilled or semi-skilled manual workers,
deploy their muscularity and forceful culture in the illicit but highly
competitive and risk-laden local markets of crime. And they do so -
defending the markets they have conquered, and the territories over which
they organise supplies - with the gun.
The fifth anxiety is no more
demonstrable a feature of popular anxiety over guns than the fourth, but I
would argue that at some level of popular consciousness the issue of
firearms and their potential use in crime connects up to widely-felt
anxieties about the wholesale "marketisation of social relations”.
Reports of increased weapons finds by national customs authorities fuel
speculation as to the number of such trans-shipments of weapons which are
not being discovered by the authorities, especially in the context of
weakening of border-controls across the European Community.10
The anxiety over firearms arises in part out of the fear that access to
firearms is becoming easier as a direct result of the increasing
liberalisation of markets. It seems clear that access to handguns has
become easier, especially at the level of local crime communities: the
increase in the use of handguns in crimes known 10 the police (England and
Wales between 1984 and 1994 was in the order of 142 per cent, compared to
only 13 per cent for the generally more expensive shotguns, and some 7 per
cent for all other types of weapon (Criminal Statistics, England and
Wales 1994 Table 3.3). There may even be some recognition that the
increased liberalisation and globalisation of market activity in itself is
making easier the entry of cheaper American and Eastern European handguns
in particular, but also the even more lethal machine guns and heavy
weapons that are widely available near to the war-zones of central Europe.
Again, it is not necessarily the case that weapons like these are now
widely available in the UK: it is rather that there are fears (with
different degrees of supporting evidence) that they could become so.
Some of these fears will appear
entirely speculative. But the question is whether we should approach the
widespread anxiety over firearms (and related violence) by recognising the
momentous changes that are currently taking place along these different
social and cultural dimensions (post-Fordist long-term unemployment and
the associated growth of craft criminality, the crises of masculinity, the
dystopian themes in mass culture and the anxieties produced by the
marketisation of social life) or whether we should proceed, as
spokespeople for the sports shooters and firearms industry would have us
do, as though all was well and stable with the broader culture and
particularly with men, except only for the unpredictable emergence of a
few individual psychopaths. My own judgement is that the defence of
Britain’s relatively gun-free social history requires a more serious
response.
3. Firearms Crime: the immediate future
I should start this concluding
discussion with the observation that too much of what will follow (and too
much of the debate over firearms in Britain) has a speculative, rather
than very carefully grounded, character. Lord Cullen was not the first to
express his surprise at the undeveloped and uncoordinated system of
record-keeping which is supposed to inform firearms regulation and control
in Britain. More recently, a series of similar complaints have been made
at major national conferences of police.11 It is clear that
any intervention in this debate which treats existing police data for
example, on levels of firearms ownership (numbers of legally owned
firearms in private hands etc) - uncritically must be open to suspicion.
Mr Jan Stevenson is surely right, in the evidence he presented to the
Cullen Enquiry, to insist that there are far more guns in private hands
than existing police records suggest. His purpose was to direct attention
to the volume of guns illegally in circulation in order to support his
argument that proposals directed at the legal market would be
substantively irrelevant to the more serious problem. All different
protagonists in the difficult argument about firearms in Britain can agree
on the pressing need for a system of record-keeping on firearms ownership
in this country on a par with the systems (like Project Search12)
which have been developed for tracing guns used in crime in America by the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (Vince, 1996), but extended to
all firearms in private ownership in the United Kingdom. They can
presumably all also support calls for much more sophisticated extended
research into firearms ownership and firearms crime in Britain, in
order to ensure that the ongoing debate is no longer articulated around
American realities (like the "concealed weapon" law in states like
Florida, Mississippi and Oregon. which surely has no direct or immediate
relevance to the sets of social and cultural conditions obtaining in
Britain, even in our most stressed urban areas and neighbourhoods).13
But Mr Stevenson moves a little
quickly in wanting to focus only on the strictly illegal trade. The Sports
Shooting Association have argued, with the support of the Firearms
Consultative Committee - ostensibly a House of Commons committee, but in
reality a forum for the firearms industry and the sports shooters, and
unrepresentative of all public interests in this field (for example,
relatives of the victims of firearms crime) - that there is a clear and
demonstrable difference between their own respectable memberships on the
one hand, and dangerous and psychopathic individuals on the other. This
is a powerful discursive device in public debate, but this manichaean
dichotomy finds little favour amongst psychoanalysts or, indeed, amongst
serious students of contemporary masculinity.14 Great emphasis
is placed on the existing system of registration and licensing as a major
"fail-safe" in British firearms law. But Hungerford and Dunblane were
"spree murders" committed by firearms-owners who had been passed fit to
own a gun under the present system of licensing. This system of licensing
really carries no severe penalties for individuals "who forget" to update
their licenses, and there is no maximum limit on the number of firearms
that can be possessed by a legal licensee (a "ticket-holder"). A really
critical issue in present circumstances are the numbers of
firearms-owners who are holding firearms "off-ticket" in the belief that,
as fully-accredited licence-owners, they would never challenged. There is
no knowing how extensive a practice this is amongst firearms-owners,
"respectable" or otherwise: alarming reports have appeared in the press,
especially since Dunblane.15 There is much discussion amongst
police officers involved in the various Armed Crime Units (created in the
early 1990s in response to the upturn in armed robberies) about the
intense trading taking place at this time (before the final passage of the
new legislation) amongst legitimate owners of firearms. Many of these
firearms-owners, no doubt, are trying to ensure that they are only in
possession of legal firearms in order to maximise the compensation they
will eventually receive from the Government. Others, however, may be
positioning themselves to try and retain a personal collection of legal
firearms (including the .22 pistol). Still others may be selling off their
collections into the "black market" on a permanent basis, or loaning them
out. In the absence of any serious research into the practices of legal
firearms-owners it is very difficult to tell. Nor it must be emphasised.
is there any research, or, for that matter, any regular, serious and
professional investigation into security arrangements at Britain's 2,118
licensed gun clubs.16 Arguments raised during the national
debate of 1996 to the effect that the retention of guns in licensed clubs
might be more secure (for example, from theft) than in private homes have
clearly not been persuasive amongst sports-shooters themselves. In its
response to the Cullen Enquiry, the Government intimated that a system of
inspection would be put in place to oversee security arrangements at gun
clubs and that clubs which failed these inspections would no doubt have to
close. This commitment to strict regulation, by a Government not known
for any such practices, should certainly be the subject of careful
research and evaluation.
On the question of how many
legitimately owned firearms are stolen for use by others in crime, the
evidence presented to Cullen Enquiry suggested that:
In 1994
there were just 3,000 offences in England. Wales and Scotland in which one
or more firearms was stolen, most often from residential property,
although it should be noted that the principal weapon stolen was an air
weapon in more than 50 per cent of cases, whereas it was a shotgun in 19.5
per cent of cases and a pistol in only 9.6 per cent. (Cullen
1996, Para 9.8)
Police spokespeople suggest
that the use of firearms in crime, stolen from legal owners, is a variable
problem, more significant in some parts of the country than others. In
parts of the country where there is a thriving hidden economy in different
types of firearms, theft of firearms from legal owners is an unnecessary
additional risk. In these circumstances, the "grey market" in firearms
(the trade between legal and illegal owners) will be a less obvious local
phenomenon. In other parts of the country, it may be very significant
indeed. Indeed, the whole issue of regional variation in legal firearms
ownership, illegal ownership of firearms, and the use of firearms in crime
cries out for investigation - not least in relation to the much-publicised variation in practices of different constabularies in respect
of the existing licensing system.
However much they want to
downplay the various problems that obtain in the world of legal and
respectable gun-ownership, spokespeople for the sports shooters and other
firearms-owners associations are right in pointing to the continuing
problem of the full-blown hidden economy of guns in Britain. Estimates
vary wildly as to the size of this illegal economy. Commander Davies'
paper to this year's ACPO conference, admits there is no way of knowing
whether there are one, two or three million firearms in private ownership
in Britain today. Cohn Greenwood, in his evidence to Lord Cullen, gave
figures of 2.7 million legally-held firearms and an "illegal pool" at
least equal to that (Cullen, 1996 Para 95.).17 Once
again, there is some evidence that the size of the illegal economy may
vary considerably across regions: the city of Liverpool has been the site
of several major firearms incidents (including six shootings of victims
in the legs in April 1996) and several major firearms seizures over the
last three years, and Greater Manchester, whilst it may have outlived its
reputation as "Gunchester", is by no means free from a sense of threat.
There have been several recent reports of problems with criminal use of
firearms in Newcastle on Tyne. There is a pressing need for more
systematic study of local crime markets, especially in the vicinity of
ports, and local prevalence of illegal firearms availability and use,
though the research involved would almost certainly carry with it
significant personal risks.
Not much is yet known about the
practicalities of the forthcoming ban of handguns and the actual processes
of forfeiture and compensation. It will certainly be important to
understand the different practices adopted by police forces across the
country, not least with respect to individual firearms-owners who are
suspected of trying to resist the ban, by stealth and deceit, or by
outright refusal. Will the courts be prepared to make use of prison
sentences for firearms-owners resisting the new regime? A continuing
reliance on the use of the fine may create an incentive for some owners to
side-step the new regime. And what certainly also needs to be evaluated is
the real effect of the removal of over 120,000 handguns from private
ownership on the general availability of such weapons, as well as on the
overall rate of lethal violence per se (including suicides, domestic
violence and accidents), and also on the effective policing of
firearms-owners by local police.
There may be some sense in which
the Government’s proposed legislation will ease the task of policing the
illegal firearms market, in the sense that there can be no dissembling
over handguns encountered by police during raids: all handguns will be
illegal, and all persons found in possession of them can be charged with a
criminal offence. There is little question, however, that any serious
challenge to the prevalence and penetration of organised "craft
criminality" in some of our cities will require a political and social
programme of action which may be beyond the reach of our established
political parties, especially in these "post-Fordist" times.
Acknowledgements
I want to acknowledge here
extremely useful conversations held with D.C.I. Kevin Haigh of Greater
Manchester Police and Tony Hill and Gill Marshall-Andrews of the Gun
Control Network. The arguments and observations in this paper, however,
are my own responsibility.
Endnotes
-
The Government's sudden transformation into an "activist-Government
of the public interest" dearly unsettled the gun lobby itself (who were
unprepared for the Government moving beyond the recommendations of the
Cullen Enquiry), but also that guardian of Conservative commonsense, the
Daily Telegraph. Its editorial response to the Government's
decision to move to a wholesale ban of handguns, made use of arguments
more familiar in rather more progressive circles, to argue that the
government was caught up in a "moral panic", whilst also echoing the
arguments of the National Rifle Association in the United States, to the
effect that "depriving the law-abiding of handguns leaves us less
free as a people and brings close the day when the state has a
monopoly of firepower" (Daily Telegraph editorial 'Making law in a
Panic' 17 October 1996) (my emphasis - IT).
-
Of the 729 deaths from homicide reported to the police in England
and Wales in 1994, 236 involved a sharpened instrument (Duncan Campbell
"When Knives are Out" The Guardian 29 October 1996).
-
Another, unattributed estimate of firearms ownership which appeared
in The Observer newspaper (18 August 1996) provided the following
picture (which is not inconsistent with that presented by the Canadian
Department of Justice).
Percentages of households with guns
United States 48.0
Belgium 16.6
Norway 32.0
Italy 16.0
Canada 29.1 Sweden 15.1
Finland
23
Northern
Ireland 8.4
France 22 Scotland 4.7
New Zealand 22 England and Wales 4.7
Austria
19.4
Source:
The Observer 18 August 1996 p.12
-
Kellermann's work is particularly despised in NRA circles for the
challenge it poses to the idea of firearms ownership in the home as a
hedge against lethal 'intruder violence". Far from guns providing an
overall protection against homicide, Kellermann's analysis suggests that
firearms possession increases the chances of homicide in the home (Kellermann,
Rivara, Rushworth et al 1993).
-
In its most recent pronouncements, for example, the Shooters'
Rights Association claims that the proposed legislation on handguns
constitutes "the most pernicious and evil legislation to stalk Europe
since the reign of the Third Reich". (The Guardian 24 October
1996).
-
The National Rifle Association's Book of Rifles opens with
the following words: "The ability to shoot a rifle is an American
tradition. Our country was established and its boundaries expanded
westward by men with rifles in their hands. The rifle gave the settlers
protection against marauding Indians and other foes, and was an important
means of securing food for the pioneer family" (Smith and Smith, 1948, p.
i).
-
Ian Burrell, James Cusick and Michael Streeter ("Tories caught in
Cullen Cross-fire" The Independent 15 October 1996) unearthed an
internal Home Office report of 1972, submitted to Robert Carr, Home
Secretary. This 153 page report, written by senior police officers,
including Sir John Mackay, had demanded radical changes to the firearms
licensing system, a national weapons index, centralised processing of
applications for licenses and a system for giving all firearms an
identification number. Burrell et al claim that the report was in some way
"suppressed": it was certainly never published.
-
Lord Cullen (Para 9.60) uses the term "amok killings" without
elaborating on the origins of this usage.
-
At the end of March 1996, there were at least seven British gun
magazines registered with the Audit Bureau of Circulation, with a
combined sale of 175,100. (The Observer 24 March 1996). A
significant number of American firearms magazines were also in
circulation.
-
Customs and Excise officers in Britain in 1993 seized 8,674 firearms
at British airports and ports, compared with only 1,427 in 1992 (The
Guardian 9 October 1994).
-
Cf. for example Commander Dai Davies (Metropolitan Police) "Firearms
in Society: Time to Act" Paper presented to ACPO Conference, 1996.
-
Project Search is a Windows-based computer programme which enables
the user to trace the purchases of individual guns found used in crime
down to house number and street name in any city in America.
-
For a very sceptical evaluation of the so-called "shall issue" laws
(allowing carrying of concealed weapons for self-defence) in these three
states, see McDowall, Loftin and Wiersema 1995. Spokespeople for the
National Rifle Association in the United States, and some spokespeople for
the firearms-owners in this country, have been considerably more
enthusiastic about a national study published this year by John Lott of
the University of Chicago relating the passage of "concealed carry" laws
in 31 American states to the more pronounced fall in the numbers of
homicides and other crimes.
-
Attempts made in the 1960s, during moves to de-institutionalise
large numbers of patients from mental hospitals, to identify the precise
set of characteristics that would distinguish really "dangerous"
individuals from others eventually came to naught and were abandoned both
by the psychiatric community and leading organisations within the criminal
justice system (cf. Bottoms 1977). In its evidence to the Home Affairs
Committee in May 1996, the British Medical Association, through its
secretary, Mac Armstrong, indicated that GPs, psychiatrists and
psychologists were in no position "to assist in any reliable way with the
prediction of those positively safe with firearms, nor those who are
unsafe" (The Guardian, 3 May 1996).
-
In June 1996, for example, a prison officer in Milton Keynes was
found in possession of a private armoury of twelve weapons (of which only
seven were licensed). The collection, which included one sub-machine gun,
was discovered only after this licensed owner threatened a women with a
Magnum in a railway station parking lot. (Mail on Sunday 9 June
1996)
-
This figure for the number of licensed gun clubs in Britain is given
in the Cullen Report, Para. 8.36. As James Richardson, the deputy chief
constable of Strathclyde force, discovered in his study of Scottish police
procedures, the licence renewal form filled out on request by licensing
officers makes no enquiry with respect to the gun club where the weapon
will be used ("'Inadequate system' used to renew gun certificates" The
Guardian 25 June 1996).
-
There are all kinds of problems of definition as to what would count
as an illegal weapon in Britain, and also whether the count should be
extended to "imitation weapons" (which are an enormous source of tension
in some police force areas).
-
In February 1994, for example, Merseyside Police seized nine sub
machine guns, three Kalashnikovs and one Armalite rifle, plus 250 rounds
of ammunition, in a raid on a flat in Everton (The Guardian 8
February 1994). However, problems in the use of firearms in crime,
including murders, have continued, especially in certain parts of that
city.
-
In April 1996, for example, Anthony Constantinou, known locally as
Tony the Greek, was shot down with a shotgun in the Cafe Loco, in the
middle of Manchester's fashionable Whitworth Street strip. In May, a
supermarket in Eccles, North Manchester, was raided in the early evening
hours by a gang wielding a sub machine gun. The overall rate of firearms
crime in Manchester, however, was significantly down by comparison with
1993, which witnessed the murder of the 16 year old Ben Stanley in a fast
food shop in Moss Side, and the 30 year old Chris Horrox, apparently shot
down during the course of a struggle between different fly posting
franchises for control of city centre wall space.
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Introduction
I would like to introduce my paper here today with four, in many ways,
rhetorical remarks which I would like to act as a background framework in
all that I have to say today. I would want, first, to anticipate
arguments that may occur later - comparing rates of firearms rates in
Britain, North America or elsewhere - by reminding you that the United
Kingdom has for many years had a far lower rate of firearms crime than the
United States and also than any European member- | |
