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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.
Bibliography
Barker, Martin
(1984) A Haunt of Fears: The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign London: Pluto
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Bottoms, A.E (1977) "Reflections on the Renaissance of Dangerousness"
Howard Journal of Penology and Crime Prevention 16: 70-97
Connell, R.W. (1996)
Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity Press
Cullen,
Lord (1996) The Public Enquiry into the Shootings
at Dunblane Primary School on 13 March 1996. Edinburgh: The Scottish
Office Cm.3386
Gusfield, Joseph (1963) Symbolic
Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement. University of Illinois
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(1978) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. London: Macmillan
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McDowall,
David, Loftin, Colin and Wiersema, Brian (1995) “Easing Concealed Firearms Laws: Effects on
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J.A. (1996) Guns and Violence: The Debate before Lord Cullen Brightlingsea: Piedmont Publishing Co.
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The Decline of the English Murder and other Essays. London: Penguin
Smith W.H.B.
and Smith Joseph
E. (1948) The Book of Rifles Harrisburg, Pa: The Stackpole Company
Stevenson, Jan
A. (1996) "Evidence into issues concerning the control of
firearms arising from the Dunblane Tragedy" Evidence presented to the
Dunblane Enquiry, reprinted in Munday and Stevenson, op.
cit.
Vince, Joseph
J. (1996) Disarming the Criminal: ATF's Strategic and
Scientific Approach to Focused and Targeted
Enforcement. Washington D.C.:
Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco
Wills,
Garry (1995) "Why we have no right to bear arms" New York Review of Books
XLII No.14 (21 September): 62-72
Wright, Will
(1975) Sixguns and Society: a Structural Study of the Western
Berkeley: University of California Press
Firearms and Public Safety: Continuing Dangers after the Handguns Ban
by Ian Taylor
Department of Sociology
and Social Policy, University of Durham
Paper for Conference on Gun Control:
Current Issues and Future Challenges
Scarman Centre for the Study of Public
Order, University of Leicester,
10 February 1999
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-state. That this has
occurred in a society riven by deep divisions of class and status is in
itself some kind of civic achievement, and one of which most citizens are
aware and, on occasion, rightly, celebrate, especially in our regular and
painful comparisons of ourselves with the United States.
If this remark sounds like a celebration of ‘Little England' - or, more
accurately, ‘Little Britain' - then I should immediately add that the
civic achievement (i.e. of a gun-free society') can no longer to easily
guaranteed. The increasing globalisation of trade, and the creation of
borderless trade blocs, is one of the defining realities of our time, and
commentators of all kinds have cast doubt on the continuing ability of
individual nation-states to regulate the flow of commodities in the name
of some national conception of the public interest. We should not be
speaking about firearms trade and firearms crime today in purely national
terms, without attention to the developments in the larger European
theatre. Nor either should be speaking about regulation today as if this
is a project that can continue to be pursued by police, customs and
regulatory agencies acting in isolation from each other.
But the third introductory, rhetorical remark I want to make is to insist
that we treat the issue of the ‘firearm' with some kind of cultural
curiosity. That is to say, rather than treat the question of firearms
ownership in purely jurisprudential terms (‘the right to own arms') -
which is the argument preferred by the National Rifle Association in the
United States and by some of its sister organisations in this country - we
should be asking what is about the gun that attracts the fervent feelings
of the firearms-owning and shooting community, and/or the firearms
industry. Even the most cursory examination of the shooting magazines in
this country indicate that the firearms business is overwhelmingly
directed at men. Attendances at gun shows and, indeed, at conferences and
debates about guns (like this one) are overwhelmingly attended by men. I
am aware of arguments that insist that the training of young men in the
‘responsible' use of guns is in some sense a disciplining of the wild and
feral instincts that some think to be definitive of ‘real masculinity'.
But, at a time of great debate about the relationship between education
and social and moral development, as well as problems that men are having
in assuming new roles in the broader society, we are entitled to throw
open the question as to whether the idea of a ‘responsible' and
disciplined shooter is the best role model we can imagine for men.
Previous experience in debates with representatives of the shooting sports
and firearms industry indicates a marked preference in such circles for
debates that are organised in terms, primarily, of ‘facts' - as defined,
in this instance, in terms of a display of statistics. I have suggested
elsewhere that this fervent belief in the truthfulness of statistical
material has a curious nineteenth-century quality, reminiscent of the
fervour of the medical researchers and astronomers who placed such a
touching faith, as natural scientists moving into the study of crime and
other social problems, in the potential of fast-developing statistical
records as a way to understand the social world (Taylor 1998). It is also
clear that this fervent belief in 'facts' (rather than 'theory') as a
framework for argument in itself operates as a kind of masculine
forcefulness (the 'final word' or 'closure' on otherwise difficult
debates). It seems fairly certain that we will have some such recitation
of statistical material at this conference as well - not least, because
those few statistics that are available in England and Wales would suggest
that the problem of firearms is well under control, and that, by
implication, the continuing concerns of groups who continue to work for
further regulation of firearms are unfounded.
Two sets of statistical material are likely to be referenced. First, the
official criminal statistics for England and Wales, which suggest,
prima facie, that the increase in the use of firearms in crime which
had been so marked a feature of the annual record in the late 1980s and
early 1990s has been put into reverse.
On the basis
of these figures, read at face value, it could obviously be argued that
there has been an 11 per cent reduction in the overall number of firearms
offences reported to the police between 1993 and 1997, and a reduction of
49 per cent in the number of armed robberies. No doubt, statistics of this
order will be taken in many quarters, and by some spokespeople for the
firearms industry and shooting lobby, that the criminal use of firearms is
now under control in this country, and that public anxiety is irrational.
Table One
Notifiable Offences recorded
by the Police in which Firearms were reported to have been used by offence group
1988-1997
(England and Wales)
Year
All All Offences
Homicides
Attempted
Other Robbery Burglary
Other
offences (excl.
criminal murder and violence excluding
Damage) other
acts criminal
endangering
life damage
1988 8524 5289 36
531 1816 2688 107 111
1989 9502 6181 45
581 1914 3390 133 118
1990 10373 6829 60
663 1855 3939 154 158
1991
12129 8352 55
861 1795 5296 176 169
1992
13341 9023 56
868 1895 5859 182 163
1993 14067 9382 74 1058 1743 6012 237 258
1994 13167 7717 66 1075 1789 4239 259 289
1995 13434 7577 70
894 1779 4206 279 349
1996 13876 7753 49
810 2027 4013 300 554
1997 12410 6504 59
628 2148 3029 316 324
Source Criminal Statistics (England and Wales) 1997
Second, we are
likely to have reference made to the decline in the number of individual
firearms certificates on issue, especially during both 1996 and 1997, as
well as to the significant reduction in the overall number of firearms
covered by such certificates. In 1996 alone, the number of firearms
'listed' on officially-recorded firearms certificates was 305,000, 27
per cent lower than in 1996 (Wilkins and Addicott, 1998). Firearms
commentators with a longer experience of patterns and volumes of
registration will point out that the decline in the total number of
firearms on official 'lists' has been fairly steady since 1989, when
records suggested that firearms-owners were in control of something over
800,000 firearms. The Home Office's Research, Development and Statistics
Directorate in its 1998 report (Wilkins and Addicott, op.cit.) had no
hesitation in attributing this reduction in the number of firearms
certificate holders, and the reduction in the numbers of firearms listed
on owners' certificates, to the Firearms Amendment Act which finally came
into force on 1 July 1997, banning handguns of more than .22 calibre,
either in the aftermath of this legislation or in anticipation of it. The
Home Office's statistics also suggest that there was a three per cent
reduction in the number of registered dealers in firearms in 1997, down to
2,400 dealers in total (Wilkins and Addicott, 1998, op.cit.).
As in many
rehearsals of statistical evidence in other areas, of course, there is a
certain selectivity. The statistics on 'offences involving firearms'
reported by the Home Office do not include offences which, we are told,
were eventually determined to have involved only airguns - though it would
obviously be interesting to know more about the 7,000 or so such cases
that are thought worth reporting to the police every year. The statistics
on firearms certificates suggest that the overall decline in the number of
certificate holders and the number of firearms in personal possession was
offset by a one per cent increase in the number of shotgun certificates on
issue (a total of 1,343,900 in 1997)(Wilkins and Addicott 1998). At a time
of great difficulty in the country's farming industry, it beggars belief
that this increase in shotgun ownership is explicable in terms of enhanced
use by country people in the elimination of ‘vermin'. But in the absence
of any serious and systematic research into substitution of firearms by
firearm license holders in advance of the Firearms Amendment Acts, it is
difficult to be dogmatic about the significance of such an increase.
Indeed, the almost complete absence of research in this country into the
patterns of firearms ownership, difference between the practices in our 43
police forces in the organisation of the licensing process, the
relationship between firearms owner and shooting clubs. the practices of
the 2,400 dealerships that continue to exist in England and Wales, and
many other related issues, means that any attempt to develop an argument
exclusively around those few statistics that are released into the public
domain is a very hazardous process indeed.
Public anxieties
about the provenance of firearms in crime may have been assuaged by the
passage of the Firearms Amendment Act, and the surrender of the estimated
160,000 handguns which resulted from the passage of that legislation. The
disappearance of the firearms issue from the leading position it occupied
on the public policy agenda in 1996 should not, however, be interpreted as
an absence of public concern. As with so many other issues which rise to
the surface of public attention in the last years of the twentieth
century, there is an important analytical question here - namely, the
extent to which the expression of public anxiety or anger is actually an
artefact of the constant construction of panic that now characterises the
presentation of news in the mass media, and, along with that, the constant
identification of categories of malevolent groups (paedophiles) or
misguided individuals (Glenn Hoddle) who are then deemed either to be
responsible for our social malaise, or to have misunderstood the limits of
acceptable or required speech and behaviour in our newly liberal society.
There can be no denying that this kind of media representation was a
feature of the press coverage given the 'gun lobby' in Britain in 1996,
not least in the representation of all members of the shooting community
as if they were members of inner-city handgun clubs. But to recognise that
there is this constant process of panic-driven representation in the
media, where issues may rise to the head of the public agenda almost
overnight, only to vanish just as rapidly 'in the air' - and to recognise
that this process integrally involves the endless identification and
labelling of scapegoats - is not to say that the topics that achieve
public status in this restless kind of media world, however momentarily,
are without some kind of substance. Not the least of the intriguing issues
in this respect is the relationship between the agendas of national
newspapers, radio and television media (where the firearms issue in 1999
seems to have a relatively low priority) and the representations of news
in local newspapers, radio and television news programmes (where firearms
incidents continue to be reported with considerable frequency). We will
return to this question - the relationship between such national and local
media representations and ongoing organic processes of social change - in
the final section of this paper.
For the
moment, we want to identify some seven areas in which we can say there is
continuing public concern over firearms, even in the aftermath of the
handguns ban. The level of such concern is not a matter for analysis here,
since we do recognise that 'public concern' under present circumstances
has an extraordinarily labile and potentially short-lived character. The
concerns we want to identify are known to us, however, in large part,
because of the coverage which particular incidents have received in the
media, but whose provenance may then be confirmed - as it has to be in the
absence of any serious, funded social research in this area - through
further investigation and analysis by interested individuals. We take it
for granted that such investigation is often conducted by individuals -
for example, around the Gun Control Network or the Dunblane parents - for
whom the goal is the restoration of ‘a gun-free society' i.e. a society
free from the possession and use of firearms by private individuals. As I
have argued elsewhere, the existence of a substantially gun-free society,
up until the 1990s, was a particular and distinctive achievement of
government and civil society in Britain, dating from the seventeenth
century and continuing to exist as a definitive feature of commonsense'
sentiment in Britain until the present day (Taylor 1996).1 The
entry of these issues onto the public agenda is also a function, we would
argue, of the reportage of incidents involving firearms in the local
newspaper press and local television and radio - a product of their close
relationship with local police and other established news sources. There
is an important sense, in this respect, in which the firearms issue
retains an important presence in local media, where currently it has lost
such a presence on the agenda of national news media.
Seven Areas of Concern
1. Loopholes in the Firearms
Amendment Acts
The objective of the two new statutes of 1997 was to tackle the growth of
the ownership of handguns - not least because of the ease with which
handguns can be concealed and carried on the person. There was also a
widespread belief that the growth of availabilities of handguns was
complicit in the increase of armed robberies which more than doubled in
number in just five years between 1988 and 1993 to a total of 6,0l2 in
1993. Some 160,000 or more handguns in private possession have now been
surrendered, but there are still many different kinds of handguns in
circulation. The majority of these may be firearms which have never been
under legal license, and in this respect, of course, the fact that all
handguns are now illegal in England and Wales eases the police task
considerably (for example, during searches of suspect private premises).
But is no surprise to many close observers of the firearms trade that the
industry itself has responded to its potential loss of market in England
and Wales. Press reports during 1998 focused on the increasing provenance
in some cities of ‘muzzle loader' pistols, a quick-loading rapid-fire hand
gun of large calibre. Originally seen as an historical weapon of interest
to collectors, but now having the great benefit that they do not meet the
definition of a handgun in the recent legislation, muzzle-loaders once
again being manufactured and sold, entirely legally, through gun shops and
gun magazines. Another response of the firearms industry itself to the
recent handguns legislation has been to modify the shape and size of some
rifles and shotguns, which remain entirely legal under the legislation,
such that they can more easily be carried and concealed (for example,
‘down the trouser leg') and perform quite the same function in a robbery
or assault as a handgun.
2. Replica Weapons
The interest of local media in firearms has focused on several different
occasions in recent years on the use of replica weapons - for example, in
hostage takings, in street-confrontations with police2 and in
robberies of banks or other financial institutions. Replica guns, when
used to threaten and intimidate, can be just as intimating as fully
operational weapons, though, unlike such weapons and knives, they may not
have the capacity to inflict major injuries or fatalities. Replica weapons
are very widely sold at military regalia shops, car-boot sales and
military and country fairs up and down the country, and constitute a
potential source of instruments of intimidation. So also, of course - at
least in theory - do the very realistic range of toy firearms being
produced for children. The regulation of the replica and toy weapon
markets constitutes a very challenging area, which theoretically has been
tackled at government level by the creation in September 1994 of an
offence of ‘carrying an imitation firearm with intent to cause fear',
carrying a sentence of up to 10 years in jail.
3. De-activation and
Re-activation
A more serious and immediate issue, perhaps, than the issue of replica
weapons is the question of de-activated weapons3. It is not
illegal for private citizens to have de-activated weapons in their
possession (the assumption being that they are in the hands just of
collectors or military enthusiasts). ‘Armed crime units' in different
police forces in England and Wales are well-aware of a number of cases,
however, in recent years, in which previously deactivated weapons,
including Uzi machine guns, have been re-activated for use4. In
1994, reporters for the Manchester Evening News found that they
were able to purchase ostensibly de-activated (but actually fully
functional) Danish army machine guns in licensed gun shops in East
Manchester for £60 and also ascertained that similar weapons were
available for a similar price in licensed stores in the centre of the city
(Manchester Evening News 25 March 1994). The Home Office
issued a set of deactivation guidelines in 1989, and then tightened up
these guidelines in 1995, especially with respect to the technical
question of what parts of a firearm have to be removed or welded up to
ensure their final de-activation. But it is not clear that police
licensing officers, or any other section of the police force, have any
preventative strategy with respect to the market in re-activation of
de-activated weapons (for example, through surveillance work at military
fairs) : current information suggests that the policing of this area of
danger is essentially retroactive, responding to cases as they emerge.
4. Rifles and Shotguns
Earlier in this paper, we made passing reference to the increase that has
occurred in the number of shotgun certificates granted in 1997 and 1998
i.e. in the period in which existing firearms-owners, especially those in
possession of some form of handgun, would have been anticipating the
passage of new firearms legislation and deciding on some changes in the
collection of weapons they might be holding ‘on ticket' i.e. on their
existing license. In the absence, again, of any publicly-released research
or evaluation of the handguns surrender and its impact on the
firearms-owning community, we can only speculate as to the meaning and
significance of this increase in shotgun ownership. Supporters of the
recent legislation may be able to rejoice at the reduction in the number
of handguns in private houses in the United Kingdom, but no one should be
allowed to interpret the legislation as having necessarily reduced the
overall amount of lethal firepower that is legally retained in the hands
of private individuals. From a public safety point of view, there is every
good reason, as the Gun Control Network currently proposes, to support
legislation requiring all shotguns in private possession for
target-shooting to be low-powered single-shot instruments and that
shotguns used, for example, for clay-pigeon shooting should not have more
than a double-barrelled 12 bore capacity.
5. Firearms and Public Health
and Safety
The continuing presence of some 2,000 or more firearms clubs, regularly in
use by large numbers of sports shooting enthusiasts, throws up a range of
questions about public safety. Many of such clubs, like army ranges, are
situated on land that may regularly be used by other sections of the
public for other purposes (hikers, campers, mountaineers etc). Gun clubs
are required under existing legislation to allow shooting at specified
distances from any boundaries of the property or within reach of any
public right-of-way. The practices of gun clubs in this respect are
theoretically under the supervision of the Health and Safety Executive,
but reports suggest that the ability of the HSE to intervene in the
practices of private firearms clubs are severely limited under current
legislation. Police license-officers were given the power under the 1997
legislation to inspect the premises of firearms-clubs to ensure that the
firearms and ammunition stored in such clubs were retained ‘in secure
conditions': there has been no public report of the inspections which were
conducted nationally to this effect during 1997-8.
Even more difficult a challenge for Health and Safety regulators, as well
as for police licensing officers, is the supervision of the means used for
storage of shotguns or other legally-held weaponry and ammunition in
private homes. There are quite enormous issues here, in terms of the reach
of any existing idea of 'public law', but there can surely be no doubting
the importance of this question (not least in protecting the health and
safety of the families and kin of firearms-owners).
6. Firearms and Young People
One of the widely expressed concerns given expression in the nation-wide
debate over firearms in 1996 was the fear that Britain was in process of
developing its own ‘gun culture'. The passage of the two 1997 Acts,
targeting the private possession of handguns, can certainly be interpreted
as the authoritative or official response to this particular concern -
that is, to the handgun specifically as a signifier of this growing gun
culture. In this respect, the objection to the handgun was not so much its
potential utility in bank-robberies or street assaults per se, so
much as to its role it seemed to be performing in contemporary youth
culture. Some commentators spoke, for example, of the (overt or thinly
disguised) carrying of the firearm as a fashion statement' in certain
places of youthful resort in our major cities.
There are a host of issues here for critically aware students of the
culture, which I do not want to address in this paper. No one would argue
that the forms of masculine gun culture that may have been glimpsed in the
clubs of Liverpool or Manchester in the mid 1990s directly connect to the
forms of masculine gun culture that are supported in shooting clubs. There
is clearly a body of opinion in the sports shooting community, however,
which believes that children should be introduced to 'the sport' of
shooting at the earliest possible age, and who legitimise this belief in
the benefits of shooting for young people in terms of a regime of adult
tutelage and personal discipline5. Early in the 1990s, the
House of Commons itself, under the leadership of James Paice MP, was host
to Firearms '94, a campaign aimed at encouraging young
people to take up shooting, and resisting moves to put a minimum age on
shotgun certificate applications (Guardian 6 December 1993). The
Boy Scouts Association of England and Wales was momentarily persuaded of
this perspective. But set against this perspective must be the recognition
that this introduction to guns to young people at an impressionable age is
very likely to produce a life-long commitment to firearms, and thereby add
to the total number of firearms enthusiasts within society. No matter how
fervently this is denied by spokespeople for the shooting community, it is
precisely from this subculture of firearms enthusiasts that those
individuals responsible for the recent spate of 'amok killings' (in
Hungerford, Dunblane, Tasmania, British Columbia and elsewhere) have
emerged.
7. Firearms and Public
Knowledge
Perhaps the most troubling feature of all with respect to the situation in
respect of firearms in the United Kingdom in the aftermath of the recent
legislation, and the handguns surrender, is the almost total absence of
‘public knowledge' and information. Quite extraordinarily, the Home Office
appears not to have committed itself to any systematic evaluation of the
impact of the legislation - or even to the costs-and-benefits of the
extremely expensive method that was chosen for the compensation of
firearms-owners who had to surrender their weaponry. The 1997 Acts
included no governmental commitment to the establishment of a nation-wide
system for the registration of all ownership of rifles, shotguns and
airguns: the contrast is here with Canada, where such a system has been
speedily introduced, making full use of new computer software programmes
which can identify all weapons on the basis of a number of visual clues.
Not the least of the many benefits of such a system is that it does enable
a law enforcement agency to complete an effective trace on the history of
an individual firearm in terms of ownership, places of purchase and sale
etc. Even in the United States - where the National Rifle Association has
waged such a long-lasting and effective campaign against Government
‘interference' into what it alleges is the constitutional entitlement of
citizens to bear and own arms - the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and
Tobacco has ownership of a nationwide computer system, Project Search,
which enables the sequential trace of stolen firearms down to individual
addresses. The contrast with the United Kingdom - where systems of
national registration were rejected on financial grounds by a Home Office
Working Party - is remarkable: the tracing by an individual police force
of stolen firearms might still involve making contact by phone, fax or
other media with the full complement of 43 police forces in England and
Wales and the eight police forces in Scotland.
Getting Serious about the
Issue: Guns, Men and the Condition of the Culture
I have already referenced the extraordinary preference of some of the
shooting lobby and firearms industry for conducting the debate over
firearms in terms, purely, of a very formal version of social scientific
positivism6. This addiction to statistical 'facts' is
remarkable not just for its disavowal of one hundred years of critique of
natural science models applied, without question, to the study of social
life but also the way in which such an endless recital of different sets
of statistics works in the discourses of the firearms lobby as an
avoidance of two of the most critical issues with respect to the ownership
and use of firearms in Britain in the late 1990s7. Let me
finish this paper with a brief discussion of these two inescapable issues.
(a)
Arms and the Man
One of the more obvious features of the ‘gun-lobby', broadly defined, is
its overwhelming domination by men8. In the angry debates that
surrounded the production of the Cullen Enquiry in 1996, one of the most
insistent arguments of the sports-shooting fraternity was that firearms
owners and users in Britain - unlike Michael Ryan (the Hungerford killer)
and Thomas Hamilton (his equivalent at Dunblane) - were overwhelmingly
responsible men who could be trusted in charge of firearms.
There were several sub-themes in this argument - firstly, that Michael
Ryan and Thomas Hamilton were self-evidently psychopathic individuals who,
by definition, behaved very differently from the ways in which typical'
firearms-owners would behave; secondly, that it must be possible in
principle, to develop a diagnostic taxonomy of male personalities that
would predict the onset of such psychopathic disorders in individual men9,
and, thirdly, that the identification of such ‘difference' in men is
‘self-evidently' a more sensible approach to minimising lethal outbreaks
of firearms use than is the restriction of ownership of such firearms by
responsible citizens in civil society. This being England, some versions
of this argument went further in order to insist on the gentlemanly
character of sports-shooting and of firearms clubs - a refrain that was
later to find expression in the sport-shooters' partnership with the
Countryside Alliance.
As I have
argued elsewhere, this particular discourse about the differences between
‘responsible men' and ‘psychopaths' has to be understood as a part of a
strategic attempt to establish a British version of the National Rifle
Association's refrain, in the United States, that ‘it is not guns that
kill, but people'. But it also works as a way of ‘naturalising’
'responsible' men's ownership of lethal firearms, even in their own home.
What is at issue here, most fundamentally, are issues about men,
trust and responsibility. It requires little reflection on the
wider context of gender relations in the 1990s to realise that there are
some very fundamental issues at work here. In the context, in particular,
of the profound changes that have occurred in the organisation of the
labour market over the last 25 years - the haemorrhaging of
millions of male jobs in manufacturing and other related employment and
the rise of service industries prioritising other sets of skills and
sensibilities, many commentators have come to speak of ‘a crisis of
masculinity', in which young men and old alike experience enormous
difficulties in coming to terms with a different ‘gender order'. Bob
Connell's extraordinarily comprehensive analysis of masculinities' in the
late twentieth century what he calls ‘protest masculinity' - an angry and
vengeful rejection of the changes in local labour market and symbolic
worlds of status and value that sometimes finds expression, in the United
States, in the growing number of militia and survivalist movements
(Connell 1994; cf. also Jeffords, 1989; Gibson 1994). There is no evidence
of any equivalent and widespread adaptation of organised ‘protest
masculinity' in this country, but it would be a naïve
observer who was not aware of the re-birth of an assertive form of
‘laddism' - for example, in television programming and weekly male
magazines - exhibiting many of the same forms of aggressive and
essentialist forms of masculinity. It is not at clear what alternative
models of masculinity are being constructed in the late 1990s, ensuring
the reproduction of gentlemanly codes of individual self-regulation.
(b) Nothing is Real: Arms,
Victims and Post-Modern Culture
The 'crisis in masculinity' is a key and definitive dimension of
the firearms issue that is systematically avoided by spokespeople for
sports shooting and the firearms industry. So also is the broader
'condition of the culture'. Discussion of the content of Hollywood film in
the mid to late 1990s, though not new, as been particularly pointed, and
actors like Dustin Hoffman have refused to perform in the essentially
nihilistic movies of Quentin Tarantino. More recently, the author John
Grisham has taken out a civil suit against the film producer Oliver Stone
and his production company for the movie Natural Born Killers.
No country
escapes the embrace of this nihilistic embrace of violence and
anti-humanism. In Britain itself - the country which united in large
numbers around the handgun ban in 1996 - one of the most popular
characters on video playstations in 1999, chosen by the Department of
Trade and Industry as ‘an ambassador for Britain' is Lara Croft, a
gun-toting virtual ‘babe'. One of the persistent fads in fashion shows
held in Britain - for example by the Prada fashion house - has been for
young models carrying guns up and down the catwalks. The Qasar
organisation, specialising in facsimile massacres with paint-ball guns, is
one of the fastest-growing leisure companies in Britain. The explosion of
this nihilistic culture, in which there are no foundational arguments
per se for valuing human life, has been the subject of a massive
literature of social analysis and commentary - both of a critical and a
resigned and defeatist character. It is not my purpose in this paper to
enter directly into this debate here. But what does need to be said is
that the debate about firearms cannot proceed in ignorance of this larger
context. It would be a foolhardy protagonist indeed who argued that the
celebration of the right to own firearms was in some sense a positive
contribution to ‘the condition of the culture' in western society at this
time. But it might be a wise commentator who suggested that - however
little agreement there might be on other social goals in post-modern
conditions - the preservation in cultural representations as well as in
the field of policing and in legislation of the pre-modern achievement of
Britain - a civil society without firearms in private hands - remains a
noble enough objective to be taken really seriously.
Notes
1.
The strength of this ‘commonsense' was repeatedly confirmed in
public opinion surveys during the long debate over firearms ownership that
followed the Dunblane massacre in 1996. In the survey commissioned by the
BBC for Jeremy Paxman's You Decide special on firearms in August
1996, for example, 76 per cent of all people surveyed declared themselves
in favour of an outright ban on the private ownership of firearms.
2.
One of the most well-known recent and tragic examples of such a
confrontation was the killing by West Yorkshire police, late at night
during the Christmas season, of "Cowboy" Bob Dixon on the Sycamore Estate
in Huddersfield in December 1994. Mr Dixon was celebrating a successful
fund-raising event at a local club by firing shots from his replica
Winchester Trinity revolver, but police officers in the local response
unit were unable at a distance to distinguish this replica weapon from
'the real' (Guardian 28 December 1994)
3.
One of the first police interventions on de-activation in the 1990s
was the Report of the Metropolitan Police of 1994, which pointed to
a large increase in de-activated weapons being found in Britain, which it
attributed to the firearms industry in Eastern Europe, with specialised
re-activation occurring in Britain (Guardian 2 August 1994).
4.
Subsequent reports in the local press revealed that this particular
Uzi had been purchased in a nightclub in Stretford, Manchester, for £1,000
(Sale and Altrincham Express and Advertiser 26 May 1994).
5.
For more extended interrogation of the discourses of the English
gun lobby, especially in respect of shooting as sport, see Taylor 1998.
6.
For one remarkable example of this attempted re-invention of
statistical display as social 'science', see Munday and Stevenson 1996.
7.
According to many philosophical critics, the obsessive addiction to
statistics as 'hard truth' is one expression in debate of masculinist
assertions of power and superiority, especially in circumstances of threat
or defeat (cf. Connell 1995; Harding 1991).
8.
This is not to ignore the presence of certain women - for example,
Carol Page, the Olympic pistol shooter - who often played a prominent role
in media debates after Dunblane. But even the most superficial scrutiny of
the shooting press in this country will reveal the masculine assumptions
that inform involvement in sport-shooting and gun-collecting.
9.
This attempt to construct a distinction between potentialities to
gun use in men was very much reminiscent of the futile attempts made to
predict the onset of ‘dangerousness' in young offenders in the
1970s. So, for example, the secretary of the British Medical Association,
Mr Mac Armstrong, gave evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee in
May 1996 indicating that no such predictive measure is available to
psychiatrists and doctors, other than in the case of individuals who
already have a long history of psychopathic illness' (Guardian 3
May 1996).
Bibliography
Connell, R.W. (1995)
Masculinities Oxford: Polity Press
Cullen (1996) The Public
Inquiry into the Shootings at Dunblane Primary School on 13 March 1996 (The Rt.Hon.
Lord Cullen) Cm.3386
Edinburgh: Scottish Office
Gibson, J.W. (1994) Warrior
Dreams: Violence and Manhood in Post-Vietnam America New York: Hill
and Wang
Harding, Sandra (1991) Whose
Science ? Whose Knowledge ? Thinking from Women's Lives Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press
Jeffords, S.( 1989) The
Remasculinization of America Bloomington: Indiana University Press
Taylor, Ian (1996)
"Firearms Crime at the time of the Cullen Enquiry" Salford Working Papers in Sociology No.20 and
Scottish Journal of Criminal Justice Studies 3 (August1997)
Taylor, Ian (1998) "Respectable,
Rural and English: the Lobby against the Regulation of Firearms in Great
Britain" in Pat Carlen and Rod Morgan (eds) Crime Unlimited: Questions
for the 21st Century London: Macmillan
Wilkins, Graham and Addicott,
Chris (1998) Firearm Certificate Statistics, England and Wales 1997
London: Home Office Statistical Bulletin No.26
*****
Respectable, Rural and English: the Lobby Against the Regulation of
Firearms in Great Britain
by
Ian Taylor
27 October 2000
INTRODUCTION
In this chapter, I want to present
some observations and analysis with respect to the organised pressure group
that, for the first time in the post-war period, began in 1996 to attract
significant public attention in Britain - the 'sports-shooters' and their
friends and allies in the firearms trade, who collectively became known in
press discussion as 'the gun lobby'. My concerns in this paper represent an
exercise in the social scientific analysis of law-creation, in that the
group concerned was engaged in a campaign of resistance against the passage
of publicly proposed legislation. But, as I will argue later, the paper is
also intended as a contribution to the fast-growing literature in what might
be called 'cultural criminology', i.e. in bringing the insights of cultural
theory to bear on critical issues in the unending and anxious public debate
over law and order. In this instance, my attention is focused on the
cultural connections between gun ownership, certain versions of masculinity,
and notions of 'respectability' and 'Englishness'. My interest is also
excited by the ways in which these connected discourses were firmly
institutionalised in Home Office and parliamentary circles, in the period
between 'Hungerford' and 'Dunblane', as sensible, rational and balanced
sources of official discourse on guns.
My concerns in
this paper do not extend to any detailed and formal analysis of the role of
firearms in crime, trends in firearms crime, or, indeed, to the evaluation
of the Firearms Amendment Act which eventually became law in February 1997
(or the revised legislation, promised by our new government, to extend the
ban on handguns to pistols of over .22 calibre). Some of these issues have
been treated elsewhere (Taylor, 1997) and others will hopefully be the
subject of detailed research at some future date. It suffices, for the
moment, to remember that the emergence of the 'gun lobby' was one of several
features of the anguished public debate in Britain which followed the
massacre of sixteen infants and their teacher at the Dunblane Primary School
by Thomas Hamilton on 13 March 1996 - the second major instance of a
so-called 'spree-killing' in England in nine years. The previous incident,
on 13 August 1987, in the village of Hungerford in Berkshire, involved the
murder of sixteen people and the wounding of eleven others, chosen mostly at
random, by 27-year-old Michael Ryan, a member of a local gun club, wearing
army fatigues. The Hungerford massacre gave rise to troubled public debate
and the passage of a new Firearms Act, banning the ownership of certain
automatic weaponry. But the 'Dunblane massacre', committed against
pre-school infants, was the subject of international press coverage and the
bipartisan response of the political leadership of the country. It also gave
rise to a concerted movement, led by the Snowdrop Petition (based in
Dunblane), the nationally organised Gun Control Network, favouring the
radically improved regulation of firearms ownership. This crystallised
around the successful demand for a ban on the ownership in private hands of
all handguns (other than a small number which were claimed as Olympic
pistols). This development occurred in the aftermath of a period of
heightened public concern over what was widely thought to be a significant
increased use of firearms in crime. Throughout 1993, there were many reports
in the local and national press focusing on an ominous and apparently
relentless increase in the number of incidents being reported to the police
(see Table 6.1).
In the period
1990-3, the number of firearms offences reported to the police in Scotland
increased from 435 to 738. So, throughout Britain as a whole - a country
which for years defined itself (in contrast to 'America') as a 'gun-free'
and civil society - anxieties over the apparent increase in the use of
firearms in crime and, perhaps, the increased availability of firearms, was
voiced with great regularity, particularly in the local press (albeit in
some urban areas more than others). A variety of theories began to be
developed journalistically as to whether the firearms in use were mainly
illicit firearms, finding their way into Britain as a result of the easing
of border control within the European Community and/or the increasing
prevalence of organised criminality in parts of Europe. Other commentators
speculated on the rise of 'gangsta rap' culture, especially amongst
Britain's black 'underclass' -. the latest expression of an undesirable
American influence. There was also periodic discussion, especially in police
circles, of the possible development of a 'grey market' in firearms -the
emergence of arsenals of weapons in Britain with an ambiguous and fluid
relationship to the legal firearms market and the 'black economy' of illicit
firearms possession and/or use.
Table 6.1 Offences involving
firearms reported to the police (England and Wales, 1993)
Year Homicides Attempted
murder Other violence Robbery
Burglary Criminal Other offences All offences
and other acts against t
he person
damage
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
51 363 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
5,296 176 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
Source: Criminal Statistics
(England and Wales) 1994, Cm3010
(Table 3.1).
The
ad hoc development of these
lay-theories of gun crime was slowed by the release of the criminal
statistics for 1994, which showed a reduction in the number of offences
involving firearms reported to the police to 12,977 and, although the 1995
return showed a one per cent increase to 13,104, popular concern over guns
seemed, if anything, to have been replaced (in a culture suffused with
fast-developing anxieties and panics of all kinds) by anxieties over
knives. The massacre in Dunblane had the effect of resurrecting the
anxieties over guns and firearms crime and the extent to which the firearms
used in crime originated from legal owners. These anxieties were to play no
small part in the parliamentary and public debates, and also in the enquiry
into the Dunblane massacre conducted by Lord Justice Cullen. There is no
question but that this theme - that legal ownership of handguns and shotguns
was a contributory factor in firearms crime as such - attained a kind of
master status in popular understandings of the issues during the debates
around the Cullen Enquiry (Thomas Hamilton was, after all, a fully licensed
firearms owner and an erstwhile member of a sports shooting club). In the
event, this master argument was to prove impossible for the gun lobby to
overturn, and the Conservative government, however reluctantly, was
compelled to legislate against handguns as a matter of public safety.
The analysis of
the movements that led up to the passage of this legislation is not our
purpose here (cf. Karp, 1997). Our concern instead is with those who were
moved to oppose this legislation.
THE POLITICS OF GUN LOBBIES
In his recently published
re-analysis of Masculinities,
Connell (1994) devotes five pages to the role of 'the gun lobby' in
Australia and the United States, especially with respect to the defence of
what Connell calls 'hegemonic masculinity' (the routine domination of men
within the gender order, which he takes to be a defining feature of most
modern societies). He argues that 'gun lobby' type politics emerge in
circumstances of crisis in this routine gender order, and that three
defining preoccupations of such politics can be identified - the routine
monopoly of men in respect of violence (the male as
warrior), the idea of an exemplary
form of masculinity (the male as hero)
and the role of the male in the management of social and personal
relations (the responsible male in a necessary
position of power and command). The first dimension of
this reconstruction and reassertion of masculinity - the male as
warrior - has also been the subject
of powerful recent studies and analyses of male violence in the United
States by Jeffords (1989) and Gibson (1994), tracing the continual unfolding
of the 'Vietnam syndrome' in that country, not least in the spread of the
militia movements (for a recent overview see Stern, 1996). Jeffords' study
also draws attention to the role of Hollywood, in particular, in the active
reconstruction and celebration of a version of American manhood - from John
Wayne and Clint Eastwood to Bruce Willis - as a kind of modern-day
frontiersman, albeit located on the urban rather than the Western
'frontier'. Spitzer (1995),
amongst many others, draws attention to the influence of this kind of
masculinism in the movements that have sprung up in the United States to
oppose any attempt to regulate or restrict the ownership of firearms in the
United States, especially, of course, the National Rifle Association (NRA).
In alliance with a multitude of local organisations across the United
States, the NRA has been extraordinarily successful in its recent campaigns
- not least, in holding back demands for the national registration of
firearms ownership in the US and in restricting discussion of firearms
control in that country (as in 'the Brady Bill' of 1993) to the question of
a five-day 'waiting period' during the purchase of lethal weapons.
One of the
lessons of the movement for firearms control that developed in the
aftermath of the Dunblane massacre in England, Scotland and Wales, and the
debates which surrounded the passage, under the Conservative government, of
the Firearms Amendment Act (1996) and its rapid revision (to extend legal
prohibition to all handguns) under the New Labour government (1997), is that
we do not have an equivalent electorally powerful and publicly recognised
national organisation to the NRA (though there is in Britain a National
Rifle Association, one of several organisations that in 1996 gave support to
the political work undertaken on behalf of all shooters by the British
Sports Shooting Council). In part, this is simply a reflection of the very
different history of firearms ownership, and the general provenance or
availability of firearms in England, Scotland and Wales compared with the
United States (Squires, 1997). The estimate - apparently accepted by Lord
Cullen in his Report - is that there were some 2.7 million legally held
firearms in Great Britain in 1996 (Cullen, 1996, para. 9.5). According to
the collation of existing national information rapidly undertaken by the
Firearms Control Task Force of the Canadian Department of Justice in 1995,
there were some 3,307 firearms owners per 100,000 people in Britain,
compared to 85,385 in the United States, 42,857 in Switzerland, 29,412 in
New Zealand, 24,138 in Canada and 19,444 in Australia. These statistics have
been the subject of angry critique by Jan Stevenson (1996), who argues that
these official estimates lack credibility to any knowledgeable
sports-shooter, but they are largely consistent with another set of
statistical comparisons collected by The
Observer (see Table 6.2).
Whether or not
one accepts either of these different sets of comparative data, it is clear
that the prevalence of legally owned firearms in England, Scotland and Wales
is very low on any international comparison. But, as the campaigns around
firearms regulation in the aftermath of Dunblane made clear, this has not
meant that there is no 'gun lobby' at all in England, Scotland and Wales.
One objective of this paper is to identify and record the specific character
of this 'gun lobby', and to comment on its political significance. A second
objective is to offer some interpretative commentary on the public
intervention of this lobby - with respect to the question of a certain,
socially located form of masculinity (particularly in England), and the
presence and continuing play of a particular lay-theory of the nature and
source of violence and criminality advanced by that lobby during 1996-7. It
is in this sense that this paper is an exercise in cultural criminology,
with particular respect to firearms and guns. It is decidedly not an
exercise in nineteenth-century positivist social science, of the kind which
some members of the 'gun lobby' have been keen to resurrect in recent
months, demanding attention only to 'the facts' made available on existing
systems of policing and firearms licensing and registration. The
acquaintance I have made with the system of firearms regulation in England
in 1996 and 1997 is of a system that is in need of radical modernisation
(not least in respect of computerisation of basic records on a national
archive, as against the hard-copy (paper) records which currently do service
across 43 police forces of England and Wales): it would be the most unwise
commentator who drew any firm conclusions from such a set of records.1
References made to
'the gun lobby' in England in 1996,2 in parliamentary debates
and in the national press, were very often a response to the interventions
made by the British Sports Shooting Council (BSSC). In the aftermath of
Dunblane, the BSSC assumed a lead position, for example, in the presentation
of evidence on behalf of sports shooting organisations to the Cullen
Enquiry, and, more generally, in the campaigns which were waged in the
press against what was described as panicky legislative response to the
massacre itself. For most of 1996, the BSSC presented itself as an umbrella
organisation, speaking on behalf of the British Field Sports Society, the
National Pistol Association, the National Rifle Association, the National
Small-Bore Association, the Clay Pigeon Shooting Association, the Gun Trade
Association, the Muzzle Loaders' Association, the Shooting Sports Trust and
the United Kingdom Practical Shooting Association. In its various
interventions on television and in the press during 1996, it also made
common cause with the Handgunners' Association and even the radically
libertarian Shooters' Rights Association - until the secretary of this
particular organisation, Richard Law, in December 1996 had his firearms
license revoked by Dyfed Powys police after discovery of firearms and
ammunition worth over £100,000 on his premises (which had hitherto also
functioned as a Home Office-approved firing range) on the suspicion that
these firearms could not all be for private use
(The Guardian, 5 Dec.1996).
Table 6.2
Firearms Ownership (Percentage of households with guns)
Country
Percentage of households with guns
United
States 48
Norway 32
Canada
29.1
Finland 23.2
France 22.6
New
Zealand 22.3
Austria 19.4
Belgium 16.6
Italy 16
Sweden 15.1
Northern
Ireland 8.4
Scotland 4.7
England & Wales 4.7
Source: The Observer,
18 August 1996.
The membership
of these different organisations in England, Scotland and Wales in 1996 was
said to comprise about 200,000. A significant number of these individuals
made use of these guns in a sporting context, whether competitively or
simply for 'leisure', at one of Britain's gun clubs, of which, according to
the Cullen Report (para. 8.36), there were 2,118 approved by the Secretary
of State in 1996. Significant numbers of these individuals also subscribed
to, or were regular readers of, one or more of the eleven gun magazines
which were regularly on sale in newsagents and railway bookstands in
England, Scotland and Wales, and which an inquiring journalist early in 1994
estimated to have a combined circulation of just over a quarter of a million
copies (Engel, 1994). Anecdotal evidence suggests that some of these
magazines have lost circulation since 1994, and two have ceased publication.
But there is no doubting the continued existence in England of a committed
constituency of 'sports shooters': in May 1997, for example, the Sportsmen's
Association claimed a membership of over 40,000
(Shooting Times and Country Magazine,
22 May 1997) and was able to organise three rallies in London against
the new firearms legislation, with the largest attracting over 25,000
people. The Sportsmen's Association, which in the first months of 1996 was
quite closely allied with the Shooters' Rights Association and the
Handgunners, later shifted ground, and began to present itself as a close
ally of the British Field Sports Society, which was beginning to develop an
organised campaign to defend hunting and other aspects of what its Chief
Executive referred to as the 'moral economy' of the countryside
(Shooting Times and Country Magazine,
19 June 1997).
The use of
shotguns and pistols in target-shooting may have some resonance for the
rural economy, but it also echoes the military background of many of those
routinely involved in sports shooting. During the parliamentary debates
after Dunblane, members of parliament were themselves astounded to discover
that the House of Commons had a shooting range, overwhelmingly, though not
exclusively, patronised by Conservative members from the shire counties.
Many MPs including senior members of Labour's Shadow Cabinet, were equally
surprised to discover the existence of a body known as the House of Commons
Firearms Consultative Committee (FCC), established in the aftermath of the
Hungerford shooting in August 1987 and the subsequent Firearms (Amendment)
Act 1988. The FCC had been releasing annual reports ever since, and playing
an influential advisory role in most governmental deliberations in the
sphere of firearms policy. Membership of this Committee was a result of a
process of identification and appointment of:
"those who appear to the Home Secretary to have knowledge and experience of
either the possession, use (in particular for sport or competition) or
keeping of, or transactions in,
firearms or weapons technology; or the administration or enforcement of the
provisions of the Firearms Acts. (FCC Sixth
Annual Report, 1995 para 1.1)"
It is clear that the FCC - for all
that it was established in response to the 'amok killings' in Hungerford in
August 1987- is not a committee with any direct experience of victimisation
by firearms crime, and was not appointed to any such purpose. The Committee
was established, instead, as a way of drawing more directly on the knowledge
of a specific interest-group with an experience of firearms in the routine
governance of this field of activity, still largely understood, for all the
horror of the Hungerford incident, as a sport. In this fashion - after the
example of many such imperatively coordinated advisory committees in
Whitehall which claim to provide the resource of expert knowledge - the FCC
worked to give a more direct voice in government to representatives of the
firearms industry and trade, as well as, in this instance, the
soi-disant 'sports shooting
community'. In this sense, the FCC helped to position firearms traders and
sport shooters as an integral link in the policy consultation process,
rather than leaving the trade and the sport shooters to operate primarily as
an outside lobby or pressure group - an option that is not available, under
such arrangements, to gun control organisations (like the Gun Control
Network) or to organisations of victims of firearms violence (like the
Hungerford parents' organisation or the Snowdrop petitioners). Putting this
point another way, we can say that the FCC works to normalise the idea of
firearms ownership and use (albeit within regulated circumstances) and
therefore constitutes an important element in the 'firearms lobby' in
England. A great deal of trust, for example, was placed in the sports
shooting press in the work of the FCC during the Cullen Enquiry,
particularly in respect of the arguments the firearms lobby were advancing
against any kind of ban on
private ownership of handguns. The 'sports shooters' were absolutely stunned
by the decision taken by the last government, in the critical last few days
before publication of the Cullen Report, to switch position and to go for a
partial handgun ban (see the pained remarks of Sir Jerry Wiggin MP that the
FCC was not consulted prior to publication of the Firearms Amendment Bill -Hansard, 18 Nov.1996, col. 726).
THE DISCOURSES OF THE ENGLISH
GUN LOBBY
In their agitated responses to the
Dunblane massacre, and to the urgent public pressure for a renewed and
strict regulation of firearms ownership in England, Scotland and Wales,
spokespeople for the firearms trade and for sports shooting advanced a mix
of six different discursive arguments. We shall review each of these in
brief, before moving on to our main concern in this paper - to interrogate
the meaning of the commitment to the gun that was being displayed by this
body of organised (industrial, economic, cultural and social) interest. It
is not my concern here to treat these arguments
on their merits, i.e. as if they
were themselves fully fledged quasi-social-scientific theories, My
intention is to treat them as a 'discursive formation' - as the body of
discourses that is emblematic and constitutive of the English 'gun lobby'.
i) 'Maniacs': the Proper Identification of
'Unfit Persons'
Perhaps the most frequently
rehearsed of all the discursive 'gun lobby' arguments during 1996 was that
which identified Thomas Hamilton, the perpetrator of the Dunblane massacre,
as some kind of 'psychiatric Other'. Evidence given to the Cullen Enquiry
by the BSSC placed an enormous emphasis on the responsibilities of Police
Firearms Licensing Officers in the identification of individuals as 'fit
persons' to own firearms. In particular they argued for the enhancement of
the role of GPs in this process of identification of disturbed or
problematic individuals. The Cullen Enquiry devoted fully two chapters (41
pages) to a narrative on the life of Thomas Hamilton - one of which (Chapter
4, 'Events in the life of Thomas Hamilton') is a traditional piece of
lay-theory on Thomas Hamilton's sexual psychopathology (his interest in
young boys), with no clear account being offered as to how this sexual
predilection might in itself connect to his interest in guns and the
subsequent slaughter of young pre-school children of both sexes. In the
parliamentary debates of 1996 around the Firearms Amendment Act,
spokespersons for sports shooting argued repetitively and insistently that
the key issue was not the firearm as such, but the person into whose hands a
firearm might fall. The 'real problem' was the effective identification of
'maniacs' like Thomas Hamilton or Michael Ryan and the prevention of their
gaining access to lethal weaponry.
There are three
observations to make. First, this argument is the equivalent in the English
context of that advanced in the USA' most famously by the NRA' that 'it is
not guns that kill, but people'. The argument is open to the empirical
objection arising out of a mass of sophisticated research (which the NRA has
tried consistently to marginalise or suppress through putting pressure on
funding agencies in the United States) - for example, by the Centre for
Injury Control at Emory University, Georgia (e.g. Kellermann et al., 1993).
Kellermann's work purports to demonstrate, inter alia:
"that homes
where guns are kept are almost three times more likely to be the scene of a
homicide than comparative homes without guns, even after the independent
effects of victim age, sex, race, neighbourhood, previous family violence,
anyone using illicit drugs, and any history of previous arrests were taken
into account. (Kellermann, 1994, p.615)"
On the evidence of
Kellermann,
echoing earlier work by Cook (1983) and Zimring (1968), it is precisely the
availability of guns - especially when kept in private households - which
plays a major, determining role in the production of firearms violence
(especially in the form of deliberate homicide, accidents, suicides). More
recent research by American scholars working in the public health field
makes powerful connections between the failure to regulate the spread of the
9 mm. handgun in America (the 'Saturday night special') and the continuing
escalation of violent deaths amongst young Afro-Americans in America's inner
cities. On the evidence, the issue is the prevalence of the gun, not the
question of identification of fit or unfit persons.
Secondly, the
argument that the psychiatric profession and/or GPs could be asked to play a
more active role in the firearms licensing process is based on a curious,
dated and highly individualistic psychopathological theory, namely that it
is possible a priori to identify
the existence of 'dangerous' individuals, and to anticipate, even on a
probabilistic model, their later explosion into killing sprees. The British
Medical Association (BMA), through its secretary, Mac Armstrong, gave
evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee in May 1996 indicating that
there is no such predictive measure available with respect to murderous or
other seriously anti-social behaviour, other than in the case of individuals
who already have a 'strong history of psychotic illness linked to violent
behavior' (see 'Gun Licence Tests "Are Pointless",
The Guardian, 3 May 1996). In this
respect, the BMA was simply giving voice to conclusions already well known
to penologists interested in the reform of parole in the mid-1970s, namely,
that there is no such thing as a reliable science for predicting
'dangerousness' (Bottoms, 1977).
Thirdly,
insistence on identifying 'maniacs' or 'disturbed', 'strange', 'lonely' and
isolated men unfit to hold a firearms licence was a necessary discursive
response to the fact that Thomas Hamilton, like Michael Ryan, was a 'legal'
firearms owner, that is, a person who had been identified, via the existing
licensing system, as being fit and proper to own a private arsenal of
firearms (the system makes no formal distinction, at this or any other point
in the decision-making process, between the fitness of persons to own
handguns or rifles). Moreover, many other firearms incidents appearing in
the local or national press involve individual licence-holders of
respectable backgrounds and/or in reputable occupations (rather than Rambo
stereo-types like Michael Ryan).3 As we shall see later, the
defence of the idea of the responsible gun-owner, identified in terms of
holding a licence, is not simply an empirical quasi-legal category, which
can be more or less sensibly managed (the licensing of Thomas Hamilton was
an example of mismanagement of the existing system): it is, much more
importantly, a matter of ideological and social significance, especially in
the sphere of masculinity.
ii) The Illegal Market: the 'Real Criminals'
A second popular refrain of
spokespeople for sports shooting organisations and the gun trade in 1996 was
that the legislation being pro posed was wrongly targeted. The main source
of the increased number of firearms in use on the street' was the illegal
market in guns, dominated by 'the criminal fraternity' not least, in some
accounts, by foreigners. References ranged from the Jamaican 'Yardies', who
excited so much attention in the early 1990s, to Russian and Eastern
European 'Mafiosi' whose presence, recently, is thought to be on the
increase in Western Europe as well as North America. This kind of account
has a long history in the populist criminology of the mass media and
everyday talk about crime. 'Foreign' corruption has always played a key
role, for example, in mass media accounts of the drug-trade. In recent
discussions of firearms crime in Britain, however, we have been presented
with a strong image of an underworld of organized criminals, heavily armed
themselves and active in selling on such weaponry 'on the street'. The
evidence presented in support of the: existence of such a cartel of
organized and professional criminality is rather thin. Van Duyne's (1993,
1996) close analysis of the structures of organized crime elsewhere in
Europe and, in particular, the close relationship between the
ad hoc and episodic business
activities in crime and the legitimate local economic markets, suggests that
this is a relationship of interdependence rather than of binary opposition.
We ought to be empirically interested in the process whereby guns do in
practice move between legal owners, firearm traders, individual miscreants
and/or local subcultures, rather than assuming, as the sports shooters want
to insist, that all these actors live in hermetically sealed social worlds.
iii) 'Panic legislation'
An insistent refrain from the 'gun
lobby' in 1996 was that the proposed legislation was being carried through
'in panic'. The Daily Telegraph
editorial of 17 October 1996 ('Making Law in a Panic'), for example, reacted
in shock and anger at the decision taken by the Conservative government to
change position and move towards a partial handgun ban, accusing the Cabinet
of caving in to 'Labour self-righteousness and popular emotion'. It also
carried a feature, by Allan Massie, in which the government's shift was
eventually supported on strategic grounds (to keep the Conservatives in
touch with popular emotion), but which also argued that the proposed
legislation arose from the 'emotional blackmail' exerted by 'Middle
Scotland'. In the various papers written by Munday and Stevenson (1996) and
presented to the Cullen Enquiry, the strategy adopted is that of eschewing
emotion and 'special pleading' on behalf of the Dunblane families, in order
to ground the debate over firearms regulation in what these authors take to
be the self-evident 'facts' about firearms ownership and rates of violent
crime. Implicit in this strategy, of course, is a cold certainty that these
facts speak for themselves, in favour of firearms, in the right hands, as an
entirely normal and legitimate practice - that is, for responsible,
respectable men. I shall return to this theme of rationality and
masculinity. But it is important to note here how this approach tries to
valorise the kind of measured discourse (so characteristic, for example, of
the Civil Service in England) in which the 'soundness' or 'reliability' of a
policy proposal is identified in terms of the absence of any clear or
partisan moral or political purpose.
iv) Firearms, National Pride and Sporting
Achievement
Another powerful theme for sports
shooters in 1996 was the argument that pistol shooting was recognised as an
Olympic (as well as a Commonwealth Games) sport in which Great Britain had
'traditionally' done well. This argument seems to have informed the
compromise position arrived at by the Conservative government, firstly, in
their refusal to extend the prohibition on handgun ownership to the .22
calibre pistol and, secondly, the careful way in which the Home Secretary
outlined the arrangements to be made to allow Britain's best pistol shooters
to continue with their training (with police escort being provided during
transportation and storage of their guns and equipment abroad). It is
noteworthy how frequently the spokesperson chosen to represent the sports
shooting interest in debates on national television in 1996 (including, for
example, Jeremy Paxman's You Decide)
was Carol Page, Olympic team member and .32 calibre pistol
shooter, always appearing in the national tracksuit. The obvious discursive
connection being constructed here was to 'national pride', signified by Ms
Page's achievement in the international Olympic sphere. The attempt to
connect sporting victories to ideas of national honour, and, indeed, to the
self-esteem of individual citizens (all drawn together as 'the nation')
continues to be a powerful aspect of the coverage of different sports (in
particular, international athletics or football) in the popular and quality
press and on national television. It has many troubling features at a time
when tribal feelings are on the increase throughout the world. Some thirty
years ago, two Conservative commentators with significant sporting
experience, Philip Goodhart and Christopher Chataway (1968) - apparently
resigned to the inevitability of such tribal sentiment - referred to
international sports competition as a form of 'War without Weapons'. But
sports-shooting matches involve the competitive use of firepower and in that
sense specifically connect the idea of international competition and the
acquisition and ownership of armaments in general.
A closely
connected dimension of this appeal to the firearm as an essential piece of
sports equipment was the insistence on shooting, generally, as a sport.
Shooting, whether of grouse on a moor or targets on a range, was often
identified, especially alongside archery, as a form of country or field
sport, on a continuum of sports and leisure pastimes with angling, cricket
and golf. Several important sub-texts (which is to say 'presences') and
several issues which were left unsaid ('absences') arose in this particular
discursive argument. The first spoken sub-text was that sports shooting was
a popular and democratic form of sport in which, according to the BSSC in
the evidence it presented to the Home Affairs Subcommittee in 1996, 'over
one million' participate. Sports shooting, like angling, was presented as a
significant participatory sport. This argument always invited critical
empirical enquiry and attempts (on several audience-participation programmes
in 1996) to equate sports shooting with angling, cricket or golf usually
resulted in incredulous and angry audience responses.
A second
sub-text worked to represent sports-shooting as the chosen and preferred
sport of women (Carol Page acting almost as an iconic signifier of women's
active and enthusiastic participation) and also of the disabled - especially
disabled people confined to wheelchairs. This argument found some purchase
in amendments to the Labour government's Firearms Bill in the House of Lords
in September 1997, exempting disabled people from the overall ban on
handguns. The effect of this discursive move was to emphasise the
harmlessness of sports shooting and suggest that any criticism of the use of
firearms by the disabled would be insensitive to the situation of disabled
people. The show of solidarity with the disabled by defenders of sport
shooting also opened up the kinds of arguments, so frequently rehearsed by
the gun lobby in the USA, with respect to guns as an instrument for
self-defence.
Whatever else
might be said about the substance of these two sub-texts, they had the
crucial effect of suppressing alternative arguments - specifically, the
issue of 'arms and the man' (the sensuous and affectionate relationship of
the sports shooter with the gun4), in the different expressions
which this connection assumes in sports shooting and handgun clubs. Though
no statistical evidence is available in the public realm, it is clear that
the membership of the more than 2,000 gun clubs in Britain is overwhelmingly
male. The forms of masculinity in evidence in these clubs will vary - from
the 'protest masculinity' that, according to some investigative journalists
and even to many sports shooters themselves, was in evidence in many handgun
clubs - to forms of 'respectable' military masculinity in evidence among
many committed sports-shooting enthusiasts. This particular inscription of
respectable masculinity echoed the mix of attitude, behaviour and practice
which the BSSC saw itself as representing, and therefore could never be
subject to critical investigation (even in its particular and defining 'love
of guns').
v) The Tutelage and Discipline of Sports
Shooting
Another important sub-text of the
discourses over firearms and sport was the emphasis often placed on the
merits of the discipline and training involved in the introduction of
novices and young people into use of firearms on dedicated firing ranges.
This refrain was particularly marked in discussion of the use of firearms
by Officers' Training Corps in secondary schools up and down the country. In
1997 it resurfaced in a debate within the Boy Scouts movement over the use
of firearms training as part of the process of 'character-building'
traditionally associated with the Scouts. This clearly echoed the
discourses of 'harmless respectability' and evoked the notion that the
responsible use of guns and the
commitment of individuals to training and
practice reflected other closely connected social values. The
maintenance (and perhaps the effective reproduction) of social order,
irrespective of party-political and other considerations, was suggested, as
was training for leadership (for example, in the competitive new world of
finance and commerce) of 'disciplined' individuals, attuned, we might say,
to focusing on specific and dedicated targets. The specific construction
being attempted here was to the idea of self-improvement through hard work
and repetitive practice - a refrain which had enormous cultural purchase at
a time when English society was becoming increasingly aware of the
importance of skill and disciplined' habits of work and personal lifestyle
in competitive post-Fordist circumstances. But in England these refrains
simultaneously carried powerful and nostalgic references to 'tried and
trusted' cultural themes: of deference to the good taste and sensibilities
of the landed nobility, the 'English gentleman' no less, harmlessly carrying
his shotgun across the grouse moors, and relying on his retainers to collect
the fallen quarries; and also to a form of masculinity that, by
definition, spoke of reliability in
a world of great uncertainties and change.
vi) Guns for Self-protection, and the Right to
Bear Arms
The analysis of discourses of the
English gun lobby must pay attention to 'absences' (suppressed or forgotten
areas of talk and discussion) as well as 'presences' in the chosen or
approved forms. In this respect we should be attentive to how the arguments
which were voiced by sports shooters or spokespersons for the firearms trade
in England differed from the discourses of the 'gun lobby' in the USA. In
contrast to the arguments that have become familiar in the US throughout the
1980s and 1990s, for example (Kopel, 1992), little credence was placed in
England on the firearm as an instrument for self-protection and none at all
on the idea of 'the concealed weapon' which is now legal in many different
American states (see McDowell, Loftin and Wiersema, 1995). Nor was there
much display of another dimension of the American debate, very effectively
mobilised by the NRA, in which the carrying of firearms by women was
advocated as an extension of feminist discourse on the carrying of rape
alarms. It is not that these arguments are never voiced in England (the
Paxman programme gave voice to an elderly Yorkshireman who had
pistol-whipped two local car thieves), but they were not taken up as
first-order arguments, with a high degree of public legitimacy or appeal.
There was also little evidence in the debates in Parliament or on public
television of the NRA argument about the right to carry guns as a marker and
an entitlement of full-blooded citizenship, protected by the Second
Amendment of the US Constitution (for further discussion of this currently
pressing political and legal issue see Wills, 1995). This kind of argument
was publicly advanced only by the Shooters' Rights Association, although
there is some evidence that small numbers of other individuals, often of
military background or associated with fringe organisations of the far right5
and far left6 hold them. For the shooting and firearms
lobby as a whole, recognition of some other notion of citizenship (we shall
argue later, the nature of Englishness) acted as a check on any such
populist or libertarian rhetoric.
INTERPRETING THE DISCOURSES OF
SPOKESPERSONS FOR THE ENGLISH GUN LOBBY
The analysis of discourses and/or
ideological representation is one of the most fertile and contested areas of
social-scientific enquiry. This is also an area on which literary theory
(whether in the psychoanalytical or Bakhtinian traditions) has a lot to
offer. One of the fascinating aspects of doing analytical work on issues of
firearms ownership or crime is the frequency with which one encounters the
use of linguistic references or metaphors deriving from the sphere of
firearms: 'getting a bead on the target', 'going off half cock', 'going
ballistic', 'son of a gun', and so on. The use of such metaphors seems
especially common in reports and commentaries on male-dominated sports -
particularly football. Only last week, the Chief Executive of Manchester
United, Martin Edwards, was quoted in the local newspaper, on his football
club's search for new players on the transfer market, as saying:
"There is one more transfer possibility. There is one more bullet in the gun
and if we hit the target it will be a useful addition …….Sometimes you don't
get what you want immediately, then if you keep your powder dry another
opportunity will arise. (Manchester Evening
News, 10 July 1997, p.76)"
There is also evidence of a
widespread use of militaristic and firearms metaphors in the world of
business and finance in competitive market society: the routine talk, for
example, of 'hits' or 'taking out the opposition', which could fruitfully
be the subject of separate extended study.
I wish to focus my analysis of
the discourse of the English gun lobby on three distinct themes. But I need
first to clarify my position. I am not arguing that public discourses
against gun control had a constant or unitary character. In fact the
priorities of the 'gun lobby' changed quite markedly at different moments in
1996: first, in relation to the broad 'war of position' taking place in
parliamentary or press responses, especially in respect of daily reports
from the Cullen Enquiry; and, secondly, in relation to other initiatives
taken by individuals or different sports-shooting organisations or
representatives of the gun trade, as well as in response to arguments
amongst these groups about the strategy of a common front (through the BSSC).
Nor am I arguing that one can understand the discourses of the English gun
lobby just through a close reading of what was said by their spokespersons
in the course of the long debates of 1996: there is, as I have said, a lot that was left unspoken and unattended,
including the full horror of the event which gave rise to the firearms
debate of 1996 in the first place. Dunblane was always deplored, but in a
manner which suggested that there was need to move on from emotion to more
'rational' discourses ('the facts').
i) There was
widespread resort by spokespersons for the gun lobby to the use of
statistics and 'facts' and the denunciation of the movements for firearms
control as being led by 'emotion' and 'panic'. The unspoken sub-text in
these interventions is clear enough:
"A familiar
theme in patriarchal ideology is that men are rational whilst women are
emotional. This is a deep-seated assumption in European philosophy. It is
one of the leading ideas in sex-role theory, in the form of the
instrumental/expressive dichotomy, and is widespread in popular culture
too. Science and technology, seen by the dominant ideology as the motors of
progress, are culturally defined as a masculine realm. Hegemonic masculinity
establishes its hegemony partly by its claim to embody the power of reason,
and thus represent the interests of the whole society. (Connell, 1994
p.164)"
So the submission made by Jan
Stevenson, the founder of The Handgunner,
to the Cullen Enquiry, we are told, was informed, with no false
modesty, from 'four decades of study and experience' resulting from his
working 'to the highest standards of scholarship' (Stevenson, 1996, p.73).
The Home Office evidence to the Cullen Enquiry is indicted, with great
force, by Richard Munday, the military historian and firearms enthusiast, as
having resulted from 'over-hasty compilation' and being 'full of unsupported
statements, logical non-sequiturs and somewhat tortuous overlay of
different strains of argument' (Munday, 1996, p.227).
ii) This claim
to masculinity having a close and definitive connection to rationality is
closely tied up with an idea of men as exercising their rationality whilst
in positions of power and authority, that is, whilst being
responsible. In its pure form, this
equates patriarchy with the Law of the Father, responsible for the safety
and well-being of a dependent family and, of course, in many cultures at
many times (the American frontier in the last century), this connects
directly to the idea of the Man/Father/Head of Household acting as Guard
against a threatening world of Nature and the human Other ('wild bears' or
'the Indians', for example).7 In a culture in which there has
been no generalised and legal popular access to guns since 1662, however,
this kind of discourse has scant purchase.8
iii) England is
also a distinctive culture in a very different sense. As Perry Anderson, Tom
Nairn and E.P. Thompson made clear in their momentous political and
theoretical debate in the 1960s, this is a society in which there still has
not been a successful bourgeois revolution. In his classic essay on 'The
Peculiarities of the English’, Thompson (1965) argues that the slow process
of social change inaugurated by the Settlement of 1688 produced no
full-scale transformation of social relations (or bourgeois achievement of
hegemony), but neither did it completely institutionalise the aristocracy or
the lesser gentry in a permanent and secure position. Instead the eighteenth
century and early nineteenth century were witness to a process of
accommodation of landed gentry and mercantile interests at both national and
local level, a process which Thompson, in order to highlight the murky
character of the economic, political, personal and familial struggles that
repetitively took place in the winning of position and influence during this
period, chooses to call 'Old Corruption. These struggles were nearly always
played out, however, in the context of appeals to continuity, whether in the
form of national tradition or
local custom. It is remarkable how
even the high points of England’s commercial, industrial and imperial
activities were accompanied, discursively, by appeals to ideas of 'the
nation' expressed in terms of the traditions and practices of rural England
and the quaint traditions of the rural gentry.
The sporting gun
or the shotgun as an emblem of the landed gentry lifestyle found expression
in the submissions made to the House of Commons Home Affairs Subcommittee
and to the Cullen Enquiry by the BSSC: emphasis was placed on the use of
firearms by field sports men and farmers (notably, in a phrase that would be
of interest to linguistic analysts, in the control of vermin). In nearly all
such representations, the more specific agendas of the different
organisations affiliated to the BSSC coalition (like the National Pistol
Association or the Gun Trade Association) were subordinated to the
generalised 'master text'. This, as outlined earlier, carried a range of
different allusions to: the self-evidently responsible moral character of
firearms owners deemed fit to own such weaponry through the existing system
of firearms licensing; the important role of such weapons in a recognised
Olympic sport; and the importance of the kind of training and discipline
involved in training young people ('future leaders') in the safe but
effective use of firearms.
The social
references operative in these discourses of the English gun lobby were
quite different to the references
mobilised in the rhetoric of the NRA in the United States, with the
constantly repeated refrain about the constitutional 'right to bear arms' or
to the NRA's alter egos, the armed militias, taking the paranoid themes in
American politics to their logical extremes by taking up arms against an
oppressive State. The English gun lobby's appeal, by contrast, was to an
ordered and hierarchical world in which a limited number of respectable men,
licensed to carry guns essentially on the basis of trust, would exercise
their paternalistic responsibilities - like the gentry itself - with care
and restraint. This sure and certain discourse was threatened less by
individual incidents like the Dunblane and Hungerford spree-killings (which
the discourse had firmly identified as the acts of 'maniacs' -
self-evidently emerging from very
different biographies than those of the typical - responsible and
respectable - sports shooter) than by the various interventions made during
the debates of 1996 by committed 'firearms-libertarians', echoing the
arguments of the NRA for a universal
entitlement to own and carry guns.
In the summer of
1996, some of these arguments began to be advanced on radio and television
by Richard Munday and Jan Stevenson of the Handgunners' Association and
Richard Law of the Shooters' Rights Association. These interventions were
sometimes accompanied in newspaper feature articles on the gun clubs with
pictures of handgun enthusiasts foregrounding knots of khaki clad young men
in balaclavas (see, for example, Peter Beaumont, 'Dressed to Kill - Just for
Thrills', The Observer, 12
Sept.1993). These representations provided critical visual evidence of the
co-presence within the 'sports shooting fraternity' of the kinds of young
men associated in the public mind with street-corner gangsterism in Los
Angeles or the genocidal civil wars in Chechnya, Rwanda or Yugoslavia -
young men by definition beyond
control of the established hierarchies of power and status. There was
visual confirmation, in other words, of handguns having fallen into the
hands of 'the dispossessed'. The presence of such images paralleled the
release of a series of press stories detailing the mayhem being caused in
the United States as a result of the cheap and easy availability of the 9
mm. handgun (the 'Saturday night special').
But for most
English readers the United States is a long way away, especially in terms of
its constitutional libertarianism. The anxiety provoked by the press images
was social and
political: it was evidence not just
of the existence in England of a large and angry underclass of dispossessed
young men. The visual images provided a powerful empirical counter-factual
to the public rhetorics of the sport-shooting 'community', and especially
the refrain that firearms ownership was best understood in terms of the
retrieval of the 'country way of life'. They may also have problematised the
gun lobby's argument that there is no connection between the legal and
illegal markets in firearms. The young men shown in many of these
photographic images did not look like, the kind who would pause to enquire
about the provenance of particular weapons. The importance of such visual
symbols in the public debate that led to the passage of the Firearms
(Amendment) Act 1996 is incalculable. The quite momentous move towards
heightened regulation of firearms in England in 1996 involved the kinds of
deep-seated fears and anxieties that have historically underpinned life in a
society still deeply divided by class and status. And finally, as Prince
Phillip himself only belatedly understood, it also involved a fundamental
misreading of the way in which any unqualified and obstinate appeals to the
values of the English countryman (as if they were some kind of social and
political solution to firearms problems in the late 1990s) had been
undermined by the horror of Dunblane.
NOTES
Revised version of the paper
presented to the British Society of Criminology Conference, Queen's
University, Belfast (July 1997).
Acknowledgements: This paper
benefits from very helpful suggestions from Ruth Jamieson and from both the
editors of this volume, as well as from my continuing conversations with
Tony and Judith Hill, Mick North and Gill Marshall-Andrews of the Gun
Control Network.
-
Commentators frequently try to make use, for example, of
existing statistical material in order to demonstrate the absence of any
evidence for a link between the number of legal-owned firearms in private
hands and the frequency with which firearms are used in crime (Munday and
Stevenson, 1996, passim). I am as
sceptical about these statistical exercises (on the basis of existing police
data in England and Wales) as I am about those studies, like that of Corkery
(1994), which try to demonstrate the existence of some such link and/or
suggest that there is an increasing use 'by criminals' of firearms stolen
from legal firearms owners.
-
I have opted to identify the 'gun lobby' of England, Scotland
and Wales as the English gun lobby. I am aware that the campaigns against
the Firearms Amendment Act in 1996 attracted some support in Wales and also,
in rather more muted fashion, in Scotland. The bulk of my argument,
especially in the second half of my paper, is that the politics of the gun
lobby are rather closely implicated with the idea of the 'respectable
English country gentleman'.
-
In 1996, for example, the press reported on a 66-year-old pensioner
and retired cleaner from High Wycombe who allowed access to guns to young
children visiting his home - which children then revisited his home and
stole the guns for use in thefts (The Guardian, 19 March); a prison
officer (arrested at Milton Keynes rail station when threatening a woman
with a Magnum pistol), licensed for five of twelve guns found in his home
(The Mail on Sunday, 9 June), and a London marketing executive found
drunk in possession of an antique shotgun on a West Highland rail line
(Scotsman, 3 October). These examples, alighted on through no systematic
process of search, do not include the instances of use of firearms by
licensed owners on their own families or themselves which are reported in
the local press (for example, the murder of 12-year-old Dominic Bennici by
his father, Vincent, who then committed suicide, in Oldham in 1997
(Manchester Evening News, 14 March 1997).
-
Even the most cursory examination of the firearms press
provides a mass of evidence of discourses crying out for psychoanalytic and
critical cultural interpretation. The August 1996 issue of Guns and
Shooting, for example, had as its special feature the new 'Bianchi Beef
Cake' Action Revolver, with the plaintive enquiry 'Is It Up to the Job?’
-
In October 1995, for example, the 64-year-old Mr Bannistre-Parker,
who claimed to be a retired army Major, was arrested at his home in Preston
after threatening two burglars with a shotgun. In court, it was revealed
that Mr Bannistre-Parker was an active member of an organisation known as
the legion of Frontiersmen (European Command)
(Daily Telegraph, 25
Oct.1995).
-
In late 1996 and early 1997, for example, a curious alliance
was struck between the BSSC and Living Marxism, the house
journal of the Revolutionary Communist Party, in campaigning against New
labour's commitments to an extension of the ban of private handguns
owner-ship. At a pre-election seminar in London in February 1997, one of the
chief theoreticians of the RCP, Frank Furedi, argued that the proposed
firearms legislation represented 'the new authoritarianism' of a
crisis-ridden capitalist State, a descendant of the Firearms Act 1920, which
he interpreted as an attempt by the capitalist state to disarm revolutionary
fractions of the proletariat.
-
The NRA'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 the marauding Indians
and other foes, and was an important means of securing food for the pioneer
family. (Smith and Smith, 1948, p. i).
-
The Militia Act 1662 of Charles II authorized the King's agent 'to
search for and seize all arms in the custody or possession of any person or
persons who the said lieutenants or any two or more of their deputies shall
judge dangerous to the peace of the kingdom'. This statute was followed up
by the punitive Game Act 1671 debarring all non-hunters from owning guns, on
pain of severe fines. There have been periods since when small numbers of
arms have crept back into civil society, usually via soldiers returning from
wars (e.g. 1918-20), but generally English everyday life has been free from
the threat of firearms owned and used by other citizens from the late
seventeenth century onwards. (For an alternative interpretation, see Kopel,
1992.)
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