Mr. Toad is very fond of referring to certain 1997 British firearms legislation as a “gun ban”. In his own “short story” excerpt, Mr. Toad points out that
"Thus the Firearms Act of 1920 sailed through Parliament. Britons who had formerly enjoyed a right to arms were now allowed to possess pistols and rifles only if they proved they had "good reason" for receiving a police permit.” Thus, guns were effectively banned in 1920. That being the case, how could guns be banned again in 1996/1997 when they were
already banned? They couldn’t. And that’s because the 96/97 legislation was not a “gun ban”. It was an addendum or codicil to existing legislation, under which guns have been “banned” for generations.
As for those who had “formerly enjoyed a right to arms”, the author of Mr. Toad’s reference work seeks to interpret the gun situation in Britain from an American perspective. That does not work. The 1920 legislation came about shortly after WW1. There would have been a lot of old WW1 service revolvers left lying around – ready to be stolen and used by criminals perhaps… 1920 predates me by some margin, and I have no idea of the public mood with regard to firearms at that time. But I don’t suppose for one minute that there were any pro-gun diehards chaining themselves to the gates of Buckingham Palace, and chanting
”From my cold dead hands”. You have to remember that Britain has never had a love affair with guns in the way America has. It seems likely that, following a war which was costly in terms of human suffering, most people were only too glad to see redundant guns collected up and melted down, and to put that chapter of history behind them. Certainly, I cannot recall ANYONE from my grandparents’ generation harking back to the “good old days when we had guns”.
The fact that the 1997 “gun ban” did little to influence gun crime was because it wasn’t a ban. So why is Mr. Toad so fond of referring to it as such? There are two reasons. One is of course that it gives him a leg up on the one-upmanship ladder, from which he can crow
“Your ‘gun ban’ didn’t work”. The other reason is closer to (his) home. America’s gun nuts are worried about their gun rights being eroded. Mr. Toad comments on the chronology of gun law in Britain, and how our “rights were taken away” by the anti gun crowd, and then adds
“You'll also find that anti-gun US groups are using the same techniques”. It’s understandable the the pro-gun crowd should be worried, what with a presidential election scheduled for next week, and with Kerry edging ahead in the polls. The second reason Mr. Toad refers to our most recent firearms legislation as a “gun ban” falls into two parts.
- Part 1 is because his largely American audience will be gulled into believing that prior to the 1997 “gun ban”, Britain had a policy of guns-4-all just like the US. This illusion is very easy for Mr. Toad to conjour up because most Americans have never been outside the US, and therefore have no concept of an unarmed society: Guns-4-All is the only thing they’ve ever known. I see the evidence for this in numerous posts – guys who believe that the “confiscation” of our guns was a prelude to our being “rounded up and exterminated” – and other such tripe in which the author has drawn parallels with events from earlier centuries under oppressive totalitarian regimes. Couple that with Mr. Toad’s alarmist rhetoric of “You'll also find that anti-gun US groups are using the same techniques”, and it’s easy to see why the pro-gun crowd can be won over into his camp.
- Part 2 is that by calling the 1997 legislation a “gun ban” when in fact it was a modification to earlier legislation which itself had kept our gun crime at relatively low levels, Mr. Toad can turn to his pro-gun American audience and say “See – ‘gun bans’ don’t work – it didn’t change anything in Britain, and it wouldn’t change anything here”.
And Mr. Toad’s campaign of convincing pro gun Americans of that has not been without success. He wants people to believe that “bans don’t work” in order to beef up his campaign at home, and to derail any attempts to legislate against guns in the US.
The logic is flawed, of course. As Mr. Toad himself would readily concede, gun crime in Britain was next to nothing both before and after 1997. The reason for that is simple. The 1997 legislation had little to do with it. Earlier legislation dating back to the first half of the last century ensured that no gun culture developed, and that there was never a situation by which there were gun shops in every neighbourhood. Because good people never had guns, bad people could never target any to steal.
We have however always had shotguns, but these would largely be owned by country folk – pheasant shooters, farmers. But this meant that criminals could get them too. So whereas in America, a heist might involve handguns, here it would be shotguns. But these were cumbersome and difficult to conceal, even after the illegal modification of having the barrel shortened.
Originally posted by Mr. Toad
Your gun crime always has been low.
I guess that means we must be doing something right, or that our gun control
works – or both.
