Oregon Shooter

If each of us carried a gun . . .

Posted: December 10, 2008 | Last Updated: June 06, 2009

Think tank: If each of us carried a gun . . .
. . . we could help to combat terrorism

Richard Munday

The firearms massacres that have periodically caused shock and horror
around the world have been dwarfed by the Mumbai shootings, in which
a handful of gunmen left some 500 people killed or wounded.

For anybody who still believed in it, the Mumbai shootings exposed
the myth of “gun control”. India had some of the strictest firearms
laws in the world, going back to the Indian Arms Act of 1878, by
which Britain had sought to prevent a recurrence of the Indian
Mutiny.

The guns used in last week’s Bombay massacre were all “prohibited
weapons” under Indian law, just as they are in Britain. In this
country we have seen the irrelevance of such bans (handgun crime, for
instance, doubled here within five years of the prohibition of legal
pistol ownership), but the largely drug-related nature of most
extreme violence here has left most of us with a sheltered awareness
of the threat. We have not yet faced a determined and broad-based
attack.

The Mumbai massacre also exposed the myth that arming the police
force guarantees security. Sebastian D’Souza, a picture editor on the
Mumbai Mirror who took some of the dramatic pictures of the assault
on the Chhatrapati Shivaji railway station, was angered to find
India’s armed police taking cover and apparently failing to engage
the gunmen.

In Britain we might recall the prolonged failure of armed police to
contain the Hungerford killer, whose rampage lasted more than four
hours, and who in the end shot himself. In Dunblane, too, it was the
killer who ended his own life: even at best, police response is
almost always belated when gunmen are on the loose. One might think,
too, of the McDonald’s massacre in San Ysidro, California, in 1984,
where the Swat team waited for their leader (who was held up in a
traffic jam) while 21 unarmed diners were murdered.

Rhetoric about standing firm against terrorists aside, in Britain we
have no more legal deterrent to prevent an armed assault than did the
people of Mumbai, and individually we would be just as helpless as
victims. The Mumbai massacre could happen in London tomorrow; but
probably it could not have happened to Londoners 100 years ago.

In January 1909 two such anarchists, lately come from an attempt to
blow up the president of France, tried to commit a robbery in north
London, armed with automatic pistols. Edwardian Londoners, however,
shot back – and the anarchists were pursued through the streets by a
spontaneous hue-and-cry. The police, who could not find the key to
their own gun cupboard, borrowed at least four pistols from passers-
by, while other citizens armed with revolvers and shotguns preferred
to use their weapons themselves to bring the assailants down.

Today we are probably more shocked at the idea of so many ordinary
Londoners carrying guns in the street than we are at the idea of an
armed robbery. But the world of Conan Doyle’s Dr Watson, pocketing
his revolver before he walked the London streets, was real. The
arming of the populace guaranteed rather than disturbed the peace.

That armed England existed within living memory; but it is now so
alien to our expectations that it has become a foreign country. Our
image of an armed society is conditioned instead by America: or by
what we imagine we know about America. It is a skewed image, because
(despite the Second Amendment) until recently in much of the US it
has been illegal to bear arms outside the home or workplace; and
therefore only people willing to defy the law have carried weapons.

In the past two decades the enactment of “right to carry” legislation
in the majority of states, and the issue of permits for the carrying
of concealed firearms to citizens of good repute, has brought a
radical change. Opponents of the right to bear arms predicted that
right to carry would cause blood to flow in the streets, but the
reverse has been true: violent crime in America has plummeted.

There are exceptions: Virginia Tech, the site of the 2007 massacre of
32 people, was one local “gun-free zone” that forbade the bearing of
arms even to those with a licence to carry.

In Britain we are not yet ready to recall the final liberty of the
subject listed by William Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws
of England as underpinning all others: “The right of having and using
arms for self-preservation and defence.” We would still not be ready
to do so were the Mumbai massacre to happen in London tomorrow.

“Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India,” Mahatma Gandhi
said, “history will look upon the act depriving a whole nation of
arms as the blackest.” The Mumbai massacre is a bitter postscript to
Gandhi’s comment. D’Souza now laments his own helplessness in the
face of the killers: “I only wish I had had a gun rather than a
camera.”

Richard Munday is the co-author and editor of Guns & Violence: The
Debate Before Lord Cullen

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/article5299010.ece

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