Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns From: [ACUS 10] at [WACCVM.SPS.MOT.COM] (Mark Fuller) Subject: [Gun World] How Britain Lost its Gun Rights Date: Mon, 6 Dec 1993 23:47:53 GMT THE GREAT LIE [From Gun World, Sept. 93 Kopel's Komment] by David Kopel This article continues our look at the how the British people lost their right to bear arms, a tale with ominous implications for the United States. "War is the health of the state" observed one historian, and it was World War I that set in motion the growth of the British government to the size where it could begin to destroy the right to arms which the British people had enjoyed with little hindrance for over two centuries. After "The Great War" broke out in August 1914, the British government began assuming "emergency" powers for itself. "Defense of the Realm Regulations" were enacted which required a license to buy pistols, rifles or ammunition at retail. As the war came to a conclusion in 1918, many British gunowners no doubt expected that the wartime regulations soon would be repealed, and Britons would again enjoy the right to purchase the firearm of their choice without government permission. But the government had other ideas. The disaster of World War I had bred the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Armies of the new Soviet state swept into Poland, and more and more workers of the world joined strikes called by radical labor leaders who predicted the overthrow of capitalism. Many Communists and other radicals thought the Revolution was at hand; all over the English-speaking world governments feared the end. The reaction was fierce. In America, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer launched the "Palmer raids." Aliens were deported without hearings, and American citizens were searched and arrested without warrants and held without bail. While America was torn by strikes and race riots, Canada witnessed the government massacre of peaceful demonstrators at the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919. In Britain, the government worried about what would happen when the war ended and the gun controls expired. A secret government committee on arms traffic warned of danger from two sources: the "savage or semi-civilized tribesmen in outlying parts of the British Empire" who might obtain surplus war arms, and "the anarchist or 'intellectual' malcontent of the great cities, whose weapon is the bomb and the automatic pistol." At a Cabinet meeting on January 17, 1919, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff raised the threat of "Red Revolution and blood and war at home and abroad." He suggested that the government make sure of its arms. The next month, the Prime Minister was asking which parts of the army would remain loyal. The Cabinet discussed arming university men, stockbrokers and clerks to fight any revolution. The Minister of Transport, Sir Eric Geddes, predicted "revolutionary outbreak in Glasgow, Liverpool or London in the early spring, when a definite attempt may be made to seize the reins of government. "It is not inconceivable," Geddes warned, "that a dramatic and successful coup d'etat in some large center of population might win the support of the unthinking mass of labour." Using the Irish gun licensing system as a model, the Cabinet made plans to disarm enemies of the state and to prepare arms for distribution "to friends of the Government." Although popular revolution was the motive, the Home Secretary presented the government's 1920 gun bill to Parliament as strictly a measure "to prevent criminals and persons of that description from being able to have revolvers and to use them." In fact, the problem of criminal, non-political misuse of firearms remained minuscule. Of course, 1920 would not be the last time a government lied in order to promote gun control. In 1989 in the United States, various police administrators and drug enforcement bureaucrats set off national panic about "assault weapons" by claiming that semi-automatic rifles were the "weapon of choice" of drug dealers and other criminals. Actually, police statistics regarding gun seizures showed that the guns accounted for only about one percent of gun crime. Many Americans swallowed the 1989 lie about "assault weapon" crime, and most Britons in 1920 swallowed the lie about handgun crime. Indeed, the carnage of World War I (caused in good part by the outdated tactics of the British and French general staffs) had produced a general revulsion against anything associated with the military, including rifles and handguns. Thus the Firearms Act of 1920 sailed through Parliament. Britons who had formerly enjoyed a right to bear arms were now allowed to possess pistols and rifles only if they proved they had "good reason" for receiving a police permit. Shotguns and airguns, which were perceived as "sporting" weapons, remained exempt from control. In the early years of the Firearms Act, the law was not enforced with particular stringency, except in Ireland, where revolutionary agitators were demanding independence from British rule. Within Great Britain, a "firearms certificate" for possession of rifles or handguns was readily obtainable. Wanting to possess a firearm for self-defense was considered a "good reason" for being granted a firearms certificate. The threat of Bolshevik revolution -- the impetus for the Firearms Act -- had faded quickly as the Communist government of the Soviet Union found it necessary to spend all its energy gaining full control over its own people, rather than exporting revolution. Ordinary firearms crime in Britain -- the pretext for the Firearms Act--remained minimal. Despite the pacific state of affairs, the government did not move to repeal the unneeded gun controls, but began to expand the controls further. In 1934, a government task force, the Bodkin Committee, was formed to study the Firearms Act. The committee collected statistics on misuse of the guns that were not currently regulated (shotguns and airguns) and collected no statistics on the guns under control (rifles and handguns). The committee concluded that there was no persuasive evidence for repeal of any part of the Firearms Act. Since the Bodkin Committee had avoided looking for evidence about how the Firearms Act was actually working, it was not surprising that the committee found no evidence in favor of decontrol. In 1973 and 1988, when the government was attempting to expand controls still further, gun control advocates claimed that the Bodkin Committee report was clear proof of how well the Firearms Act of 1920 was working and why its controls should be extended to other guns. A somewhat similar phenomenon takes place in the United States, where the federal Centers for Disease Control funds research to "prove" that guns in the hands of private citizens are a malignant "vector" that must drastically be reduced. The federally funded researchers write articles which cite previous research validating the effectiveness of gun control -- and quite often the research cited actually had found that gun control is ineffective. Spurred by the Bodkin Committee, the British government in 1934 enacted new legislation to outlaw completely (with minor exceptions) possession of sawed-off shotguns and automatic firearms. The law was partly patterned after the National Firearms Act in the United States (which taxed and registered, but did not prohibit, such guns). As a result of alcohol prohibition, America in the 1920s and early 1930s did have a problem with criminal abuse of automatic weapons, particularly by the organized crime gangsters who earned lucrative incomes supplying bootleg alcohol. The repeal of prohibition in 1933 had sent the American murder rate into a nosedive, but Congress went ahead and enacted the NFA in 1934 anyway. In Britain, there had been no alcohol prohibition, and hence no crime problem with automatics (or other guns). Yet the guns were banned since, as the government explained, automatics were crime guns in the United States, and there was no legitimate reason for civilians to possess them. The same rationale is used today in the drive to outlaw semi-automatic firearms in the United States. Since some government officials believe that people do not "need" semi-automatic firearms for hunting, they believe that such guns should be prohibited, whether or not the guns are frequently used in crime. Starting in 1936, the British police began adding a requirement to Firearms Certificates requiring that the guns be stored securely. As shotguns were not licensed, there was no such requirement for them. While the safe storage requirement might, in the abstract, seem reasonable, it has been enforced in a highly unreasonable manner by a police bureaucracy determined to make firearms owners suffer as much harassment as possible. In one case, a person traveling from a range to his home left ammunition in a locked car for an hour. When the ammunition was stolen, the man was convicted of not keeping the ammunition in a secure place. After the fall of France and the Dunkirk evacuation in 1940, Britain found itself short of arms for island defense. The Home Guard was forced to drill with canes, umbrellas, spears, pikes and clubs. When citizens could find a gun, it was generally a sporting shotgun -- ill-suited for military use, because of its short range and bulky ammunition. British government advertisements in American newspapers and in magazines such as American Rifleman begged Americans to "Send A Gun to Defend a British Home -- British civilians, faced with threat of invasion, desperately need arms for the defense of their homes." The ads pleaded for "Pistols, Rifles, Revolvers, Shotguns and Binoculars from American civilians who wish to answer the call and aid in defense of British homes." Pro-Allied organizations in the United States collected weapons; the National Rifle Association shipped 7,000 guns to Britain. Britain also purchased surplus World War I Enfield rifles from America's Department of War. Prime Minister Winston Churchill's book _Their Finest Hour_ details the arrival of the shipments. Churchill personally supervised the deliveries to ensure that they were sent on fast ships, and distributed first to Home Guard members in coastal zones. Churchill thought that the American donations were "entirely on a different level from anything we have transported across the Atlantic except for the Canadian division itself." Churchill warned his First Lord that "the loss of these rifles and field-guns would be a disaster of the first order. "When the ships from America approached our shores with their priceless arms special trains were waiting in all the ports to receive their cargoes," Churchill recalled. "The Home Guard in every county, in every town, in every village, sat up all through the night to receive them.... By the end of July we were an armed nation ... a lot of our men and some women had weapons in their hands." Before the war, British authorities had refused to allow domestic manufacture of the Thompson submachine gun because it was "a gangster gun." When the war broke out, large numbers of American-made Thompsons were shipped to Britain, where they were dubbed "tommie guns." As World War II ended, the British government did what it could to prevent the men who had risked their lives in defense of freedom and Britain from holding onto guns acquired during the war. Troop ships returning to England were searched for souvenir or captured rifles, and men caught attempting to bring firearms home were punished. Guns that had been donated by American civilians were collected from the Home Guard and destroyed by the British government. And yet, large quantities of firearms slipped into Britain, where many of them remain to this today in attics and under floor boards. At least some British gunowners, like their counterparts in today's gun-confiscating jurisdictions such as New Jersey and New York City, were beginning to conclude that their government did not trust them, and that their government could not be trusted to deal with them fairly.