SERIOUSLY TANKED UP
Alasdair Palmer on the ease with which
you can acquire your own heavy armaments
'YEAH, I CAN get you a bazooka: a rock- et launcher would be more difficult, but not necessarily impossible.' The man so eager to oblige with hi-tech weaponry was sitting opposite me. He is a dealer — not normally in bazookas and rocket launch- ers, but in shotguns. 'The thing is,' he added, 'there's so much military equip- ment around in Russia and eastern Europe, and so many soldiers who need money, that practically anything is avail- able if you're willing to pay the price. And the price is still coming down.' Curious to meet the suppliers of this formidable array of military hardware, I wondered whether I could purchase the bazooka, and maybe the rocket launcher, myself. The dealer was not enthusiastic. 'You could try, but personally, I wouldn't advise it. The men who organise these sales are not very nice. They would not think twice about, say, running you over if they thought you were setting them up. And, quite honestly, they'd see you coming a mile off. Your problem is that you do not look as if you really need a bazooka.' I was relieved to hear that. But it raised the intriguing question of what someone who really needs a bazooka looks like. The dealer refused to elaborate. 'Not like you' was all he would say.
You will be glad to know that I am not, now, the proud owner of one bazooka. The price may be coming down, but it still runs to several thousand pounds, and The Spectator was not prepared to invest that kind of money in a bazooka — though there are one or two people here who look as if they could really use one. The dealer also offered me a whole range of less cumbersome, though hardly less destructive, weaponry. 'Automatic pistols, Uzi sub-machine guns, AK74s (Kalash- nikov's latest adaptation of his world famous assault rifle) . . . I can get them all for you, easy. But weapons like that you probably could get for yourself. It would probably be safer and easier to do it abroad — just hang around in Berlin or any big garrison town in east Germany but if you want to do it in London or Manchester, all you need to do is go into the right pub. But you'll be on your own. I
don't want it known in those circles that I've been talking to someone like you.'
'In those circles' refers to the widening class of criminals who minister to the bur- geoning demand for unlicensed guns. Prices have fallen so drastically that it is now actually less expensive to purchase a pistol on the black market than to buy it legally. A pistol which would cost £300 from a licensed gun shop — and which you could take home only after filling in dozens of forms, several interviews with the police, and a detailed inspection of your home — can be bought for around half that on the street. No questions asked, and no forms to fill in.
The gun-licensing laws are very obvious- ly failing to keep guns out of the hands of criminals. Twelve-year-olds pack pistols on Moss Side in Manchester. Rival drug gangs have no difficulty in finding guns to shoot each other. Armed robbers are hold- ing up more and more banks, post offices and building societies — though they at least still seem to prefer threatening bank clerks and customers with old, dependable sawn-off shotguns rather than assault rifles, machine guns or bazookas.
But then the point of the licensing laws is not, in fact, to keep guns out of the hands of criminals. It is to keep them out of the hands of ordinary, law-abiding citi- zens. The basis for the current legislation is the Firearms Act of 1921. Before that Act, anyone could own a gun without any interference from the state. Blackstone's commentaries had even laid down the right 'of having, and using arms for self- preservation and defence' as one of the three fundamental constitutional rights of British subjects (the others being the 'reg- ular administration and free course of jus- tice in courts of law', and of 'petitioning the king and Parliament for redress of grievances').
But in 1921, the government took fright at the sight of thousands of recently demo- bilised members of the working class ex-soldiers who had just spent four years learning how to use guns and whose expe- rience in the trenches had not necessarily reinforced the love and respect they ought to feel for their social superiors. The spec-
tre of a Bolshevik revolution was real enough to persuade Lloyd George's gov- ernment to introduce the first set of con- trols on firearm ownership.
Subsequent acts followed the template laid down in 1921. The conviction last week of Malcolm Hammond for unlawful posses- sion of a firearm demonstrates that. Ham- mond is a jeweller. He and his wife were held up at gunpoint, tied up, while two rob- bers attempted to force his safe. Hammond freed himself, and in the ensuing struggle, shot the robbers. He says he fired after grabbing the pistol from one of the rob- bers. The police say he owned it himself and since he did not produce a licence for it, they had him prosecuted. Mr Hammond was fined £2000 and ordered to pay costs. He now joins Douglas Hurd and Lord Caithness in the distinguished group of citi- zens who have been been convicted for fail- ing in some way to comply with the firearms regulations. Detective Chief Inspector David Howe, correctly interpret- ing the Firearms Act, said the case 'goes to show that members of the public cannot possess firearms without proper authority'. Criminals apparently can — but then the Act was never really intended to touch them.
The connection between increased gun ownership and increased gun-related death is not as straightforward as it seems. In 1966, in Orlando, Florida, there was an epi- demic of rape cases. Police responded with a highly publicised campaign to train 2,500 women in the use of guns. The result was that rape cases in Orlando fell by 85 per cent during the next year. Shootings also dropped. And five years later, Orlando's rape statistics were still 13 per cent lower than the 1966 level, whilst in the surround- ing towns, rape was up by over 300 per cent. Accident? Chance? Or a rational response by would-be rapists to the raised risks they faced? During a police strike in Albuquerque in 1974, armed citizens patrolled the streets and shopkeepers all broadcast their ownership of guns. The result was not a collapse of public order, but a lower crime rate than the city had seen for years.
The situation in some areas of Britain today is more like a police strike than a Bolshevik revolution. The biggest threat to public order is certainly not from an organ- ised proletarian uprising. It is from crimi- nals whose capacity to intimidate grows by the day.
The state's most important task — per- haps its only legitimate one — is to protect its citizens from force and fraud. When it fails to do that, can it ever have the right to prevent citizens from protecting them- selves? We have not — yet — reached the situation where most people feel they need a gun. But unless the police devote more time and effort to controlling the criminal, as opposed to the legitimate use of guns, we may soon reach it. And then the arms race will really begin. Anyone for bazookas?
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