ANOTHER VOICE
Give us the tools and we will finish the job
CHARLES MOORE
People in Britain are more frightened of crime than ever before, according to an opinion poll. The two most notable changes in modern crime are that so much of it is related to drugs and that criminals are so much more often armed. So the best thing to do, most people appear to think, is to make guns and drugs more difficult to obtain. Right-wing people feel this more strongly about drugs and left-wing people about guns; but all are united in believing that the answer lies in banning objects with which people do bad things.
This is, when you think about it, an extremely strange idea. It is rather like the argument that shops full of goods lead poor people to commit crimes because they are forced to grab what they cannot afford. It transfers moral responsibility from people to things, as if God, instead of telling Moses that thou shalt not covet thy neigh- bour's ox, or wife, or ass, instructed him to get rid of all three so that the occasion for covetousness would not present itself.
Drugs and guns contain no inherent moral qualities. The product of the opium poppy can assist medical treatment or wreck a life. A bullet from an AK-47 can murder the innocent or defend them. It all depends upon who has the things and why. In the West we seem unwittingly to have devised a system by which the only people to have drugs and guns are particularly unpleasant criminals. This has happened at least partly because drugs and guns are more or less forbidden to the law-abiding majority. Given that there will always be a demand for both, and given that the laws restricting both have become harsher and harsher, it is inevitable that those prepared to supply the demand are bad and danger- ous men. And since illegality drives up the price, these men get very rich precisely because what they do is forbidden; and since what they do is forbidden, and there- fore clandestine and unregulated, they set their own savage rules, which include killing people who threaten their (untaxed) profits. The law has created a huge market economy beyond its reach, depriving the Treasury of revenue and increasing the likelihood of crime, misery and death.
Some commentators have perceived this in relation to drugs, compared it with the Prohibition era in America, and argued for legalisation. Their argument is strong, but its appeal is greatly limited by the associa- tions which the word 'drugs' have for con- servative-minded people. They think of those who take drugs as, at best, posturing twerps trying to show how daring they are, or, at worst, debauched monsters trying to destroy their children. So even when they see the force of the anti-prohibition case in principle, most respectable persons cannot get excited about it. Why should the law be changed, they think to themselves, to make life easier for rock stars and actresses and the Marquess of Blandford or Bristol? The prospect of destroying sinister drug gangs seems remote compared with the possibility of a daughter's yobbish boyfriend feeling that he can now light a joint in her parents' drawing-room with impunity.
Perhaps guns offer a more fruitful field for persuasion. Conservative-minded peo- ple can see the point of guns. Guns, unlike drugs, are things which they are not ashamed of having. Those of them who live in the country, and have survived the bureaucratic terror and expense imposed after the Hungerford massacre, still possess shotguns. They think that it is a good thing, in principle, that sensible people should possess them, and are only worried by the difficulty of identifying who is or is not a sensible person.
And here I think we should be more trusting. Parliamentary democracies are based on the belief that most of the people who compose them are more sensible than not. That is the principle behind giving every adult the vote, permitting every adult to sit on a jury, allowing most adults to bring up their children and so on. The prin- ciple should apply to gun ownership. Mr Algy Cluff, chairman of this magazine, is the author of the theory that the best way of stopping aeroplane hijacks is not to search every passenger for guns but to issue a gun to every passenger. That way, the interest of the majority is protected. The Algy principle can be extended to all pos- session of guns.
The obvious objection to this is that if millions of people had guns, you would 'So when I got back both the Ferrari and the Rolls had been clamped. I mean, Sarah, isn't that just typical of my luck.' only need a small proportion of idiots among those millions for quite a large number of people to be killed: look at America. And the honest answer must be that there is some truth in the objection. If millions of people had guns, one would expect more people to be killed by guns than now. But this is not such a knock- down argument as it first appears. It is not, on the whole, a good idea to forbid some- thing to the majority because of the foolish- ness or wickedness of a few. Motor-cars kill far more people than guns are ever likely to in this country, and yet few suggest banning them. Very young, very silly men are allowed to drive these engines of death so long as a test has shown that they are physi- cally competent to do so. Society has con- cluded, surely rightly, that the benefit of the freedom of the roads outweighs the possible loss of life.
Mightn't something comparable apply to guns? The present situation is that most law-breaking people can get guns and most law-abiding people cannot. There probably is not much to be done about the first point, but it is quite easy to remedy the second.
And if that were to happen, the balance of power would shift away from the crimi- nal and in favour of the ordinary citizen. If the ordinary citizen could defend his prop- erty, his property would be more truly his and one of the most important of all free- doms would be thus advanced. He would also feel better and so experience a greater freedom from fear. As for the criminal, he would not necessarily see the error of his ways, but he would undoubtedly be deterred from many of his crimes by the fear of being shot. Last but not least, the citizen would have some ultimate protection not only against robbers, but against the state. The growing idea that we can move to an armed police force and an unarmed citizenry is something which no psychopathologist of power could countenance. Exclusive public ownership of the means of destruction is even worse than of those of production, dis- tribution and exchange.
Yes, by all means have safeguards. Restrict gun ownership to householders, perhaps, and make every owner pass a test to show that he can use the thing (far more people are likely to die by mistake than on purpose). But trust the people. If the only fingers on the trigger are those of the gang- sters and the Government, the rest of us will eventually get hit in the crossfire.
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