30 April 2009 3:06 PM
On being a gun nut
control', and I duly was, by a contributor who seems keen to legalise a
drug that destroys the brains of the young, but regards it as
unthinkable to allow individuals to own guns. He says I am a 'gun nut'.
Does that make him a 'dope nut'? Perhaps, though I doubt he will see it
that way. Well, I don't see it his way either. Here's why.
Presumably he imagines that my house is crammed with firearms and
ammunition, and that I salivate over gun porn in my bullet-proof bunker.
I'm sorry to disappoint him but I neither own any guns nor wish to do
so. I find proper firearms as alarming as I find powerful motorcycles.
In both cases you need to know what you're doing before you use them. In
both cases they give you more power than you might want to possess. In
both cases, they are too easily capable of inflicting pain and injury.
Having nearly killed myself (and someone else) on a motorbike when I was
17, I would be reluctant to ride one again. I can, without any effort at
all, recall in vivid detail the screaming of metal on Tarmac as my
machine tipped over, sparks flying, and the first sight of my very badly
broken ankle after I had hopped to the roadside. I can also remember
that, after a dreamlike interlude when I was unaware of how badly I was
hurt, it was very painful but (fortunately) have no actual memory of the
pain itself, which was just short of the level needed to pass out. I
hope this helps to explain why I am also not anxious to keep a firearm.
I don't even like being near motorbikes any more. I am more aware than
most people of what severe physical injury looks and feels like. And I
suspect I should be just as cautious with a loaded gun of any kind.
Handling unloaded ones, as I did for some posed pictures in Moscow,
Idaho last October, is of course another matter.
The only firearms I ever possessed were a couple of childhood airguns,
once common but now - I suspect - more or less banned. The righteous
frenzy against toy guns (including those which are unmistakably and
obviously toys) is now so great that toyshops often don't stock them any
more. All I desire is my lawful freedom, as guaranteed by the 1689 Bill
of Rights and lawlessly whittled away by the civil service and dim
politicians, to own a gun if I choose to do so. I suppose it's possible
that, as our anarchy deepens, I might reluctantly want to take advantage
of this. But that's the point. The choice should be mine, not that of
some boot-faced politically-
his monopoly of force - and anxious to ensure that his idea of the law
should be the only one available.
As I argue in my book 'A Brief History of Crime', it's the great gulf
between police and public over how the law should be enforced that lies
behind two important features of modern Britain. The frequent arrests of
people for defending themselves or their property are not accidents or
quirks. They are the consequence of the Criminal Justice system's
abandonment of old-fashioned ideas of punishment; also of that system's
social democratic belief that crime has 'social' causes and the
ownership of property isn't absolute. Most law-abiding people don't
really accept this. They think criminals do bad things because they lack
conscience or restraint, not because they were abused as children or
their dole payments are too small. And they don't see why they have to
barricade their houses or hide their worldly goods from view on the
assumption that some unrestrained low-life is otherwise bound to steal
them. So they regard it as legitimate to hurt and punish those who rob
them or otherwise attack them. If they were allowed to enforce the law
as they see it, they would quickly show the police and courts up as
useless and mistaken. One of the most important jobs of the police is to
stop us looking after ourselves, in case we do a better job than PC
Plod.
Guns simply take this to a higher level. Since we foolishly abolished
the formal death penalty, imposed after a careful trial, we have
transferred the power of capital punishment to an increasingly armed
police force (though no legislation has ever actually been passed to arm
them, and the pretence is still maintained that they are unarmed). That
police force is now the arm of the liberal state - rather than enforcers
of conservative law (which is why it is nowadays called a 'service') -
and so has a much wider licence to use (liberal) violence than ordinary
conservative citizens. Contrast the police force's zealous efforts to
stamp out private gun ownership with its own rather poor efforts at
responsible gun use, as a result of which quite a few people (one stark
naked in a well-lit room) have been shot by mistake or as a result of
over-reaction by armed officers. As it happens, I find these mistakes
and over-reactions quite easy to pardon. Which of us, in such
situations, could be sure he would do the right thing? I've never joined
in the frenzy of criticism over the de Menezes case, for instance. It is
terribly easy to see how such an error could have been made under the
circumstances. But if we didn't have an armed police force, and left
executions to the hangman, then these things would be a lot less likely.
But what concerns me is that members of the public in the same situation
are judged so much more harshly if they make such mistakes. And, perhaps
more important, how police shootings are widely accepted, though they
are summary, often erroneous and inadequately investigated. Whereas a
society which finds this summary execution acceptable gets into a
pseudo-moral lather about the idea of lawful execution after due
process, jury trial, the possibility of appeal and reprieve.
This brings me back to the USA. Americans are not so infantilised as we
are. For many reasons, mainly the fact that it is still possible to live
genuinely rural lives in large parts of the country, Americans are less
likely to rely on others to protect them or their homes from danger.
This used to be true of us too (again I must urge those who are
interested to read the relevant chapter in 'Brief History'). It's
evident from a lot of English fiction, written not for propaganda but by
people who simply recorded life as they understood it, that until quite
recently we had a more American view of things. In fact until 1920
English Gun Law made Texas look effeminate. Read, as nobody now does,
Captain Marryat's 'Children of the New Forest' set in the days of
Cromwell, and observe the wholly different attitudes towards self-
defence against crime that are casually described there.
Read, as fewer and fewer people now do, alas, the 'Sherlock Holmes'
stories, and see how often Holmes and Dr Watson venture out carrying
firearms. This was perfectly legal, and unsurprising, in the late
Victorian and Edwardian era in which the stories are set. And pre-1914
attempts to control guns were resisted by MPs much as the US Congress
resists them now.
My suspicion is that the guts were knocked out of us British by the
First World War, in which the best people of all classes died by their
thousands in the great volunteer armies which marched off to Loos,
Passchendaele and the Somme. Those who survived lacked something of the
spirit that a free country needs, and we never fully recovered, just as
Russia has yet to recover from the fourfold blow of the First World War,
Civil War, Great Purge and Second World War, each of which destroyed the
best and brightest of their generations. The USA - a society, for the
most part, of volunteers and pioneers, has never had a comparable
experience. Let us hope it never does.
May I endorse the kind things said about Canada by some correspondents?
British people are often given to making lofty and scornful remarks
about various countries which they decry as 'boring' - Canada, Belgium
and Switzerland usually being the chief victims. Canada is anything but
boring. On the contrary it is a fascinating and intensely civilised
society, made all the more so by the survival of a French-speaking
province (and I admit to having been too diffident about the monarchism
of the Quebecois, who were sensibly allowed by Protestant Hanoverian
Britain to maintain their Roman Catholic faith without restriction -
though I was sorry, on my last visit to Quebec City, to find the
handsome Anglican Cathedral there closed and locked. Still, I was
pleased to see that - like the Anglican church in Sark - it offered
services in French as well as English. How I wish the 1662 Prayer Book
could be translated, and I mean properly translated, with all the
poetry, into every major language of the world).
Belgophobes also need to travel a bit more. Among the many delights of
that country are a comprehensive railway system that puts ours to shame,
several treasure houses of some of the best paintings in the world and a
rather better record in resisting German invasion than they are
generally given credit for. As for Switzerland, the determination of its
people to remain free is very far from boring, and continues to this
day.
One contributor asks why I don't go to live in the USA, since I like it
so much. Why should I? This is my country, where my ancestors are buried
and where I hope and intend to be buried myself, where I grew up, whose
landscape, climate, music, poetry and architecture are in my bones,
whose battle-honours are my battle-honours and whose history is my
history. Nowhere else is like it. It is precisely because I know and
like so many other countries that I know and love my own best of all.
Given the way things are going, I don't completely rule out the
possibility of becoming an exile, but that will not be because I want to
be. It never is.
Oh, and by the way, those who object to being called 'dimwitted' by me
have a simple remedy. Don't say dimwitted things, and especially spare
me any repetitions of the 'what about alcohol and tobacco, then, eh?'
attempted defence of cannabis. If I urged the unrestricted sale of
alcohol and tobacco, they might just have a small point. Since I support
legal restrictions on both (both for reasons repeatedly given on this
site - I do not believe that legally banning their possession would
work, whereas it would with cannabis), they have no point at all. This
argument annoys me especially because it is so dishonest, given that
those who use it have no actual interest in curbing the use of any
poison, merely in preventing serious action against the poison they
favour. It also annoys me because its proponents did not even think of
it themselves, but bought it retail, ready made in easy-to-swallow
capsules.
I suspect (because it is so common) that this non-argument is being
widely taught it in school in 'PSHE' indoctrination sessions, and that
those who advance it have never thought about it all, because it suited
their own interests to swallow it whole. I think it is good for such
people to realise that others regard them as dimwitted - for parroting
weak and wicked arguments foisted on them by irresponsible teachers.
They and these teachers ought to be forced to do weekend shifts in the
cannabis wards in our mental hospitals. Meanwhile, the jibe that they
are 'dimwitted', a mild one under the circumstances, might make them
think about the subject, perhaps for the first time in their sheltered
lives.
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