PANIC SIMPLY LEADS TO MORE BAD NEWS
Derrick Bird went on a shooting spree in Cumbria
Friday June 11,2010
By Frederick Forsyth
THE best laws we have derive from four sources: logic, science, common sense and disagreeable necessity.
The second worst are emotion-sourced and the worst are panic-generated.
The Countryside Act stemmed from the overwhelming Labour domination of the Commons and the equally over-whelming superiority within Labour of those with abysmal ignorance of our countryside, matched with a pretty naked class bigotry.
The result was the ban on fox-hunting which simply doesn’t work, whatever one’s views on foxes. The impartial Burns report was completely junked, all scientific experience denounced and the Act went through on a mix of sugary sentimentality and class loathing.
The Dangerous Dogs Act of 1991 was panic-derived after a spate of children were bitten. Not only does it not work there are now more pitbulls than ever and not a single child can provably be shown to have been saved by the law.
Worst of all was the Firearms Act, rushed through after the horror of the Dunblane primary school massacre in 1996.
Driven by political panic this law destroyed a harmless sport – very much an Olympic discipline – called target shooting. It would have been perfectly possible to confine this pastime, which enthused tens of thousands, to a secure environment (the shooting range) with super-vision and an absolute ban on the guns going home.
BUT no, the whole lot had to be banned to save us from an eventual Derrick Bird. But it didn’t, did it? The key to Dunblane was always this question: never mind the killer Thomas hamilton taking his entire armoury to store at home, why was he allowed guns at all? he was a thwarted paedophile and evidently deeply unstable.
The local village bobby had pleaded with the authorities to revoke his licences and confiscate his weapons. What did the Act do? There are more guns in the hands of the underworld than ever, more gun crime than ever – and now Whitehaven. With square miles of printed paper being now covered with investigations into the Cumbria massacre up goes the cry again: “We need more laws.”
But why not enforce the laws we already have? If they had been enforced at Dunblane, Thomas Hamilton would have had access to a single-shot air rifle firing pellets at most. One question still remains unanswered from Cumbria: why did a taxi driver without an estate to manage need a .22 rifle at all? Why did a man who appears never to have been to a clay-pigeon shoot need a .12-bore shotgun? What about the old rule of “show need”?
The reason Hamilton had his armoury was particularly outrageous: he had a friend at court who rebuffed the village bobby’s pleas. But why Derrick Bird? This is something Cumbria Constabulary should be asked.
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