Targeting guns instead of criminals
In Britain, we have an interesting case study of what happens when guns become the focus of police efforts instead of the criminals themselves. The results are obvious in hindsight, but are also so absurd that perhaps the British can be forgiven for not realizing what would happen.
But in Canada, we have no such excuse, since we can study the British experience and draw lessons from it.
Britain has banned guns since 1997. Plenty has been written about the steady increase in gun violence and in particular, in certain types of crime such as home invasions, crimes in which citizens are likely to be confronted but are now virtually guaranteed to be unable to defend themselves.
Much of this is a numbers game. Several percent increase in this versus a drop in that. Sometimes you get into the trap of arguing which crimes are worse than others as a way of weighting these trends.
But today I read about what happens to law enforcement when they see guns as the evil instead of the criminals. Would you believe letting criminals go who are willing to rat out guns, instead of other criminals? Of course, criminals aren't stupid, and firearms became the currency to buy freedom from incarceration. And that increases the incentive to import guns:
Merseyside, with its seaport and close-knit culture of criminal families, was on the front line of this new trend. For those looking for an explanation of how a city can become flooded with weapons, a series of gun caches found by the police in Liverpool more than a decade ago invite closer examination.
In three months at the beginning of 1994, over a hundred weapons and thousands of rounds of ammunition were discovered after tip-offs from informants. According to Powder Wars, a chilling account of the Liverpool underworld in the 1990s by the Sunday Mirror's Graham Johnson, these were not just the handguns and sawn- off shotguns that had always been available to British small-time gangsters, but an armoury more suited to a Balkan warlord. They included Uzi sub-machine guns, AK-47 assault rifles and even an elephant gun. At the time, the police didn't question the fact that no one was ever found at the scene of the caches: usually abandoned cars or empty houses. The seizures were hailed as a triumph in the war against violent crime.
Of course no one questioned that no actual criminals were caught. No one cared. Criminals weren't the problem. Guns were the problem. If you could get rid of all the guns, there would be no criminals, and no crime violence. No gun, no criminal, no funeral.
Makes sense to some people.
In fact, police now believe that the arms caches were an elaborate scam carried out by [Liverpool criminals John Haase and Peter Bennett] to secure their early release from prison. If that is the case, far from marking a victory for the forces of law and order, the seizures reinforced Liverpool's gun culture by allowing those involved in the scam to operate with virtual impunity in the years that followed. In August 1995, the two men had each received a long prison sentence. But the information they were now providing as "supergrasses" about the location of the arms led to their release after serving less than a year of their sentences. Following information passed to him by Customs and Excise, the trial judge wrote to the Conservative home secretary, Michael Howard, asking for a royal pardon. When this was granted in July 1996, Howard justified his decision by saying the information provided by Haase and Bennett "had proved to offer quite enormous and unique assistance to the law-enforcement agencies".
It's all very absurd and also very predictable. Police will go for high value targets, as determined by legislation and political mood. They will also prefer easy targets over difficult ones, everything else being equal. If firearms are as demonized as the people who use them who commit crimes, even more so, then why wouldn't police focus on going after firearms?
It is a natural progression to favouring the capture of firearms over the arrest of criminals.
From there you go to rewarding criminals who rat out guns.
How do you rat out an inanimate object?
There is a lesson in all this. Denying criminals the tools of their trade is a valid crime fighting technique. But you can never lose sight that you are still fighting the criminals. The idea that you can fight crime by implementing a blanket handgun ban is fatally flawed:
- A handgun in the possession of a responsible and law-abiding private citizen is not the tool of criminals. Taking it away does nothing to fight crime. But it does send the message that, in some strange way, guns are criminals. And that leads to what we've seen in Britain.
- Guns are easily replaced but criminals are not. Take away a thousand guns, and five thousand will replace them in a month's time. Arrest and imprison a thousand criminals, and it might be years, even a generation, before their ranks are replaced.
- The measure of success is to have fewer criminals at the end of the day. If police uncover a weapons cache but arrest no one, nothing much has been accomplished. If lawmakers declare gun owners to be de facto criminals by banning previously legal handguns, we've created a whole new class of criminals, and taken a step backwards.
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Comments
One unfortunate result of the recent gun violence is the re-emergence of the politically attractive idea of blaming inanimate objects - guns- for the wilful acts of criminals. This is an attractive strategy because it's emotionally appealing to an upset public and spares politicians the difficult task of going after organized crime or deranged criminals. The policy has the further advantage of outraging law-abiding gun owners, who know perfectly well that inanimate objects don’t cause violence. This makes a blatently political manoeuver seem bold and somehow “heroic”. Most importantly, attention can be drawn away from expensive, difficult to address problems, such as organized crime, criminal subcultures and adequate opportunities for our ongoing flood of immigrants with a politically correct “morality crusade” against guns.
The $380,000 contract the Liberal government gave Kim Doran (an employee of the Liberal Party) to represent the Coalition for Gun Control is a measure of how appealing this strategy was to the Liberals. Ms. Doran used the money to lobby the federal Solicitor General, Treasury Board and Privy Council in support of the government's own policies. A move that enabled them to claim that a government funded lobby group, lobbying the government on the government’s behalf was a “grass roots” organization representing the “majority of Canadians”.
Posted by: Bruce at September 1, 2007 11:22 AM
Excellent point but I'll take the argument one step further if you do not mind.
By making guns a de facto criminal and ignoring the human criminals it allows governments to avoid dealing with the 'root' causes, the reasons why people become part of gangs and engage in violence to begin with. Instead, the government can focus on providing its unwitting supporters with numbers of guns seized as a way to fool them into believing that their justice system is being effective and that criminals are being taken off the street.
This is why I never understood the NDP's irrational support for tough-on-guns (as opposed to criminals who use guns) legislation. Even if gun laws were effective in removing guns from criminals they do not remove the criminals from the streets or prevent others from becoming criminals.
What has been omitted in this entire debate is how we can prevent people from becoming criminals and use guns in the first place. Gun laws that punish people for using guns in crimes allow just retribution and punishment, which is important. But how can we stop young adults from engaging in such crimes to begin with? I'm not a firm believer in the 'more basketball courts' method since that also fails to address the appeal of gang life. Any thoughts?
Posted by: southernontarioan at September 1, 2007 12:18 PM
'root causes' is just another spin word to give the governments an out to really dealing with the 'root cause' of crime--that being criminals. Without criminals there would be no crime--no criminals, no crimes!?
The real failure is with the Injustice System. They fail to make crime the responsibility of the criminal. Defence lawyers always find an excuse for the criminal committing the crime, and the soft on crime judges are swayed by the arguments. Plea barganing is a game and we, the citizen, are again viewed as expendable.
It is all about accountability. Let the punishment fit the crime and maybe crime would not be the glamorous life we have made it seem. Let jail be punishment, not a vacation(barbeques, movies, massages, fashion shows, etc). Make the judges, lawyers, and parole boards responsible for their early release of criminals that re-offend.
Sadly, 'rehabilitation' of the criminal takes precedence over the safety and well being of the victim that we are about to become. When honest citizens are referred to by Corrections Canada as 'non-convicted citizens' we know their impression of us.
And the real bottom line is that, as noted in the first posting, there is money in them thar criminals, and governments, especially the Liberals, know how to milk it for all it is worth.
I don't know of one person that would be against building more jails to house these despicable criminals. Building one or two on Hans Island would solve two problems--get the criminals away from honest citizens, and reinforce Canada's sovereignty to that island. After all, criminals must have a use somewhere, just not on our streets in our communities reoffending again and again.
Posted by: George at September 1, 2007 01:37 PM
If your are a career criminal it would make good sense to hide a bunch of guns somewhere with no link to yourself. If the cops bust you for something, you rat out the guns as belonging to some fictional shadowy aquaintance.
It's a easy get out of jail free card.
Posted by: Stan at September 1, 2007 03:41 PM
The main reason people become criminals is because of training and encouragement by other criminals. There is a root cause, and that's what it is. An improved criminal justice system will help not only by providing disincentives and by (through prison) stopping people from committing further crimes, but also by removing the coaches from the street.
Posted by: LTEC at September 1, 2007 08:47 PM
They will also prefer easy targets over difficult ones, everything else being equal.
Yes. Criminals (those who take away other people's life and property by force or fraud) are hard to fight. They're tough and heartless. Non-criminals (those who do not take away others' life and property) are rather easy to push over, as long as (a) you've disarmed them, and (b) they've been conditioned from birth to automatically bow down before those wearing fancy hats and shiny badges and carrying impressive-looking diplomas.
That's why government and mobs are like the heads and tails of the same coin. They define and support each other's existence and they both live off the same marks. Think of what's happened between the Mob and the government from 1927-2007. The Mob lived off liquor, gambling and prostitution rackets. The government since then has taken over liquor and gambling, but has left them the prostitution racket and given them the gift of narcotics prohibition (a gift that keeps on giving, in the form of thousands of jobs for cops, prison guards, lawyers, etc.) Both of them run protection rackets - though in this regard one of them is the clear champion, with enormous horizontal and vertical reach across various interlocking organizations and jurisdictions. But even though they are far and away bigger and more powerful than the Mob, governments will never get rid of them. They need the Mob, terrorists, rogue states, etc. If they didn't exist, they would have to invent them. Because without them, how would they scare you into obedience?
Posted by: at September 2, 2007 12:13 AM
Sadly, 'rehabilitation' of the criminal takes precedence over the safety and well being of the victim that we are about to become.
Most of what the government does is senseless. It is absurd to claim that people need help from some powerful outside entity to teach their children ABCs, to find them a job, to save their money for old age, and to pay their doctors' bills. They take the power to do these things from you by claiming that far from being simple, obvious tasks which *anyone* could do, in fact these functions require exotic, specialized knowledge which only the *elite* possess. The same reasoning (so-called) is applied to justice. *Anybody* could say that a vicious murderer should be executed or put away for life. That's the obvious answer. But to preserve the awe and mystery (and juicy paycheques) of the elites, they must pretend that some arcane, intellectual process has determined that common sense is wrong, and that the right answer is to *coddle* criminals.
Run your finger down the blue pages of the phone book, try to figure out what all those infinitely varied government departments are up to, and it all adds up to the same thing: an absurd and nonsensical (but very lucrative) con-job.
Posted by: at September 2, 2007 12:31 AM
Poster at 12:31--absoultely correct. The carnage left against the innocent by criminals is almost indistingusable from the carnage left by the governments. The criminal takes our goods, and sometimes our lives, while the government takes both with impunity and 'legally'--after they have legislated their right to do so. Voting is just another way of deciding which criminal organization gets first crack at us. At least we know what the criminal will do, but government is so far reaching that we have no concept of the crimes they will commit against us for 'our own good'.
Government=con job--well said. I wonder why we are so pliable though? Could it be the governments, while in charge of 'eduction' have created human putty?
Posted by: George at September 2, 2007 06:36 AM
"A handgun in the possession of a responsible and law-abiding private citizen is not the tool of criminals."
Herein lies the core of the matter, Steve. For the modern Left there is no such thing as a "responsible and law-abiding private citizen". People are stupid and must be controlled.
The thinking goes that human beings are all equally likely to go off the rails should the circumstances arise. The circumstance which turns "normal" people into killers is the presence of a gun. The gun bestows the power and the opportunity to kill and rob, and given the opportunity most people will go ahead and do that.
If you believe that, then rooting out inanimate objects is completely sensible.
If you believe that, many things become sensible. A CCTV camera on every street light, cars that report traffic violations themselves, short prison sentences (because it wasn't really their fault, eh?), regulations on every little thing to make SURE the people do what they are supposed to do. I hear there is a plan afoot to ban the sale of knives that come to a point to prevent stabbings.
This is why Lefties freak out whenever some crazy Conservative type suggests lowering taxes, repealing regulations or shrinking government. Without the firm hand of Authority on their necks, the average shmoe will run amok and civilization will crumble.
You can't argue with that. You have to defeat it at the ballot box.
Posted by: The Phantom at September 3, 2007 09:12 AM
Damn I was hoping some utopian leftoid would post some worn out anti-gun cliche's so I could label them a "reality denier".
BTW Good post Bruce.
Posted by: Bill at September 3, 2007 06:54 PM
 
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