Angry in the Great White North

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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