The Abolition of Liberty by Peter Hitchens

Author:Peter Hitchens [Hitchens, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Out of the barrel of a gun

Gun control? It’s the best thing you can do for crooks and gangsters. I want you to have nothing. If I’m a bad guy, I’m always gonna have a gun.

Mafia turncoat Sammy ‘The Bull’ Gravano, interview in Vanity Fair, September 1999

More legally owned guns mean less crime. A disarmed people are more easily oppressed and ignored than an armed people. These are statements of the obvious. It is a measure of how dim and limited our national debate is that anyone should think them shocking. It is also evidence of our lack of knowledge of our own history and our lack of curiosity about it. Those who are convinced that America’s gun law is a crazed relic of frontier chaos do not even know that this law is based on England’s seventeenth-century revolution against autocracy.

Respectable citizens in this country used to own and even carry guns without a second thought, long after the Victorian police forces established order in the towns and countryside. In pre-1914 London there was a famous incident, the ‘Tottenham Outrage’ of 1909, where, when police came under fire from an anarchist gang, they borrowed guns from the citizenry and appealed to members of the public to help shoot down the gang members. This event was one of the very few occasions when the police of that time encountered armed criminals of any kind. These criminals were not English but foreigners from the repressive Russian empire, entirely unused to English law and behaviour.

Conan Doyle’s great fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, frequently set out on his private missions with a revolver, as did his colleague, Dr Watson. It is quite clear from the stories that the author expects his readers to think this is entirely normal and legal. Where Holmes and Watson do infringe the law, usually by breaking into the premises of blackmailers, they think about it very carefully indeed. Since this is so—and since that paradise of social peace and order, Switzerland, is among the most heavily armed countries in the world — it is clear that the main belief on which gun control is based is wrong. (Switzerland did suffer a gun massacre during 2001, which was followed by illogical calls for gun control. A far worse massacre in the German city of Erfurt in the spring of 2002 led to no such calls, for the simple reason that Germany already has extremely strict laws on legal gun ownership.) The logically and factually insupportable belief that gun ownership is itself a cause of violent crime is accepted as a self-evident truth among the cultural and media establishment. Those who refuse to believe it or dare to doubt it are reviled as if they are unhinged or possibly malicious. The unstated implication is that they may even be potential mass-murderers themselves. Statistics that undermine this belief are belittled or ignored. Isolated and wholly atypical incidents where guns are used in massacres are treated as if they were common and general.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.