The Real Gun Guys

Where’s the crime reduction?

We keep talking about England’s out-of-control violent crime. We keep pointing out that the British government said that a drop in gun ownership would result in a drop in violent crime. We keep seeing stories where kids are being murdered anyway:

Kodjo Yenga was ambushed in a quiet London street by about a dozen youngsters armed with knives and bats. The 16-year-old tried to escape but was cornered and stabbed in the heart. The gang ran away laughing as the teenager lay bleeding in his girlfriend’s arms. He died later in hospital.

There it is again folks. Guns didn’t kill Yenga, people did. If they had had guns there’s little doubt that they would have used them to murder him. However, even if they did not have knives and baseball bats they would have proceeded to stomp the guy to death or beat his skull in with a brick. They were out for blood and Kodjo Yenga was unarmed.

Murderers are predators. They’ll kill simply because they want to, because they think it’s fun, because they won’t control themselves, because they want to show how powerful they are, or maybe just because they’re animals. They don’t kill because they have a weapon in their hands. The weapon is only a convenient tool. They would be just as lethal without weapons, just less efficient.

Yenga may have been lured into a bad situation in a moment of youthful pride, but the simple harsh reality remains that in London the criminals are armed and the citizens are easily lead to the slaughter. In the face of such a brutal reality, it is absolutely unfathomable why England has declared that the thugs can run free in the streets, but honest law-abiding subjects are not allowed to defend themselves with the only weapon available that could even the odds in such a situation.

It’s worse than unfathomable. It’s immoral.

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OMG! Someone in Britain Gets It!

Wouldn’t you feel safer with a gun?
British attitudes are supercilious and misguided
Richard Munday

Despite the recent spate of shootings on our streets, we pride ourselves on our strict gun laws. Every time an American gunman goes on a killing spree, we shake our heads in righteous disbelief at our poor benighted colonial cousins. Why is it, even after the Virginia Tech massacre, that Americans still resist calls for more gun controls?

The short answer is that “gun controls” do not work: they are indeed generally perverse in their effects. Virginia Tech, where 32 students were shot in April, had a strict gun ban policy and only last year successfully resisted a legal challenge that would have allowed the carrying of licensed defensive weapons on campus. It is with a measure of bitter irony that we recall Thomas Jefferson, founder of the University of Virginia, recording the words of Cesare Beccaria: “Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”

One might contrast the Virginia Tech massacre with the assault on Virginia’s Appalachian Law School in 2002, where three lives were lost before a student fetched a pistol from his car and apprehended the gunman.

Virginia Tech reinforced the lesson that gun controls are obeyed only by the law-abiding. New York has “banned” pistols since 1911, and its fellow murder capitals, Washington DC and Chicago, have similar bans. One can draw a map of the US, showing the inverse relationship of the strictness of its gun laws, and levels of violence: all the way down to Vermont, with no gun laws at all, and the lowest level of armed violence (one thirteenth that of Britain).

America’s disenchantment with “gun control” is based on experience: whereas in the 1960s and 1970s armed crime rose in the face of more restrictive gun laws (in much of the US, it was illegal to possess a firearm away from the home or workplace), over the past 20 years all violent crime has dropped dramatically, in lockstep with the spread of laws allowing the carrying of concealed weapons by law-abiding citizens. Florida set this trend in 1987, and within five years the states that had followed its example showed an 8 per cent reduction in murders, 7 per cent reduction in aggravated assaults, and 5 per cent reduction in rapes. Today 40 states have such laws, and by 2004 the US Bureau of Justice reported that “firearms-related crime has plummeted”.
In Britain, however, the image of violent America remains unassailably entrenched. Never mind the findings of the International Crime Victims Survey (published by the Home Office in 2003), indicating that we now suffer three times the level of violent crime committed in the United States; never mind the doubling of handgun crime in Britain over the past decade, since we banned pistols outright and confiscated all the legal ones.

We are so self-congratulatory about our officially disarmed society, and so dismissive of colonial rednecks, that we have forgotten that within living memory British citizens could buy any gun – rifle, pistol, or machinegun – without any licence. When Dr Watson walked the streets of London with a revolver in his pocket, he was a perfectly ordinary Victorian or Edwardian. Charlotte Brontë recalled that her curate father fastened his watch and pocketed his pistol every morning when he got dressed; Beatrix Potter remarked on a Yorkshire country hotel where only one of the eight or nine guests was not carrying a revolver; in 1909, policemen in Tottenham borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by (and were joined by other armed citizens) when they set off in pursuit of two anarchists unwise enough to attempt an armed robbery. We now are shocked that so many ordinary people should have been carrying guns in the street; the Edwardians were shocked rather by the idea of an armed robbery.

If armed crime in London in the years before the First World War amounted to less than 2 per cent of that we suffer today, it was not simply because society then was more stable. Edwardian Britain was rocked by a series of massive strikes in which lives were lost and troops deployed, and suffragette incendiaries, anarchist bombers, Fenians, and the spectre of a revolutionary general strike made Britain then arguably a much more turbulent place than it is today. In that unstable society the impact of the widespread carrying of arms was not inflammatory, it was deterrent of violence.

As late as 1951, self-defence was the justification of three quarters of all applications for pistol licences. And in the years 1946-51 armed robbery, the most significant measure of gun crime, ran at less than two dozen incidents a year in London; today, in our disarmed society, we suffer as many every week.

Gun controls disarm only the law-abiding, and leave predators with a freer hand. Nearly two and a half million people now fall victim to crimes of violence in Britain every year, more than four every minute: crimes that may devastate lives. It is perhaps a privilege of those who have never had to confront violence to disparage the power to resist.

Richard Munday is editor and co-author of Guns & Violence: the Debate Before Lord Cullen

Thanks to Alphecca.

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More on the "English Experiment"

Weapons sell for just £50 as suspects and victims grow ever younger
Richard Ford, Home Correspondent and Philip Webster, Political Editor

Senior police officers have been warning for several months that a growing number of teenagers in big cities are becoming involved in gun crime.

The age of victims and suspects has fallen over the past three years as the availability of firearms in some cities has risen. Liverpool and Manchester are the cities where illegal guns are most readily available, with criminals claiming that some weapons are being smuggled from Ireland. Sawn-off shotguns are now being sold for as little as £50, and handguns for £150.

Despite a ban on handguns introduced in 1997 after 16 children and their teacher were shot dead in the Dunblane massacre the previous year, their use in crimes has almost doubled to reach 4,671 in 2005-06. Official figures show that although Britain has some of the toughest anti-gun laws in the world, firearm use in crime has risen steadily. This year eight young people have been killed in gun attacks: six in London and one each in Manchester and Liverpool.

“Illegal firearms have become increasingly accessible to younger offenders who appear more likely to use these firearms recklessly,” a report on gun crime commissioned by the Home Office cautioned last year.

The research supports warnings from police chiefs in Merseyside and London about the spread of gun use in gangs and among teenagers.

Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Chief Constable of Merseyside, said this year that although gun crime in the area had fallen there had been an increase in the number of teenagers involved in firearms crimes.

Figures from the Metropolitan Police show that the average age of gun crime victims in London fell from 24 to 19 between 2004-06 and that there was a similar trend among suspects charged in connection with shootings.

Mr Hogan-Howe said that youths were being protected by a wall of silence, and he demanded a new law to compel the public to give information about gun crime. He said that action must be taken to break down the power base of families involved in gun crime. “Families who do nothing to stop their children’s involvement in gun crime put society at risk and could find themselves identifying their child in the morgue,” he said.

The Home Office research highlighted how guns were an integral part of a gang culture in which guns were used to deal with disputes. “In the context of firearm ownership, even quite trivial disputes may result in shootings as the presence of guns elevates threat levels and the so-called ‘shoot or be shot’ scenario precipitates pre-emptive violence,” the study said.

Policies to help to deal with the problem were considered at a scheduled No 10 summit yesterday, chaired by Gordon Brown and attended by Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, Beverley Hughes, the Children’s Minister, Lord Hunt, the Justice Minister, as well as police chiefs and local government leaders.

It was the first of a series of meetings to tackle the issue. Mandatory minimum jail sentences for carrying knives and requiring people to give information if they are aware that people have illegal weapons are among the ideas under discussion. Mrs Smith has asked the Serious Organised Crime Agency to look atways to curb the importation of illegal weapons.

After the 90-minute meeting, the Prime Minister said: “Make no mistake about this — the people responsible will be tracked down, they will be arrested and they will be punished.” He said that the Home Office would be earmarking ten areas for an intensive campaign against gun and knife crime. The areas will be announced next week.

Mr Brown added that families would be offered greater support. “The vast majority of young people are decent and law-abiding. They too want to feel safe and secure on our streets. Where there’s a need for early intervention, we will work very intensively with those families so that young people are deterred from going into gangs and guns and knife crime,” he said.

Mrs Smith has outlined a range of measures, including the increased use of Acceptable Behaviour Contracts and a crackdown on the sale of alcohol to under-age children. The Government has issued guidance to police and local authorities on how to use the contracts — written pledges to improve behaviour — effectively.

David Cameron said that social breakdown would be the central theme of the Conservative election manifesto. Sir Menzies Campbell, leader of the Liberal Democrats, called for a “change of atmosphere” in communities with gang violence, but said that there was “no simple solution”.

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Where Gun Registration and Banning Lead!

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England’s Gun Ban Working…

Handguns were banned following the Dunblane massacre

A new study suggests the use of handguns in crime rose by 40% in the two years after the weapons were banned.

The research, commissioned by the Countryside Alliance’s Campaign for Shooting, has concluded that existing laws are targeting legitimate users of firearms rather than criminals.

The ban on ownership of handguns was introduced in 1997 as a result of the Dunblane massacre, when Thomas Hamilton opened fire at a primary school leaving 16 children and their teacher dead.

Existing gun laws do not lead to crime reduction and a safer place

David Bredin Campaign for Shooting

But the report suggests that despite the restrictions on ownership the use of handguns in crime is rising.

The Centre for Defence Studies at Kings College in London, which carried out the research, said the number of crimes in which a handgun was reported increased from 2,648 in 1997/98 to 3,685 in 1999/2000.

It also said there was no link between high levels of gun crime and areas where there were still high levels of lawful gun possession.

Of the 20 police areas with the lowest number of legally held firearms, 10 had an above average level of gun crime.

And of the 20 police areas with the highest levels of legally held guns only two had armed crime levels above the average.

Smuggling

The campaign’s director, David Bredin, said: “It is crystal clear from the research that the existing gun laws do not lead to crime reduction and a safer place.

“Policy makers have targeted the legitimate sporting and farming communities with ever-tighter laws but the research clearly demonstrates that it is illegal guns which are the real threat to public safety.”

He said the rise was largely down to successful smuggling of illegal guns into the country.

Weapons have even been disguised as key rings no larger than a matchbox to get them in, he said.

Other sources of guns include battlefield trophies brought back by soldiers, the illegal conversion of replica firearms including blank firing pistols and the reactivation of weapons which had been deactivated.

Ammunition

Examples of illegally manufactured guns include screwdrivers being adapted to fire off one round, he said.

The Metropolitan Police said its official figures showed a 20% drop in armed robberies of commercial premises between April and July this year, compared with the same period last year.

A Scotland Yard spokesman said that, since April 2001, the Flying Squad has arrested 39 people in connection with 34 armed incidents and seized 52 weapons.

Operation Trident, which investigates “black on black” shootings in the UK, has made more than 300 arrests, recovered 100 firearms and 1,500 rounds of ammunition since it was established a year ago.

The Home Office said measures were being taken to tackle handgun crime, including an intensified effort against illegally smuggled weapons.

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Lara Croft gets Busted!

…from the “Only in England” file.

[found at The War on Guns]

Armed police raid home after mistaking Lara Croft dummy for gunman
James Tozer
Last updated at 18:57pm on 15th May 2007

When police spotted a gun-wielding suspect lurking in the shadows of a suburban front room, their response was swift.

Armed officers burst into the house, shouted at the owner to lie on the floor, and ordered him to surrender his weapon.

But efficiency turned to embarrassment when the “gunman” turned out to be a life-sized model of the video game character Lara Croft, complete with trademark outsized pistols.

Computer shop owner David Williams, 42, had taken the dummy home to put it up for sale on the auction site eBay.

As the source of the confusion dawned on all concerned, it might have been the moment for an apology from the police.

Instead, however, Mr Williams was taken to the cells and held for more than 13 hours before being released.

He is now on bail for a suspected firearms offence, and Lara Croft remains impounded as evidence.

David Williams was arrested for having Lara Croft model in window “It would have been laughable if it hadn’t been so terrifying,” he said yesterday. “One of the police held a gun and yelled, ‘Where’s the weapon, where’s the weapon?’

“I didn’t have a clue what was going on, I assumed they’d got the wrong house. I couldn’t believe it when I realised they’d mistaken a Lara Croft dummy for someone with a gun.”

Father-of-two Mr Williams had phoned police after receiving nuisance phone calls, and officers arrived at his house in Dukinfield, near Ashton-under-Lyne, Greater Manchester, shortly before midnight.

He says he did not hear them arrive, but unknown to him one officer had seen the dummy’s silhouette through the front window and called for armed back-up.

Soon afterwards, the street was cordoned off and a team of armed officers burst in through Mr Williams’s back door.

A spokesman for Greater Manchester Police said officers peered inside after Mr Williams failed to answer his front door.

“They believed they saw a silhouette of a person pointing what appeared to be a firearm inside the house,” she said.

They followed “correct procedure” by withdrawing to await armed officers, she added.

“Officers then went into the house and found a mannequin holding a toy weapon.”

Mr Williams, who says he is speaking to lawyers about a possible claim for wrongful arrest, will hear whether he faces further action when he answers bail next month.

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First there was "a rifle behind every blade of grass"…

…now there’s a shotgun behind every stuffed animal!

A 10 month old Illinois toddler becomes a legal gun owner. Story and pithy commments from our good old friends the Brits. I’m sure that his dad will give him the proper guidance when he gets old enough to actually use it.

For the record, I think that “Bubba” is adorable, and his getting a FOID card only points out the stupidity of gun control and this particular gun control scheme. The only real crimes here are that he had to get a FOID to begin with and that his dad named him “Bubba.”

Trigger nappy: 10-month-old baby given firearm’s licence
By CLAIRE BATES
Last updated at 12:51pm on 16th May 2007

A baby called Bubba has proved even an 10-month-old child can own a gun in America.

The tot from Illinois received his Firearm Owner’s Identification card - no question’s asked- after his father filled in an online application form and paid just £2.50.

“My 10-month-old son has the cutest FOID card,” Howard Ludwig wrote in a U.S newspaper.

“As an FOID card holder, baby Bubba can own a firearm, as well as ammunition, in Illionois.”

The card lists the youngsters height, (2 ft, 3 inches) and his weight (20 pounds.)

“Since Bubba can’t sign his name, I simply placed a pen in his hand. He made the scribble,” Bubba’s father added.

Mr Ludwig, a Daily Southtown columnist, said he applied for the tot’s legal gun ownership after the baby’s grandfather bought him a shotgun as a present.

“The Wife wasn’t excited,” Mr Ludwig said.

“Despite her Texas upbringing she’s under the impression that books and pyjamas are somehow better baby gifts.”

The loophole Mr Ludwig has found was that guns are only refused to convicted felons and those subject to an active order of protection. At 10-months-old Bubba hadn’t broken any of these rules.

“It makes an adorable addition to his baby book,” Mr Ludwig said.

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U.K. School Kids Strap on Stab-Proof Vests as Knife Crime Soars

From the, “Gee, I thought there was no more violent crime in the UK since handguns were banned” file. …clicky…

By Nick Allen

March 22 (Bloomberg) — Ashgar Jilow used to sell stab-proof vests to nightclub bouncers and security guards at his London military surplus store. Now his clients are kids as young as 10 who fear they’re going to be knifed at school or on the street.

“Some of them are so tiny the vests don’t even fit under their school uniforms,” said Jilow, 55, who sells about three of the 120-pound ($230) vests a week. “Parents don’t know what to do to keep their kids safe.”

Every week in London 52 teenagers are victims of knife crime, according to the Metropolitan Police. A child is stabbed to death in Britain every two weeks and knife killings outnumber gun homicides three to one, said Norman Brennan, a police officer and director of the Victims of Crime Trust.

“Knife crime is out of control and kids carry them like fashion accessories,” Brennan said. The youngest child to be suspended from school for brandishing a blade was just five.

Last week two teenagers were knifed to death in London. Adam Regis, 15, was attacked March 17 on his way home from the movies in Newham, an east London borough that is being regenerated by the 2012 Olympics. He called his girlfriend for help as he bled to death, police said.

Three days earlier, Kodjo Yenga, 16, was stabbed to death as a gang of boys and girls chanted “Kill him, kill him” in Hammersmith, west London, where homes sell for more than 1 million pounds, eyewitnesses said.

Gang Culture

Statistics indicate that more children are reaching for blades as gang culture spreads. Some 42 percent of boys aged between 11 and 16 in state-funded schools admit to having carried a knife, according to the Youth Justice Board, which oversees punishment of child offenders.

Natashia Jackman, then 15, was stabbed in the eye with a pair of scissors at Collingwood College in Camberley, Surrey, by a 14- year-old girl who didn’t like her taste in music.

“I came from a private school,” Natashia said in court, according to a transcript of her testimony. “When I started realizing that there were gangs and when I realized that stabbing was common in state schools, then I started worrying about it.”

Her assailant was sentenced to 3 1/2 years in jail in December.

Some students have brought machetes, combat knives, swords and sharpened screwdrivers at school, police say. Girls have been caught with blades hidden in lipstick and mascara tubes.

Security Guards

“I wouldn’t blame any parent for giving their child a stab vest if it makes them feel a bit more secure,” said Nancy Odunewu, a pastor whose son Emmanuel, 19, was stabbed to death in Lewisham, southeast London, in November 2006. “If I could have done anything to save my son then I would have.”

She said all schools should have security guards and airport- style metal detectors. George Mitchell School in Leyton, east London, became the first in the capital to use handheld metal detectors for random checks.

Juvenile knife crime first grabbed the public’s attention in the U.K. when 10-year-old Damilola Taylor was fatally stabbed by other youngsters on his way home from school in Peckham, east London, in November 2000.

Prime Minister Tony Blair opened a community center named after Damilola in 2001. In February 2004, a 14-year-old boy was arrested on suspicion of stabbing another teenager at the facility.

In 2004, 170 pupils between the ages of 12 and 14 were convicted of possessing knives, double the 2000 figure. Last year, one teacher was injured by a pupil every school day. In the 12 months to March 2006, knife crimes rose 73 percent, according to the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King’s College London.

Knife Amnesty

The report said the government’s strategy for tackling knife crime was “incoherent” and criticized the lack of data. Home Secretary John Reid announced March 19 that, beginning in April, police will record knife crimes as a separate offense for a “more detailed understanding” of the problem.

The government’s Violent Crime Reduction Act, passed last year, increases the maximum sentence for possession of a knife in a school or public place to four years from two and raises the minimum age for buying a knife to 18 from 16. An amnesty last year brought in more than 100,000 weapons.

Kids Company, a south London charity partly funded by the government, works to turn around the lives of violent children who have been expelled from school.

“At street level, children are getting killed,” said Camila Batmanghelidjh, a psychotherapist who runs the program. “They are sleeping with knives under their pillows because they don’t feel safe.”

There’s no doubt schools are getting more violent, said Jilow, whose military supply store has received 400 enquiries from parents about protective products.

“The 15- and 16-year-olds have started to ask for bullet- proof vests,” he said. “Some want it for protection, some as a status symbol. One group wanted to buy a gun. They wouldn’t believe me when I said I didn’t sell them.”

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England’s Gun Ban Proponent Admits He Was Wrong

From Scotland’s Sunday Herald. Be sure and read the comments below the article. I’m copying it here verbatim in case it disappears from the web:

Dunblane made us all think about gun control … so what went wrong?
By Ian Bell

ALMOST 11 years now. Kids grow up, life changes, leaves rot on the branch, and all memories decay. Stuff happens. Almost 11 years ago, on the morning after, I told myself that I had sworn off the vampire habit. You know the sort of thing. Something vast and terrible and inexplicable happens. The journalist dusts down his purple prose and sets out, consciously and deliberately, to feel everyone’s pain. Inexcusable, really.

For example: they gave me a prize for Dunblane. To this day, I have never understood why I am the only person I know who finds the fact unsettling. WH Auden, born a century ago last week, said famously that poetry makes nothing happen. He should have tried journalism.

Facts: In mid-March of 1996 Thomas Hamilton, 43, warped, morally crippled, dead in his soul, certainly disgusting, the suicide-in-waiting who should have done us all a favour in the privacy of his own nightmare, went into the precincts of Dunblane primary, and into the gym class, with all his precious sex-toy handguns.

He killed 16 infants, then their teacher, then himself. He accomplished all this with four weapons, in three short minutes. Lots of official things - never adequately explained, for my money - had gone wrong before the event. Somehow that ceased to be the point. Half the world was staggered, but Scotland went into a state of near-clinical shock. The human ability even to begin to pretend to comprehend was defeated.

All over the country, people did irrational things, knowing them to be irrational. They turned up at schools, 100 miles from the scene, just to convince themselves that their own infants were safe. They called home from work, or called people at work, simply to prove that sanity still prevailed. Many could not face the idea of the working day. Strangers in the street, caught unawares by the news, were in tears. If you happen to be too young to remember, trust this: I’m not making it up.

Explanation and analysis, journalism’s default responses, were worse than pointless. Those rituals, too, seemed insulting. Joining the world’s media on the streets of Dunblane to ask people “how they felt” was worse than ghoulish: I refused that request. To their credit, nobody pressed the point. There was still the usual column to be written, however.

In fact, over the days and weeks that followed, there was more than one. I allowed myself two simple, possibly simplistic, strategies. First, I was not ever going to attempt to “explain” Hamilton: the bereaved deserved better. Secondly, in my small way, I was going to take on anyone who failed to support the banning of handguns.

There was a lot of American comment, predictably, and much of it abusive. The clichés appeared as if by return of post. “Guns don’t kill people,” they wrote. “People kill people.” So why - this struck me almost as the definition of self-evident - did Thomas Hamilton feel a need for four of the damnable things?

Then the Duke of Edinburgh, and the field sports people, and the target shooters entered the fray. The royal consort, with his usual sensitivity, expressed the view that things were getting out of hand, and that a more considered response was required. I can clobber royals in my sleep.

The most troubling questions came, instead, from those who answered my simplicities with one of their own. They didn’t oppose a ban, as such. They merely wanted to know why I was so sure that legislation would work.

That seemed obvious. It even seemed faintly stupid to think otherwise. No guns, no gun-killings. Remove the threat: wasn’t that one of the jobs of government?

Sceptics were more subtle than I allowed. What they meant was that it is easy to impose laws on the law-abiding. Criminals, by definition, don’t take much interest in well-meaning legislation. If they chose to arm themselves while the rest of society was, in effect, disarming, outraged newspaper commentators and their quick fixes might merely make matters worse.

I’m still not convinced, or not entirely. A rueful young man in Los Angeles told me once that his city boasted more cars than people, and more guns than cars. “Current population?” he added. “Eleven million, give or take.” To him, the notion of a country patrolled by unarmed police officers was a kind of fantastic dream. To him, equally, the fact that nice kids could lay hands on the family pistol - bought for “self-defence” - and die while simply messing around in the back yard was not an example to be envied, or copied.

“You know what guns do?” he asked. “They go off. You know what guns are for? To kill. That’s their purpose. Only the rhetoric is harmless.”

Back then, I believed every word. America had, and has, too many of the instruments that Thomas Hamilton found so alluring. Yet almost 11 years on, what do I read, and what do I say?

I read of three London teenagers murdered in the space of 11 days. I read of firearms “incidents” spreading like an epidemic across our cities. I read of Tony Blair holding a Downing Street summit on a crisis that seems - call me naive - a greater threat to many communities than any terrorism.

What I say then becomes obvious: my idea didn’t work. In fact, I begin to thread certain fears together, like links in a chain. Here’s one: if even London teenagers can provide themselves with the means to kill 15-year-old Billy Cox in his bedroom, guns have become commonplace, so commonplace that every would-be terrorist worth his salt must be armed to the teeth. Bans have failed utterly.

That’s a nightmare for another day, however. We can worry about what might happen after we think of what is actually happening.

David Cameron’s Tories argue the issue is societal, a problem of parenting and family breakdown. John Reid, home secretary, speaks of people “working together” for a gun-free world while he hints at new laws. Menzies Campbell, of the Liberals, says we need more and more effective policing.

Each of these opinions may have some value. I’d like to think so. Yet why do they sound like the words of men who have only the faintest idea of what life might be like in Harlesden or Moss Side? It is entirely proper to talk of youths who have become detached from society. You may, however, need to qualify the statement with a question: who is detached from whom?

A weapons fetish escalates for a fairly obvious reason. Many things may have changed since my working-class youth, but I am certain that one piece of logic persists. If he is armed, you had better be armed too. Knives become swords, swords become pistols. Status, respect and “security” follow. If you live. Having a father in the household, or access to a youth club, or hopes of a decent education can seem minor, by comparison, on a dark Saturday night.

Saying so solves nothing, obviously. Perhaps journalists, far less politicians, should make that confession now and then. We could all demand a better world - preferably by tomorrow lunchtime - but always bear our fallibility in mind. It goes back to the question I refused to attempt almost 11 years ago. If I could not explain Thomas Hamilton any more than I can explain the killers of Billy Cox, perhaps I have nothing useful to say about anyone’s desire to kill.

I can guess, for all that, that there is something unreasonable, even bizarre, about declaring a youth crisis if teenagers are simply as we have made them. It’s Tony Blair’s fault, if you like. It’s my doing, if you prefer. It’s schools, or a lack of discipline, or insufficient policing, or new sets of laws, or just society.

If that last word still means anything, however, then we are all, in fact, culpable. Who turned Thomas Hamilton into a beast? God isn’t talking. That leaves the rest of us. I cling, nevertheless, to one near-instinctive conclusion from 11 years ago. Guns breed guns. When they enter a society they multiply like a pestilence.

Let’s concede that all the bans have failed. That doesn’t mean we should also fail to ask a practical question. Britain has become a security state in recent years. Nobody strolls unmolested through customs these days. There are terrorist suspects, so they say, at every turn. So why, precisely, are handguns still getting into this country?

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