Sub mission to Commonnwealth on gun laws

From, Firearm Owners Association of Australia.
Box 346, Gympie, 4570,
Queensland,
Phone 07 54 825070 Fax 07 54 824718 email
b3969976@spiderweb.com.au
To
Committee Secretary
Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee
PO Box 6100
Parliament House
Canberra ACT 2600
Phone: +61 2 6277 3560
Fax: +61 2 6277 5794
legcon.sen@aph.gov.au
An Un Submissive Submission On
“The ability of Australian law enforcement authorities to eliminate gun-related violence
in the community”.
(The submission deadline is 15 August 2014. The reporting date is 2 October 2014.)
``We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government
is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage
of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.''
-Ayn Rand, The Nature of Government.
Introduction.
Why would a committee, paid for by public funds, be concerned with ‘gun related violence’, and
not all ‘violence’? Why so specific when ‘gun related violence’ is such a small percentage of all
violence perpetuated by Australia’s people, that it is undefined, no statistics. It would not suit the
political agenda of removing firearms from the community, so its never produced. Surely, the
ability to eliminate violence would be the aim, or goal of government. From the above terms of
reference we can be certain that the aim of the committee is to eliminate guns, and they consider
that the 200,000 incidents per annum of ‘violence’ in the Australian community can look after
itself, as there is no evidence that ‘controlling firearms’, reduces community violence, in fact the
evidence shows the reverse is true.
This submission compares firearm legislation in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the USA, with
the results, which shows that the Australian State governments have made a huge mistake in
following the British model. Contrary to this the Australian law abiding people, have re-armed
and put crime into a decline, similar to the USA . This is the opposite outcome to what has
occurred in Britain which has similar legislation and proves that either there is no relationship
between firearm legislation, firearm ownership and violent crime, or More Guns Means less
Crime?
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Experience has shown that Australia elected politicians, bar one, or two exceptions and all public
servants who are paid by the public to review, propose and legislate have an aversion to reading,
or listening to any information that does not agree with their own ingrained opinions, so for those
with an aversion to knowledge we have to say it in one line. The rest of this submission is written
to educate those of the public who are not in government, but who have the enquiring mind to
seek the truth on this important subject.
Question 1.
“The ability of Australian law enforcement authorities to eliminate gun-related violence in the
community, with reference to:”
Answer 1. The Commonwealth Government has no Ability.
Reason. 1.
THE CONSTITUTION (63 & 64 VICTORIA, CHAPTER 12) An Act to constitute the
Commonwealth of Australia. [9th July 1900] has not been repealed, or amended to give any
power to the Commonwealth enabling it to spend money and time on subjects it has no powers
under the Commonwealth Constitution to legislate for. The Commonwealth Constitution is
specific in the powers awarded to the Commonwealth Government and no mention is made of
firearms or any other type of weapons.
This subject is beyond the powers of the Commonwealth and all who have been responsible for
the mis direction and mis spending of the public resources should be made financially
responsible to pay back the mis spent funds to the Commonwealth.
As this Committee has now been informed, put on notice, it should not proceed any further in
any discussions on the matter excepting ensuring the public servants pay back the money it has
spent on this area over the last twenty years. As experience has proved that Australian elected
politicians and bureaucrats consider themselves a ‘Protected Species’, above and beyond the
Laws of the Constitution, we have to continue with the submission as if our Constitution did not
exist.
Question 2.
a. the estimated number, distribution and lethality of illegal guns, including both outlawed and
stolen guns, in Australia;
Answer 2.
Estimating the lethality of illegal guns, is a nonsense, its either lethal, or its not a concern,
estimating numbers is impossible as if they don’t know how many legal firearm are in the nation
never mind knowing numbers of illegal firearms. (Note all State Police Registers are inaccurate
and up to two years behind in entering information) distribution is something that they should
have some source of information as most missing firearms are either from Commonwealth
Customs, Commonwealth Post Offices, the Armed Forces or State Police. The above
Government Departments hold most of the ‘bad apples’ they organise the illegal firearm trade
in Australia so should be qualified to comment.
Question 3.
b. the operation and consequences of the illicit firearms trade, including both outlawed and stolen
guns within Australia;
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Answer 3.
As above the Customs and Police would be the most qualified and experienced to comment on
the operation and consequences of the illicit firearms trade. Intelligent people would realise and
understand that the States have created this illicit trade by improperly legislating on the law
abiding licencing and banning honest peoples access made firearms a commodity that prior to
this legislation was not a target for criminal activity. State registration of firearms and licensed
shooters has established a illegal trade in all States of those registration lists that are sold by
Police to criminals. This enable Criminals to pick out expensive and rare firearms to steal. This
is one of the reasons that the Canadian Federal Government publicly burnt the register that it had
spent two billions dollars composing. They also were brave enough to admit that during the ten
years since its inception, like Australia, it had not solved, or prevented, or saved a life, or brought
a criminal to justice.
Question 4.
c. the adequacy of current laws and resourcing to enable law enforcement authorities to respond
to technological advances in gun technology, including firearms made from parts which have
been imported separately or covertly to avoid detection, and firearms made with the use of 3D
printers.
Answer 4.
In all Australian States, all unlicenced manufacture of firearms and major component parts is
illegal with huge penalties. All methods of manufacture are already covered, it even prohibits the
manufacture and possession of items that can be freely purchased in hardware shops, used for
1000s of other purposes. Bureaucrats, Politicians and Police join together to build a Police State
using a false pair of kid gloves. Even removing 100% of all firearms and ammunition from the
Australian people will not make Australia a safer place. The human being is a tool maker, it is
the main difference between the other animals on the planet. The human being will manufacture
weapons even though it is prohibited. Even the closure of hardware stores and steel supplies
would not prevent manufacture.
Australian Police: 10% of firearms seized are homemade
Posted June 16, 2014
Pipe Control.
“The new boss of the
Firearms and Organized
Crime Squad has revealed
that at least 10% of
firearms seized by police
in NSW are homemade.
"Supt Plotecki said there
was anecdotal evidence
that outlaw motorcycle
gangs were targeting
people who have the skills
to make weapons. –
Earlier this year a Hells
Angel prospect was
caught with a homemade
3
Uzi that police believe was a prototype he was showing his prospective employers to impress
them."
http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2014/06/16/australian-police-10-firearms-seized-homemade/
In the same article the anti-gun group 'Gun Control Australia' make the claim that "All guns start
out legal -before they become illegal (via theft or rogue dealers)". Certainly not standard tubing
submachine guns.
Question 5.
d. the extent to which the number and types of guns stolen each year in Australia increase the risk
posed to the safety of police and the community, including the proportion of gun-related crime
involving legal firearms which are illegally held;
Answer 5.
Who ever wrote this should be sacked as again it is nonsense. In all States as soon as a person
illegally holds a firearm the firearm is not legal as firearms have to be registered and the holder
has to be licensed. Surely the person responsible for writing this drivel should have researched
his question. If there is a genuine moral desire from our legislators to improve the safety of the
community, they should follow the example of Canada and New Zealand of scrapping the State
held registers, so criminals and police cannot access them. The increase of firearm ownership in
Australia, and other western nations has reduced crime and improved the safety of the
community. More Guns, Less Crime, check the import figures and the crime rates.
Quote “Customs figures show 85,035 handguns, rifles, shotguns, military firearms and air
firearms were legally imported into Australia last year, up from 39,389 in 2006.
The popularity of handguns has soared, increasing from 5876 to 19,561, while imported airguns
have increased from 106 to 8452.
During that time, detection of illegal firearms at Australia's borders has fallen 66 per cent from
17,635 to 5922.”
http://www.news.com.au/national/south-australia/soaring-gun-imports-prompt-licence-questions/story-fndo4dzn1226468517843
Question 6.
e. the effect banning semi-automatic handguns would have on the number of illegally held
firearms in Australia;
Answer 6.
The writer of this question again has not researched Britains failure in the firearm legislation
experiment. The information supplied below shows that the least effect will be a doubling of
illegal use of firearms within a short period of time.
British government study for the years 1890-92, for example, found that when there was no
firearm legislation at all, only three handgun homicides, an average of one a year, in the countries
population of 30 million. Australia with a population of may 20 million could be that lucky if it
chose to dispose of firearm legislation. In 1904 there were only four armed robberies in London,
then the largest city in the world. A hundred years and many gun laws later, the BBC reported
that England's firearms restrictions "seem to have had little impact in the criminal underworld."
Guns are virtually outlawed, and, as the old slogan predicted, only outlaws have guns. Worse,
they are increasingly ready to use them.
London's Evening Standard reported that armed crime, with banned handguns the weapon of
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choice, was "rocketing." In the two years following the 1997 handgun ban, the use of handguns
in crime rose by 40 percent, and the upward trend has continued. From April to November 2001,
the number of people robbed at gunpoint in London rose 53 percent.
Gun crime is just part of an increasingly lawless environment. From 1991 to 1995, crimes against
the person in England's inner cities increased 91 percent. And in the four years from 1997 to
2001, the rate of violent crime more than doubled. Your chances of being mugged in London are
now six times greater than in New York. England's rates of assault, robbery, and burglary are far
higher than America's, and 53 percent of English burglaries occur while occupants are at home,
compared with 13 percent in the U.S., where burglars admit to fearing armed homeowners more
than the police. In a United Nations study of crime in 18 developed nations published in July,
England and Wales led the Western world's crime league, with nearly 55 crimes per 100 people.
This sea change in English crime followed a sea change in government policies. Gun regulations
have been part of a more general disarmament based on the proposition that people don't need
to protect themselves because society will protect them. It also will protect their neighbours:
Police advise those who witness a crime to "walk on by" and let the professionals handle it. This
is a reversal of centuries of common law that not only permitted but expected individuals to
defend themselves, their families, and their neighbours when other help was not available. It was
a legal tradition passed on to Americans from Britain. Personal security was ranked first among
an individual's rights by William Blackstone, the great 18th-century exponent of the common
law. It was a right, he argued, that no government could take away, since no government could
protect the individual in his moment of need. A century later Blackstone's illustrious successor,
A.V. Dicey, cautioned, "discourage self-help and loyal subjects become the slaves of ruffians."
But modern English governments have put public control ahead of the individual's right to
personal safety. First the government clamped down on private possession of guns; then it
forbade people to carry any article that might be used for self-defence; finally, the vigor of that
self-defence was to be judged by what, in hindsight, seemed "reasonable in the circumstances."
Question 7.
f. stricter storage requirements and the use of electronic alarm systems for guns stored in homes;
Answer 7. As the legislators have created the black market in firearms, they also have the power
to dispose of the problem by ending registration, this would also remove the temptation of police
and administrative staff to sell the state lists of firearms to criminals. Emphasis of policing
should be on the apprehension of the criminal wrong doer not on imposing further fines,
penalties, restrictions on the law abiding firearm owner who is innocent. The innocent deserve
your protection, police criminals not the innocent firearm owner. Firearms are safer and more
secure against robbery in private homes rather than in large installations. When eggs are in all
one basket the target is much more attractive. In large installations such as Police and Defence
Military losses are higher than from private homes. Look at the figures that show thousands of
missing firearms in Defence as recorded by journalist Fia Cumming in the Canberra Times.
Question 8.
g. the extent to which there exist anomalies in federal, state and territory laws regarding the
ownership, sale, storage and transit across state boundaries of legal firearms, and how these laws
relate to one another; and,
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Answer 8.
The supreme anomaly is in the waste of resources in attempting to up keep State firearm
registries by administration staff who do not know the subject matter and can never all know the
subject matter that they are recording, so perpetuate mistakes in every increasing circles. This
information is correct when recorded by the Gun shop, or the Firearm owner then incorrect by
the time its entered in the State registry and information is returned to the owner sometimes the
owner spends years of his time writing to his State registry trying to correct the mistakes, only
to see it perpetuated again once its sold to another legal owner. Mistakes occur, again and are
often compounded when information is transferred to another State. The huge anomaly is it’s a
waste of time, as never used to convict a criminal, or to save a life, its only use is to employ more
staff, create more promotion and to impose financial and inconvenience to the law abiding
firearm owner. Other countries such as Canada and New Zealand have seen the error of this and
ended registration. Australia, shows its ignorance of perpetrating bureaucracy to the world.
Question 9.
h. any related matters.
Answer 9.
All the following are related matters and go to show that all firearm legislation is counter
productive in protecting the community and is only a government control that imposes burdens
on the good people and encourages the bad people to prey on the good people. The choice of
continuing to follow the British catastrophic mistake of disarming the law abiding public, leaving
them helpless to defend home and family, or following the USA state ‘licence to carry laws’,
(only western country that has a diminishing violent crime
rate) is a political decision. The Socialist Greens have
chosen to support illegal immigration, and further
impositions on the law abiding firearm owners. These
politicians’s have the facts, they have the knowledge, that
restricting the good, supports the bad elements in our
community. So this choice exposes the motives of all that
follow the British path, we all will know that there agenda
is not public safety but public tyranny. It is now time to
address the wrongs that have been imposed, repeal all the
illogical, harassing registration legislation, for the
following reasons.
------------If the following reasons are incorrect and the Australian
people are not under the protection of The Bill of Rights
1688/89 could the committee please reply in writing to the
above address and explain why the following reasons are
irrelevant. If you cannot achieve this, then all Arms
legislation that imposes harsh conditions, penalties, fees,
fines, bans on firearms, property ownership is unlawful
and of no effect.
-----------Original copy of Bill of Rights 16888/89.
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Contention.
1. The Australian people are under the protection of the British Bill of Rights1688, which is law
in Queensland today, see Imperial Acts Application Act 1984. The Bill of Rights 1688/89
enforces restrictions on the Monarch of the day, Queen Elisabeth II, to only rule under those
conditions prescribed in the Bill of Rights. The Monarch of our time is the same one identified
in the Commonwealth Constitution and the Queensland Constitution, they are bound by this Bill
of Rights and as the Governor - General and the State Governor’s receive their Constitutional and
legal powers from that same Monarch they have no more power than the Monarch and are
restrained in giving assent to any legislation that conflicts with the Bill of Rights 1688/89.
(excerpts)
“By causing several good subjects being Protestants to be disarmed at the same time when
papists were both armed and employed contrary to law;
The Subject's Rights.
And thereupon the said Lords Spirituall and Temporall and Commons pursuant to their
respective letters and elections being now assembled in a full and free representative of this
nation takeing into their most serious consideration the best meanes for attaining the ends
aforesaid doe in the first place (as their auncestors in like case have usually done) for the
vindicating and asserting their auntient rights and liberties, declare
Right to petition—That it is the right of the subjects to petition the King and all commitments
and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegall.
Subjects' arms—That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence
suitable to their conditions and is allowed by law.
Freedom of election—That election of members of Parlyament ought to be free.
Freedom of speech—That the freedome of speech and debates or proceedings in Parlyament
ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parlyament.
The said rights claimed—And they doe claime demand and insist upon all and singular the
premises as their undoubted rights and liberties and that noe declarations judgements doeings or
proceedings to the prejudice of the people in any of the said premisses ought in any wise to be
drawne hereafter into consequence or example.”
Read complete Bill of Rights CLICK HERE http://www.foaa.com.au/?s=Bill+of+Rights
In any court case when the Freedom of Speech in Parliament is reviewed of threatened the Bill
of Rights of 1688/89 is used as fixed constitutional principle that cannot be restrained, so to are
the other principles.
The WRONG by disarming Protestants and arming other sections of the community, were
considered when Sir Robert Peel established the Metropolitan Police Force with his ‘Peelian
Principles. One principle The principles traditionally ascribed to Peel state that:
“Above all else, The police are the public and the public are the police.”
When our Australian Police are set over us armed in a military sense and we the public are
disarmed, contrary to the Bill of Rights, they have divided the community into armed and
disarmed. Persons that can protect their lives, or persons whose lives are worthless, disposable
or expendable in the cause of government control.
Our Question. Is it the Agenda of Australian Government to send us down the path of
British Gun Laws, with the following massive increases in armed crime?
Our Proposal is to follow the proven path of More Guns, Less Crime.
If our government takes the British path we will all know that the objective of our government
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is civilian disarmament
not community safety.
Facts, and Moral
Principles.
2. Our political leaders
in Australia believe
that firearms are so
dangerous that only
criminals should be
allowed to have them.
If you think this sounds
unhinged, you are quite
right. However, crazed
as it is, such is the
thinking behind this
country's current law
on firearms.
It is almost impossible for a law-abiding person to obtain or keep a firearm un impeded, un
harassed, thanks to severe laws diligently enforced by a stern police force. Yet criminals, who
care nothing for laws, can and do easily obtain guns and ammunition - which they use with
increasing frequency on the good people who have been disarmed. They are the ones who have
not been willing to jump the hoop, do course in police legislation, pass examinations, fill out
endless forms, set up steel safes in their homes and pay application fees plus renewal fees.
Emotive Response.
3. Most bureaucrats and politicians are either emotional dupes, are just intent on enlarging the
public service and controlling honest people. They constantly rave about firearms but refuse to
think about them. They run, squawking, from the subject as though it were perfectly obvious that
the best response to anything that goes 'bang' is to ban it.
Those who own or keep firearms are treated as only slightly less repellent than child molesters.
In a perfect example of this silly frenzy, a Doncaster (Britain) college lecturer was sacked last
January for allowing a student to bring a toy plastic gun into class for use in a photography
project.
If we ever did think about the subject, we should realise that something very strange indeed was
going on and might begin to worry that we have gone seriously wrong.
The investigation of the British experience in firearm legislation offers some insights about the
current gun control debate in Australia, and also about ongoing debates over other civil liberties.
4. Many Australian’s who have never owned a firearm and may never want to have one, but want
to have the right to do so if they wish - and the right to use a firearm in defence of themselves and
their homes. They say, “I believe in that fact and I believe am not a free citizen unless I have
these rights.” Many non-firearm owners believe that, but do not have a firearm licence or the
means to acquire one. 600,000 licenced shooters in Queensland who have thought about it, have
jumped over the massive hoops and have acquired the Shooters licence obviously believe that as
well.
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I can remember speaking on this subject at a meeting in Brisbane in the 1990s and afterwards
being approached by a blind man, guide dog white stick an all, he wanted to join our association
because he believed in the importance of the public rights to own firearms, even though he
personally could not use them.
Duty-bound.
5. These idea’s are not some wild idea imported from the badlands of North America. Until very
recently, these were our rights under the Laws of England.
Moreover, we were all actually obliged by law to keep weapons at home so that we could help
the authorities in the fight against crime. It began as a duty, operated as a mixed blessing for
Kings, and wound up as one of the "true, ancient, and indubitable" rights of Englishmen. From
as early as 690AD., the defence of the realm rested in the hands of ordinary Englishmen. Under
the English militia system, every able-bodied freeman was expected to defend his society and to
provide his own arms, paid for and possessed by himself. It appears that the wearing of arms was
widespread. The only early limitations placed on gun possession were for the misuse of arms by
appearing in certain public places "with force" under a 1279 royal enactment or by using them
"in affray of the peace." These limitations were construed to prohibit only the possession of arms
"accompanied with such circumstances as are apt to terrify the people" but not the mere "wearing
[of] common weapons" for personal defence.
6. The Tudor monarchs, tyrannical in nature and nervous of their faint claim to the throne were
in constant fear of insurrection so tried to implement dual system of ‘Us and Them' not to
dissimilar to the Australian /British of the 21st Century. Preventing hunting with crossbows, and
later with firearms, by commoners and setting a minimum annual income from land as a
condition of hunting, or of possession of crossbows and handguns. They were unsuccessful and,
after first liberalizing the prohibitions, Henry VIII's government repealed them in 1546. As the
Tudor era ended, individual armament (typically with long bows) and an individual obligation
to serve in the militia was the norm for Englishmen. Historians view the widespread individual
ownership of arms as an important factor in the "moderation of monarchial rule and the
development of the concept of individual liberties"in England during a period when absolute,
divine-right royal rule was expanding as the norm in continental Europe.
7. In the period leading up to the Glorious Revolution, the Stuart monarchs adopted a radical
policy of personal disarmament toward those who politically threatened their royal prerogatives.
This included the militia of armed freemen as well as direct political rivals. Through a series of
parliamentary enactments, they tried registration of possession, registration of sales, hunting
restrictions, possession bans ostensibly aimed at controlling illegal hunting, restrictions on
personal arms possessed by the militia, warrantless searches, and confiscations. By 1689, the
Stuart monarchs had succeeded, not at full disarmament, but at alienating their "allies" as well
as their opponents and losing their throne in a bloodless revolution.
8. When William of Orange and Mary arrived to begin their reign on England's throne, the
country's political leaders recognized the need to rein in any tendency of the new monarchs
toward the excessive royal power the nation had just suffered under James II. Thus, William and
Mary were required to accept a "declaration of rights" as a definitive statement of the rights of
their subjects. That declaration was later enacted as the Bill of Rights. The Declaration of Rights
was prepared in great haste, limited to noncontroversial matters, and viewed as a statement of the
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existing rights of Englishmen. It contained only two individual rights applicable to the general
public: to petition and to arms. Even though the Bill of Rights was by its terms a contract, to be
upheld "in all times to come," nothing one Parliament does can constrain the actions of
subsequent Parliaments. However, a statute an Act of parliament requires Royal Assent and per
our Commonwealth Constitution can be refused or removed at a later date by the Monarch. The
Monarch or their governors, Substitutes working from Royal Instruction are by contract restrained
by the Bill of Rights. Twice, in the 1850s Royal Assent to Acts of the Victorian Parliament were
withheld.
http://sydney.edu.au/law/slr/slr29_1/Taylor.pdf
The Anglo-American legal world would not implement a genuine constitution until 1776, when
newly-independent Virginia created her first.
9. The experience under the Stuarts, demonstrating the political uses of disarmament, convinced
many in the Convention Parliament that there was great danger to the security of English liberties
from a disarmed citizenry. In the Commons, member after member complained about the loss of
liberty they had personally suffered when disarmed of their private arms by actions "authorized"
under the 1662 Militia Act, the 1671 Game Act, and various other laws. Since the new monarchy
was to be a limited one, the members saw both a personal and national interest in the ability of
ordinary Englishmen to possess their own defensive arms to restrain the Crown. After much
discussion and numerous revisions, the right to arms evolved into a statement that "the Subjects
which are Protestants may have Arms for their Defence suitable to their Conditions and as
allowed by law." Historian Joyce Lee Malcolm concluded that'
“The last-minute amendments that changed that article from a guarantee of a popular power into
an individual right to have arms was a compromise forced on the Whigs. The vague clauses about
arms "suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law" left the way open for legislative
clarification and for perpetuation of restrictions .... But though the right could be circumscribed,
it had been affirmed.”
By the time of the American Revolution, legislation and
court decisions had made it clear that Englishmen had a real
right to possess arms, even during times of turmoil such as
the anti-Catholic Gordon riots in London in 1780. The
Recorder of London, the equivalent of a modern-day city's
general counsel, gave this opinion in 1780,
“The right of his majesty's Protestant subjects, to have
arms for their own defence, and to use them for lawful
purposes, is most clear and undeniable. It seems, indeed,
to be considered, by the ancient laws of this kingdom, not
only as a right, but as a duty; for all subjects of the realm,
who are able to bear arms are bound to be ready, at all
times, to assist the sheriff, and other civil magistrates, in
the execution of the laws and the preservation of the
public peace. And that right, which every Protestant most
unquestionably possesses, individually, may, and in many
cases must, be exercised collectively, is likewise a point
which I conceive to be most clearly established by the
authority of judicial decisions and ancient acts of
parliament, as well as by reason and common sense.”
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10. Blackstone's celebrated treatise lauded the individual right to arms as one of the "five
auxiliary rights of the subject," and explained that the right was for personal defence against
criminals, and for collective defence against government tyranny. He further explained that “in
cases of national oppression, the nation has very justifiably risen as one man, to vindicate the
original contract subsisting between the king and his people.” The Englishman's boast that he
and his countrymen were "the freest subjects under Heaven" because he had the right "to be
guarded and defended ... by [his] own arms, kept in [his] own hands, and used at [his] own
charge under [his] Prince's Conduct" was true. This did not mean, of course, that Englishmen
enjoyed perfect civil liberty, as those in the
United States frequently pointed out.
Englishmen did, however, enjoy much greater
freedom and participation in government than
did the people of Continental Europe, and it
was England's conventional wisdom that the
freedom of the English people was closely
tied to their right to possess arms, and thereby
deter any thought of usurpation by the
government.
11. From the day when the Stuarts fled to
France, there were virtually no restrictions on
an Englishman's right to own and carry
firearms, providing that he did not hunt with them, for the next two centuries. The only notable
exceptions were the Seizure of Arms Act and the Training Prevention Act, which banned drilling
with firearms and allowed confiscation of guns from revolutionaries in selected regions. The Acts
were the product of social unrest related to the Industrial Revolution, climaxing in the 1819
Peterloo Massacre, in which government forces killed unarmed demonstrators. The Acts expired
by their own terms in 1822. Even while the 1819 Acts were in force, the case of Rex v. Dewhurst
explained that the "suitable to their condition" clause in the Bill of Rights's "Arms for their
Defence" guarantee did not allow the government to disarm "people in the ordinary class of life."
Peterloo Massacre of un armed civilians by Military
forces in Manchester 1819.
12. The Bill of Rights of 1688/89 - on which its American equivalent was modelled 100 years
later - enshrines the right of subjects to have arms for their defence. Sir William Blackstone's
great summary of English law, the 'Commentaries' of 1765, also affirms the English people's
'right of having arms for their defence'.
Attempts to limit gun ownership in the United Kingdom are very recent indeed. As late as 1909,
when the police came under fire from a foreign anarchist gang in Tottenham, North London, they
borrowed guns from the citizenry and appealed to members of the public to help them shoot back
at the gang leaders.
Readers of the Sherlock Holmes stories, set around the same time, will have noticed that he and
his assistant Dr Watson frequently go out on their expeditions armed with at least one revolver.
The gun laws of Victorian England make modern-day Texas look effeminate.
Another Question?
13. Yet, though these stories are still widely read, almost nobody stops to wonder why what was
legal in peaceful, well-ordered Edwardian London should be so illegal now in London and now
in Australia. How and why is it that this freedom has been so abruptly and totally withdrawn?
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Social unrest after World War One with the Communist Revolution in Russia, plus the systems
fear of thousands of returned servicemen who had fought for a ‘land fit for heroes’, yet found they
had been swindled, starved, left unemployed, intensified the pressure for firearm control. This
finally resulted in the creation of a licensing system for rifles and handguns after the war. The
firearm control system was gradually expanded in the 1930s, relaxed in enforcement during
World War Two when Nazi invasion loomed, and then re-imposed with full force in the 1950s.
14. In the final decades of the nineteenth
century, Great Britain was much like the
United States in the 1950s. There were
almost no gun laws, and almost no gun
crime. The homicide rate per 100,000
population per year was between 1.0 and
1.5, declining as the century wore on.
Two technological developments,
however, began to work together to
create in some minds the need for gun
control. The first of these was the
revolver. Revolvers had begun to achieve
Wartime production of Webley, usually they were very well mass popularity when Colonel Samuel
finished, in .38/200 calibre. Reliable, but very low powered Colt showed off his models at London's
575 fps. Early 20th Century. Often used by the British Police 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of
and Army officers.
Industry in All Nations. Revolver
technology advanced rapidly, and by the 1890s, revolver design had progressed about as far as
it could, with subsequent developments involving only minor tinkering with parts.
15. As revolvers got cheaper and better, concern arose regarding the increase in firepower
available to the public. And in fact, the change from one or two shot weapons to the repeat-firing,
five or six shot revolver represented perhaps the greatest advance in small arms civilian firepower
that has ever occurred. Compared to the seemingly more benign single-shot muzzle-loaders of
the past, the revolver seemed a frightening innovation.
Revolvers were also getting less expensive, and concerns began to grow about the availability to
criminals of cheap German revolvers. Cheap guns were, in some eyes, associated with hated
minority groups. For example, in the late 1860s, the London Lloyd's Newspaper blamed a crime
wave on "foreign refuse" (Newspaper, had the freedom of speech, unlike today’s Politically
correct Newspeak) with their guns and knives. The newspaper stated that "[t]he revolver's
appearance ... we owe to the importation of reckless characters from America .... The Fenian
[Irish-American] desperadoes have sown weapons of violence in our poorer districts."
16. All of these developments have their parallels in modern Australia and the United States with
most of the crime being committed by certain groups within the community that have only a
small right, or none at all, to be in the country. The current popularity of semi-automatic pistols,
with a magazine capacity of thirteen, fifteen, or seventeen rounds, frightens some people who
view the old six-shooter as a harmless traditional weapon. Furthermore, the fact that
semi-automatics were invented over 100 years ago does not stop the press from portraying them
as dangerous new firearms, just as the revolvers of the 1850s were portrayed as dangerous new
12
firearms in the 1880s.
17. Prejudice and discrimination against ethnic groups still persist with some justification. While
United States/ Australian/British gun control advocates do not now complain at all about Irish
immigrants with firearms, but all are aware that firearms are not the problem the conflict between
racial gangs armed with "ghetto guns." is where 90% of the problem lies. They will kill one
another with any tool at hand. The derisive term for inexpensive handguns, "Saturday Night
Specials," has a racist lineage to the term "niggertown Saturday night." The phrase "niggertown
Saturday night" apparently mixed with the nineteenth century phrase "suicide special," which is
a cheap single action revolver, to form "Saturday night special."
18. Revolvers were one technological development that began to make some politicians rethink
the desirability of the right to bear arms. The second
development was the growth of the mass circulation
press. Newspapers, like firearms, had been around for
quite a while, but the late nineteenth century witnessed
several printing innovations that made printing of vast
quantities of newspapers extremely cheap.
19. The Walter press, patented in England in 1866,
introduced stereotype plates. Printers discovered ways to
make sheets of any desired length, thereby allowing rolls
of paper to be fed into cylinder presses, and greatly
accelerating printing speed. Machines for folding
newspapers were brought on-line. By the late nineteenth
century, typesetting machines were coming into use. All
of these developments made possible the production of
low-cost newspapers, which even poor people could buy
every day. As audiences expanded, papers became increasingly sensationalist, and the "yellow
journalism" of publishers such as the United States' Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst
was born.
20. The British counterparts were equally fervently in devoting journalism into sensation, and
especially loved lurid crime stories. In 1883 a pair of armed burglaries in the London suburbs set
off a round of press hysteria about armed criminals. The press notwithstanding, crime with
firearms was rare. As this paper will detail, the propensity of the press to sensationalise what
sociologists call "atrocity tales" to create "moral panics" while demanding greater government
regulation is one of the factors dramatically increasing the risk that a nation will descend down
a slippery slope of removing human rights. While media sensationalism can spur action, media
attention is not necessarily sufficient by itself to produce results. Eighteen-eighty-three did see
the first serious attempt at firearm control in many decades, when Parliament considered and
rejected a bill to ban the "unreasonable" carrying of a concealed firearm. In 1895, strong pistol
controls were rejected by a two to one margin in the House of Commons on the grounds of
personal rights and the wording within the Bill of Rights of 1688/89.
21. The developments of the British press, and the press attitude towards crime and firearms in
the late 19th century, have their own parallels in Australia and the United States today. Television
13
news is cutting loose its last ties to traditional standards imposed from the days of print
journalism. In the "infotainment" produced by organizations such as NBC News, depiction of
reality is less important than the production of entertaining and compelling "news" pieces. Thus,
when the "assault weapon" panic of 1996 broke out, television journalists paid little attention to
whether "assault weapons" actually were the "weapon of choice" of criminals. Instead of being
on the reality of firearm crime, the focus was on the sensational footage of guns firing full
automatic, while newscasters decried the availability of semi-automatics. Police statistics show
that so-called assault weapons were used in about .005% of firearm crime. In other contexts,
displaying one thing while talking about another would be
decried as fraud.
22. As the nineteenth century came to a close in Britain the
press had not as yet persuaded the public to adopt gun controls.
Buyers of any type of gun, from derringers to Gatling guns
faced no background check, no need for police permission, and
no registration. As criminologist Ex Police Inspector ,Colin
Greenwood wrote,
"anyone, be he convicted criminal, lunatic, drunkard or
ch i l d , coul d l egal l y a c q u i r e a n y t ype o f
firearm."Additionally, anyone could carry any gun
anywhere.
23. The English firearm crime rate was at its all-time low. A
somewhat similar situation prevailed on the American frontier
in the 1880s where everyone who chose to be, was armed, and
"the old, the young, the unwilling, the weak and the female
... were ... safe from harm." The frontier crime rates, except for the results of "voluntary" bar
fights among dissolute young men, were less than a tenth of the rates in modern-day United States
and British cities.
Government's growing mistrust of the People.
24. The official attitude about guns was summed up by Prime Minister Robert Gascoyne-Cecil,
the Marquess of Salisbury, who in 1900 said he would,
"laud the day when there is a rifle in every cottage in England." Led by the Duke of Norfolk
and the mayors of London and Liverpool, a number of gentlemen formed a cooperative
association that year to promote the creation of rifle clubs for working men. The Prime Minister
and the rest of the aristocracy viewed the widespread ownership of rifles by the working classes
as an asset to national security, especially in light of the growing tension with imperial Germany.
While shotguns were seen as bird-hunting toys of the landed gentry, rifles were lauded as military
arms suitable for everyone. Yet, within a century, the right to bear arms in Britain would be well
on the road to extinction. The extinction had little to do with gun ownership itself, but instead
related to the British government's growing mistrust of the British people, and the apathetic
attitude of British firearm owners. That statement of course includes Australian firearm owners
as well as both had the numbers to elect there own supporters into government if there was
enough sustained effort from the firearm owners.
The First Step in the Wrong Direction.
14
25. In 1903, the British Parliament enacted a gun control law that appeared eminently reasonable.
The Pistols Act of 1903 forbade pistol sales to minors and felons and dictated that sales be made
only to buyers with a gun license. The license itself could be obtained at the post office, the only
requirement being payment of a fee. People who intended to keep the pistol solely in their house
did not even need to get the postal license.
The Pistols Act attracted only slight opposition, and passed easily. The law had no discernible
statistical effect on crime or accidents. Firearms suicides did fall, but the decline was more than
matched by an increase in suicide by poisons and knives. The homicide rate rose after the Pistols
Act became law, but it is impossible to attribute this rise to the new law with any certainty. The
bill defined pistols as guns having a barrel of nine inches or less, and thus pistols with
nine-and-a-half inch barrels were soon popular.
26. While the 1903 Act was, in the short run, harmless to gun owners, the Act was of
considerable long-term importance. By allowing the Act to pass, British gun owners had accepted
the proposition that the government could set the terms and conditions for gun ownership by
law-abiding subjects. As Frederick Schauer points out, for a government body to decide "X and
not Y" means that the government body has implicitly asserted a jurisdiction to decide between
X and Y. Hence, to decide "X not Y" is to assert, indirectly, an authority in the future to choose
"Y not X." Thus, for Parliament to choose very mild gun controls versus strict controls was to
assert Parliament's authority to decide the nature of gun control. As this paper shall discuss in
regards to the granting of police authority over gun licensing, establishing the proposition that
a government entity has any authority over a subject is an essential, but not sufficient, element
for a trip down the slippery slope of community despair.
Dangerous Weapons
27. The early years of the twentieth century saw an increasingly bitter series of confrontations
between capital and labour throughout the English-speaking world. In Britain, the rising militance
of the working class was beginning to make the aristocracy doubt whether the people could be
trusted with arms. When American
journalist Lincoln Steffens visited
London in 1910, he met leaders of
Parliament who interpreted the current
bitter labour strikes as a harbinger of
impending revolution.The next set of
gun control initiatives reflected fears of
immigrant anarchists and other
subversives.
As the coronation of George V
approached, one United States
newspaper, the Boston Advertiser,
warned about the difficulty of
protecting the Coronation March "so
long as there is a generous scattering Landstad Auto Revolver Patent 1900. This is a 3 D, three
of automatic pistols among the 70,000 Dimensional Drawing on the internet. If 3 D, Drawings are
aliens in the Whitechapel district." banned on the internet to sate manufacturing concerns, this sort
The paper fretted about aliens in the of drawing which is useful for the licensed collector/historian
will not be available. This sort of thinking is ludicrous.
United States and Britain with their
15
"automatic pistols," which were "far more dangerous" than a bomb. The Advertiser defined an
"automatic pistol" as a "quick-firing revolver," and called for gun registration, restrictions on
ammunition sales, and a ban on carrying any concealed firearms, all with the goal of "disarming
alien criminals."
28. What was the "automatic pistol/quick-firing revolver" that so concerned the newspaper? In
1896, the British company of Webley-Fosberry introduced an "automatic revolver." It reloaded
with the same principle as a semi-automatic pistol, but held the ammunition in a cylinder, like
a revolver. It was an inferior pistol. If not gripped tightly, it would misfire. Dirt and dust made
the gun fail. Although the firearms most deadly feature was, supposedly, its rapid-fire capability,
rapid firing also made the firearm malfunction. The so-called automatic revolver that was "more
dangerous than the bomb" was more dangerous in the minds of overheated newspaper
editorialists than in reality. In this way it is comparable to today's "undetectable plastic gun,"
which are non-existent, and the "cop-killer teflon bullet," which was actually invented by police
officers.
29. As the Webley-Fosberry and its modern equivalents show, media pressure for new laws does
not necessarily have to be based on real-world conditions. That is, an item need not necessarily
be particularly dangerous in order for the media to describe it as dangerous. For example,
whatever else may be said about marijuana, we now know that the "Reefer madness" stories from
the mass media in the 1920s and 1930s were scientifically inaccurate; marijuana does not impel
users to commit violent crimes. However, when the media and public know little about an item,
such as Webley-Fosberry revolvers, self-loading firearms, or marijuana, it is easy for reporters
to talk themselves and their audience
into a panic.
Dangerous People Are Always the
Problem.
30. Whatever the actual dangers of
the automatic revolver, immigrants
scared authorities on both sides of
the Atlantic. Crime by Jewish and
Italian immigrants spurred New
York State to enact the Sullivan Law
in 1911, which required a license for
handgun buying and carrying, and Winston Churchill making sure he was in front of the camera and
behind the two Policemen with the shotguns that they had borrowed
made licenses difficult to obtain. for the day.
The sponsor at the Sullivan Law
promised homicides would decline drastically. Instead, homicides increased and the New York
Times found that criminals were "as well armed as ever."
Terrorists
31. As in modern United States, sensational police confrontations with extremists also helped
build support for firearm control. In December 1910, three London policemen investigating a
burglary at a Houndsditch jewelers shop were murdered by rifle fire. A furious search began for
"Peter the Painter," the Russian anarchist believed responsible. The police uncovered one cache
16
of arms in London: a pistol, 150 bullets, and some dangerous chemicals. The discovery led to
front-page newspaper stories about anarchist arsenals, which were non-existent, all over the East
End of London. The police caught up with London's anarchist network on January 3, 1911, at 100
Sidney Street. The police threw stones through the windows, and the anarchists inside responded
with rifle fire. Seven-hundred and fifty policemen, supplemented by a company of the Scots
Guards, besieged Sidney Street. Home Secretary Winston Churchill arrived on the scene as the
police were firing artillery and preparing to deploy mines. Banner headlines throughout the
British Empire were already detailing the dramatic police confrontation with the anarchist nest.
Churchill, accompanied by a police inspector and a Scots Guardsman, strode up to the door of
100 Sidney Street; the inspector kicked the door down. Inside were the dead bodies of two
anarchists. "Peter the Painter" was nowhere in sight. London's three-man anarchist network was
destroyed. The "Siege of Sidney Street" turned out to have been vastly overplayed by both the
police and the press. A violent fringe of the anarchist movement was, however, a genuine threat,
Arch Duke Ferdinand of Austria, and President William McKinley were only two of many world
leaders assassinated by these anarchists groups.
32. While the "Siege of Sidney Street" convinced New Zealand to tighten its own gun laws, the
British Parliament rejected new controls. Parliament turned down the Aliens (Prevention of
Crime) Bill, that would have barred aliens from possessing and carrying firearms without
permission of the local Chief Officer of Police.
With modern day sensationalism, such as in 1993 Virginia legislature had less fortitude than the
1911 British Parliament. After a Pakistani national used a Kalashnikov rifle to murder three
people outside of CIA headquarters, the Virginia legislature rushed to enact broad restrictions on
guns carryied by legal resident aliens.
Temporary War Time. Excuse To Subvert The Constitutional Bill of Rights 1688/89.
33. British resistance to firearm controls finally cracked in 1914 when Great Britain entered The
Great War, later to be dubbed World War One. The government imposed comprehensive,
stringent controls as "temporary" measures to protect national security during the war. Similarly,
the United States continues to live under various "temporary" or "emergency" restrictions on
liberty enacted during the First or Second World Wars. Few restrictions on liberty, especially
when imposed by fiat, are announced as permanent. Even when Julius Caesar and, later,
Octavian, destroyed the Roman Republic by making themselves military dictators for life, they
claimed to be exercising only temporary powers because of an emergency.
34. Randolph Bourne observed that "war is the health of the state," and it was World War One
that set in motion the growth of the British government to the size where it could begin to destroy
the right to arms, a right that the British people had enjoyed with little hindrance for over two
centuries. After war broke out in August 1914, the British government began assuming
"emergency" powers for itself. "Defence of the Realm Regulations" were enacted that required
a license to buy pistols, rifles, or ammunition at retail. As the war came to a conclusion in 1918,
many British firearm owners no doubt expected that the wartime regulations would soon be
repealed and Britons would again enjoy the right to purchase the firearm of their choice without
government permission. But the government had other ideas.
35. The disaster of World War one had bred the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Armies of the
new Soviet state swept into Poland, and more and more workers of the world joined strikes called
17
by radical labour leaders who predicted the overthrow of capitalism. Many Communists and other
radicals thought the World Revolution was at hand. All over the English-speaking world
governments feared there own public. The reaction was fierce. In the United States, Attorney
General A. Mitchell Palmer launched the "Palmer raids." Aliens were deported without hearings,
and United States citizens were searched and arrested without warrants and held without bail.
While the United States was torn by strikes and race riots, Canada witnessed the government
massacre of peaceful demonstrators at the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919.
Government Begins To Arm One Section of the Community, and Disarm the Public.
36. In Britain, the government worried about what would happen when the war ended and the
firearm controls expired. A secret government committee on arms traffic warned of danger from
two sources: the "savage or semi-civilized tribesmen in outlying parts of the British Empire" who
might obtain surplus war arms, and "the anarchist or 'intellectual' malcontent of the great cities,
whose weapon is the bomb and the automatic pistol." At a Cabinet meeting on January 17, 1919,
the Chief of the Imperial General Staff raised the threat of "Red Revolution and blood and war
at home and abroad." He suggested that the government make sure of its arms. The next month,
the Prime Minister was asking which parts of the army would remain loyal. The Cabinet
discussed arming university men, stockbrokers, and trusted clerks to fight any revolution. The
Minister of Transport, Sir Eric Geddes, predicted "a revolutionary outbreak in Glasgow,
Liverpool or London in the early spring, when a definite attempt may be made to seize the reins
of government." "It is not inconceivable," Geddes warned, "that a dramatic and successful coup
d'etat in some large centre of population might win the support of the unthinking mass of labour."
Using the Irish gun licensing system as a model, the Cabinet made plans to disarm enemies of
the state and to prepare arms for distribution "to friends of the Government." Again contrary to
the Bill of Rights principle of Arming one section of the community against the other, which has
followed through to the 21st Century with arming of Police and Military and disarming the
private citizens.
37. Although popular revolution was the
motive, the Home Secretary presented the
government's 1920 firearm bill to Parliament
as strictly a measure "to prevent criminals
and persons of that description from being
able to have revolvers and to use them." In
fact, the problem of criminal, non-political
misuse of firearms remained minuscule. Of
course 1920 would not be the last time a
government lied in order to promote firearm
control.
In 1996 in Australia and the United States,
various police administrators and drug enforcement bureaucrats set off a national panic about
"assault weapons" by claiming that semi-automatic rifles were the "weapon of choice" of drug
dealers and other criminals. Actually, police statistics regarding gun seizures showed that the
guns accounted for only about 0.5% of firearm crime.
Swallowed the LIE.
38. Most people in Australia and United States swallowed the lie about "assault weapon" crime,
18
and as did most Britons in 1920 swallow the lie about handgun crime. Indeed, the carnage of
World War One, which was caused in good part by the outdated tactics of the British and French
general staffs, had produced a general revulsion against anything associated with the military,
including rifles and handguns.
Thus the Firearms Act of 1920 sailed through Parliament. Britons who had formerly enjoyed a
right to arms were now allowed to possess pistols and rifles only if they proved they had "good
reason" for receiving a police permit. Shotguns and airguns, which were perceived as "sporting"
weapons, remained exempt from British government control.
39. Similarly, the horror of use of poison gas during World War I's trench warfare made the
Firearms Act's ban on small CS self-defence spray canisters seem unobjectionable. In the hands
of Australian and British citizens, CS was considered by the State governments to be impossibly
dangerous, requiring complete
prohibition--much more dangerous than a rifle
or shotgun. Yet when the CS is in the hands of
the government, the State governments now
mandates that CS gas (Tear Gas) is to be
considered benign. When British local police
authorities brought this to the attention of the
Home Secretary's issuance of CS gas and plastic
bullets to local police forces and argued that the
central government had no authority to force
police departments to employ dangerous
weapons against their will, the court ruled for
the government on the theory that the Crown's
Benign, harmless in the hands of the police, but "prerogative power to keep the peace" allowed
prohibited as much to dangerous for the law abiding the Home Secretary to "do all reasonably
public to use in Self Defence. Double standards and necessary to preserve the peace of the realm.
setting up, two classes of people in Australia,
Thinking people, have to ask what right does the
Government employees and the masses.
government have to disarm one section of the
community and arm another section. The answer to that is no right. We all have a right to “keep
the Peace” if we are being attacked.
40. The treatment of CS is emblematic of the transformation of British arms policy during the
twentieth century. Principles about the use of force were changed from the traditional
Anglo-American to the suppressive German Weberian philosophy, (Karl Emil Maximilian "Max"
Weber 1864 to 1920 power of the professional bureaucracy with the monopoly of force becoming
crucial to the state's definition of its rightful power)
Instead of worrying about cheap German handguns among the people, the British and Australian
people should have been better prepared to guard against the fancy German socialist ideas among
the government.
More Guns, Less Crime?
41. Less guns, in the hands of the law abiding public, equates to more armed crime.
One thing is for certain. It is not because tighter gun laws mean less gun crime. The more fiercely
they have restricted private gun ownership in Britain over the past century, the more armed crime
there has been and the more the police have had to strap on holsters.
19
What should we learn from this? First, that criminals feel safer and more powerful when they
know they are not likely to face any armed resistance.
That was certainly the view of Sammy 'The Bull' Gravano, an American Mafia turncoat who told
Vanity Fair in 1999: “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
going to have a gun.”
42. His view has been backed up by
American author John Lott, who found
that many types of crime fell sharply in
districts where law-abiding citizens were
allowed to carry concealed firearms.
A right to carry firearms is especially
helpful to women, because the chance that
they might have a handgun in their
handbags transformed them from being
easy victims to tough propositions.
This practical form of sex equality is one
of the things that does not compute in the
world of the politically correct. Even so,
what Lott says has been proved to be
undeniably true.
Discouraging Crime.
43. People who imagine that widespread
firearm ownership would turn quiet
Australian towns into a wild west town
tend to ignore the fact that firearms in the As the Right to Carry, either unrestricted, or with licence has
accepted by 50 US State governments their violent crime
hands of responsible people are a been
rates have drastically reduced. This should be the lesson that
deterrent that is most unlikely to be used, our political leader use as a guide, not the British disaster.
but which alters the behaviour of
criminals.
Just one astonishing statistic shows just what a deterrent they can be. In Britain, roughly half
of all burglaries take place while the householder is at home. In the United States, where
the home-owner is likely to be armed, only one burglary in eight happens when there is
someone at home. And in some states, which openly licensed residents to use deadly force
against intruders, burglary is virtually unknown.
44 .American law, unlike Australian law but both based on the original laws of Britain, also takes
the view that a man is entitled to defend himself in his own home. The principle of 'defence of
habitation' gives the besieged citizen far more freedom to deal with an intruder than the vague
and uncertain English/Australian requirement that only 'reasonable force' should be used.
What seems reasonable in the small hours, in the dark, in the midst of a fear-soaked struggle, may
not seem reasonable in the calm of a courtroom or in the offices of the Crown Prosecution
20
Service, where the gravest danger is a shortage of digestive biscuits.
NO Sense.
45. The main arguments for gun control do not, in fact, make sense. The mass hysteria about guns
which followed the Dunblane school massacre made even less sense. It is quite clear that Thomas
Hamilton, who murdered a teacher and 16 little children there in March 1996, should not have
been allowed to own firearms and like many of these similar murderers should not have been
allowed out of doors un -supervised. We used to keep Mental institutions for these people, now
they want to advocate their release yet lock up the sane people instead.
After a long and careful investigation, the
Cullen Report specifically did not
recommend a general ban on handguns.
There was no case for it. Yet, that was what
the politicians chose to do.
In recent years, chief constables and Home
Secretaries have sought to limit gun
ownership as never before. Most of these
changes have happened since the Sixties,
when liberal and politically correct ideas
first infected the British Home Office and
the police forces of the world. Much of the
change has happened without proper
informed debate and legislation.
‘There is no statistical relationship
between the numbers of firearms legally
held in Britain and the use of firearms in
homicide or robbery.' Chief Inspector,
Colin Greenwood.
The Firearms Act
46. The first proper British Firearms Act of
1920 said that the police must issue firearms certificates on request, unless there was a good
reason not to, and it assumed that people living in remote places who wanted a firearm for
self-defence would be permitted to keep one. Now, thanks to private, executive decisions by civil
servants and police chiefs, that reasonable right has disappeared.
In the early years of the Firearms Act the law was not enforced with particular stringency, except
in Ireland, where revolutionary agitators were demanding independence from British rule, and
where colonial laws had already created a firearm licensing system. Within Great Britain, a
"firearms certificate" for possession of rifles or handguns was readily obtainable. Wanting to
possess a firearm for self-defence was considered a "good reason" for being granted a firearms
certificate.
--------The AIC found that between July 1997 and June 1999 "Not one handgun used in homicide
was registered." - See: Mouzos, J. (2000). The Licensing and Registration Status of Firearms
21
Used in Homicide, Trends & Issues in Crime Control & Criminal Justice, No. 151. Canberra:
Australian Institute of Criminology, p. 4.
-------------47. The threat of Bolshevik revolution, which had been the impetus for the Firearms Act, had
faded quickly as the Communist government of the Soviet Union found it necessary to spend all
its energy gaining full control over its own people, rather than exporting revolution. Ordinary
firearms crime in Britain, which was the pretext for the Firearms Act, remained minimal. Despite
the pacific state of affairs, the government did not move to repeal the unneeded gun controls, but
instead began to expand the controls.
In 1934, a government task force, the Bodkin Committee, was formed to study the Firearms Act.
The Committee collected statistics on misuse of the firearms that were not currently regulated,
such as shotguns and airguns, and collected no statistics on the guns under control, namely rifles
and handguns. The Committee concluded that there was no persuasive evidence for repeal of any
part of the Firearms Act. Since the Bodkin Committee had avoided looking for evidence about
how the Firearms Act was actually working, it was not surprising that the Committee found no
evidence in favour of decontrol.
48. Spurred by the Bodkin Committee, the British government in 1936 enacted legislation to
outlaw (with a few minor exceptions) possession of short-barrelled shotguns and fully automatic
firearms. The law was partly patterned after the 1934 National Firearms Act in the United States,
which taxed and registered, but did not prohibit, such firearms. In 1973 and 1988, when the
government was attempting to expand controls still further, firearm control advocates claimed
that the Bodkin Committee report was clear proof of how well the Firearms Act of 1920 was
working, and why its controls should be extended to other firearms.
49. As a result of alcohol prohibition, the United States in the 1920s and early 1930s did have a
problem with criminal abuse of machine guns, a fad among the organized crime gangsters who
earned lucrative incomes supplying
bootleg alcohol, although most such
firearms were owned by peaceable
citizens. The repeal of Prohibition in 1933
had sent the American murder rate into a
nosedive, but in 1934 Congress went
ahead and enacted the National Firearms
Act anyway.
In Britain, there had been no alcohol
prohibition, and hence no crime problem
with automatics, or other firearms. Before
1920, any British adult could purchase a
machine gun; after 1920, any Briton with a Firearms Certificate could purchase a machine gun.
During the 1936 British debate, the government could not point to a single instance of a machine
gun being misused in Britain, yet these firearms were banned anyway. The government explained
its actions by arguing that automatics were crime guns in the United States and there was no
legitimate reason for civilians to possess them.
50. The same rationale is used today in the drive to outlaw semi-automatic firearms in the United
22
States. Since some government officials believe that people do not "need" semi-automatic
firearms for hunting, the officials believe that such guns should be prohibited, whether or not the
guns are frequently used in crime.
William Shakespere encapsulated this in his play King Lear, "O, reason not the need!" shouted
King Lear after his two traitorous daughters, Regan and Goneril, disarmed him by taking away
his armed retinue. Goneril and Regan had asked why the King needed even a single armed
retainer, since Goneril's Army and Regan's army would protect him. The King's "reason not the
need" response was his way of saying that, he should not have to justify what he wanted; he
should not have to convince his daughters that he had a good reason for wanting to be armed.
Unfortunately, for British and Australian firearm owners they shared the same fate as King Lear,
as it was too late. King Lear had already turned the power in the kingdom over to Regan and
Goneril.
51. It was also too late for British firearm owners, by their silence had agreed that rifle and pistol
ownership should be allowed only when the government, not the citizen, believed that there was
a "good reason" for it. This shift of power by the British Parliament for the 1903 Act made a false
precedent that has been followed by all Australian State parliaments and should be corrected. The
people’s WILL for freedom could change this, but until this education occurs to them and the
realise what they have lost, apathy will allow the governments to win.
52. So, the burden of proof in public debate was reversed. The parliament was not required to
show that there was a need to ban short shotguns or automatic rifles; indeed, the misuse of these
firearms in Great Britain was so rare that the British government could never have shown a
"need" for the bans. Instead, the government faced a much lower burden. Did the government
believe that citizens have a "need" for the firearms in question? The British Government began
a new direction followed by every State
parliament ever since, using the notion, to
Discard ‘Reason’ and substituting, a ‘Need’.
If the public has no Need well the
Government will remove that property from
the public. Of course, Government had a
need and they ensure that Police and
Military always have arms suitable for their
defence. Obviously many law-abiding
citizens thought they did, since the citizens
had chosen to purchase such firearms. For
example, short shotguns are easy to
manoeuver in a confined setting, and hence
are very well-suited for home defence against a burglar. Likewise, machine guns are enjoyed for
target shooting and collecting, and are useable for home defence.
53. The Firearms Act of 1920 had not, of course, banned short shotguns or automatic rifles. The
former were ignored by the Act, while the latter were subject only to a lenient licensing system.
The Firearms Act had, however, moved the baseline for gun control, and had helped to shift
public attitudes. The concept of a "right" to arms was giving way to a privilege, based on whether
the government determined that the would-be firearm-owner had a "need" according to the
government's standard. The 1934 British ban on short shotguns and machine guns was a classic
23
instance of the dangers of an excessively broad rationale. The parliament decided that nobody
outside the government "needed" such items. Thus, the "good reason" requirement of the 1920
Firearms Act set the stage for the 1934 gun ban rationale, that "people outside the government
don't need this," which in turn would set the stage for further prohibitions.
Frederick Schauer's classic article on Slippery Slopes, 99 Harv. L. Rev. 361 (1985) identifies a
close relation to the classic slippery slope argument is "the argument from added authority." Here,
the argument is that "granting additional authority to the decision maker inevitably increases
the likelihood of a wide range of possible future events, one of which might be the danger
case."
The British Firearms Act of 1920 offers a clear example of the dangers against which Schauer's
"added authority" argument warns. Before the Firearms Act, the police had no role in deciding
who could own a firearm. The Firearms Act instructed them to issue licenses (Firearms
Certificates) to all applicants who
had a "good reason" for wanting a
rifle or pistol. Starting in 1936 the
British police began adding a
requirement to Firearms
Certificates that the firearms be
stored securely. As shotguns were
not licensed, there was no such
requirement for them.
54. While the safe storage
requirement might, in the abstract
seem reasonable, it was eventually
enforced in a highly unreasonable
manner by a police bureaucracy
often determined to make firearms
owners suffer as much harassment
as possible, as has been showed throughout Australia since 1997. More importantly, Parliaments
supposedly to be “the voice of the people” did not vote to impose storage requirements on
firearm-owners in 1934 . Whatever the merits of the storage rules, they were imposed not by the
representatives of the people, but by administrators who were acting without legal authority.
Without the licensing system, the police never would have had the opportunity to exercise such
illegal power.
55. Once even the most innocuous licensing system is in place, it is more possible (almost
inevitable) that increasingly severe restrictions will be placed on the licensees by administrative
fiat. The recognition of this danger is one reason why the USA s Bill of Rights First
Amendment's prohibition on prior restraints is so wise. The rule prohibiting prior restraint
recognizes that any system for licensing the press, creates a risk that the system will be
administratively abused. In Australia and Britain the Police would be constrained by the Ninth
Amendment, ‘The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed
to deny or disparage others retained by the people’.
56. All this legislation and control was supposed to stem the rise in armed crime, it has
completely failed. A former senior police officer, Colin Greenwood, has studied this in detail and
24
says, devastatingly: ‘There is no statistical relationship between the numbers of firearms legally
held in Britain and the use of firearms in homicide or robbery.’
This is no surprise. The sort of firearms used in crime - sawn-off shotguns and revolvers - are all
illegally obtained in the first place and cannot be controlled by law. Hardly any legally owned
weapons are ever used in crimes. Armed
robbery is almost never a first offence. Those
who commit it have criminal records and are
legally banned from owning weapons
anyway.
--------------The AIC's work on the status of firearms
used in homicide found that between July
1997 and June 1999, only 9.4% of
firearm-related homicides in Australia
involved licensed owners with registered
guns. - See: Mouzos, J. op. cit
------------------Government Expediency Makes Night into
Day, Right into Wrong. Ban Firearms
Today, Encourage Ownership Tomorrow.
57. After the fall of France and the Dunkirk
evacuation in 1940, Britain found itself short
of arms for island defence. The Home Guard
was forced to drill with canes, umbrellas,
spears, pikes, and clubs. When citizens could
find a gun, it was generally a sporting
shotgun, which was ill-suited for most types
of military use because of its short range and
bulky ammunition. British government
advertisements in United States newspapers and in magazines such as American Rifleman begged
readers to "Send A Gun to Defend a British Home--British civilians, faced with threat of
invasion, desperately need arms for the defence of their homes." The adds pleaded for "Pistols,
Rifles, Revolvers, Shotguns and Binoculars from American civilians who wish to answer the call
and aid in defence of British homes."
As a result of these adverts, Pro-Allied organizations in the United States collected weapons; the
National Rifle Association shipped 7,000 guns to Britain. Britain also purchased surplus World
War One Enfield rifles from the United States Department of War. Before the war, British
authorities had refused to allow domestic manufacture of the Thompson submachine gun because
it was "a Gangster Gun," but when the war broke out, large numbers of American-made
Thompson's were shipped to Britain, where they were dubbed "tommy guns."
58. Prime Minister Winston Churchill's book Their Finest Hour details the arrival of the
shipments. Churchill personally supervised the deliveries to ensure that they were sent on fast
ships, and distributed first to Home Guard members in coastal zones. Churchill thought that the
American donations were "entirely on a different level from anything we have transported across
25
the Atlantic except for the Canadian
division itself." Churchill warned an
advisor that "the loss of these rifles
and field-guns [if the transport ships
were sunk by Nazi submarines]
would be a disaster of the first order."
He later recalled that "when the ships
from America approached our shores
with their priceless arms, special
trains were waiting in all the ports to
receive their cargoes." "The Home
Guard in every county, in every town,
in every village, sat up all through the
night to receive them .... By the end
of July we were an armed nation ... a
Winston with his .45 acp Thompson. Briton would have been a
lot of our men and some women had safer place today if those that followed after him had inherited his
weapons in their hands."]
common sense approach on firearms and security.
59. As World War II ended the British government did what it could to prevent the men who had
risked their lives in defence of freedom and Britain from holding onto firearm acquired during
the war. Troop ships returning to England were searched for souvenir, or captured rifles and men
caught attempting to bring firearms home were punished. Firearms that had been donated by
American civilians were collected from the Home Guard and destroyed by the British
government. In spite of these measures, large quantities of firearms still slipped into Britain,
where many of them remain to this day in attics and under floor boards. At least some British
firearm owners, like their United States counterparts in today's gun-confiscating jurisdictions
such as New Jersey and New York City, were beginning to conclude that their government did
not trust them, and that their government could not be trusted to deal with them fairly. In 1946,
the Home Secretary announced a policy change: henceforth, self-defence would not be considered
a good reason for being granted a Firearms Certificate. This was copied years later by the
Australian State governments in the wake of the John Howard Un-informed Gun laws.
60. The next rounds of British legislative action were aimed at knives, rather than guns. The 1953
Prevention of Crime Act outlawed the carrying of an "offensive weapon" and put the burden of
proof on anyone found with an "offensive weapon," such as a knife, to prove that he had a
reasonable excuse. In 1959, the Home Office pushed for, and won, a ban on self-loading knives.
Self-loading knives are knives that use a spring or other mechanism so that they can be opened
with one hand. These "flick knives," as they were called in Britain, were not any more of a crime
problem than other knives, but the rationale for their ban was the same as for the 1937 ban on
certain guns. The government did not see any reason why a person would need a self-loading
knife. Furthermore, just as machine guns had been associated with American gangsters, "flick
knives," which are called "switchblades" in the United States, were associated with American
juvenile delinquents.
Forgotten Freedoms.
61. The British government in the 1950s left the subject of gun control alone. Crime was still
quite low, and issues such as national health care and the Cold War dominated the political
26
dialogue. Even so, the maintenance of the existing, relatively mild, structure of rifle and pistol
licensing would have important consequences. As the Firearms Act remained in force year after
year, a smaller and smaller percentage of the population could remember a time in their own lives
when a Briton could buy a rifle or pistol because ‘he had a right to do so,’ rather than because he
had convinced a police administrator that there was a "good reason" for him to purchase the gun.
As the post-1920 generation grew up, the licensing provisions of the Firearms Act began to seem
less like a change from previous conditions and more like part of ordinary social circumstances.
A similar process is at work in the United States, where only part of the population remembers
the days before 1968 when federal registration was not required for people to purchase firearms.
In Queensland Licencing was first introduced in 1990 selling people a ‘Life Time Shooters
Licence," registration and good reasons came a few years later in the tide of John Howard's Un
informed Gun Laws, so only the older generation can remember firearm freedoms.
62. As in most of the Western world, the late 1960s in Great Britain was a time of rising crime
and civil disorder. In 1965, capital
punishment was abolished, except for
treason and piracy. Gun crime did not
seem to be a problem. Scotland Yard
stated "with some confidence" that the
objectives of eliminating "the improper
and careless custody and use of firearms
... and making it difficult for criminals to
obtain them ... are effectively achieved."
In June 1966, Home Secretary Roy
Jenkins told Parliament that after
Pontius Pilate thought he had to make it look like he was consulting with the Chief Constables and
‘Doing something’. That precedent has been unfortunately the Home Office, he had concluded (as
followed by countless politicians and administrators ever since. had his predecessor the year before) that
With disastrous un considered outcomes.
shotgun controls were not worth the
trouble, yet six weeks later, Jenkins
announced that new shotgun controls were necessary, because shotguns were too easily available
to criminals.
Diverting Public Attention.
63. Had there been a sudden surge in shotgun crime in the six week period? Not at all, but three
policemen at Shephard's Bush had been murdered with illegal revolvers. Popular outcry for
capital punishment was fervent, and Jenkins, an abolitionist, responded by announcing new
shotgun controls, in an attempt to divert attention from the noose.
In retrospect, Mr. Jenkins' shotgun controls made no logical sense. Regulating shotguns would
obviously have no impact on criminal use of unlicensed revolvers, the guns used to murder the
three policemen. Jenkins claimed that "criminal use of shotguns is increasing rapidly, still more
rapidly than that of other weapons." The "rapidly" increasing type of crime associated with
shotguns, however, involved mostly poaching or property damage rather than armed robberies
or murders. Nevertheless, by showing that he was "doing something" about crime by
proposing shotgun controls, Mr. Jenkins effectively achieved his main goal, which was to
divert public attention from the death penalty. The Jenkins tactic has been used by many other
politicians since then, including former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, who is a proponent
27
of gun prohibition and an opponent of the death penalty.
Un related Government Needs, Fuel Legislative Restrictions on the Public.
64. This brings to light a third factor that may help push a civil right down the slippery slope: the
exercise of the right may be unproblematic, but pushes for restriction on the right may satisfy
unrelated political needs. The more likely that media or other interest groups are to be hostile to
the exercise of the right, the greater the prospect that further infringing on the right may fulfill
the political need of distracting attention from other matters.
At Jenkins' request the British government began drafting the legislation that became the
Criminal Justice Act of 1967. The new act required a license for the purchase of shotguns. Like
the USAs Gun Control Act of 1968 , Britain's 1967 Act was part of a comprehensive crime
package that included a variety of infringements on civil liberties. For example, the British Act
abolished the necessity for unanimous jury verdicts in criminal trials, eliminated the requirement
for a full hearing of evidence at committal hearings, and restricted press coverage of those
hearings.
65. Under the 1967 system, a person wishing to obtain his first shotgun needed to obtain a
"shotgun certificate." The local police could reject an applicant if they believed that his
"possession of a shotgun would endanger public safety." The police were required to grant the
certificate unless the applicant had a particular defect in his background such as a criminal record
or history of mental illness. An applicant was required to supply a counter signatory, a person
who would attest to the accuracy of the information in the application. During an investigation
period that could last several weeks, the police might visit the applicant's home. In the first
decades of the system, about ninety-eight percent of all applications were granted.
Once the £12 shotgun certificate was granted, the law allowed a citizen to purchase as many
shotguns as he wished. Private transfers among certificate holders were legal and uncontrolled.
As with the Firearms Act of 1920, the statutory language of the 1967 shotgun law was eminently
reasonable, and unobjectionable except to a civil liberties purist.
66. The 1976 law
contained one other
provision that
illustrated a key
strategy of how to
push something down
a slippery slope: it is
easier to legislate
against people who
cannot vote, or who
are not yet born, than
against adults who want to retain their rights. Reducing the number people who will, one day in
the future, care about exercising a particular right is a good way to ensure that, on that future day,
new restrictions on the right will be politically easier to enact. Thus, the 1967 law did nothing to
take away guns from law-abiding adults, but the Act did severely restrict firearm transfers to
minors. It became illegal for a father to give even an air rifle as a gift to his thirteen-year-old son.
The fewer young people who enjoy the exercise of a civil liberty such as the shooting sports, the
fewer adults there will eventually be to defend that civil liberty.
28
67. This conditioning of young people, not to
believe they have rights has occurred throughout
the western world and Australia and is especially
prevalent in restricting young people the right to
acquire a driving licence, or waiting 11 months for
a shooting licence, without being aware that they
have a rights of redress. In the American context
they have the practice of denying American
schoolchildren constitutional protection from locker
searches, dog sniffs, metal detectors, and random
drug testing is a method of raising new generations
with little appreciation for the freedoms that past
generations have fought and died to retain.
Government is Arming itself and Disarming the public.
68. “What seems to be happening is that the Government is trying to get the monopoly of the
use of force of all kinds.”
Bill of Right 1688/89
“By causing severall good Subjects being Protestants to be disarmed at the same time when
Papists were both Armed and Imployed contrary to Law.”
With Administrative Abuse
As is typical with all gun control laws, in Britain the shotgun certificate system was enforced in
a moderate and reasonable way by the government in the law's first years. Similarly, the rifle and
handgun licensing system, introduced in 1920, had been enforced in a generally moderate way
in the 1920s and 1930s. However, as the public grew accustomed to the idea of rifles and
handguns being licensed, it became possible to begin to enforce the licensing requirements with
greater and greater stringency. This in effect has been mirrored within Australia during the 1990s
The Boiled Frog.
69. Severe enforcement of the rifle and handgun licensing system would not have worked in
1922. Too many gun owners would have been outraged by the rapid move from a free society to
one of repressive controls. By initially enforcing the 1920 legislation with moderation, and then
with gradually increasing severity, the British government acclimatised British gun owners to
higher and higher levels of control. The British government used the same principle as do people
who are cooking frogs. If a cook throws a frog in a pot of boiling water, he will jump out, but if
the cook puts a frog in a pot of moderately warm water, and gradually raises the temperature, the
frog will slowly lose consciousness, and be unable to escape by the time the water gets to a boil.
Australia and other western countries have suffered losses of personal civil rights under this same
political strategy. The frog-cooking principle helps explain the Australian decline. As in
Queensland once the lenient life time licence was installed used for a six years this laid the
foundation for the more sever 1996/97 the licensing and registration system that has been
systemically tightened. Now, this current Commonwealth committee has been commissioned to
tighten the chains once more.
70. The British "firearms certificate" system of 1920 had required that a person who wished to
possess a rifle or handgun prove he had "a good reason. In the early years of the system,
self-defence had been considered "a good reason,"but, by the 1960s, it was a well-established
29
police practice that only "sporting" purposes, and not self-defence could justify issuance of a rifle
or handgun license. Parliament had never voted to outlaw defensive gun ownership, but
self-defence fell victim to what Schauer calls "the consequences of linguistic imprecision."
When a legal rule is expressed in imprecise, or broad terms there is a heightened risk that
subsequent interpreters of the rule may apply the rule differently than the formulators of the rule
would have. Thus, while self-defence was a "good reason" in 1921, in later decades the
government had decided that a "good reason" did not include self-defence. In practice, being a
certified member of a government-approved target shooting club became the only way a person
could legally purchase a pistol. The British example has taught all Australian Police States the
lessons in People Control.
71. Again, a method of control used by Police in all Australian States, they say we interpret it this
way, if you disagree, you take the Police to Court under Appeal, The Police are defended at the
cost of the Public Purse and you pay for your own expenses and losses, if you win we will take
you to the highest court and out spend you, till we win.
Under regulations implementing Britain's 1997 Firearms (Amendment) Act, gun club members
must now register every time they use a range, and must record which particular gun they use.
If the gun-owner does not use some of his legally-registered guns at the range often enough, his
permission to own those guns will be revoked. This control was mirrored in Australian legislation
in 1997, made more severe in 2003 and squeezed like a lemon in further Weapons Act Up dates
and re-prints.
72. Having control over rifle and handgun owners through a licensing system, the police began
inventing their own conditions to put on licenses. The police practice was not entirely legal, but
it was generally accepted by a compliant public. Similar practices occur in United States
jurisdictions such as New York city, where licensing authorities sometimes add their own,
extra-legal, restrictions to handgun licenses. In the 1980s, the then New York Police
Commissioner Benjamin Ward told his firearms licensing staff to refuse to issue any licenses for
the Glock pistol. The prohibition ended when the media found out that Commissioner Ward
himself carried a Glock pistol.
73. When the safe storage requirement was introduced for rifles and handguns in the 1930s, it
was enforced in a reasonable manner by the police. Leaving one's handgun on the front porch was
not acceptable; keeping it on a dark closet shelf was perfectly fine.
From the 1930s through the 1960s, the security requirement
simply meant that Firearms Certificate holders were told of
their responsibility for secure storage. Starting in the early
1970s, the police began performing home inspections as part
of the Firearms Certificate issuance in order to assess the
applicant's security. After the 1996 Dunblane shootings,
some police forces began performing spot checks on persons
who already held Firearms Certificates. Apparently the home
searches were done to make sure that the firearms really were
locked up.
Parliament never granted the police home inspection authority, nor did Parliament enact
legislation saying that a hardened safe is the only acceptable storage method. However, that is
what the police in many jurisdictions require anyway. In fact, many gun owners who bought safes
30
that the police said were acceptable are now being forced to buy new safes because the local
police have arbitrarily changed the standards. In many districts, an "acceptable safe" is now one
that can withstand a half-hour attack by a burglar who arrives with a full set of safe-opening tools.
74. Again, this has been mirrored in all Australian Police States with legislation that began for
hand guns in the 1980s and now enforces safes for long arms and for instance, whilst
Queenslanders suffer spot checks from the Police legislation only allows for checks when an
application for a licence or Permit to acquire is before them. The Police will always take
legislation further than the intent of the legislators.
Sometimes the police require the purchase of two safes: the first one for the gun and the second
one for separate storage of ammunition. A safe for ammunition is not yet required under
Queensland State law and hopefully is never proposed as explosives should not be contained, it
is a safety hazard that is why explosive magazines are made of wood without nails. Containment
of explosive devices increases its power if for instance there was a house fire.
Grind Them Down Strategy.
75. For the Australian law abiding firearm owner it is the same principle as for the beleaguered
Briton, buying a low-powered, £5 rimfire rifle may have to spend £100 on a safe. Likewise, a
person with five handguns (before the 1997 ban) might have been ordered to add a £1000
electronic security system. Added to the cost of the illegal requirement for hardened safes is the
escalating cost of Firearms or Shotgun Certificates. Home inspections are expensive for the
police, and thus the cost of Firearms Certificates or Shotgun Certificates has been raised again
and again, far above the rate of inflation, in order to cover the costs of the intrusive inspections,
as well as the cost of many gross inefficiencies in police processing of applications.
All these effects are mirrored in all of the Australian Police States.
76. By the use of large licencing & permit fees and heavy security costs bureaucrats have hoped
to reduce legal gun ownership by the less wealthy classes, as in the days of Henry the Eighth and
Charles the First, who was later beheaded during the
English Civil War, and James II, who was driven out of
the country by the Glorious Revolution. Statistics,
released from State governments prove that this “Grind
them Down”strategy has failed and since 1997 there
has been a massive increase in Firearm Licence holders
and millions more registered firearms entering
Australia.
Most of this information has been suppressed and is
only available to the public under FOI applications.
Reduction in the numbers of firearms in private
hands is the real goal of all legislation and not to
reduce the miss use of firearms.
77. The increasing severity of the application of the
gun licensing system is no accident. A 1970 internal
government document, the McKay Report was turned
into a 1973 British government Green Paper, which
proposed a host of new controls. The British shooting
31
Professor Harding then the Director of the
Australian Institute of Criminology. His
research interests include a long-standing
involvement in many international
organisations, including United Nations.
lobbies, however, mobilized and the Green Paper was withdrawn. Law professor Richard
Harding, Australia's then-leading academic advocate of gun control, criticized the Green Paper
as "statistically defective ... [and] ... scientifically quite useless." Harding was looking at
whether the proposed laws would reduce gun crime, gun suicide, or other gun misuse and
admitted that the report had failed, but could not, or was not honest enough to admit why ‘The
Reason’ was missing, the truth was the connection in reality was ever there in the first instance.
He only saw civilian disarmament as a ‘Need’. The proponents of the Green Paper, on the other
hand were more honest, and admitted that they did not care whether more gun control would
reduce gun misuse. The earlier, secret draft of the Green Paper (the McKay Report) had stated
that "a reduction in the number of firearms in private hands is a desirable end in itself." As
all increases in legislation of firearms since the British 1903 Act has been followed by increases
of crime with firearms and this information has been available to any serious researcher, we can
only deduce that "a reduction in the numbers of firearms in private hands" is the real goal of all
legislation and not to reduce the miss use of firearms. This Green Paper (the Mc Kay Report) is
the first formal admission, will this committee make the same honest admission?
Bureaucrats Impose Own Agenda. Create work, Create Promotion, Create Greater Powers.
78. One of the Green Paper items required prospective rifle hunters to receive written invitation
from the owner of the land where they would shoot, and then take the letter to the police. The
police would investigate the safety of the hunt and other factors before granting permission.
Several Chief Constables adopted this proposal and others from the Green Paper as "force policy"
and enforced them as if they were law. A certificate for rifle possession now often includes
"territorial conditions" specifying exactly where the person may hunt. While it is not legally
necessary for shooters to have written permission to hunt on a particular piece of land, police
have been stopping shooters, demanding written proof of permission, and threatening to
confiscate guns from persons who cannot produce the proof. This 1973 British Green Paper
proposal was legislated in a similar fashion into the 1996/97 legislation in all Australian Police
States with minor differences and have been interpreted in slightly different methods in each State
jurisdictions. The Western Australian Police being the most severe.
Just one other example concerning the Queensland Police, Weapons Act 1990, states,
Part 4 Possession and use of weapons Page 104 Current as at 1 July 2014.
77 Collector’s licence (weapons)
(1) It is a condition of a collector’s licence (weapons) that the licensee may possess—
(a) category D, M or R weapons only if—
(i) for weapons that are firearms—the weapons are made permanently inoperable; or
(ii) for other weapons—the weapons are inert; or
(b) category A, B or C weapons that are collectable firearms manufactured on or after 1 January
1901 only if the weapons are made temporarily inoperable; or
(c) category H weapons only if—
(i) they are manufactured before 1 January 1947 and are temporarily inoperable,
collectable firearms; or
(ii) they are manufactured on or after 1 January 1947 and are temporarily inoperable,
collectible firearms and the licensee’s licence is endorsed to allow possession of collectable
firearms manufactured on or after 1 January 1947; or
(iii) otherwise—they are permanently inoperable.
(2) In this section— collectable firearm means a firearm that is of obvious and
32
significant commemorative, historic, thematic or investment value.
You can see above that the Act makes provision for temporary Inoperable (trigger locks, firing
pin removed) for firearms that are collectable. Yet whenever a collectors licence is renewed, or
applied for the Police will automatically remove the above option by stipulating in the small print
conditions supplied with the licence that all firearm on the collectors licence had to be inoperable.
The effect of this usually only apparent on the collectors first inspection by the Police. Usually,
the collector has not noticed the conditions have changed, so then he can lose his collection and
be charged and prosecuted. Even, if that does not happen, his collector licence is worthless, and
so too is his collection as permanently inoperable means it cannot be opened to be cleaned, its
welded up and is then a piece of junk, scrap. Historic relics are then lost, handed in for
destruction, or welded up. All because the police are forever pushing for harsher impositions and
more power. No wonder the community has no trust in them, nor supports them in there need.
79. Police abuses appear in every aspect of gun licensing. As Police Review magazine noted:
"There is an easily identifiable
police attitude towards the
possession of guns by members of
the public. Every possible difficulty
should be put in their way." The
stated police position is "to reduce
to an absolute minimum the number
of firearms, including shotguns, in
hands of members of the public."
Thus, without legal authority, the
police have begun to phase out
firearms collections by refusing new
applications. The police with some
legislative authority, required
applicants for shotguns capable of
holding more than two shells to
prove a special need for a shotgun
with three shot capacity.
Furthermore, if a policeman has a personal interest in the shooting sports, that interest may
disqualify him from being assigned to any role in the police Weapons Licensing Departments.
Policemen who know virtually nothing about firearms, but who can be counted on to have a
hostile attitude towards firearm owners, are often picked for the Weapons Licensing positions.
Another large example from Queensland is:35 Acquisition of weapons
(1) A person may acquire a weapon only if—
(a) the person is a licensed dealer; or
(b) the person is the holder of a permit to acquire the weapon and acquires the weapon—
(c) the person acquires the weapon under other lawful authority, justification or excuse.
When the holder of a current Shooter’s licence is granted the licence that is a lawful authority and
is used in all other legal contexts. Yet, the Queensland Police enforce 90 % of transaction along
a Permit to Acquire path involving each transacting with an additional $33. payment and further
28 day waiting periods sometimes extended by lack of Police enthusiasm to 11 months waiting
for a transaction, when the Police lose the application they force the licenced shooter to pay again
33
for another application. Pure tyranny over the public.
80. Parliament has no interest in investigating police abuses of the firearm licensing laws. One
reason is that the instigated of these abuses has to have the assent of the of Australian Police
Ministries, or in the British model the Home Office, which is controlled by the leaders of the
party in power in Parliament.
The courts are submissive to police "discretion." As a formal matter, applicants may appeal police
denials of permit application, but the courts are generally deferential to police decisions. Hearsay
evidence is admissible against the applicant. An appellant does not have a right to present
evidence on his own behalf, nor does an applicant who has been denied have a right to find out
the basis for the denial until the trial begins. Weapons Acts in all states protect the individual
Police or administrative staff from ignorance, or incompetence, or pure vindictiveness, they are
made above the law and beyond reproach, where the law abiding firearm owner has to take on
the whole government at his own expense with legislation and the court system stacked against
him. That is why the appellant/applicants is never truley informed of the basis of his denial, he
has to prepare his case on guesses.
81. The only practical way that British and Australian firearm owners could have avoided abuse
of the licensing laws would have been to resist the first proposed laws that allowed the police to
determine who should be awarded a firearm license. However the Firearm owners never would
have dreamed of resisting, because such a law which at first glance seemed so "reasonable."
Having meekly accepted the wishes of the police and the ruling party for "reasonable" controls,
by the early 1970's British rifle and handgun owners found themselves in a boiling pot of severe
controls from which escape was no longer possible. British shotgun owners, ignoring the fate of
their rifle and handgun-owning brethren, jumped into their own pot of then-lukewarm water when
they accepted the 1966 shotgun licensing proposals. This was followed by the Australian
acceptance in the 1990s. Class A model citizens are the least likely to strongly protest. In the
Australian context even the rallies of 100,000 shooters protesting in major Australian cities were
all well behaved and easily minimised by the governments and media outlets.
----------------------------" . . . . licensed firearms owners were not responsible for over 90 per cent of firearm related
homicides. Most (over 90%) firearms used to commit homicide were not registered and
their owners not licensed." - See: Graycar, A. (2000). Crime, Safety & Firearms. Canberra:
Australian Institute of Criminology
---------------------------Prohibition
34
82. Firearm control in Australia and Great Britain now proceeds on two fronts. When a
sensational crime takes place, proposals for further firearm confiscations and for major new
restrictions on the licensing system are introduced. During more tranquil times, fees are raised
and increased controls are applied to relatively smaller issues mainly by small but powerful
bureaucratic regulation controls that never see the inside of a parliament debate.
An examples of tranquil-period controls was the British Firearms Act of 1982, which introduced
restrictive licensing for deactivated firearms that were permanently in-operable. The original
proposal had been to implement an outright ban on realistic imitation, or toy firearms. The
proposer of the new law against imitation firearms promised that it would help stem "the rising
tide of crime and terrorism," although he pointed to no successful crime or terrorist acts
committed with realistic toys. In Australia Crossbows 4000 year old technology was given a new
‘M’ class under the Police State Weapons Act and licence legislation. Now crossbows are harder
to access than modern hand guns.
More than likely this Committee’s findings will sit un read on a shelf and will only be dusted off
and used for an additional excuse when the parliament of the day sees a ‘need to be seen to be
doing something’ an excuse for more people control and the media hype to support a tightening
of the noose or a raising of the temperature of the boiled frog.
83. In Britain under new "safety" regulations regarding explosives, persons who possess modern
gunpowder or blackpowder are now subject to unannounced, warrantless inspections of their
home at any time to make sure that the powder is properly stored. The government, of course,
promises that its inspections will not be unreasonable, but "reasonableness" is often in the eye
of the beholder. In Australia the
State Explosives Acts have had
these provisions surreptitiously
added into the regulations but
as yet have not been
implemented. Up to date we
only have knowledge of one
prosecution in Queensland
where a licensed shooter had
to plead guilty for having 10
round of historic .310
(nineteenth century) (Boer
War vintage) ammunition
not in its original packet.
84. In Australia and Britain firearm crime is not as common as in the United States, but it
inevitably attracts sensational media attention that becomes the basis for further tightening of
controls. As with the Australian Monash University murders in 2004 where a Chinese national,
honours student in economics, (who could not speak English, needed an interpreter to be charged)
stole handguns from a pistol club and murdered two people gave an excuse for the ban on
handguns over 9mm and large magazines capacity (over 10 rounds) and ushered in further
restrictions on memberships of Pistol Clubs. This followed the British example of 1989, where
a person who had been rejected for membership in a firearms club stole a handgun from the
locked trunk of a club member and shot a Manchester policeman. In another case a probationary
member of a firearms club, learning that he had a fatal disease, killed one club member, stole a
35
gun from the club, and shot a personal enemy. The Home Secretary, at the urging of the
Manchester police department, issued a new set of restrictions on firearms clubs, including
restrictions on bringing guests to a range to
shoot a firearm. The practical effect of the
new restrictions was to try and reduce the
entry of new members into many firearms
clubs.
It worked in Britain but has had an opposite
effect with increased membership in
Australian clubs.
85. In Britain thanks to decades of such
restrictions aimed at restricting entry into
the shooting sports, the vast majority of the
public has no familiarity with guns, other
than what media choose to let them know.
Legal British gun owners now constitute
only four percent of total households, with
perhaps another small percentage of the USA, Violent Crime figures. Does Australia want to see a
similar decrease, and introduce Licence to Carry for
population possessing illegal, unregistered Defence, or the reverse outcome by following the British
guns. Given that many Britons have no Disaster?
personal acquaintance with anyone who
they know to be a sporting shooter, it is not surprising that seventy-six percent of the population
supports banning all guns. Thus, the people who used rifles and shotguns in the field sports, who
confidently expected that whatever controls government imposed on the rabble in the cities who
wanted handguns, genteel deer rifles and hand-made shotguns would be left alone, have been
proven disastrously wrong.
The Right to Life, or the Right to Freedom?.
86. The British gun-owners must accept much of the blame for their current predicament because
of their concession that guns were only appropriate for sports. When the Home Office in the
1980s began complaining that some people were obtaining guns for protection, British Shooting
Sports Council joined the complaint: "This, if it is a fact, is an alarming trend and reflects sadly
on our society." One hunting lobby official condemned "the growing number of weapons being
held in urban areas" for reasons having nothing to do with sport. The major hunting lobby, the
British Association for Shooting and Conservation, defended the right to arms, but only, in its
words, "the freedom to possess and use sporting arms.” This sounded their own death bell.
87. Australia has an ownership of firearms lower than the United States, but much higher than
the United Kingdom, this increase in firearm ownership seems to be the only reason for further
increases in bureaucratic impositions, as all statistics including suicides generally, or suicides
with firearms has been in an ever reducing spiral, at the same time that legal firearm ownership
has increases. The supports the fact, that More Firearms, equated to Less Crime.
88. Strong rights usually need a strong sociological foundation. More than half of American
homes contain a firearm, and a quarter contain a hand gun. Thus, except in a few cities like New
36
York where gun ownership is rare, firearm bans in the United States are nearly impossible to
enact; too many voters would be unhappy. Consequently firearm prohibition in the United States
must focus on very small segments of the firearm owning population. That is why "assault
weapon" bans, which cover only about one or two percent of the total firearms stock, are so much
easier to enact than handgun bans. Even with "assault weapons," it is usually necessary to exempt
the Ruger Mini-14 and Mini-30 rifles since these rifles, while functionally identical to banned
guns, have too large an ownership base. Of course, in the Australian contect John Howard did
not have to take this into account in
1996/97 as the ownership of semiauto rifles and shotguns was only a
small percentage of the shooting
voting public. Giving the right to
collectors, to have them made
permanently inoperable, was fraud,
as they knew that this procedure
would destroy any historic value
and destroy any financial
investment in the piece. So counted
‘coup’ on the greater figure handed
in. Falsely making it seem as if the
shooting public agreed, or
conceded with the government.
When in reality they seethed.
89. A few sensational burglaries in the 1880s had created the first calls for restrictive British
firearm laws. A century later, some sensational crimes would initiate the final stages of British
gun prohibition. In between the 1880s and the 1980s, an initially reasonable and then gradually
more restrictive licensing system had reduced the number of firearm owners so far that they had
little political clout. The firearm owners were of much less political significance than the media,
which had become venomously anti-gun.
Fair Treatment has Nothing to Do with Firearm Legislation, its just Political Expediency.
90. In Britain's Hungerford Disaster on the morning of August 19th , 1987, a licensed firearm
owner named Michael Ryan dressed up like Sylvester Stallone's "Rambo" character and shot a
woman thirteen times with a handgun. After shooting at a filling station attendant, he drove to
his home in the small market town of Hungerford, where he killed his mother and his dog. In the
next hour, he went into town and slaughtered fourteen more people with his handgun and his
Chinese-made Kalashnikov rifle. Ryan disappeared for a few hours, reappeared at 4 p.m. in a
school, and killed himself three hours later. A few days later, a double murder was perpetrated
at Bristol, this one with a shotgun.
91. The media's reaction, especially the print media's, was intense. The tabloid press ran editorials
instructing the public how to spot potential mass murderers--advising suspicion of anyone who
lived alone or was generally a "loner," who lived with his mother, or who was a bit quiet. The
tabloid press and the respectable press both pushed heavily for more stringent gun laws. Pressure
also mounted for tighter censorship of violent television. All this was mirrored during the
aftermath to the Port Arthur atrocity, but in both instances no legislation was enacted restricting
37
violent TV or electronic media.
92. The Hungerford atrocity was the only instance in which a self-loading rifle had been used in
a British homicide. Punishing every
owner of an object because one
person misused the object is unfair,
but two factors worked in favour of
prohibition. First, the cabinet
leadership observed that the number
of owners of self-loading rifles was
relatively small, so no important
number of voters would be offended.
Second, shotgun owners, who are by
far the largest group of gun owners,
generally decided that they did not
care what the government did to
someone else's rifles.
93. Parliament responded. Semi-automatic centre-fire rifles, which had been legally owned for
nearly a century, were banned. Pump-action shotguns were banned as well, since it was argued
that these guns could be substituted for semi-automatics. Practical Rifle Shooting, the
fastest-growing sport in Britain, vanished temporarily, although participants eventually switched
to bolt-action rifles.
All the above and below was mirrored in Australia ten years later with the Port Arthur atrocity,
is it all just by accident, or is it with planning and forethought?
---------"those who engage in firearm-related violence in Australia are least likely to register their
weapons or comply with appropriate licensing procedures" - See: Mouzos, J. op. cit.
----------------Simple Logic Is All That Is Require.
94. In both Australian and British instances the conservative shotgunners and bolt action rifle
shooters, made a disastrous error. The Association of Chiefs of Police, in Briton and the
Australasian Police Ministers' Council (APMC.) had long been pushing to bring shotguns and
rifles into the restrictive "Section 1" of the Firearms Acts, which strictly controlled pistols. The
ACPO worked out a deal with the Thatcher administration to take a major step in the ACPO's
direction. As part of the legislation responding to a crime with a rifle, controls on shotguns were
made significantly more stringent. In both countries there was no criminological rationale for the
extra restrictions on shotguns; indeed, the extra police personnel required to administer the
licenses would have to be diverted from other tasks and Police Departments budgets would
increase exponentially , enabling promotion of current policemen and higher rates of pay grade.
95. A Home Office Research Study written the year before Hungerford had concluded:
"To make shotguns subject to the same controls as pistols ... would have considerable resource
implications for the police .... Nor is there any real optimism that anything would be achieved
by such a move since pistols ... are already subject to the very strict controls and yet ... are used
in more cases of armed crime than shotguns."
38
This was mirrored in Australia by Chief Inspector Newgreen,
Chief Inspector Newgreen stands firm on registration.
Herald-Sun
2 November 1990
COMPULSORY registration of all firearms should be abolished, a former firearms registrar
said yesterday.
Chief Inspector Lex Newgreen said it was the owners who should be registered, not their guns.
Chief Inspector Newgreen came under intense pressure three years ago when he told the State
Government in a report that registering forearms did not prevent or control criminal misuse
of guns.
Nor did it discourage the irresponsible use of firearms, he said in the report, which had been
kept under wraps until The Herald-Sun obtained a copy under the Freedom of Information
Act.
Shortly after presenting his report to the Government, the man, the man in charge of
Victoria’s firearms control suffered an angina attack and was transferred to other duties.
Yesterday, Chief Inspector Newgreen stood by his advice to the Government. “My report was
not well received because it was contrary to the Government’s policy,” he said.
In the report, he described the registration of all firearms as a waste of public money and time.
“Probably, and with the best of intentions, it may have been thought that if it were known what
firearms each individual owned, some form of control may be exercised. “… and those who
were guilty of criminal mis-use could be readily identified.“This is a fallacy, and has been
proven not to be the case.”
“In my view (firearms registration) does not repress or control the criminal mis-use of, or
irresponsible use of, firearms,” he said.
Asked yesterday if he regretted taking such a strong stand, Chief Inspector Newgreen said:
“How can you ever regret speaking the truth? I told the Government what I believed to be true
and correct.”
Simple Logic, that proves that the legislators know what its all about. More proof that community
protection is not the driving force, just the need for more control over the public is the real task
that they have set themselves. Registration, in Australia needs to be repealed immediately.
-----------------" . . . . while legal controls may have some effect on the slippage of guns into the black market,
they are not likely to have a dramatic impact on reducing the use of guns in robbery . . . ." See: Gill (2000, p. 84) as cited in Mouzos, J. and Carcach, C. (2001). Weapon Involvement in
Armed Robbery. Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology, p. 8.
-----------------------
39
96. Now in Britain and Australia, all shotguns and rifles, even the children’s toy the Daisy BBs
guns that have a lot of trouble penetrating the corn flakes packet at the other end of the kitchen
table must now be registered.
Shotgun and rifle sales between
private parties must be registered
with the police. Buyers of
ammunition must produce a
licence. In Britain applicants for a
shotgun certificate must obtain a
countersignature by a person who
has known the applicant for two
years and is "a member of
Parliament, justice of the peace,
minister of religion, doctor,
lawyer, established civil servant,
bank officer or person of similar
standing." The same requirements
for an application to be a Justice of
the Peace. In Australia, the applicant also has to
prove memberships of clubs and have security
checks before joining a Pistol Club. In both
countries applicants can be denied if the applicant
did not have a "good reason" for wanting to own
firearm.
97. Although the legislation placed the burden on
proof on the police, to show that there was not a
good reason, police practice immediately shifted the
burden back to the applicant to show that they did
have a good reason. Self-defence, of course, was
deemed by legislation not to be good reason, except
for Police, Politicians and Dignitaries, whose lives
are worth more than the cilil population.
Persons who were active members of shooting
clubs, recreational hunters, and farmers engaged in
pest control were all deemed by the police to have
demonstrated good reason, but a person who merely
wanted to retain legal possession of a family
heirloom was not considered by the police to have
a good reason. In Britain by the time two cycles of renewals for the Shotgun Certificates, which
were only valid for three years, had been completed, the number of legal owners of shotguns had
fallen by a quarter. This sharply reversed the steady growth of firearm ownership in the previous
two decades.
98. While Britains relatively liberal pre-1988 shotgun system had allowed significant growth in
the number of legal firearm owners, the greater police discretion over rifles and pistol licenses
40
had allowed police to reduce continually the number of legal owners of rifles or pistols. The
256,000 holders of Firearms Certificates in 1968 had been cut to 173,000 by 1994.
Approximately one-third of the group of Firearms Certificate holders owned handguns.
After 1988 the most important remaining difference between Firearms Certificates for rifles and
pistols and Shotgun Certificates was that holders of the latter did not need police permission for
every new acquisition. Once a person was granted as Shotgun Certificate, he could still acquire
as many shotguns as he wanted, although he had to report each acquisition to the government.
In contrast, Firearms Certificate holders have been required, ever since the original Firearms Act
of 1920, to receive a police-granted
"variance" for each new acquisition.
Generally speaking, the police are sceptical
about claims that Firearms Certificate holders
have a "good reason" for wanting additional
guns. Consequently, if a target shooter has
one rifle in the .308 caliber, he will not be
allowed to acquire a second rifle in the same
caliber. To bring all shotguns under Section
one of the Firearms Act, a step which has not
yet been taken, would have huge implications
for shotgun acquisition. A person who legally
owned one 12-gauge shotgun would not be
allowed to own more than one. Again,
mirrored in Australia legislation in during the
1990s.
99. Home Secretary Douglas Hurd told an audience that most of the provisions in the 1988
Firearm Act had been prepared long before Hungerford, and the government had simply been
waiting for the right moment to push them through parliament.
The Dunblane Atrocity
The Hungerford cycle was repeated in 1996 when a pederast named Thomas Hamilton used
handguns to murder sixteen children and a teacher in Dunblane, Scotland. The man was well
known as mentally unstable. He should have been at least restrained in a Mental Institution. He
had been refused membership in several gun clubs. Citizens had written to the police asking them
to revoke the man's firearm license. Under Great Britain's already restrictive gun laws, the police
could easily have taken away this man's firearms. Indeed, the police had already investigated him
seven times, but had done nothing. Giving evidence to conjecture that the Police knew he was
a time bomb waiting to go off , but left him at large to enable them to win the battle against
legitimate firearm owners.
100. The press went wild with angry stories about gun-owners, portraying anyone who would
own a gun as sexually inadequate and mentally ill. The Labour Party immediately called for a ban
on all handguns over .22 calibre, using the same rationale that had been employed in earlier gun
bans: "We can think of no good reason why a larger calibre handgun should ever lawfully be held
for sporting purposes." The fact that at least 40,000 Britons engaged in target shooting with guns
over .22 caliber apparently did not qualify as a "good reason." Thus, "good reason" continued its
metamorphosis. In 1921, "good reason" had meant "the applicant has no nefarious
purpose." In 1996, "good reason" meant "no reason can be good enough, if the gun is a
41
handgun."
101. The Tory government, headed by John Major, convened a Dunblane Public Enquiry. The
Enquiry received presentations on firearms policy from groups and experts on all sides of the gun
issue. The most powerful submission, however, based
on what the report concluded, came from the British
Home Office. The Home Office presented a report
citing claims from two international studies that high
gun ownership rates, even legal, regulated gun
ownership, caused high rates of criminal violence.
These claims were seriously flawed; in Great Britain,
within the United States, within Australia, and within continental Europe, the regions with the
highest rates of legal gun ownership (such as rural England, the USAs Rocky Mountain states,
Queensland, and Switzerland) tend to have the lowest violence rates. But the Dunblane
Commission, misled by the Home Office, came back with a report that recommended dozens of
ways to tighten the already restrictive gun licensing system, and impose more controls on licensed
gun owners.
102. The Home Office's deception of the Dunblane Enquiry highlights another condition that may
increase slippery slope risks: the government's ability to produce "data" that "prove" the need for
more government power. Deliberately misleading data from the government was hardly unique
to the Dunblane Enquiry. In the United States, we have J. Edgar Hoover's production of false data
about interstate car theft to boost FBI funding, deceptive anti-gun research created by the federal
Centres for Disease Control, and a breathtaking variety of lies in support of the "War on Drugs"
to name just a few. Television, of course, can also be deceptive. In 1993, NBC News was caught
red-handed rigging pickup trucks to explode and burn in order to support a news program. Since
the term "assault weapon" came into the media vocabulary, the technique of showing footage of
machine guns firing in fully-automatic mode while the voice-over discusses other types of
firearms has become routine. This practice continues even after the station acknowledges that the
image is false or the result of outright fakery.
103. While the Dunblane Enquiry did recommend many new controls, the Enquiry did not
recommend banning all handguns. Prime Minister John Major's Conservative government had
decided to accept what it knew would be the Cullen recommendations, tightening the licensing
system still more, but not banning handguns. However, then Labour Party leaders brought
Dunblane spokesperson Anne Pearston to a rally, and, in effect, denounced opponents of a
handgun ban as accomplices in the murder of school children. Prime Minister Major, who was
already doing badly in the polls, crumbled. He promptly announced that the Conservative
government would ban handguns above .22 caliber, and .22 caliber handguns would have to be
stored at shooting clubs, not in homes.
104. A few months later, Labour Party leader Tony Blair was swept into office in a landslide. One
of his first acts was to complete the handgun ban by removing the exemption for .22s. The Home
Office was unable to produce any statistics at all regarding the use of .22 pistols in crime. Prior
data showed that the Firearms Certificate system worked about as well as any human system
could to keep criminals from lawfully acquiring guns, or from stealing them from lawful owners.
A study by the London Metropolitan Police Inspector of 657 armed robberies in the London area
42
Where is the Justice, in forcing a person to have an
historic exhibit internally welded into a solid lump?
Losing its intrinsic and financial value, and still have
to licence the person and register the lump of metal.
Police are responsible for the destruction of millions of
historic items.
from January 1988 to June 1991 found that half
the robberies were perpetrated with imitation
firearms. Of the remaining 328 real weapons,
only one involved a gun which had ever been
within the Firearms Certificate system. Dunblane
was the only British mass murder in this century
with a lawfully registered pistol. But gun
ownership in general, and pistols in particular,
had become rare, and consequently
anathematized, once a few generations had
grown up under the regime created by the
Firearms Act of 1920. A two-to-one majority in
Parliament found it commonsense that the crime
of one person should lead to the collective
punishment of 57,000 others.
105. Since 1921, all lawfully-owned handguns in
Great Britain are registered with the government, so handgun owners have little choice but to
surrender their guns in exchange for payment according to government schedule. The British
system of firearm registration has laid a foundation for confiscation not only in Great Britain, and
Australia, but also in New York City, where the 1967 registration system for long guns was used
in the early 1990s to confiscate lawfully owned semiautomatic rifles. Nevertheless, United States
firearm control advocates continue to insist that the United States gun rights advocates are
"paranoid" for resisting registration because it might lead to confiscation. The gun control
advocates reason that they do not intend to
confiscate registered guns. However, the gun
control advocates fail admit their ultimate
intentions, until they prepare for the next step of
‘Confiscation. The British Parliament who created
the firearm registration system in 1920 had no
intention of banning handguns at that time. The
1920 British Parliament failed to foresee the
danger that a registration system, even if created
with the best intentions, could later be used for
confiscation. Thus, it is eminently sensible for
civil liberties advocates in the United States and
Australia to resist registration of persons who
exercise constitutional rights, not only because
registration is excessively burdensome in itself,
but because the events in Britain and Australia
have proved that registration is only a preceding
step before confiscation and further greasing the
slippery slope to tyranny.
The Next Steps.
106. The handgun ban by no means has satiated
the anti-gun appetite in Great Britain. When
43
Letter show registration always leads to confiscation.
Even in the USA, New York, Washington DC, Chicago,
etc where they have the most severe firearm restrictions,
attracts the highest murder and violent crime rates in the
USA. Without those cities there crime rates would be
lower than the UK.
Scottish handgun owners dutifully surrendered their handguns many of them applied for permits
to own rifles or antique handguns that remained legal. The Scottish Home Affairs Minister
announced that he wanted "to send a very powerful message" against acquisition of alternative
"weapons that are currently legal." He announced that the Scottish government would begin
considering whether to tighten controls on shotguns. Consequently, while British gun owners
gracefully gave away the right to own firearms for protection, they are now finding their privilege
to own firearms for sport is under greater attack than ever. Britain's leading anti-hunting group,
the League Against Cruel Sports, points to the "hundreds" of people killed by guns and
"thousands" of guns used in robberies and demands a ban on all guns. The Blair government then
announced plans to study whether airguns should be brought into the gun licensing system, and
whether the age limit on gun possession should be raised, which would prevent most teenagers
from using firearms, even under adult supervision. A ban on all rifles above .22 caliber except
for deer hunting was expected, then included a requirement that shotgun owners receive
government permission each time they acquire a shotgun, as rifle owners currently must.
Again mirrored, without any logical reasons into Australian legislation. Basic logic, should
prevail that even in the extremely rare instance of a licenced firearm owner committing a violent
offence, he can only direct one firearm at one target at one time. Someone should tell our
legislators that Hollywood is false, Rambo is not real, and firing shotguns in each hand at a target
is impossible. Two firearms, don’t get up and commit a crime, it’s the person that commits the
crime.
107. A ban on all real firearms is still not enough to sate the legislators. Many British and
Australian firearm owners now own deactivated "replica" guns that cannot be fired. The guns are
merely decorative pieces, and are less dangerous than a cricket bat. For some gun owners,
deactivation was the only way they could retain possession of a prized semiautomatic. Other gun
owners simply found the hassles of the police licensing system too much to overcome, and had
their family heirloom guns deactivated into non-firing permanently in-operable firearms. With
deactivation, at least, the family could retain the firearm without need to spend vast sums on
police security requirements. This last "loophole," however, in the British firearm laws has now
been closed, as the police in Britain ad Australia lobbied to require that owners of deactivated or
replica guns get the same license that would be required for firearm which can fire ammunition.
This has already occurred in Australian Police States.
108. We can see from the above a parallel progression of Australia following Britains lead in
removing civil rights from the public, breaching the Bill of Rights 1688/89 disarming the public
and arming Police and Military, so surely Australia could learn from Britains lead in following
its outcome. Before doing this of course we have to establish that in Australia there has been an
opposite effect to this similar British legislation.
----------------According to the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics & Research, in 2000, 55% of
all handgun related shootings in New South Wales in took place in the Canterbury-Bankstown
and Fairfield-Liverpool areas - See: Briscoe, S., Fitzgerald, J., Weatherburn, D. (2001).
Firearms and Violent Crime in New South Wales, Crime And Justice Bulletin No. 57. Sydney:
NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics & Research, p. 4.
44
------------------------------109. In Australia with even more extreme restrictions on firearm ownership numbers have
dramatically increased on an average of 16 % per year on average to 32% increase in areas such
as the Gold Coast where the public feel threatened by gangs. Even knowing that the legal system
would crush them for defending themselves they still want to have the choice to live.
That is one difference, the other difference is the effect in Australia, if it is true what they tell us
armed crime has reduced, where as in Briton with its shrinking firearm population crime has gone
up the statistical ski slope.
All these controls and abusive enforcement of controls had made Britain the most dangerous
place in Europe, as its crime rates approach Washington, New Your, Detroit and Chicago places
in the world who had disarmed its populations and installed similar impositions on firearm
ownership. Armed crime
in Britain is higher than it
has been in at least three
centuries.
-------------Responding to a question
in the House of Lords,
Lord Bassam tabled data
showing that handgun
related crime in Britain
grew by nearly 30% in
1999/00 compared to the
previous 12 months –
These figures show reductions in General homicides, firearm homicides are
notwithstanding a total approx a third of these annual figures. As firearm ownership in numbers of
ban on private handgun firearms imported and new applications for licences increase annually.
ownership.
See:
Hansard, 15th January 2001 - www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk
-----------------110. Armed crime is literally one hundred times more common than at the turn of the century
when Britain had no weapons controls. Crime victimization surveys show that, per capita, assault
in England and Wales occurs between two and three times more often than the average of the
United States. These same surveys demonstrate that robbery occurs 1.4 times more, and burglary
occurs 1.7 times more. In contrast to criminologists in the United States, British criminologists
have displayed little interest in studying whether their nation's gun laws do any good. I have
visited the UK and I can attest to the facts that as British gun laws have grown more severe, the
country has grown more dangerous.
45
111. In 2000 CBS anchorman Dan Rather made many stiff British upper lips quiver by reporting
that England had a crime problem and that, apart from murder, "theirs is worse than ours." The
response was swift and sharp. "Have a
Nice Daydream," The Mirror, a London
daily, shot back, reporting: "Britain
reacted with fury and disbelief last night
to claims by American
newsmen that crime and
violence are worse here than in
the US."
But sandwiched
between the article's battery of
official denials, "totally
misleading," "a huge
over-simplification,"
"astounding and outrageous"
The Mirror had to concede that
the CBS anchorman was
correct. Except for murder and
rape, it admitted, "Britain has
overtaken the US for all major
crimes."
112. In the two years following Dan Rather public rebuke, violence in England has become
markedly worse. Over the course of a few days in the summer of 2001, gun-toting men burst into
an English court and freed two defendants; a shooting outside a London nightclub left five
women and three men wounded; and two men were machine-gunned to death in a residential
neighbourhood of north London. And on New Year's Day this year a 19-year-old girl walking on
a main street in east London was shot in the head by a thief who wanted her mobile phone.
London police are now looking to New York City police for advice.
113. None of this was supposed to happen in the country whose stringent gun laws and 1997 ban
on handguns have been hailed as the "gold standard" of gun control. For the better part of a
century, British governments have pursued a strategy for domestic safety that a 1992 Economist
article characterized as requiring "a restraint on personal liberty that seems, in most civilized
countries, essential to the happiness of others," a policy the magazine found at odds with
"America's Vigilante Values." The safety of English people has been staked on the thesis that
fewer private guns means less crime. The government believes that any weapons in the hands of
men and women, however law-abiding, pose a danger, and that disarming them lessens the
chance that criminals will get or use weapons.
114. The results -- the toughest firearm restrictions of any democracy -- are credited by the
world's gun control advocates with producing a low rate of violent crime. U.S. Supreme Court
Justice Lewis Powell reflected this conventional wisdom when, in a 1988 speech to the American
Bar Association, he attributed England's low rates of violent crime to the fact that "private
ownership of guns is strictly controlled."
In reality, the English approach has not reduced violent crime. Instead it has left law-abiding
citizens at the mercy of criminals who are confident that their victims have neither the means nor
46
the legal right to resist them. Imitating this model would be a public safety disaster for the United
States.
115. The raw statistics do make some facts clear: when Britain had no gun control (early in the
twentieth century) or moderately-administered gun control (in the middle of the century), Britain
had virtually no gun crime. Today, Britain literally has substantially more gun crime, as well as
more violent crime in general. From 1776 until very recently, the United States has suffered a
much higher violent crime rate than Britain, regardless of whether British gun laws were liberal
or strict. In recent years, however, the once-wide gap in violent crime has disappeared. This gap
was closed by a drop in American crime rates, coupled with a sharp rise in the British rates. One
does not hear British gun control advocates touting statistics about how crime rates fell after
previous gun laws were enacted. Rather, the advocacy is based on the "inherent danger of guns,"
and on the "horror" of Dunblane and Hungerford.
116. Gun crime was up by more than a third in 2002. That is not a short-term blip. Over the past
50 years, the long-term trend has been relentlessly upwards. In the whole of 1954, there were four
robberies in London in which guns were used. Today, four armed robberies take place in London
every day.
So the Government does indeed need to "do something" to stem the criminal use of guns.
Unfortunately, the "Gun Summit" demonstrates that what ministers propose to do is what they
usually do in these circumstances: issue eye-catching initiatives which make headlines in the
media, but do nothing whatever to address the real problem. Its outcome was merely a series of
noises aimed at reassuring the Government that its policy on guns is "on the right track" and will
eventually reduce gun crime.
117. It isn't and it won't. The Government seems convinced that gun crime will be reduced by the
passing of yet another law prohibiting guns and attaching harsher penalties to those who use
them. You might think that by now ministers would have realised the limitations of this approach.
After all, in the wake of the Dunblane massacre, the Conservatives passed a law banning the use
of full-bore sporting handguns. They were enthusiastically supported by Labour: Tony Blair
invited Anne Pearson, the founder of the "Snowdrop Campaign" to prohibit all guns, to speak at
the 1997 Labour Party Conference. Her plea for a ban on all handguns was implemented by
Labour once the party was in power.
What has ensued since that legislation? Crimes involving handguns have more than doubled.
More people, not fewer, have been shot and killed with handguns. The only effect of the law has
been to punish, not the gun-toting criminals who murder and maim people on the streets, but the
innocent sportsmen and women who enjoy target shooting. The gangsters have not been affected
in the slightest. They have not found it any more difficult to obtain their deadly weapons. The
black market in firearms is flourishing.
----------------Expert opinion published in AIC reports:
" . . . . those who commit homicide in Australia are individuals who have circumvented
legislation and will be least likely to be effected if further restrictions on firearms ownership
are introduced." - See: Mouzos, J. (2000). No. 151, The Licensing and Registration Status of
Firearms Used in Homicide. Australian Institute of Criminology: trends & issues in crime and
criminal justice. p. 5.
47
------------------118. The British black market is fuelled by the tens of thousands of guns that have become
available since the break-up of the old Soviet Union and the instability in the Balkans. The
collapse of effective border controls has enabled organised criminal gangs to sell guns in Britain
on a very large scale. And eastern Europe is not the only source: guns come with drugs from the
Caribbean and even China. In Australia and Britain Customs officials seem to be about as
effective at intercepting illegal guns as immigration officials are at intercepting illegal
immigrants. They catch at most one per cent of the incoming traffic.
119. There are no grounds for thinking that the Government's latest eye-catching initiatives, on
a mandatory sentences for anyone caught carrying a firearm or imitation firearm, or buying or
selling a firearm - will have much effect. There already is tough legislation on the statute books.
The British 1994 Firearms Amendment Act, for
instance, attaches a 10-year prison sentence for
anyone who uses a "firearm or imitation firearm" to
threaten someone else. It is true that a 10-year
sentence is not "mandatory" - but then five years
won't actually be mandatory under the new
legislation either. Neither will the Australian 15
year sentence for buying or selling a firearm.
Before committing these crimes, the perpetrators
never consider penalties.
120. Furthermore, the Government's insistence that
it will crack down on the use of replica guns may
well have the opposite effect to the one intended. The Assault rate comparing the USA and England
At present, the majority of firearms used by separated in the early 1980s and have continued to go
criminals are either outright imitations, or in opposite directions.
imitations modified so as to fire ammunition. Even
when modified, imitation guns are much less dangerous than real ones: they are inaccurate, very
slow, and highly unreliable, frequently blowing up in the hands of the user. If action by the
Government restricts the supply of imitation guns, then criminals will simply use real ones more
often. The ample supply of firearms being smuggled into Australia and Britain makes that
outcome only too likely.
121. The British Government, however, seems unable to see it, or more likely not to care about
it, as government often have an agenda that is separate of community safety. The core problem
is an arms race among criminals and gangsters, who are now settling their disputes with
increasingly powerful weaponry. Drug dealers need to monopolise supply in the area they control
in order to maximise the price they can charge. That means eliminating the competition by
terrorising them. These people are not frightened of the police, nor of the penalties imposed for
carrying guns. They are frightened of their rivals , who they know have guns. Jamaican, Kurdish,
Turkish, Lebanese, Vietnamese, Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, Ethiopian and Albanian gangs all
shoot each other, and they have all ensured their supply of up-to-date automatic weapons.
48
122. Firearms on our streets will not diminish until we diminish the power of criminal gangs. Not
the mistaken wording of Bikie Gangs, they are Racial Gangs most of the gang members drive
a van and could not ride a motor bike. The Government's first priority should be an aggressive
strategy to attack gangs and gang culture, drugs and drug-dealers - a policy which would require
rather more political courage than simply proposing yet another firearm ban. Charlene Ellis and
Latisha Shakespear, the two girls killed in Birmingham at New Year, were caught in the crossfire
when one gang tried to eliminate its rivals. The killers used an automatic weapon, perhaps an Uzi
or MAC10 machine pistol.
Why No Justice?
123. If a homeowner or a private citizen uses a firearm, or any other weapon, to defend his
property or himself, the normally feeble law suddenly changes character and smites him with an
iron fist.
When, in August 1999, British Farmer Tony Martin shot
dead thief Fred Barras in the darkness and confusion of a
burglary at his remote home, he was energetically
prosecuted and convicted of murder. Though his conviction
was later reduced to manslaughter and his sentence cut, he
was in prison for many years and Barras's accomplice,
Brendan Fearon, sued him for 'loss of earnings', an
increasingly common pattern of behaviour among burglars
injured during their crimes.
Mr Martin's action was clumsy and rash but understandable
and reasonable in the circumstances. But the same could be
said of some police officers, who mistakenly shoot suspects
in the heat and confusion of the moment. However, while
25 British police officers have killed suspects in the past decade, only two have been prosecuted.
One was Police Constable Christopher Sherwood, who in 1998 shot dead a naked and unarmed
James Ashley in Hastings. PC Sherwood was cleared of murder after the judge ruled that the
officer genuinely believed he was in danger and acted in self-defence.
124. If only such understanding had been shown to Tony Martin, he might never have been
prosecuted or jailed. So why wasn't it? Similar to Australia, it seems that the authorities fear that
the people, left to their own devices, will enforce the old conservative laws of England.
That the people will defend their lives and property against attack. That the people will assume
that criminal acts are bad and that they are entitled to prevent and even punish them.
Governments Campaigns Against Self-Defence, But Admits That It Cannot Secure The
Safety Of the Public.
125. A.V. Dicey's classic The Law of the Constitution, "the most celebrated exposition of the rule
of law," explained that the British common law of self-defence allowed deadly force to be used
only as last resort in great peril. Dicey used a lawful shooting to illustrate the rule:
A is struck by a ruffian, X; A has a revolver in his pocket. He must not then and there fire upon
X, but, to avoid crime, must first retreat as far as he can. X pursues; A is driven up against a wall.
49
Then, and not till then, A, if he has no other means of repelling attack, may justifiably fire at X.
Moreover, because citizens were legally bound to
prevent the commission of certain particularly
dangerous felonies committed in their presence by
strangers, the killing of a night time burglar
without first retreating was lawful, wrote Dicey.
Dicey illustrated the prevention-of-felony rule by
quoting a judge's advice that the proper action to
take upon discovering a night time burglar was to
shoot him in the heart with a double-barrelled
shotgun. Of course what once was expert legal
opinion, has been altered to make the victim
defenceless.
126. Twenty First Century Australia and Britain's, which are the result of first Britain in 1967
and then followed by Australia's Parliament's abrogation of the common law rules on justifiable
use of deadly force. These days should a person use a firearm for protection against a violent
home intruder, he will be arrested, and a case will be brought against him by the Crown
Prosecution Service, DDP. In one notorious case, an elderly lady tried to frighten off a gang of
thugs by firing a blank from her imitation firearm. She was arrested and charged with the crime
of putting someone in fear with an imitation firearm.
127. With gun ownership for self-protection now completely illegal (unless one works for the
government), Britons and Australians have begun switching to other forms of protection. The
government considers this an intolerable affront. Having, through administrative interpretation,
de-legitimized gun ownership for self-defence, the British government has been able to outlaw
a variety of defensive items. For example, non-lethal chemical defence sprays, such as Mace, are
now illegal in Britain, as are electric stun devices. Again this was followed by all Australian
Police States.
128. Britons and Australian then turned to guard dogs. Unfortunately dogs, unlike guns and
knives, have a will of their own and sometimes attack innocent people on their own volition. The
number of people injured by dogs has been rising, and the press is calling for bans on Rottweilers,
Dobermans, and other "devil dogs." Under Britains 1991 legislation, all pit bulls must be neutered
or euthanised. Australia again has a little later followed their lead.
129. Other citizens choose to protect themselves with knives, but carrying a knife for defensive
protection is considered illegal possession of an offensive weapon. One American tourist learned
about this Orwellian offensive weapon law the hard way. After she used a pen knife to stab some
men who were attacking her, a British court convicted her of carrying an offensive weapon. Her
intention to use the pen knife for lawful defensive purposes converted the pen knife, under British
legal newspeak, into an illegal "offensive weapon." In 1996, knife-carrying was made
presumptively illegal, even without the "offensive" intent to use the weapon defensively. A
person accused of the crime is allowed "to prove that he had a good reason or lawful
authority for having" the knife when he did.” Again, within a few years Australian States
followed and even made harsher legislation, with less provisions for using it for a lawful purpose.
50
130. As few people realized that Britain had such an astonishingly low level of armed crime even
before firearms were restricted, this created credibility to the illusion that the British government
had protected its citizens by disarming them seemed credible because.
So the 20th Century policy of disarming the public began. The Firearms Act required a would-be
gun owner to obtain a certificate from the local police inspector, who was charged with
determining whether the applicant had a good reason for possessing a weapon and was fit to do
so. All very sensible. Parliament was assured that the intention was to keep weapons out of the
hands of criminals and other dangerous persons. Yet from the start the Police enforcement was
far more restrictive, and Home Office instructions to police, classified until 1989, periodically
narrowed the criteria. As we could relate a list of instances, (that would dwarf this submission)
of Australia’s State Police exceeding authority of legislation. Many that have had to be sorted
out in the courts. Again the firearm owners has had to bare all the legal costs where the culprit
Police or Administrator are protected and their costs are fully paid for by the State.
131. In the early 20th Century police were instructed that it would be a good reason to have a
revolver if a person "lives in a solitary house, where protection against thieves and burglars
is essential, or has been exposed to definite threats to life on account of his performance of
some public duty." By 1937 police were to discourage applications to possess firearms for house
or personal protection. In 1964 they were told "it should hardly ever be necessary to anyone to
possess a firearm for the protection of his house or person" and that "this principle should hold
good even in the case of banks and firms who desire to protect valuables or large quantities of
money." During the 1980s, due to Australian Police discouragement and lack of effective training
Australian Banks began disarming their bank
staff, and statistics of Bank hold ups doubled.
This gave Police and media more fuel for
further legislation of lawful people, but again
did nothing at all to contain criminals. Only
when Banks removed the cash and protected
there staff in other ways was a reduction in
Bank holdup noticed.
132. In 1969 police were informed "it
should never be necessary for anyone to
possess a firearm for the protection of his
house or person." These changes were made
without public knowledge or debate. Their
enforcement has consumed hundreds of
thousands of police hours and millions
maybe billions of tax payer dollars. Finally,
in 1997 handguns were banned. Even
proposed exemptions for handicapped shooters and the British Olympic team were rejected. Even
the Bisley pistol club, the heart of Britains shooting, relocated to Belgium. British pistol shooter
train there for the Olympics and Commonwealth Games.
51
133. Even more sweeping was the 1953 Prevention of Crime Act, which made it illegal to carry
in a public place any article "made, adapted, or intended" for an offensive purpose "without
lawful authority or excuse." Carrying something to protect yourself was branded antisocial. Any
item carried for possible defence automatically became an offensive weapon. Police were given
extensive power to stop and search everyone. Individuals found with offensive items were guilty
until proven innocent. It took another 40 years to introduce that to Australia but with socialist
stealth and gradualism they succeeded. No one, bothered to see if any of this legislation in Britain
and Australia actually functioned and improved crime. Was ever a Criminal deterred by the fact
that he might be prosecuted. If the Criminal is willing to risk prosecution for murder, kidnapping,
rape, robbery, he obviously is not going to be deterred by Weapons Act offences. Again the only
people that are charged for those offences are
the innocents who do not
know they are committing an
offence. Or forget to secure a
firearm, or forget to renew a
licence, then the police tun
them into a Criminal and use
those offences to get more
totalitarian legislation.
134. During the debate over
the Prevention of Crime Act
in the British House of
Commons, a member from
Northern Ireland told his
colleagues of a woman
employed by Parliament who had to cross a
lonely heath on her route home and had armed When the law abiding citizens are left defenceless they
herself with a knitting needle. A month are packaged meat, just stored for when criminals want
to come calling.
earlier, she had driven off a youth who tried to
snatch her handbag by jabbing him "on a
tender part of his body." Was it to be an offense to carry a knitting needle? The attorney general
assured the M.P. “that the woman might be found to have a reasonable excuse but added that
the public should be discouraged from going about with offensive weapons in their pockets;
it is the duty of society to protect them.” Saying that, when all intelligence shows that the Police
in any State can never protect. They are only there to dispose of the body bags and clean up.
135. Another M.P. pointed out that while "society ought to undertake the defence of its
members, nevertheless one has to remember that there are many places where society cannot
get, or cannot get there in time. On those occasions a man has to defend himself and those
whom he is escorting. It is not very much consolation that society will come forward a great
deal later, pick up the bits, and punish the violent offender."
In the House of Lords, Lord Saltoun argued: "The object of a weapon was to assist weakness
to cope with strength and it is this ability that the bill was framed to destroy. I do not think any
government has the right, though they may very well have the power, to deprive people for
whom they are responsible of the right to defend themselves." But he added: "Unless there is
not only a right but also a fundamental willingness amongst the people to defend themselves,
52
no police force, however large, can do it." That was the point, the British people had been
broken with the ‘Boiling Frog’ gradualism in legislation, they now believed and dutifully obeyed
the government. Once the precedents were set by the legislators, Court precedents recorded by
the media, they submit and hope the criminal allows them to survive. Some are luckier than
others but this was the reason for the massive increase in violent crimes against people after the
last British disarming bills of the 1990s. The difference is Australians did not submit, they re
armed and caused a decline in violent crime.
Concealed Carry Is Now Legal in All Fifty States.
136. The British willingness to defend was further undermined by a broad revision of criminal
law in 1967 that altered the legal standard for self-defence. Now everything turns on what seems
to be "reasonable" force against an assailant, considered after the fact. As Glanville Williams
notes in his Textbook of Criminal Law, that requirement is "now stated in such mitigated terms
as to cast doubt on whether it [self-defence] still forms part of the law."
The original common law standard was similar to what still prevails in the U.S. Americans are
free to carry articles for their protection, and Concealed Carry Is Now Legal in All Fifty States.
Law-abiding citizens may carry concealed guns. Americans may defend themselves with deadly
force if they believe that an attacker is about to kill or seriously injure them, or to prevent a
violent crime. Our courts are mindful that, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes observed,
"detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an upraised knife."
137. This increase in public protection is thought by many to be the main reason for the
reductions in the USAs violent crime statistics. Contrary to what Australian media portray.
The FBI. Report,
“ In 2011, an estimated 1,203,564 violent crimes occurred nationwide, a decrease of 3.8
percent from the 2010 estimate.
When considering 5- and 10-year trends, the 2011 estimated violent crime total was 15.4
percent below the 2007 level and 15.5 percent below the 2002 level.”
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/violent-cri
me/violent-crime
138. The British have taken the reverse policy that has caused an increase in violent crime. British
Courts have supported and followed the politicians/police policy without thought or care to the
impact of their actions. The British Courts interpreted the Anti Defence 1953 act strictly and
zealously. Among articles found illegally carried with offensive intentions are a sandbag, a
pickaxe handle, a stone, and a drum of pepper. “Any article is capable of being an offensive
weapon," concede the authors of Smith and Hogan Criminal Law, a popular legal text, although
they add that if the article is unlikely to cause an injury the onus of proving intent to do so would
be "very heavy."
139. The British Act of 1967 has not been helpful to those obliged to defend themselves either.
Granville Williams points out: "For some reason that is not clear, the courts occasionally seem
to regard the scandal of the killing of a robber as of greater moment than the safety of the
robber's victim in respect of his person and property."
Some samples of cases illustrates the impact of these measures, that support the Criminals and
harass the defenceless public.
53
• In 1973 a young man running on a road at night was stopped by the police and found to be
carrying a length of steel, a cycle chain, and a metal clock weight. He explained that a gang of
youths had been after him. At his hearing it was found he had been threatened and had previously
notified the police. The justices agreed he had a valid reason to carry the weapons. Indeed, 16
days later he was attacked and beaten so badly he was hospitalized. But the prosecutor appealed
the ruling, and the appellate judges insisted that carrying a weapon must be related to an
imminent and immediate threat. They sent the case back to the lower court with directions to
convict.
• Early one evening in March 1987, Eric Butler, a fifty-six-year-old executive with B.P.
Chemicals, was attacked while riding the London subway. Two men came after Butler and, as
one witness described, began "strangling him and smashing his head against the door; his face
was red and his eyes were popping out." No passenger on the subway moved to help him. "My
air supply was being cut off," Butler later testified, "my eyes became blurred and I feared for
my life." Concealed inside Butler's walking stick was a three-foot blade. Butler unsheathed the
blade; "I lunged at the man wildly with my swordstick. I resorted to it as my last means of
defense." He stabbed an attacker's stomach. The attackers were charged with unlawful wounding.
Butler was tried and convicted of carrying an offensive weapon. The court gave him a suspended
sentence, but denounced the "breach of the law which has become so prevalent in London in
recent months that one has to look for a deterrent." Butler's self-defence was the only known
instance of use of a swordstick in a "crime."Home Secretary Douglas Hurd, using powers granted
under the 1988 Criminal Justice Act, immediately outlawed possession of swordsticks. The Act
has also been used to ban blowpipes and other
exotica which, while hardly a crime problem, were
determined by the Home Secretary not be the sorts
of things which he thought any Briton could have a
good reason to possess. All this legislation was again
followed by Australian Police States.
• In 1994 an English homeowner, armed with a toy
gun, managed to detain two burglars who had
broken into his house while he called the police.
When the officers arrived, they arrested the
homeowner for using an imitation gun to threaten or
intimidate. In a similar incident the following year,
when an elderly woman fired a toy cap pistol to
drive off a group of youths who were threatening
her, she was arrested for putting someone in fear.
Now the police are pressing Parliament to make
imitation toy guns illegal.
54
• In 1999 Tony Martin, a 55-year-old Norfolk farmer living alone in a shabby farmhouse,
awakened to the sound of breaking glass as two burglars, both with long criminal records, burst
into his home. He had been robbed six times before, and his village, like 70 percent of rural
English communities, had no police presence. He sneaked downstairs with a shotgun and shot
at the intruders. Martin received life in prison for killing one burglar, 10 years for wounding the
second, and a year for having an unregistered shotgun. The wounded burglar, having served 18
months of a three-year sentence, is now free and has been granted £5,000 of legal assistance to
sue Martin.
140. The failure of English policy to produce a safer
society is clear, but what of British jibes about
"America's vigilante values" and the USAs much
higher murder rate?
Historically, America has always had a high
homicide rate and England a low one. In a
comparison between New York and London, over a
200-year period, during most of which both
populations had unrestricted access to firearms,
historian Eric Monkkonen found New York's
homicide rate consistently about five times
London's. Monkkonen pointed out that even without
guns, "the United States would still be out of step,
just as it has been for two hundred years."
The Committee should consider the philosophy of the founders of the United States as they
justifiably threw off the chains of a tyranny and attempted as best they could to return the new
Republic back to the principles expounded by John Locke Treatise on Civil Government the
foundations of the British Bill of Rights 1688/89. They did this with the tools they had at hand,
tools meaning a Constitution and a Bill of Rights for the new country. Some people (socialist,
extremists) ardently oppose the founders objectives, but the founders of our own Commonwealth
Constitution which contrary to media newspeack was not handed to us by the British Government
it was incepted, written and proposed here in Australia and one of the documents that Parks, and
Big Iron Mac, Macmillen resorted to was the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, (see Quick &
Garren) they did not include many of the rights we take for granted in our Australian Constitution
as even though they concurred with the ideals it was acknowledged that other Constitutional
documents, embedded in Australia’s legal framework such as the Bill of Rights 1688/89, Habeas
Corpus, Act of Succession, Magna Carta did not need to be repeated. A recent example, reported
by Claire Wolfe, July 26th 2014 in an article For Life and Freedom: Break the Rules.
“Freedom is not won -- or preserved -- through submission and obedience.
Freedom is won and kept by breaking rules -- not only by questioning authority, but
outright defying authority when authority itself aims to make the rules on the spot and to
rule others through threats and intimidation.”
“Dr Lee Silverman defied company policy. He walked right past "no guns" signs and carried a
sidearm into his office. It's a good thing he did. If he hadn't, who knows how many people would
now be dead?
Silverman -- Dr. Lee Silverman, is a psychiatrist at Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital in Darby,
55
Pennsylvania. On Thursday morning, July 23, 2014, a patient who had just been escorted to the
doctor's office by social worker Theresa Hunt pulled a gun of his own. The patient murdered
Hunt.
But as he turned on Silverman and fired at his head, Silverman drew his own firearm and put
three shots into the killer. Silverman survived with a grazed temple. The murderer went to the
hospital in critical condition. Nobody knows how many lives Silverman's disobedience saved.
The murderous patient had "issues" with the doctor, so maybe Silverman and Hunt would have
been the only victims. On the other hand, plenty of horrific rampages have begun with a grudge
against one individual, a former spouse, a boss, a teacher, a classroom bully, a co-worker, and
ended with mass deaths. The fact that the creep at Mercy Fitzgerald went first for Ms Hunt says
he didn't much care who he killed. He just wanted to deal death.
Silverman and his rule-defying firearm put a stop to that.
If Dr. Lee Silverman had submitted to his employer's rules, he would be dead now. And it's
impossible to say how many victims' families would be grieving.
Oh, certainly in any civilized society, free or
otherwise, people get along by adhering to
certain norms, mores, or whatever you want to
call them. In any society there are going to be
laws and rules to define what's acceptable and
discourage what's not. Merely breaking rules
for the sake of rule-breaking is dumb (as many
an overdosed rock star or Darwin Award
candidate has discovered).
As Thomas Jefferson wrote
But in any free society, laws are
1) few,
2) understandable to all, and,
3) merely "restrain men from injuring one
another,".
Once any rule or law actually becomes
harmful to life or liberty, then the proper
course for a free person (and a free nation) is to break it. Ignore it. Defy it. Agitate against
it. Laugh at it. Fight it. Get rid of it. Kill it and bury it at the crossroads on a moonless
night. NOT submit to injustice or obey to whatever simian thugs or cubicle-dwelling
bureaucrats attempt to enforce anti-freedom, anti-life diktats.
And if the force of unjust laws, obscure regulations, arbitrary enforcements, and monarchial
attitudes becomes unstoppable by all the means of free and peaceable people, then, to borrow
from Mr. Jefferson (Declaration of Independence) again, it is time to be "Absolved from all
Allegiance" to such false authority.
As a nation the U.S. may not be there yet. As individuals, we must always be "there" if we truly
are free.
141. Legal historian Richard Maxwell Brown has argued that Americans have more homicides
because English law insists an individual should retreat when attacked, whereas Americans
believe they have the right to stand their ground and kill in self-defense. Americans do have more
latitude to protect themselves, in keeping with traditional common law standards, but that would
have had less significance before England's more restrictive policy was established in 1967.
56
142. The murder rates of the U.S. and U.K. are also affected by differences in the way each
counts homicides. The FBI asks police to list every homicide as murder, even if the case isn't
subsequently prosecuted or proceeds on a lesser charge, making the U.S. numbers as high as
possible. By contrast, the English police "massage down" the homicide statistics, tracking each
case through the courts and removing it if it is reduced to a lesser charge or determined to be an
accident or self-defense, making the English numbers as low as possible.
The British rate of violent crime has been soaring since 1991.
143. The London-based Office of Health Economics, after a careful international study, found
that while "one reason often given for the high numbers of murders and manslaughters in the
United States is the easy availability of firearms...the strong correlation with racial and
socio-economic variables suggests that the underlying determinants of the homicide rate are
related to particular cultural factors."
Cultural differences and more-permissive legal standards notwithstanding, the British rate of
violent crime has been soaring since 1991. Over the same period, America's has been falling
dramatically. In 1999 The Boston Globe reported that the American murder rate, which had
fluctuated by about 20 percent between 1974 and 1991, was "in startling free-fall." We have had
nine consecutive years of sharply declining violent crime. As a result the English and American
murder rates are converging. In 1981 the American rate was 8.7 times the English rate, in 1995
it was 5.7 times the English rate, and the latest study puts it at 3.5 times. The gap is closing.
144. Americans enjoy a substantially lower rate of violent crime than England, without the
"restraint on personal liberty" English governments have seen as necessary. Rather than permit
individuals more scope to defend themselves, Prime
Minister Tony Blair's government plans to combat
crime by extending those "restraints on personal
liberty": removing the prohibition against double
jeopardy so people can be tried twice for the same
crime, making hearsay evidence admissible in court,
and letting jurors know of a suspect's previous crimes.
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This is a cautionary tale. America's founders, like their English forebears, regarded personal
security as first of the three primary rights of mankind. That was the main reason for including
a right for individuals to be armed in the U.S. Constitution. Not everyone needs to avail himself
or herself of that right. It is a dangerous
right. But leaving personal protection
to the police is also very dangerous.
145. The British government has
effectively abolished the right of
Englishmen, confirmed in their 1689
Bill of Rights, to "have arms for their
defence," insisting upon a monopoly of
force it can succeed in imposing only
on law-abiding citizens. It has come
perilously close to depriving its people
of the ability to protect themselves at
all, and the result is a more, not less,
dangerous society. Despite the British
tendency to decry America's "vigilante
values," British and Australian
legislators should implement a return to
these crucial common law values,
which stood them so well in the past
146. Canada recently abolished firearm registration in all states and publicly burnt their registers.
They considered the facts, they admitted that a wrong direction had been taken. The following
information was one of the reasons that brought them to this conclusion.
In 2008, Canada had a total of 611 killings.
200 shooting homicides, almost all gang related with black market guns.
14000 inquiry checks on the nationwide gun registry (according to Canadian Police) and:Zero hits Not One data base hit (of these 14000, inquiry checks) saved a life or convicted a
criminal.
200 stabbing homicides, almost all gang related with knives.
Zero hits on a non-existent knife nationwide registry.
200 beatings, strangulations, burnings, almost all gang related.
Zero hits on a non-existent beatings, strangulations, burnings nationwide registry.
Conclusion:
14000 hits on the gun registry nationwide (according to Canadian Police) and not 1 data base hit
saved a life at a cost of 2.4 BILLION DOLLARS.
147. The above result would be parallelled pro rata to population with the Australian registers
and a similar result. With these sort of statistics, in Canada and Australia it's no wonder that
legitimate shooting sportsman no longer support the Greens, or other socialist politicians, or
police unions. Law abiding firearm owners and their friends and families are all aware that
firearm restrictions are a political agenda to disarm the good people, and support the bad.
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As Police Minister’s , Police Associations and Police Unions support the three members of the
Coalition for Gun control and the Greens, as they did in Canada it's plainly obvious that they do
not have an agenda of increased public safety, and they have a self interest agenda of a larger
bureaucracy, promotion, more pay and more control over the public. The rights, property, lives
and safety of the firearm owners, the lawful public mean nothing to these powerful lobby groups.
Is there any question why those of the public who are informed on this subject have no faith in
the senior police, no faith in government and despise the Greens intensely.
Support for the police?...not bloody
likely!
148. Why would ay of the 2 million
firearm owners, hunters and target
shooters support the police and
politicians, who have both made the
legitimate sportsmen and women the
scapegoat for crimes committed by
mainly immigrant street gangs who
involved in the lucrative trade of
illegal drugs. This is compounded by
the Police and legislators who refer to
law abiding firearm owners and
firearm dealers in the same
terminology as drug users and drug
dealers.
If It Saves Just One Life, Its Worth It.
149. If it saves even one life, it's worth it, right? We have all heard that old furphy, and we have
all heard the old lie, "the long arm firearm registry makes sense because we register cars, don't
we? Is it coincidence that these sort of lies, iterated by TV journalist and Green, Anti Gun
extremist all end with a meaningless question. They must all have gone to the same schools of
rhetoric. I believe it because the liars that use those false furphies, are ashamed of the lie and are
struggling with their conscience, as they know they are a lying.
150. If anyone uses that sort of lie, they should be told in positive terms:If your cars were registered in the same way as firearms, you would have:
a) All automatic cars, all classic sports cars, subcompact cars, or cars capable of operating in
excess of 110 km/h would be totally prohibited.
b) Automatic Cars or Cars that look like they are capable of exceeding 110 km/h but are not
would also be prohibited by adding them to the list of prohibited vehicles.
c) Persons owning such cars prior to the enactment of the every changing "Automobile Act"
would have to hand them in for the latest destruction program.
d) Buy back money would be promised but due to the treachery and corruption of the staff
running the program you will miss out.
e) Some special people could keep theirs for assisting in a disability or special need. They would
require a "special authority to drive" to take them to a provincially certified tracks to drive.
f) The government, by virtue of a legislative screw-up, would never be permitted to grant the
special authority, due to another unrelated Act.
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g) Replica's just because they look like of those cars capable of 110Km/h even though they have
no engine or wheels that turn are also placed in the same category and have to be handed in or
held on a very restricted special licence, which includes extra security provisions.
h)All two-door sports cars, by virtue of being two doors, would be banned from driving on roads
and would be restricted to use only on the provincially regulated tracks.
i)To take your two-door car to the track would require an authorization to transport to the track.
You would have to take a designated route to the track.
j) If you deviate from the route, you could face serious criminal charges. This would also include
all the replicas or anything that looks like a sports car.
k) If you own a car, any car, you would have to store it in a security steel locked garage. If you
do not own a security steel locked garage you cannot have a car,
l)When storing your car at home in
a security steel garage you must
drain the fuel tank, as soon as you
return home.
m) You must store the petrol
separately from the car, and in a
safe place, away from any persons
not licenced to drive a car.
n) You would also have to follow
this regimen if you parked at the
shopping mall, or at work. Failure
to adhere to this could result in
serious criminal charges.
o) The same would apply to Golf
buggies and Ride on mowers with
an engine greater than a one
horsepower.
p) Failing to get a registration sticker every year on time would result in serious criminal charges
(instead of a fine or a suspended licence).
q) Any infraction of the Traffic Act would be a serious criminal offence.
r) To get your license you would, in addition to passing a safe-driving course and exams, provide
three references who would vouch for your ability to drive.
s) You would have to get approval from all your sexual partners who have stayed in your home,
as well as any former employers.
t) Upon waiting 4 or 5 months then receiving your license, you will be allowed to purchase a car,
after you have applied for a Permit to Acquire and waited but not on a Saturday afternoons or
Sundays, and sales between individuals can never occur. They would have to be brokered through
a car dealer and then every transaction reported to the police.
x) If you do not receive your license renewal on time, police will show up at your door to demand
that you turn over your car for destruction. You could also face serious criminal charges.
y) Any future car purchase you will have to apply for a Permit to Acquire and give good reasons
that satisfy the Police Officer in charge.
z) Do not bother applying if you have a similar style of car registered already even if you want
it just for the parts.
Aa) You do not need to know the basis that he refused your application, nor is this information
available to you if you make the mistake to appeal his decision.
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Bb)You could be surprised with on the spot inspections of your cars security, at anytime of the
day and night. Of course any lack of security precautions and your car will be destroyed and you
will be charged and prosecuted.
Cc) If you argue with your wife, or are going through a divorce, and your wife or partner makes
any claim of criminal action, police will seize your car and destroy it.
Dd) If you are convicted of any criminal offence, swearing on the phone, or an illegal gambling
night to raise money for your favourite charity
your car would be seized and destroyed.
Ee) If you violate any regulations under the
Traffic Act or commit any criminal offence, you
would have all your cars seized and destroyed,
and you would be prohibited from owning a car
for 5 years.
Ff) Every time there is a serious accident or a hit
and run, grandstanding and shamelessly uninformed politicians would demonize car owners
as dangerous, wife-abusing red necks who
cannot be trusted, and call for a total ban on all
cars.
If it saves even one life, it's worth it, right?
--------------------No prosecution for defending oneself is too
absurd.
151. If the Committee wants to consider following the British legislative disaster. If we share the
British legislation we will share the British outcomes. Consider a report from the Evening
Standard newspaper in London, dated October 31, 1996:
“A man who uses a knife as a tool of his trade was jailed today after police found him carrying
three of them in his car. Dean Payne, 26, is the first person to be jailed under a new law
making the carrying of a knife punishable by imprisonment. Payne told ... magistrates that he
had to provide his own knife for his job cutting straps around newspaper bundles at the
distribution plant where he works .... Police found the three knives a lock knife, a small
printer's knife, and a Stanley knife--in a routine search of his car.... The court agreed he had
no intention of using the knives for "offensive" purposes but jailed him for two weeks
anyway.”
The magistrate said "I have to view your conduct in light of the great public fear of people going
around with knives...I consider the only proper punishment is one depriving you of your
liberty."
When a society has lost the theory of constitutional absolutes as Britain has, and replaced
this with "balancing," then every right is in danger.
152. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Great Britain was the great exemplar of liberty to
continental Europe, but the sun has set on Britain's tradition of civil liberty. The police search
people's cars routinely. Public hysteria against weapons is so extreme that working men are
sentenced to jail for possessing the simple tools of their trade. The prosecutions of a newspaper
delivery men who carries some knives, or a business executive who saved his own life, would
likely have horrified the British gun control advocates of the early twentieth century. There is no
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evidence that most of these gun control advocates, who only wanted to keep firearms out of the
hands of anti-government revolutionaries, ever wanted to make it illegal for tradesmen to carry
tools, or for women to stab violent predators. The gun control advocates of 1905-1920 could
distinguish a Communist with a rifle from a tourist with a pen-knife. But while the early weapons
control advocates made such a distinction, they could not bind their successors to do so as well.
Nor could the early weapons controllers understand the social changes that they would unleash
when they gave the right to arms the first push down the slippery slope.
153. Similarly, in the United States, few Congressmen who voted for the first federal controls on
how Americans could consume medicine could have foreseen the "War on Drugs" that they were
unleashing. Who could have predicted that a law requiring a prescription for morphine would
pave the way for masked soldiers to break into a person's home because an anonymous tipster
claimed that there were hemp plants, which were entirely legal in 1914, in the home? Who could
have predicted that the Harrison Narcotics Act would pave the way for a Food and Drug
Administration that would deny terminally-ill patients the medicine of their choice because the
FDA had not satisfied itself that the medicine, available throughout Western Europe, was "safe
and effective?" Who could have predicted that doctors would not be able to prescribe the most
effective pain-killers, opiates, to the
terminally ill who were suffering
extreme pain? Who could have
predicted that legislative action on
opiate prescriptions would pave the
way for a federal administrative
agency to claim the right to outlaw
speech about tobacco? Predictions
of such events, had they been raised
in 1914 on the floor of Congress,
would have seemed absurd.
Proper Law Has Been
Disembowelled.
154. However, as too many Britons
and citizens of the United States
have learned the hard way in this
century, extreme consequences may
flow from apparently small steps. The Firearms Act of 1920 was just a licensing law; the
Harrison Narcotics Act was just a prescription system; and the serpent only asked Eve to eat an
apple.
The laws of Australia and England have been kidnapped and disembowelled by Left wing
socialists. These social experiments have a new code which seeks to manage and understand and
rehabilitate 'offenders'. It thinks there are excuses for crime. Even though it has been a failed
doctrine for thirty or more years, its advocates disapprove of those who cling to the old rules.
Once, police and courts and people all agreed about what was right and what was wrong. In days
gone bye, the authorities were more than happy for us to defend ourselves as vigorously as we
liked.
Now, while they have effectively abandoned us to the non-existent mercies of anybody who cares
to break into our homes, they will punish us fiercely if we lift a finger to defend ourselves.
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The Role of Gun Controls.
155. If firearms had never been invented, many of the Australian and British government's
current invasions of civil liberties would still have taken place, but the advance of gun controls
has played an important role in creating laws that do infringe upon other civil liberties, as well
by providing precedents.
To enforce the Firearm control laws, the Australian and British police have been given broad
search and seizure powers. Sections 46 through 50 of the 1968 Firearms Act authorized the police
to search individuals and vehicles without warrants, to require the handing-over of weapons for
inspection, and to arrest without a warrant, even in a home. The principle of warrantless searches
for firearms was expanded to include searches for "offensive weapons" by the Police and
Criminal Evidence Bill of 1984. Since "offensive weapons" are never defined, the police have
nearly unlimited authority to search and seize. African combs, bunches of keys, Carving knives
and tools have been considered offensive weapons. In one case reported by the National Council
of Civil Liberties, a workman carrying tools to his car was asked, "Would you use this tool to
defend yourself if attacked?" Had the workman given an affirmative answer, he would have
been subject to arrest for the felony of carrying an offensive weapon.
156. The principle of warrantless arrests is now a general practice in British law, even for minor
offenses or for failure to provide satisfactory identification to the police. When the British Deer
Act 1963 allowed warrantless arrests for poachers, few supporters of it foresaw that warrantless
arrests for everyone, not just poachers, would become the norm in a few decades.
Today in Britain and Australia the practice that police may inspect private homes without a
warrant is being established by the "safe storage" provisions of the firearm laws. In many
jurisdictions the police will not issue or renew a firearms licence without an in-home visit to
ensure that the police standards for safe storage are being met. The British police have no legal
authority to require such home inspections, yet when a homeowner refuses the police entry, the
licence application or renewal will be denied. The Australian State Police are given the right
under the Weapons Acts without
any excuse or evidence that a
firearm is on the premises or a that
a crime/felony is in progress.
157. The British 1989 Act
extending the safe storage laws in
Britain not only added several
hundred thousand more British
homes to those to which the police
consider they have the authority to
demand entry without a warrant, but
was quickly adopted by all
Australian Police States. On the
same basis if its good enough for
the Mother Parliament its good
enough for all of Australia. Finally,
the Firearm control laws have helped teach that laws in practice are made by Australian police
administrators, or the equivalent London bureaucrats, rather than being the exclusive creation
of Parliament.
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158. How many people are there who would care to resist infringement of a right? In Britain they
have been squeezed into a small minority. In the United States, because of the latest Obama
driven firearm spending spree, firearm ownership is reportedly over 100 million firearm owners
half the households and about half the population. In Australia with some honest figures recently
released by Police Minister Office Jack Dempsey 600,000 for Queensland NSW would not be
far behind say 500,000 and 300,000 in Victoria, if accurate State figures were provided we would
be looking at 2,000,000. Shooters who due to age, all vote. The USA firearm owners are in the
best position, British firearm owners are in the worst possible position but in Australia if current
trends continue we can safely predict that some positive improvement will be forthcoming.
Votes, and politicians quest for them will make that difference.
159. This suggests the long-term importance of young people exercising their rights. If high
school newspapers have large staffs that fearlessly report the truth, the future of civil rights, home
owners and firearm owners will be better protected. If, conversely, laws prevent teenagers from
target shooting or hunting, the future of our Western freedoms are limited, and the rights of the
people will be similar to a Chinese peasant of the Mao Ze Tung era.
160. What happened to the Bill of Right 1688/89, which was established to protect the people
rights forever? The British Parliament is in a revolutionary state against the Bill of Rights and
has convinced the Monarch that she is now and in the future powerless. It seems a majority in
Parliament means control of the entire government. Contrary to the famous book ‘Laws of the
Constitution, by A. V. Dicey, Britain and Australia now have no separation of power,
Government is not Crown, House, and Courts. The party leader, the Prime Minister and the
leader's close advisors turn their unchecked will into law. The Australian and British system does
not mean legislative supremacy, but rather executive supremacy, since the leader of the dominant
party in Parliament faces no effective opposition or checks. So, 300 years after the Glorious
Revolution, an unexpected new "monarch" the Prime Minister has taken the Kings place. As a
practical matter, the Parliament today acts as less of a check on the supreme executive's power
than Parliament did in 1613, when King James I asserted the divine right of kings. The modern
"servile but supreme parliament" is no longer a restraint on executive power, but instead an
instrument of that power. The Australian
Parliament has struggled to imitate the British
revolutionary corruption of the peoples rights and
freedoms.
161. In the seventeenth century prelude to the
English Civil War, as Parliament took control of
the militia away from the King, Parliament exalted
itself as the "epitome" of the nation, insisting
"there can be nothing against the arbitrary
Supremacy of Parliaments." Indeed, it was
commonly said that “Parliament can do no
wrong.” The fiction of a King, who embodied all national sovereignty and could do no wrong,
was replaced with the fiction of an equally absolute Parliament.
Unfortunately, modern Britain's politics derives more from the seventeenth century absolutism
than from the eighteenth century common law described by Blackstone, in which the "right of the
individual" to arms was meant for "the natural rights of resistance and self-preservation, when
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the sanctions of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression."
In Blackstone's time, and for many decades thereafter, Britons correctly believed that they had
the same right that citizens of the United States claimed in the Declaration of Independence, to
"alter or abolish" their government by force, if the government became too oppressive.
162. What a slippery slope Britain and Australia have descended to, in just a century! When the
century dawned, Blackstone's right to resist oppression was the law. Today in Britain, only the
Libertarian Alliance dares to argue
about a right of resistance. Regarding
the issue of the government's absolute
sovereignty, the British government
holds a tighter ideological grip over its
subjects today than most British
governments since 1689 ever dreamed
of achieving.
The Firearm Owners Associations in
Australia stance which current history
qualifies as a ‘reasonable position’,
which demonstrates that law abiding
owners are not bloodthirsty nuts wanting
to shoot people. Rather, law abiding
firearm owners are harmless sportsmen,
and licensed guns belong in the same
category as cricket bats or golf clubs. In
practice, however, the concession that firearms are only for sports undermines defence of the
right to bear arms. If guns are not to be owned for defence, then guns make no positive
contribution to public safety. If the power of State governments is absolute, then the people's
ownership of arms makes no positive contribution to a sound body politic. That has been the
mechanism, that has been orchestrated and implemented against law abiding firearm owners.
Eventually, as one thing in life is certain, everything will change.
163. British libertarian Sean Gabb points out ‘that licensed gun owners are not part of the gun
crime problem.” As Gabb writes: “that British gun owners have been losing battle after battle and
have therefore shrivelled in numbers because “you all failed to put the real case for guns, that
their possession for defence is a moral right and duty, as well as a positive social good.”
Instead, the many eloquent MPs who spoke against handgun confiscation pointed to all the
admirable sporting uses of sporting guns: by handicapped people in the paralympics; by British
athletes in the Olympics and in the Commonwealth Games; and by ordinary Britons on a
Saturday afternoon of innocent sport.
164. The anti-ban MPs spoke well, but the prohibitionists' argument, based on incorrect fact and
principles, was more powerful as it could be repeated by the media more often. As with the
doctrine of socialism, Lenin, Engels, Marx, Hitler and Dr Gobbels it the size of the lie and how
often it can be told. Forms public opinion. There are substitutes for sports; displaced handgun
shooters can still use rifles or shotguns or airguns. If guns are to survive in a rational political
debate, then they must be defended on the basis that guns are legitimate for shooting violent
criminals when lesser force will not suffice. In the United States, as per the above recently
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reported event about Dr Lee Silverman, even the gun prohibition groups concede that guns are
used 60,000 to 80,000 times a year for self-defence. Most studies suggest that the number is in
the hundreds of thousands, or millions. The number is undeniably large. This agreed-upon large
number of legitimate self-defence cases weighs heavily in the debate on gun control. A logical
public official must consider that, while a particular gun control proposal may promise a
reduction in gun misuse that hurts people, the particular gun control might also impair some of
the many instances of guns being used to save people. On the United States balance, there are
potential lives saved on each side of the scale. In the British balance, the lives of the innocent are
thrown away, expended, the law of the politician, or their interpretation of it is more important
then the life of a citizen as they are expendable, as they have no means of defence. Only
important dignitaries of politicians have the right to
armed defence.
Again More Guns. Equates to Less Crime.
165. Australian ignorant politicians’s such as John
Howard reiterate the lie, We don’t want a Gun
Violent culture like the United States, but any
reasonable research, not the NRA to the FBI website
show:“That recent study said compared to 1993, the peak
of US gun homicide, the rate was 49 percent lower
in 2010, even though the population had grown. In
other words, fewer people are dying by guns.
Assaults, robberies, and sex crimes also went down
by 75 percent in 2011.”
Perhaps images from shooting crime scenes seem all
too familiar, but perhaps the attention to gun violence
in recent months has caused more Americans to be
unaware that gun crimes are actually markedly lower than they were two decades ago.
When the Continual Emphasis of Law is Directed Against the Innocent, the Criminals can
do as They Please!
166. Instead of the British Government returning to the freedoms of the past, which gave armed
security to the general public the government has pressed down restriction after restriction upon
the British people, and as every restriction fails to halt the rising tide of crime, the British
government invents still more (Un)"reasonable" gun controls to distract the public from the
government's inept efforts at crime control.
As armed crime grows worse and worse, despite nearly a century of severe firearms controls, the
British government expends more and more energy "cracking down" on the rights of the
law-abiding British people. The undermining of the right to arms has parallelled the destruction
of many other common law rights, including the grand jury right, freedom of the press from prior
restraints, the civil jury, freedom from warrantless searches, the right to confront one's accusers,
and the right against self-incrimination. People who want to argue that gun rights can be
destroyed while other rights prosper must find some other country to use as an example, but the
British decease has infected many of the Commonwealth countries.
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We have to be allowed to Protect ourselves.
Government Cannot do it for us.
167. It is astonishing that this has been allowed to
happen in supposedly free countries. Unless
governments act soon to start protecting the law
abiding from crime, with proper old-fashioned
policing and punitive prisons, an increasingly
desperate population will sooner or later start to
act as Tony Martin did, in such numbers that there
will not be enough courts to try them, or jails to
hold them. Who could benefit from that? Not
even the Criminals.
168. Australia now has all the information on the
subject, if it decides to follow the British path into
ever increasing impositions on law abiding
citizens, leaving the public at the mercy of an ever increasing successful criminal element,
informed people will all know that the Australian Governments real objective is gradual
disarmament with no thought for community safety.
If on the other hand it decides to return to our Constitutional government, encouraging legal
firearm ownership for personal and national defence, we are sure that their decisions would be
trusted by the millions of freedom loving people, even those who are not firearm owners.
It is time that the socialist hijacking of the justice system in Australia and the UK was reversed
- and reversed quickly for the sake of the peace and the good order of the law abiding citizens of
Australia.
Ron Owen
Submission on behalf of the Firearm Owners Association of Australia.
Box 346, Gympie 4570.
Any enquires 07 54 825070.
2 August 2014.
The Firearm Owners Association of Australia was formed in 1987 to oppose proposed firearm
legislation. It is 100% voluntary and has over 7000 subscribers. Membership is free, on
http://www.foaa.com.au/
Or
b3969976@spiderweb.com.au
With thanks to
SAFE, PO Box 104, Hampton, Middlesex,TW12 lTQ. Briefing Document.
Gun Control's Twisted Outcome Restricting firearms has helped make England more
crime-ridden than the U.S. By Joyce Lee Malcolm
These gun policies are only replicas, but lethal. By Michael Yardley (Filed: 12/01/2003)
Mouzos, J. (2000). No. 151, The Licensing and Registration Status of Firearms Used in
Homicide. Australian Institute of Criminology: trends & issues in crime and criminal justice.
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All the Way Down the Slippery Slope: Gun Prohibition in England and Some Lessons for Civil
Liberties in America. Joseph E. Olson and David B. Kopel.
References throughout the previous 66 pages also have my thanks. Ron
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