“According to
Joyce Lee Malcolm, a professor at George Mason University Law School and author of Guns and Violence: The English Experience, “Since 1920, anyone in Britain wanting a handgun had to obtain a certificate from his local police stating he was fit to own a weapon and had good reason to have one. Over the years, the definition of ‘good reason’ gradually narrowed. By 1969, self-defense was never a good reason for a permit.”
In 1987, after a massacre in Hungerford, England, killed sixteen people and
wounded fourteen others (
since no one else had a gun, including the police, the killer roamed for eight hours), the government cracked down. Semi-automatic rifles were banned and shotguns were regulated like handguns.
Nine years later, the Dunblane massacre in Scotland resulted in the final blow to gun ownership. The Firearms Act of 1997 banned handguns almost entirely—forcing lawful owners to turn them in or face ten years in prison.”
“What happened next?
Professor Malcolm has summarized it well:
The results have not been what proponents of the act wanted. Within a decade of the handgun ban and the confiscation of handguns from registered owners, crime with handguns had doubled according to British government crime reports. Gun crime, not a serious problem in the past, now is. Armed street gangs have some British police carrying guns for the first time. Moreover, another massacre occurred in June 2010. Derrick Bird, a taxi driver in Cumbria, shot his brother and a colleague then drove off through rural villages killing 12 people and injuring 11 more before killing himself.
The homicide rate in Britain rose dramatically for seven years after the ban, from 1.1 homicides per 100,000 people in 1996 to 1.8 in 2003. At that point, fed up with the sudden increase in murder and violent crime, the police force was expanded by 16 percent between 2001 and 2005. Unsurprisingly, more police meant less crime. Still, even with the increased police presence, crime generally remained higher than before the Firearms Act.”
Excerpt From: Beck, Glenn. “Control.” Threshold Editions. iBooks.
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