Iain Murray
July 5, 2001

Therefore, it is only natural that one response should be to push for more restrictions, to make it more difficult for children to get access to weapons. If it works for children, why shouldn't it work for adults? If we want to stop criminals carrying guns, for instance, wouldn't the best way be to restrict everyone's access to them?

One of the best ways of checking hypotheses like these is to look at actual "tests" of the theories. The test lab in this case is the United Kingdom, which enacted strict gun control laws five years ago following an especially tragic school shooting. But the results so far are not good.

We in the United States were shocked, for instance, when the Josephson Institute of Ethics revealed data in April that showed that 14 percent of all high school pupils -- and 21 percent of all boys -- had carried a weapon to school at least once in the past year. Addressing these findings, a spokesperson for Handgun Control told Time.com: "The least we can do is keep guns out of kids' hands."

That's exactly what Britain's strict gun laws aim to do, but, according to a survey for the U.K. government's Youth Justice Board released recently, fully 26 percent of high school-age pupils there have carried a weapon for aggressive or defensive purposes in the past year. Unfortunately, neither survey broke down the results by weapon type (although 17 percent of the British children admitted carrying a knife). But worryingly, among British "excluded" pupils (those who had been suspended or expelled from school), a staggering 23 percent claimed to have had access to a gun in the last year.

This is in a country where it is virtually impossible to get access to a gun legally. Some commentators have suggested that part of the reason that the current outbreak of foot and mouth disease spread so rapidly there was because veterinarians could not shoot infected animals on the spot as they are now forbidden to carry pistols. Yet we have evidence that almost a quarter of the children who need the most help in avoiding taking the wrong path have access to firearms. Strict gun laws don't seem to be helping them much.

Nor are they helping hold down crime in general. The recent International Crime Victimization Survey, which provides a good indication of overall crime levels around the world, shows that, while crime fell dramatically during the 1990s in the United States and most of the rest of the world, it has remained steady in Britain and Australia (which also enacted a gun ban during the late Nineties).

Meanwhile, gun crimes are increasing. According to London's authoritative Sunday Times, the number of firearm offences in the United Kingdom increased almost 40 percent from 4,903 in 1997 to 6,843 in 2000. These are still small figures in comparison to the United States, but the trend is the opposite of what might be expected.

It does not seem that Britain can be said to be a safer place as a result of the gun ban. The police there have traditionally gone unarmed, but the number of incidents in which police officers have had guns issued to them in recognition of potential danger increased from about 6,000 in 1994-95 to more than 12,000 in 1997-98. And with such incidents come the inevitable mistakes: British police recently shot dead a drug dealer in his own bedroom. He was both unarmed and naked at the time.

Nor has strict control had much effect on the number of guns available to criminals. U.K. police estimate that there are nearly 300,000 illegal guns in circulation there - one for every 200 people. To put that figure in perspective, the leading U.S. authority on gun numbers, Gary Kleck of Florida State University, estimates that 180,000 guns are used in crimes in the United States each year. So despite the strict gun control laws, there are more than enough illegally held guns in the United Kingdom to allow gun crime there to reach U.S. proportions.

These figures speak for themselves. The United Kingdom enacted strict gun control laws and has achieved a rise in gun crime, a decline in safety and a position where access to firearms among delinquent children seems commonplace. These are valuable lessons for us here. If we enact strict gun laws nationwide, we cannot expect to see a swift drop in crime or our police able to do their jobs with less risk. Most of all, we cannot expect such laws to free delinquent children from the seduction of the gun. Iain Murray, a British citizen, specializes in criminal justice issues at STATS -- the Statistical Assessment Service, a Washington-based public policy organization. He is the author of the Encyclopaedia Britannica's article on gun control statistics.

Copyright 2001 by United Press International. All rights reserved.

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