When every second counts the police are only minutes away.When you criminalise possession of guns only criminals will have possession of guns.
Even as clichés go these two are pretty well worn, yet not only are both still true nonetheless true but from time to time that’s demonstrated in a single incident. That’s right, I am about to give you an example of that. How’d you guess?
A great-grandfather has told how he used a baseball bat to fight off two thieves who were ransacking his gun cabinet and stole a cache of weapons.
The 70-year-old grandfather-of-10, who has one great-grandchild, told Perthnow he swung his bat at both young men who were smashing into his gun cabinet and attempting to steal his utility at his Alexander Heights home early today.
Now straight away the problem with this should be obvious. Thieves were stealing his guns – his unquestionably legally owned guns which he kept in gun cabinets in accordance with WA and Commonwealth law – and he had to defend his property, and his life if they’d arrived armed or managed to load a gun and turn it on him, with a baseball bat. Surely it’s not just shooters who can see the stupidity in this, but just in case it’s not I’ll note that if they’d stolen a car from his driveway the law would not have insisted that if he chose to give chase he should do so on nothing faster than a bicycle.
Oh, and that subject they did nick his car too.
He described how he was awoken just before 5am to find his prized Ford XR6 ute on the driveway with its doors wide open and a man smashing his gun cabinet open with a sledgehammer.
[...]
John, who lives at the home with his wife, was awoken by loud bangs from his garage just before 5am.
When he went outside to investigate he found the men trying to break into his gun safe and fought with both of them with a baseball bat before they fled in his ute.
As the robbers drove off John smashed the vehicle’s windscreen with the baseball bat.
And predictably enough the ute was found burned out a short time later, minus the six guns the thieves had got away with, natch. As Vincent Vega put it, what’s more chickenshit than fucking with a man’s automobile? Well, I suppose there is nicking his guns as well, safe in the knowledge that he’s highly unlikely to have one out and ready to use to defend himself against you because that’s against the law, and the overwhelming majority of legal gun owners are scrupulously law abiding no matter what they might think. And the recently disarmed John is a case in point.
“I’ve got a crook hip [he took a blow to the side from the sledgehammer - AE] but I’m not as sore as they are,” he said.
“If they came back I wouldn’t have any hesitation . . . (to do it again).
“I confronted them because this is my house, and I’ve got a right to protect my property.
“Had I had a pistol in my hand, I would have used that as well.
“They’ve got no right to come in here, I would have used anything to stop them, I’ve got every right to do that.”
[...]
He shrugged off suggestions he was a hero for standing up to the two thugs.
“It’s just something you do to protect yourself and your property and I feel we’ve got every right to,” he said.
“I’d do it again now, right now, if they were here.
“I think everybody should have a pistol under their bed and use it.
“Had I had my pistol under the bed I would have used it and bugger the consequences . . . this has got to stop.”
But of course John did not have his pistol under the bed, because neither John nor anyone else here is allowed to keep a pistol under the bed. Yes, at least law abiding Australians are allowed to have pistols – providing the local police give permission and that owners comply with various state and Commonwealth laws, of course – and clearly this is a better situation than not being allowed to have one at all. But it’s not as good as being at liberty to have one, especially since if self defence is not a valid reason for wanting a pistol, or any other type of gun for that matter, and the law insists that you keep it unloaded and locked away then it’s quite useless when dealing with sledgehammer wielding intruders anyway. Jeez, you can have half a dozen guns and for all the good they do you locked away you might as well defend yourself with a baseball bat and hope for the best. Oh, actually that’s exactly what happened, isn’t it? John didn’t have his pistol to hand and resorted to a baseball bat because at least he’s allowed to have that lying around, and now doesn’t have his pistol or his other guns at all anymore by the sounds of things.
Six guns were stolen including a shotgun and two air rifles.
Terrific, score six for the bad guys, even if John did get a few good whacks in with the bat before they got away. And what about the good guys?
A description of the thieves has not yet been issued by police.
Well, that’s not exactly an auspicious start, is it? And of course it’s not long before we’re reminded to leave it all to the police.
WA Police Sergeant Graham Clifford said the law did give people the right to defend their lives and property, but it was a grey area.
If the defence went too far and became a form of punishment, people would probably be charged, he told AAP.
Which is fair enough, but I don’t think home owners dealing with intruders, possibly violent and possibly armed, really give a tinker’s stuff about punishing them for breaking in. Driving them off or failing that making them no longer a risk to the occupier and any family there, yes, and if achieving that means one or more intruders lying face down and approaching ambient temperature in a pool of their own vital fluids, well, so be it. Nobody made them break in to someone else’s home and put the occupants in fear for their lives, so the consequences of their decision to commit crime are on their own heads. But punishment? Seriously, Sgt Clifford, how many people do you think would honestly give a stuff about punishing intruders when just getting rid of the danger they present is all that matters in that instant?
“Really what we’d prefer people to do is back off and observe and let us know what’s going on and we’ll chase them down the track,” Sgt Clifford said.
And I wouldn’t want anyone other than trained, professional police investigators doing that, but as for the backing off part, what about when you’re at home and have nowhere to back off to? We know we’re still supposed to call the cops and let you guys sort that out too, but the problem is the intruders are there already. And in case it’s not clear why that’s a problem that can be tackled only by people being at liberty to defend themselves we only need to ask one simple question: how long did it take WA police to respond to the report of a break in at the home of a registered firearms owner?
If it was more than five seconds there’s your answer.
Presumably, you can take your guns out to clean them, can’t you? So, if you were to, say, have your gun on the bedside table with an open bottle of gun cleaning gunk for….
…well, let’s say a few months, who’d know?
Trouble is cleaning means taking it apart and they tend not to fire as readily until you put them back together, at which point you’d be expected to lock it back up in the safe. Nor would you normally need any ammunition to clean it and of course you’re expected to have that safely locked up until you’re ready to go shooting.
Just a small point, but, if he didn’t have the guns in the first place, presumably they wouldn’t have been there trying to steal them.
He might well have been targeted because he’s a gun owner (I’m sure the cops hope so because it’d narrow down the pool of suspects to people who might have known he had guns) but believe it or not it’s not just gun owners in Australia who have their homes broken into. What makes you so sure they weren’t there for the car and just saw the safes and decided it’d be a bonus if they could get into them? And having done so decided to keep the guns and torch the car? And if it turns out that way will you then say that if he hadn’t had a car they wouldn’t have tried to steal it? Somehow I doubt it.
Look, you cannot keep guns out of criminal hands. Seriously, you really can’t and it’s a fantasy to think you can. Even if you banned production and destroyed every firearm in private hands it wouldn’t be enough. If the police force of a small, wealthy and densely populated nation like the UK can’t prevent smuggling illegal goods, weapons included, then what chance has Australia with more than twice the coastline to guard, a third of the people to guard it and thirty times the space to hide anything that is slipped through? Even if you could somehow secure such a large and mostly remote border guns aren’t all that hard to make – we’ve been making them for centuries, remember, and if was possible to produce working firearms with pre-Industrial Revolution technology then it’d be a relative cinch for skilled people with access to modern tools. Yes, that’d be illegal too but if a criminal decides to make a gun what’s the law to him? A willingness to thumb his nose at the law is part of his job description. So I repeat: you simply cannot keep guns out of the hands of criminals. Ever.
All of which brings me back to the theme of this post. The police aren’t an effective deterrent. They may be superb investigators but they simply cannot be everywhere at once and lack the numbers to respond in time, and if there’s little in the way of a determined criminal arming himself the implications for the safety of the law abiding majority are not good. The way I see it there are only two options. The first is to make the police responsible for investigation first and foremost and protection only from the point at which they actually arrive, and accept that until that point individual citizens must be at liberty to defend themselves and must therefore have access to the best tools for the job if they want them. The second is to vastly increase the police numbers to somewhere between one officer per citizen and just swearing in every law abiding adult. Of course in a country where the police are routinely armed anyway you could argue that there’s not that much difference between the two, though in practice citizens being free to defend themselves with weapons would probably mean far fewer guns being carried in public.
Just a small point but by your logic we should all live in empty houses.
The majority of us are law-abiding and have a bought and paid for doorway and threshold which…as far as I am concerned…no one has the right to cross mine without my personal invitation or written legal authorisation.
All houses should be issued with signs saying “Enter At Own Risk” and people allowed to defend themselves with as much force as THEY deem necessary for as long as it takes for Everyone to get the message and fuck off out of it.
If you go looking for trouble then you can run crying when you actually get it
I agree that one should not be prevented from owning a gun or guns until it is shown that the person is unfit to do so; ie. you can until we say you can’t rather than you can’t until we say you can.
That’s plenty fair enough. When someone demonstrates through their behaviour that they can’t be trusted with a car or even with their liberty they lose their driving licence or get locked in prison. Similar principle.
You can have two safes. One by the bed containing all you need. The issue is though that in our mickey mouse countries if you faced them off and shot them you would be the one prosecuted.
Personally, I’d like a 9mm SMG with a suppressor and some plastic sheets to wrap the bodies up in. I doubt they leave a list of where they are going on the way out and if their naked bodies were found in the woods weeks later who would know who did it.
Ah, but like in the Tony Martin case, you never know if they have an accomplice who is getting away to tell the tale while you stand over the corpse and think ‘Now, just where did I put that sheeting?’…
That wasn’t what happened. Ole Tone chose not to terminate the little fucker. I’ll have plenty of spare mags.
Singing to the choir here, AE.
If I found someone breaking into my home, and I had a gun…lets just say that there would be no need to call the Police…and I wouldn’t do it afterwards either. Burglars, by and large, tend not to leave itineraries and I live near a large ocean.
They would probably only be missed when they failed to collect their Methadone the next day
Heh!
When every second counts the police are only minutes away.
In the UK, the police might send a PCSO two weeks later to fill a lengthy form.
At the time of Tony Martin and Dunblaaaaaaaaane (Oh pleeeese fink of the ickle chiiiildren!!!) I was working part time in a cellar in Brighouse, making fire-arms (technically shotguns) for re-enactment societies. Our most advanced tools were a couple of routers and a pillar drill, so I am very familiar with how easy they are to make.
Up the road, my Dad worked with a chap who would spin up black powder revolvers on his lathe during his dinner hour. He made his own black powder at home and would play with each pistol a few times before welding up the moving parts and hanging them on his wall at home.
Never understood why he made his own powder. Non-hydroscopic “Pyrodex” is available for around £15 a Kg and you can have up to 15Kg of the stuff without any form of license – great for those home made fire-works!
Around the time I was doing aforementioned work, I was told of one or two redundent engineering workers of a dodgy nature who were supplementing their dole money on their lathes by re-activating de-activated guns and flogging them to the drug gangs over in Manchester. So it’s quite correct that you will never take guns completely out of criminal hands – current UK law only takes them out of the hands of the law abiding.
Yup, and it’s the sort of thing that makes it impossible to eliminate guns even if such a thing were desirable (which is a side debate, but I’d say it’s not). Even if everyone who knew how to make a gun dropped dead right now so the technology was lost, because everyone else knows that such a thing is possible it wouldn’t be long before it was rediscovered. From what you’ve said it sounds like it would be rediscovered a lot faster than I expected.
It would require much more than us just dropping dead AE.
Just try typing “How to make a machine gun” into your search engine.
Newsgroups are also a good source of construction information.
So quite a lot of the internet would have to drop dead too.
One genuine question. What do people make of the Hemingway and Miller report – link to injuryprevention.bmj.com .
Clearly decriminalising firearms won’t take them out of the hands of criminals, so the argument I take it is that an increased amount of firearms would cause criminals to think twice before breaking into property etc. Is there any evidence to back this up – do any of the countries out there that have little firearm regulation have a significantly lower rate of theft for example, and have they managed to achieve this without an increase in violent crime and firearm related deaths (excluding suicide of course)?
Having not read it I don’t make much of it one way or the other. However, the abstract goes against other studies that I have looked at more deeply. The only thing I’d say is that studies by gun control advocates tend to find the opposite of studies by gun control critics and vice versa, which probably says more about the people that do such studies. Personally I suspect there are leading questions, missing questions, dubious extrapolation, subreption, cherry picking etc being done on both sides.
Clearly decriminalising firearms won’t take them out of the hands of criminals, so the argument I take it is that an increased amount of firearms would cause criminals to think twice before breaking into property etc.
Not as such and I don’t think it’s necessarily true anyway. It’s not difficult to conceive of situations where a criminal will act whatever he believes the chances of facing a gun are, and in such cases being in an area of high gun ownership will not deter that criminal. However, if he faces someone unarmed he will probably win, whereas if he faces someone who has the means to defend themselves the odds become more even and may even favour the victim if the criminal is not already armed. That said it’s a caveat and I doubt it applies in the majority of cases. Criminals aren’t necessarily stupid or irrational and will naturally prefer the path of least resistance – literally. So yes, while it’s not actually the argument against gun control we should expect that greater numbers of firearms will deter rational criminals. Not 100% but we should expect there to be an effect.
Is there any evidence to back this up – do any of the countries out there that have little firearm regulation have a significantly lower rate of theft for example, and have they managed to achieve this without an increase in violent crime and firearm related deaths (excluding suicide of course)?
There is some evidence, yes. First the US is widely regarded as having the most loose gun laws and probably the highest levels of private gun ownership in the world. I recall I once looked into it for a lengthy blog post and was amazed to find that there are more guns in private ownership than there are cars, and yet it’s neither the most crime ridden or violent society in the world. I’m going from memory here and may be in error but Jamaica, Brazil and South Africa all have greater rates of crime of all kinds and have both tougher gun laws and lower rates of legal private gun ownership. And even that treats the US as homogenous when really we know it’s got in excess of 50 legal jurisdictions. When you look at the US as what it is, a federation of competing territories comprising of fifty states and dozens more cities and municipalities you find that the lowest crime rates – again, not just murder and violence, but crime rates in general – are enjoyed by New Englanders, who also have the loosest gun laws. In the case of Vermont there are for all practical purposes no gun laws at all for law abiding legal adults – seriously, cars are more regulated than guns in Vermont and it’s about the safest place in the safest region in the US. And American gun owners will occasionally raise the point that even rampaging psychos going postal with a gun (who we know by their actions are irrational) and shooting into crowds will almost always choose a crowd that they know or expect to be unarmed rather than a crowd at, say, a gun show.
That’s not to say more guns=less crime either. Gun-rights advocates make the argument sometimes but while I don’t think it’s as much an oversimplification as more guns=more crime, which I feel is demonstrably false, I do regard it as unproven and unlikely to be true all the time. Here’s my theory, and since it’s beyond my ability to test it remains a theory: more violent people=more violence, and that will remain true no matter what the law allows. But violent people aren’t all violent because they’re mad, stupid or irrational (a bit mad, a bit stupid or a bit irrational perhaps, but not wholly so) and if they think there’s a good chance they’ll be met with armed resistance most, not all but most, will look elsewhere.
“In the case of Vermont there are for all practical purposes no gun laws at all for law abiding legal adults”
In all fairness though Vermont contains no major cities at all, and other states that have lenient gun control like Arizona do have an issue with gun crime. On the flip side of this obviously is Washington DC which has some of the strictest gun regulation along with the highest rate of gun violence.
“but Jamaica, Brazil and South Africa all have greater rates of crime of all kinds” – I’d say these are not fair comparisons though as you are comparing countries that are no where near as well developed as the US and have much higher poverty rates etc. When you compare the US to the likes of the UK, France, Germany, Netherlands etc. then you are looking at a much higher rate of gun crime and homicides, so i guess it goes back to my other question, as to if there are any examples of countries that haven’t seen the trade off between gun decriminalisation and increased gun crime, as many would use the US as the perfect example of more guns=more gun crime.
“However, if he faces someone unarmed he will probably win, whereas if he faces someone who has the means to defend themselves the odds become more even and may even favour the victim if the criminal is not already armed.”
This is probably my biggest concern with regards to reducing gun legislation. Put simply, if someone breaks into my house and i face off with them I would much rather face a situation where 95% of the time i was going to get my arse kicked and survive then a 50-50 chance of getting shot. If its fair to assume that some criminals will take the path of least resistance, then i guess its also fair to say that those that do not choose that path are much more likely to be prepared and armed, and that’s the crux i guess, are you willing to trade the possibility of a large reduction in property crime for the possibility of a small increase in gun crime.
You do leave comments that need a reply the length of another post to cover properly, don’t you?
In all fairness though Vermont contains no major cities at all, and other states that have lenient gun control like Arizona do have an issue with gun crime.
And on the face of it doesn’t this suggest a correlation of violence with urbanisation rather than gun possession or gun legality? You brought up DC, which again is urbanised – almost nothing but urban in fact – and very violent with lots of gun crime despite gun laws which until recently were as tough or tougher than the UK’s. Looking elsewhere we see more of this – Louisiana would be a peaceful state were it not for the drag factor of a high murder rate in New Orleans. In fact the US as a whole would be considered a safer place to live than most European countries, and certainly the UK, were it not for the poor crime stats of a number of large cities, Washington DC among them, dragging them down. It may be coincidence that these cities all have gun laws outlawing or deterring private gun ownership, but the point is the correlation is with cities rather than legal gun ownership.
Then of course there’s Switzerland, known not just for high rates of private gun ownership but, because it’s through the civil militia obligations, for compulsory ‘ownership’ of a military rifle. I believe it can be actual ownership if they take up the offer of buying it cheap later on. And of course Switzerland also has a low crime rate. I haven’t got that broken down by canton and city so I can’t say if the urban areas – I think Geneva, Zurich and Bern, basically – are skewing the rate for the rest of the country but I wouldn’t be shocked if it was. Even so I’d still expect the armed to the teeth Swiss to be less crime and violence prone than a less armed US state, probably to do with them being wealthy.
It’s also interesting to look at a few comparable (with each other, not the US) small nations/city states. Singapore, Monaco and Liechtenstein are all small and wealthy and have the low crime rates you’d expect despite being relatively urbanised (not so much Liechtenstein), but the latter two have lax gun laws and the former has strict gun laws. Result? The ones with the guns have the lower crime rates, although it has to be said all three are safe, peaceful places by any reasonable standards.
The conclusion must surely be that there is no correlation between violence and guns. There is something else going on. Cities may be part of it, though I’ll come on to why it’s not as simple as urbanisation either. What it certainly is not is guns in the hands of the law abiding.
I’d say these are not fair comparisons though as you are comparing countries that are no where near as well developed as the US and have much higher poverty rates etc.
I think you’re doing these countries a disservice by saying they’re nowhere near as well developed. South Africa has heavy industry and nuclear power – it was researching an advanced new reactor design and until not long ago too, and even a weapons program before that – while Brazil, also an industrialised nation with nuclear power, is the 6th or 7th largest economy. Much the same can be said of Mexico, one I missed but which is also fairly violent while being at the same time well developed and relatively wealthy as well as having tougher gun laws than the US. Of course part of Mexico’s problem stems from drug prohibition, but that’s a side topic. Even Jamaica, the least comparable of the lot, has far more in common with the US than with, say, the Sudan. In short, I absolutely disagree that the comparison is unfair, particularly in the case of Brazil. They may have a lot of jungle and a relative handful of indigenous people living subsistence lifestyles but that doesn’t demote them from industrialised and federated nation with a large economy to third world status in my book, especially when the US and other nations also have some indigenous people living subsistence lifestyles.
What they may have, and what I think bears looking at, is a greater disparity between wealth and poverty than the US. I hate to sound all lefty do-gooder but I’d bet there’s a bigger difference between Rio’s rich suburbs and its favelas than between East LA and Beverley Hills, and I suspect that difference is a factor. Monaco, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, the states of New England: all affluent if not plain wealthy, and all have relatively little difference between most and least well off. There are haves but no real have-nots, just have-not-so-muches. Ditto Singapore, Japan and other places with tough gun laws, the point being it’s not the gun laws they should be thanking because they’d probably have much the same without them – as we’ve already discussed the criminals they do have already go armed if they want to. And there are parts of the third world where there’s little difference in affluence because everyone’s poor, yet there’s less crime than in places where there’s a big difference between the top and bottom. Again, the correlation breaks down in places because there are countries where everyone’s poor and at each other’s throats the whole time, though sometimes that’s just plain old civil war rather than criminality, but I think wealth disparity thing is likely to be more important. If so then two important points must be considered: wealth disparity is not the fault of guns or gun owners, and wealth disparity will not be fixed by disarming law abiding citizens. I’d argue that it’s also very poorly fixed by the state rocking up to those law abiding citizens with an even bigger gun and robbing them by legal means, but that’s a whole other topic.
This is probably my biggest concern with regards to reducing gun legislation. Put simply, if someone breaks into my house and i face off with them I would much rather face a situation where 95% of the time i was going to get my arse kicked and survive then a 50-50 chance of getting shot.
What makes you so sure you’re only ever going to get your arse kicked and survive? If someone breaks in while you’re there would you not assume that they would want there to be no witnesses? This is very important anywhere that has one of those mad ‘three strikes’ laws where someone might do life for nicking a fiver off the hall table. Even without that I’d suggest that if you’re unable to offer meaningful resistance to a violent then 100% of the time you are going to lose, which in turn breaks down into percentage for when you get your arse kicked and survive and another for when you get your arse kicked and left crippled, another for arse kicking and then being killed, etc etc. Of course, there are also percentages for not being in when someone breaks in or not waking and they leave with your wallet and car keys but without any violence. Too many possible scenarios and I don’t think we’re in a position to assign percentages for any but the violent intruder vs helpless householder.
And what makes you think you’d have a 50/50 chance of getting shot if you were armed or that a 50/50 chance wouldn’t deter an intruder even more? An intruder might not be armed, and even if you were both were he has more to lose by being shot there than you do. We’re talking here about real life gunshot wounds that often leave victims alive and screaming for the ambos for quite a while before blood loss can take effect, not Hollywood ones which either kill the femtosecond the bullet pierces the outer skin or are a minor irritant that only slows the hero down until someone pretty can stick a bit of gauze on it. The worst case scenario is instant death, yes, but there are lots of not instantly lethal wounds possible and many are not lethal at all if treated in time, and clearly a wounded householder is in a better situation than a similarly wounded intruder. However, that is again an oversimplification because it assumes that shots will always be fired (and will hit targets) when in fact the reality of armed householders vs intruders in the US (can’t help it – it’s where the data is) is that very often the use of firearms to defend doesn’t actually involve the discharge of firearms – showing or pointing the thing and yelling get out is very often effective, and just shouting that they’re armed with a gun has worked for some people.
Not that I don’t have concerns about widespread legalisation of guns in somewhere like the UK because I do – I’m just not concerned about that. Frankly the biggest worry about it is the widespread infantilisation of the population by the state making it risky to go from the disarmed extreme to the armed one in a single step, but that’s come with such rampant hoplophobia that it’s virtually certain that that’s not politically achievable anyway. And of course there’s still my pet theory that rates of violence are simply highest where there are most violent people, and with the UK’s crime rates exceeding parts of the US it seems likely that it has a similar proportion of violence prone people in it. You don’t want them having guns, agreed, but we seem to agree that you can’t keep them from having guns anyway. Besides, you don’t want them having knives, baseball bats, golf clubs, large spanners and hammers, access to petrol and any number of other things that you can’t possibly ban either. Just look around your home and think about how you might turn everyday objects into a weapon in extremis – that’s the number of things you don’t want them to have, and you already know you can’t ban even a fraction of them. That being so the choice for societies with violence prone people is not just whether you lock them up, kill them or hope to reform them, which are all judicial reactions to violence well after it’s been committed, but whether you accept that the law abiding are free to defend themselves by any means (as distinct from allowed to defend themselves if they wish), which is reacting to violence as it’s being committed.