Free Life #26 now available.

[Sean Gabb <cea01sig@gold.ac.uk>]

22:09 05/05/1996 


The article below, is taken from the latest issue 
of Free Life, the journal that I edit.

Comments always welcome!


Sean Gabb
Editor
Free Life

                  A R T I C L E   B E G I N S
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                    A TIME TO BE DEPRESSED


As I write, news is coming though on the wireless of a mad gunman
in Tasmania.  Twenty people are said to have been killed, and
many more wounded.  It will not have the same effect on opinion
in this country as the Dunblane massacre, but it will add to the
existing reaction.  There will be more encouragement of people
to hand in their guns at the local Police Station.  There will
be a toughening of the draft Firearms Bill promised for the early
summer.  Whether this really will ban the keeping of guns at
home, it will certainly make them harder for ordinary people to
obtain.

To do so, of course, will not reduce the number of criminal
shootings.  There might be fewer Thomas Hamiltons - though I do
not think there are many of these already.  But there will be no
fewer armed robbers and gangland "executioners".  Indeed, so far
as these might be deterred even by a public so little armed as
ours currently is, there will be more of them.

The real effect of a new Firearms Act will be to mark another
stage in the collapse of English freedom.  The more disarmed we
are, the more armed criminals can move among us like a fox among
chickens.  The more this happens, the more we shall cry for
protection to the authorities that disarmed us in the first
place.  In the short term, this will mean more powers of arrest
and search, and more video cameras in the streets.  In the medium
term, it will mean identity cards.  In the longer term, it will
mean electronic tagging and surveillance, and efforts to isolate
and remove whatever gene might be supposed to incline one to
criminal behaviour.

Now, given the elegance of this scheme, it is hard not to believe
in conspiracies.  It is even tempting to believe in them.  They
not only explain, but also give comfort.  For all their cunning
and malevolence, conspirators have the disadvantage of being a
minority.  They can be exposed, and thereby frustrated.  Inside
every conspiracy theorist is an optimist, never more than three
steps from utopia.  However, the truth is more depressing.  There
are surely people now calling for greater gun control who know
that it cannot work as promised, and who do so for motives that
range from the selfish to the sinister.  But these people are not
the source of the problem.  The real source is a wilfully
ignorant public.  There are millions of people in this country
who take it as common sense that limiting the availability of
guns will also reduce the amount of armed crime; and who will not
listen when told otherwise.  And this does not stand alone.  It
is just another instance of the more general belief, that
government action is the answer to every misfortune.

The belief would be funny were its effects not so dangerous.  A
few children are bitten by dogs.  As if this were a new and
alarming thing, the public demands and the politicians supply the
most imbecile law of the decade.  A ferry sinks because someone
left the door open.  Half the passengers are too drunk to notice
what is happening, and some of them drown.  The result - actual
controls that make crossing the Channel less of an adventure, and
a demand for controls that would make it far more expensive.  A
Minister tells us that most eggs are bad.  After the first wild
panic, the Government has to make a food handling law that shuts
down thousands of catering businesses, and makes food poisoning
more rather than less common.  Last month, the public got into
a sweat about guns.  Then it turned to mad cows.  From today, it
will be thinking about guns again.

Of course, nations have flourished with far greater handicaps
than the Dangerous Dogs Act and the prohibition of wooden
chopping boards.  I will even say that nearly eighty years of gun
control have not yet turned this country into a police state; and
another Firearms Act will not do so purely on its own.  Bad laws
are often tolerable while the structure of laws as a whole
remains stable.  But what we have here is a state of mind that
throws up one bad law after another - a state of mind that will
accept no restraints on its behaviour.  It is no good to say that
a particular freedom or rule of Common Law is worth preserving. 
It is no good saying that it has been established for hundreds
of years.  If it gets in the way of whatever "tough new law" is
currently in fashion, it will be swept aside without regrets or
second thoughts.

Here is the true engine of collapse.  Here is why the latest
instalment of gun control will not terminate in itself, but lead
on to worse.  And here is what I find so depressing about it all. 
For I have no answers to give.  I do not know why the British
public has become so childish, nor what to do about it.  I can
only say that, unless some other cause can be made to intervene,
things will end very badly.

Sean Gabb

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        A Journal of Classical Liberal and Libertarian Thought

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                    EDITOR OF FREE LIFE:  SEAN GABB

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                    FOR LIFE, LIBERTY  AND PROPERTY
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