Wouldn't you feel safer with a gun?

Ran across this article a few years back, and happily I saved a copy as the link is no longer good and I couldn't find it on their site. From over the pond in Britain:

From The Times
September 8, 2007

Wouldn’t you feel safer with a gun?

British attitudes are supercilious and misguided

Richard Munday

Despite the recent spate of shootings on our streets, we pride ourselves
on our strict gun laws. Every time an American gunman goes on a killing
spree, we shake our heads in righteous disbelief at our poor benighted
colonial cousins. Why is it, even after the Virginia Tech massacre, that
Americans still resist calls for more gun controls?

The short answer is that “gun controls” do not work: they are indeed
generally perverse in their effects. Virginia Tech, where 32 students
were shot in April, had a strict gun ban policy and only last year
successfully resisted a legal challenge that would have allowed the
carrying of licensed defensive weapons on campus. It is with a measure
of bitter irony that we recall Thomas Jefferson, founder of the
University of Virginia, recording the words of Cesare Beccaria: “Laws
that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither
inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things
worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather
to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be
attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”

One might contrast the Virginia Tech massacre with the assault on
Virginia’s Appalachian Law School in 2002, where three lives were lost
before a student fetched a pistol from his car and apprehended the gunman.

Virginia Tech reinforced the lesson that gun controls are obeyed only by
the law-abiding. New York has “banned” pistols since 1911, and its
fellow murder capitals, Washington DC and Chicago, have similar bans.
One can draw a map of the US, showing the inverse relationship of the
strictness of its gun laws, and levels of violence: all the way down to
Vermont, with no gun laws at all, and the lowest level of armed violence
(one thirteenth that of Britain).

Serious gun crime is concentrated in particular parts of England;
internationally, the country has a low death rate from guns

Background

* Factfile: teenagers gunned down across UK


* Three murders in four days in South London


* We Shall Overcome, protesters sing at peace vigil


America’s disenchantment with “gun control” is based on experience:
whereas in the 1960s and 1970s armed crime rose in the face of more
restrictive gun laws (in much of the US, it was illegal to possess a
firearm away from the home or workplace), over the past 20 years all
violent crime has dropped dramatically, in lockstep with the spread of
laws allowing the carrying of concealed weapons by law-abiding citizens.
Florida set this trend in 1987, and within five years the states that
had followed its example showed an 8 per cent reduction in murders, 7
per cent reduction in aggravated assaults, and 5 per cent reduction in
rapes. Today 40 states have such laws, and by 2004 the US Bureau of
Justice reported that “firearms-related crime has plummeted”.

In Britain, however, the image of violent America remains unassailably
entrenched. Never mind the findings of the International Crime Victims
Survey (published by the Home Office in 2003), indicating that we now
suffer three times the level of violent crime committed in the United
States; never mind the doubling of handgun crime in Britain over the
past decade, since we banned pistols outright and confiscated all the
legal ones.

We are so self-congratulatory about our officially disarmed society, and
so dismissive of colonial rednecks, that we have forgotten that within
living memory British citizens could buy any gun – rifle, pistol, or
machinegun – without any licence. When Dr Watson walked the streets of
London with a revolver in his pocket, he was a perfectly ordinary
Victorian or Edwardian. Charlotte Brontë recalled that her curate father
fastened his watch and pocketed his pistol every morning when he got
dressed; Beatrix Potter remarked on a Yorkshire country hotel where only
one of the eight or nine guests was not carrying a revolver; in 1909,
policemen in Tottenham borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by
(and were joined by other armed citizens) when they set off in pursuit
of two anarchists unwise enough to attempt an armed robbery. We now are
shocked that so many ordinary people should have been carrying guns in
the street; the Edwardians were shocked rather by the idea of an armed
robbery.

If armed crime in London in the years before the First World War
amounted to less than 2 per cent of that we suffer today, it was not
simply because society then was more stable. Edwardian Britain was
rocked by a series of massive strikes in which lives were lost and
troops deployed, and suffragette incendiaries, anarchist bombers,
Fenians, and the spectre of a revolutionary general strike made Britain
then arguably a much more turbulent place than it is today. In that
unstable society the impact of the widespread carrying of arms was not
inflammatory, it was deterrent of violence.

As late as 1951, self-defence was the justification of three quarters of
all applications for pistol licences. And in the years 1946-51 armed
robbery, the most significant measure of gun crime, ran at less than two
dozen incidents a year in London; today, in our disarmed society, we
suffer as many every week.

Gun controls disarm only the law-abiding, and leave predators with a
freer hand. Nearly two and a half million people now fall victim to
crimes of violence in Britain every year, more than four every minute:
crimes that may devastate lives. It is perhaps a privilege of those who
have never had to confront violence to disparage the power to resist.

*Richard Munday is editor and co-author of Guns & Violence: the Debate
Before Lord Cullen*