SECOND AMENDMENT
The Dictatorship of Decorum
Who will demand an end to England anti-gun fiasco?
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Last November, Oxford University invited NRA President Charlton Heston to address the gun debate in a speech to its students. In the following excerpts from that speech, Mr. Heston calls on Britons to face up to the failure of their anti-gun laws and to consider the value of the right to self-defense, a fundamental natural right that has long been denied to the English.
"Since you banned all lawfully-owned handguns in 1997 and then rounded them up and sent them off to the smelters, gun crime has gone up. Last month the London Sunday Times reported it was up 10 percent in just the last year. Attempted homicides are up 15 percent. And 'violence against the person involving firearms' has increased an average of 11 percent per year for the past six years straight.
"That means when you leave here tonight, your chances of being shot, robbed, raped or assaulted at gunpoint are about 65 percent higher than they were in 1993.
For all its pomp and circumstance, is this gun ban really working? Let's see who it affects.
"Britain's Olympic shooting competitors must now leave Britain to practice overseas. Your target shooters, collectors and lawful owners dutifully handed in their guns to be melted down. But what of the drug thugs who've turned Nottingham, Birmingham, Liverpool and Leeds into battle zones? They haven't paid much attention to your laws.
"So now in Nottinghamshire, police are carrying Walther pistols and 9mm submachine guns on their nightly patrols. Before you gasp and fretfully fan your noses, ask yourself why crime is on the rise. Because you need more new laws? Or because you need to enforce the laws you have?
"Do you need to make it illegal, say, to gun down a Crimewatch TV reporter as she stands on her doorstep--as happened last year? Or do you need to arrest and prosecute the thugs who roam the streets of Manchester wearing bulletproof body armor and packing Mac-10s?
"The answer ought to be obvious. Yet now in Parliament they're talking about new shotgun laws. Interest groups want to make it illegal for a father to let his 15-year-old son even touch one of his shotguns. And the press is putting its predictable spin on the issue, as if shotguns and hunters had even the remotest relation to crime on England's streets. Where's the public outcry for zero tolerance and 100 percent prosecution of criminals who use guns?
"Eighty years ago, England effectively had no anti-gun laws at all and gun crime was statistically insignificant. Since then, as one anti-gun law after another has sailed through Parliament, gun crime has steadily grown worse. In 1971, former police superintendent Colin Greenwood said, 'One is forced to the rather startling conclusion that the use of firearms in crime was very much less when there were no controls of any sort.'
"The mere presence of guns doesn't and can't cause crime. One of your countrymen, Albie Fox from Anglesey, is a former competitive pistol shooter who's considering running for Parliament. He talked last week about pistol tournaments where he's seen 2,000 shooters who had about six pistols each. That's 12,000 pistols on the premises. How many police did they need for security? Two. Go to any football game in Great Britain and you'll find hundreds of policemen trying to hold down the fort.
"Please don't misunderstand my motive. I'm not here to find vicarious vindication in the failure of your gun bans. My purpose isn't to sell you on self-defense or even to convince you to roll back your laws. Your gun laws are your business, not mine. But I ask you to think about your business with an open mind.
"You must accept that yours is a society where the State is sovereign, and where the individual citizen's status hasn't advanced significantly since the days of the serfs. You must accept your Prime Ministers, who call elections whenever and as often as they want. You must accept the 'stealth taxes' and coercion and arrogance of unchecked power.
"You must live with the idea that you live at the convenience and discretion of the Crown. But you don't have to conclude that such a society, which denies the God-given right to self-preservation, is morally superior.
"This great land may be the birthplace of the Magna Carta and the freedoms it recognizes. But of all the English-speaking nations in the world, only one nation--the United States--had the guts and good sense to say not just no but hell no to the idea that rights are doled out by the government to the people, not the other way around. Thank God we did.
"Two weeks ago, a police constable in the West Side of London--an authorized firearms inspector--said he didn't think England's handgun ban had any effect at all. He said he didn't think it was meant to, calling it 'pure politics.' When we asked to quote him on that, he backed off and said he could lose his job for speaking his mind.
"On this issue, England must no longer labor under some dictatorship of decorum. Call it genteel, call it civilized, call it what you will. When it imperils hearth and home, it's nothing but cultural cowardice, a subtle form of surrender, both to the criminals and to the cops.
"Who among you will come forward to say that the gun bans aren't working? Who will stand up and demand that if Tony Blair can have his bodyguards and the police are allowed to defend themselves, then so, too, should the people?
I urge you to shake off the ancient yoke of vassals and serfs and try a little American rebellion on for size. Write the essay or give the lecture or permit the discussion that provokes an honest assessment of what human freedom should mean in 21st Century England.
"Turn the world upside down, as my ancestors did in 1776, when they said that government gets its permission from the people, not the other way around. Then, accept the costs and thank God for the benefits of this simple idea called freedom."
