We in Britain believe guns are so dangerous that only criminals should be
allowed to have them. If you think this sounds unhinged, you are quite
right. But, crazed as it is, such is the thinking behind this country's
current law on firearms.

It is almost impossible for a law-abiding person to obtain or keep a gun,
thanks to severe laws diligently enforced by a stern police force. Yet
criminals, who care nothing for laws, can and do easily obtain guns and
ammunition - which they use with increasing frequency.

Emotional


People in this country get emotional about guns but refuse to think about
them. They run, squawking, from the subject as though it were perfectly
obvious that the best response to anything that goes 'bang' is to ban it.

Those who own or keep guns are treated as only slightly less repellent than
child molesters. In a perfect example of this silly frenzy, a Doncaster
college lecturer was sacked last January for allowing a student to bring a
toy plastic gun into class for use in a photography project.

If we ever did think about the subject, we should realise that something
very strange indeed was going on and might begin to worry that we have gone
seriously wrong.

Take a deep breath and consider what follows: I have never owned a gun and
hope I never have to, but I want to have the right to do so if I wish - and
the right to use a gun in defence of myself and my home. In fact, I do not
think that I am a free citizen unless I have these rights.

This is not some wild idea imported from the badlands of North America.
Until very recently, these were my rights under the ancient laws of England.

Obliged


Moreover, we were all actually obliged by law to keep weapons at home so
that we could help the authorities in the fight against crime.

The English Bill of Rights of 1689 - on which its American equivalent was
modelled 100 years later - enshrines the right of subjects to have arms for
their defence. Sir William Blackstone's great summary of English law, the
'Commentaries' of 1765, also affirms the English people's 'right of having
arms for their defence'.

Attempts to limit gun ownership in this country are very recent indeed. As
late as 1909, when the police came under fire from a foreign anarchist gang
in Tottenham, North London, they borrowed guns from the citizenry and
appealed to members of the public to help them shoot back at the gang
leaders.

And readers of the Sherlock Holmes stories, set around the same time, will
have noticed that he and his assistant Dr Watson frequently go out on their
expeditions armed with at least one revolver. The gun laws of Victorian
England make modern-day Texas look effeminate.

Yet, though these stories are still widely read, almost nobody stops to
wonder why what was legal in peaceful, well-ordered Edwardian London should
be so illegal now. How and why is it that this freedom has been so abruptly
and totally withdrawn?

One thing is for certain. It is not because tighter gun laws mean less gun
crime. The more fiercely we have restricted private gun ownership in this
country over the past century, the more armed crime there has been and the
more the police have had to strap on holsters.

What should we learn from this? First, that criminals feel safer and more
powerful when they know they are not likely to face any armed resistance.

That was certainly the view of Sammy 'The Bull' Gravano, an American Mafia
turncoat who told Vanity Fair in 1999: 'Gun control? It's the best thing you
can do for crooks and gangsters. I want you to have nothing. If I'm a bad
guy, I'm always going to have a gun.'

His view has been backed up by American author John Lott, who found that
many types of crime fell sharply in districts where law-abiding citizens
were allowed to carry concealed weapons.

This was especially helpful to women, because the chance that they might
have a gun in their handbags transformed them from being easy victims to
tough propositions.

This practical form of sex equality is one of the things that does not
compute in the world of the politically correct. Whoever heard of a British
feminist with a gun? Can you imagine Germaine Greer keeping a revolver in
her bedside table? Even so, what Lott says is undeniably true.

Deterrent


People who imagine that widespread gun ownership would turn quiet English
towns into Dodge City tend to ignore the fact that guns in the hands of
responsible people are a deterrent that is most unlikely to be used but
which alters the behaviour of criminals.


One astonishing statistic shows just what a deterrent they can be. In
Britain, roughly half of all burglaries take place while the householder is
at home. In the United States, where the home-owner is likely to be armed,
only one burglary in eight happens when there is someone at home. And in
some states, which openly license residents to use deadly force against
intruders, burglary is virtually unknown.

American law, based on English law, also takes the view that a man is
entitled to defend himself in his own home. The principle of 'defence of
habitation' gives the besieged citizen far more freedom to deal with an
intruder than the vague and uncertain English requirement that only '
reasonable force' should be used.

What seems reasonable in the small hours, in the dark, in the midst of a
fear-soaked struggle, may not seem reasonable in the calm of a courtroom or
in the offices of the Crown Prosecution Service, where the gravest danger is
a shortage of digestive biscuits.

The main arguments for gun control do not, in fact, make sense. The mass
hysteria about guns which followed the Dunblane school massacre made even
less sense. It is quite clear that Thomas Hamilton, who murdered a teacher
and 16 little children there in March 1996, should not have been allowed to
own guns but cunningly exploited his 'human rights' to prevent the
authorities acting against him.

After a long and careful investigation, the Cullen Report specifically did
not recommend a general ban on handguns. There was no case for it. Yet that
was what the politicians chose to do.

In recent years, chief constables and Home Secretaries have sought to limit
gun ownership as never before. Most of these changes have happened since the
Sixties, when liberal and politically correct ideas first infected the Home
Office and the police. Much of the change has happened without debate and
legislation.

The first proper Firearms Act of 1920 said that the police must issue
firearms certificates on request, unless there was a good reason not to, and
it assumed that people living in remote places who wanted a gun for
self-defence would be permitted to keep one. Now, thanks to private,
executive decisions by civil servants and police chiefs, that reasonable
right has disappeared.

Yet if this policy was supposed to stem the rise in armed crime, it has
completely failed. A former senior police officer, Colin Greenwood, has
studied this in detail and says, devastatingly: 'There is no statistical
relationship between the numbers of firearms legally held in Britain and the
use of firearms in homicide or robbery.'

This is no surprise. The sort of guns used in crime - sawn-off shotguns and
revolvers - are all illegally obtained in the first place and cannot be
controlled by law. Hardly any legally owned weapons are ever used in crimes.
Armed robbery is almost never a first offence. Those who commit it have
criminal records and are legally banned from owning weapons anyway.

Monopoly


What seems to be happening is that the Government is trying to get the
monopoly of the use of force of all kinds. If a homeowner or a private
citizen uses a gun, or any other weapon, to defend his property or himself,
the normally feeble law suddenly changes character and smites him with an
iron fist.

When, in August 1999, loner Tony Martin shot dead thief Fred Barras in the
darkness and confusion of a burglary at his remote home, he was
energetically prosecuted and convicted of murder. Though his conviction was
later reduced to manslaughter and his sentence cut, he is still in prison
and Barras's accomplice, Brendan Fearon, is suing him for 'loss of
earnings', an increasingly common pattern of behaviour among burglars
injured during their crimes.

Mr Martin's action was clumsy and rash but understandable and reasonable in
the circumstances. But the same could be said of some police officers, who
mistakenly shoot suspects in the heat and confusion of the moment. However,
while 25 police officers have killed suspects in the past decade, only two
have been prosecuted.

One was PC Christopher Sherwood, who in 1998 shot dead a naked and unarmed
James Ashley in Hastings. PC Sherwood was cleared of murder after the judge
ruled that the officer genuinely believed he was in danger and acted in
self-defence.

If only such understanding had been shown to Tony Martin, he might never
have been prosecuted and would certainly now be free. So why wasn't it? It
seems that the authorities fear that the English people, left to their own
devices, will enforce the old conservative laws of England.

They will defend their lives and property against attack. They will assume
that criminal acts are bad and that they are entitled to prevent and even
punish them.

But the laws of England have been kidnapped and disembowelled by Leftwing
liberals. The new code seeks to manage and understand and rehabilitate
'offenders'. It thinks there are excuses for crime. And it disapproves of
those who cling to the old rules.

Once, police and courts and people all agreed about what was right and what
was wrong. In those days, the authorities were more than happy for us to
defend ourselves as vigorously as we liked.

Now, while they have effectively abandoned us to the non-existent mercies of
anybody who cares to break into our homes, they will punish us fiercely if
we lift a finger to defend ourselves.

It is astonishing that this has been allowed to happen in a democracy. And
unless governments act soon to start protecting us from crime with proper
old-fashioned policing and punitive prisons, an increasingly desperate
population will sooner or later start to act as Tony Martin did, in such
numbers that there will not be enough courts to try them or jails to hold
them. Who could benefit from that?

It is time that the liberal hijack of our criminal justice system was
reversed - and reversed quickly for the sake of the peace and order of us
all.