Anti-Gun Movement Worldwide Wedded to Script of Fallacies
June 15, 2007

by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor

Richard Caborn, the sports minister for the United Kingdom (UK) cabinet, is backing National Shooting Week, a campaign by British shooting groups to increase participation in the shooting sports among children as young as 12, and, as might be expected, anti-gunners in Britain have accused the government of making a U-turn, according to a report in the May 27 issue of The Sunday Telegraph.

Caborn supports moves to “demystify firearms” and said he believes that the sport helps young people to become more responsible and disciplined, and vowed that significant funds would be made available to help boost participation.

Handguns and many common long guns were banned in Britain in 1996 following the Dunblane massacre, in which 16 children and their teacher were killed at a primary school. Previously, the British government had even increased the age limit for buying airguns. Mandatory penalties also were imposed.

“We want to boost the number of people taking part in shooting sports, particularly among young adults,” Caborn told The Telegraph. “We are investing £600 million (almost $1.2 billion US) in developing (Olympic) medal winners for 2012 and shooting will benefit greatly from that.”

Schools have been encouraged to increase the involvement of young people in shooting sports and Caborn welcomed the first National Shooting Week, which was scheduled at various venues around the island nation from May 25-June 2, as a way to raise levels of participation.

He had already upset the anti-gun lobby by supporting moves to relax the ban on handguns in the hope of boosting Britain’s chances of winning pistol shooting medals at the 2012 London Olympics. Then his support to the week-long campaign raised anti-gunners fears further.

Party Charter
But, if that wasn’t bad news enough for the hoplophobes in the UK, the ruling Labor Party, of which he is a member, which had pushed most of the anti-gun and anti-hunting legislation through Parliament, appears to have taken a page from the playbook of their soul-mate Democrats in the United States. The Labor Party has released an official document, for which Caborn wrote the foreword, which argues that there is a need to work with shooting organizations to develop ways “to demystify firearms.”

Going a step further than the US Democrats, the British party has published a Charter for Shooting, which it released after promising in the 2005 UK general election to ensure that country sports would be protected.

“Country sports” is a term used by British politicians to soften the sound of hunting, shooting, riding-to-hounds and any other sport that offends the sensibilities of the liberal big city elite that corresponds to the US East Coast and Left Coast establishments. Needless to say, anti-hunting crowds across the Atlantic use the term “blood sports.”

The UK party charter says that Labor is fully supportive of shooting organizations. “Government ministers have noted the benefits of introducing young people to the sport in terms of developing habits of safety, self discipline and responsibility,” it says, according to The Telegraph.

Whew! Can you imagine US Democrat leaders like Sens. Schumer, Clinton, Feinstein, Kennedy and Lautenberg or Reps. Pelosi, Conyers and Emanuel signing a similar document here?

Anti-Gun Reaction
The British anti-gunners, of course, are reacting like their brethren in the US and other countries.

Gill Marshall Andrews, the chairperson of the Gun Control Network in the UK, said that she was “alarmed” by Caborn’s backing for National Shooting Week, which, like the National Shooting Sports Foundations’ “First Shots” and similar programs in the US, aims to introduce people to shooting for the first time and improve people’s understanding of guns.

“The government should be ashamed of itself for putting its energies into encouraging people to take up shooting when we should be ensuring that there are fewer and fewer guns available,’” she said, according to The Telegraph. Marshall Andrews went further, accusing the British government of helping to make guns seem acceptable and of creating a society in which they will become prevalent.

But the lesson the anti-gunners in the UK, the US and around the world will not learn is that the problem of violence with guns, and violence in general, is a global shift in respect for our neighbors, especially among young people.

Since 1997, firearms crimes in the UK have risen from 12,410 to 21,521 in 2005/06 (an increase of 73%), including incidents involving handguns, which have nearly doubled in this period, from 2,636 to 4,671, despite their being banned.

Meanwhile, in the island nation of Jamaica, where guns have been banned for more than a generation that country continues to struggle with violent crime. According to a recent BBC News report, heavily armed gangs, usually high on marijuana laced with cocaine, fight over turf, drug money and influence as muscle men for political parties.

Last year, five members of one gang lost their lives in gang wars, prompting one of the mothers of a gang member who was killed to say she was “glad” that her son had been taken out, because “somebody had to stop him,” BBC News reported.

The island of 2.7 million people, which is slightly smaller than Connecticut, has one of the highest murder rates in the world. There were 1,674 murders in 2005, up from 1,471 murders the year before. Last year, the number of murders came down to 1,340.

The never-ending spiral of gun crime has led to a vicious cycle of killings on both sides—nearly a dozen policemen have been killed on duty this year alone, and civil rights group allege that the police have also been trigger happy.

Crime in Jamaica is not new. According to a CIA report cited by BBC News, “deteriorating economic conditions during the 1970s led to rising violence as gangs affiliated to major political parties, evolved in powerful organized crime networks involved in international drug smuggling and money laundering.”

For a long time, Jamaica has been a transshipment port for Colombian cocaine. A lot of the cocaine gets smuggled out into the islands and sold. Drug smugglers from Haiti trade sophisticated guns for marijuana and cocaine, and the island is therefore awash with guns.

Youngsters fight gang wars, older men travel to the city to rob and steal and the women at home often take a break from homemaking to carry drugs to the US and UK. There are more than 300 Jamaican women in UK prisons serving sentences for carrying drugs, BBC News claimed.

But if the gun banning nations of Britain and Jamaica do not provide lessons enough that guns are not the reasons for the violent crime, we have still more news.

Japanese Violence
In May, Associated Press (AP) reported from Tokyo that an outbreak of violent crime has unnerved the allegedly “gun-free” Japan.

AP began their report with this brief paragraph:

“A mother beheaded by her son. A baby who suffocated after being stuffed by his parents in the baggage compartment of a motorbike while they went gambling. A murderous shooting spree during a hostage standoff.”

In another incident, a woman used a chain saw to murder and dismember her husband.

The May outbreak of violent crime triggered soul-searching and outrage in gun-banning Japan.

The “appalling destruction” of traditional values—as one lawmaker put it—climaxed on May 11, when a former gangster killed a policeman and wounded his son and daughter during a shooting rampage at his home, where he had held his ex-wife hostage for 24 hours. It was the first time an on-duty Japanese policeman was shot to death since 2001, AP reported.

Japan, a country of 127 million people, had 1,391 homicides in 2005, but overall crime jumped to 2.27 million cases that year, from 1.81 million in 1996, and violent offenses nearly doubled to 73,772 cases.

You can apparently say no to guns, but not to murder and violence.
Return to Archive Index