Firearms Licensing: Facts in Danger of Neglect
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Firearms Licensing: Facts in Danger of Neglect Catherine Pease and Ken Pease1 The paper reports analysis of routine firearms statistics, whose importance is judged to have been neglected in the Cullen Inquiry2 into the disaster at Dunblane. It is shown that revocations and refusals of firearms licences and shotgun certificates rose after the Hungerford tragedy, fell thereafter, and only increased again after Dunblane. There was wide variation in the rate of revocation and refusal by police force area, which clearly stemmed from force practice rather than from the presenting situation. The predictability of regulation practice undertaken declines over time as staff and priorities change. Thus departmental stringency in regulation relative to other police forces will disappear over a period of 3-7 years. While the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1997 makes major changes in handgun availability, it makes only minor changes to firearms regulation, which remains the major protection against criminal use of the lethal weapons which are still legally held by citizens. Suggestions are made in the paper for making that regulation more stringent and more consistent. Key Words: Firearms; licensing; gun control Introduction Thomas Hamilton entered Dunblane Primary School in South-West Scotland on 13 March 1996, and shot pupils and staff. Eighteen people died, seventeen of them small children. The carnage at Dunblane had many effects. Feelings of horror and rage were and remain pretty well universal. Many of us felt that if the bereaved parents wanted weapons of the kind that killed their children banned, then so be it. Only with hindsight does the complexity of the issue reassert itself in our minds. Whether changes in the legal availability of handguns stem from the facts of Dunblane or from sheer revulsion about the incident is open to question. How much such changes contribute to public safety, if at all, only time and adequate research may tell. The purpose of this article is not to discuss changes in firearm availability consequent upon the events in Dunblane. Rather it is to point out that the process of granting, varying and revoking firearms licences remains substantially unchanged by the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1997. There will still be many thousands of lethal firearms in legal circulation. The regulation of the availability of the remaining weapons is still our primary safeguard. What can we learn from the basic statistics of regulation? Our obligation to the parents of Dunblane surely extends to the full analysis of such data in the hope of improving public safety. As for the national relevance of the data, although the legislative framework in Scotland differs
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Crime Prevention and Community Safety: An International Journal
from that in England and Wales, in the case of firearm regulation the differences are not such as to limit generalisability. The recommended policy changes apply to England and Wales as much as to Scotland. We perceive the recommendations also to have
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