A few more regulations to love

To be precise:

            2013 No 2970

            ARMS AND AMMUNITION

            The Firearms (Amendment) (No2) Rules 2013

            Commencement date 1 December 2013.

These rules amend the Firearms Rules, 1998. The rules prescribe the format of the various certificates issued under the Act and the forms for applying for them, so one way or another they’ve always been with us and usually a year behind the legislation. We had a 1968 Act, 1969 Rules, 1988 Act, 1989 Rules, 1997 Act (twice), 1998 Rules. There are some changes each time. The main change with effect from 1 December 2013 is that there is now only one form for firearm and shotgun certificate applications, grant or renewal. You fill in the relevant parts according to what you’re applying for, then get one referee if it’s for shotguns only, or two if it’s for firearms or both.

        Condition 2 on firearm and shot gun certificates is also amended. The 1998 rule was at odds with the certificate template contained in the same rules and this amendment brings the two together. The 1998 rule says:

(ii) the holder of the certificate must inform the chief officer of police by whom the certificate was granted within seven days of the theft, loss or destruction in Great Britain of the certificate;

But the condition on the certificate reads:

2. The holder of this certificate must inform within seven days the chief officer of police by whom this certificate was granted of the theft, loss or destruction in Great Britain of this certificate and/or the theft, loss, deactivation or destruction of any firearms or ammunition to which it relates.

The new for 2013 rule reads, as a substitute for paragraph (4)(ii):

“the holder of the certificate must inform the chief officer of police by whom the certificate was granted within seven days of –

(a)  the theft, loss, or destruction in Great Britain of the certificate;

(b)  the theft, loss, deactivation or destruction in Great Britain of any firearm to which the certificate relates;

(c)   the theft or loss in Great Britain of any ammunition to which this certificate relates.”

The condition on the new form of certificate reads:

2. The holder of this certificate must inform the chief officer of police by whom the certificate was granted within 7 days of the theft, loss or destruction in Great Britain of the certificate and/or the theft, loss, deactivation or destruction of any firearms and/or the theft or loss of ammunition to which this certificate relates. 

So certificate holders no longer need to report deactivation or destruction of their ammunition to the police, thus saving the Home Office answering the open question as to whether consumption of ammunition was also destruction. Apart from that, it’s a tidying up.

       What we don’t know is whether applications made before 1 December will get old style certificates as police slog through their backlogs, or whether everyone 1 December on will get the new condition, or whether the changeover will be when old stationery has been used up. You’ll have to read the printed conditions on your next certificate to see how it’s been handled.   

      ‘Great Britain’ is referred to instead of the ‘United Kingdom’ so that anything going on in Northern Ireland relating to the peace process is nothing to do with the police, here or there.

      We note, in passing, that ‘calibre’ is now ‘calibre metric or imperial’, so things will be as confusing as ever. ‘Calibre’ means the nominal diameter of the bullet, while most ammunition is known by a variation of their calibre, which is best thought of as a brand name. So .38 Special is a brand name; the calibre is .357in (groove) or .354in (land), the latter being 9mm in metric, and so on.  In practice, most police forces have ignored ‘calibre’ for years in favour of what the cartridge is known as when you’re buying it. 

There’s an interesting little nugget near the end of this new raft of rules, in an addition to the conditions on an auctioneer’s permit. An auctioneer is exempted from the need to hold a certificate for the possession of firearms and ammunition in the ordinary course of his business; likewise is a warehouseman or a carrier. The difference between the three is that auctioneers sell stuff, so while they can retain firearms on their exemption, to sell them they have to get a police permit, which sets in train the mechanism by which the police are notified of (a) what the auctioneers is going to sell, and (b) after the sale, to whom he sold it.

       Condition 1 on an auctioneer’s permit states that it’s an offence to sell any firearm or ammunition to anyone other than a registered firearms dealer, any (controlled) firearms or ammunition unless the other person produces (as appropriate) a firearm certificate, a shot gun certificate or demonstrates an exemption from the need to hold one.

       That’s been the case as far back as we go, but the 2006 Violent Crime Reduction Act created a number of anomalies, and condition 3 on the auctioneer’s permit reveals one of them:

3. Under section 3(1)(c) of the Firearms Act 1968, as amended by the section 31(1) of the Violent Crime Reduction Act, 2006, it is an offence for a person to sell or transfer to any person an air weapon other than a registered firearms dealer.

4. Under section 32 of the Violent Crime Reduction Act, the final hand over of air weapons must take place in person.

So the conflict is this: an ‘air weapon’ is a firearm within the meaning of section 57(1) of the 1968 Act, defined in section 1(3)(b) as an air rifle, air gun or air pistol not declared ‘especially dangerous’ by the Secretary of State. The Firearms (Dangerous Air Weapons) Rules, 1969 identify as ‘especially dangerous’ air rifles that generate more than 12 foot/pounds of muzzle energy and air pistols with more than 6 foot/pounds of push.

      So under condition 1 on the auctioneer’s permit, one can demonstrate an exemption from the need to hold a certificate for a firearm (a low powered air gun) by being over 18 years old. However, condition 3 prevents the auctioneer selling a low powered air gun to anyone other than a registered firearms dealer, who, under condition 4, has to be present to receive it. That makes transactions involving air guns harder to complete than for ‘real’ ones. Good, eh.

Is This Why Mark Duggan Died?

On 8 January 2014 an inquest jury ruled that the shooting of Mark Duggan on 4 August 2011 was lawful. We watched Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley trying to read his self-serving statement aloud outside the High Court in London to a hostile crowd. Our interest was piqued by AC Rowley’s earnest desire to ‘get firearms off the streets’.

     That’s the official reason why Metropolitan police officers attacked registered firearms dealer Guy Savage in February, 2011, their opening gambit being to shoot his tyres out. Then, having taken him into custody, they cleared his arms factory at Sabre House, Northolt, of all firearms, ammunition and parts. Having established that he had committed no offence in the United Kingdom, they didn’t give any of it back, as ‘keeping guns off the streets’ means shutting dealers down, the same as in the drugs market. Except that a) firearms dealers are easier to find, as they are all registered with and by their local police chiefs, and b) nobody has ever tried reducing drugs crime and illicit drug dealing by cracking down on registered pharmacists.

     Material presented at the Duggan inquest suggests the police had intelligence that he was going to obtain a firearm from somewhere, so they swooped on him when they expected to find him in possession of a firearm. That makes a change: they usually pounce on people they know have guns when they are least likely to be holding one—in Guy Savage’s case, when he was on his way to work.

      Mark Duggan spent most of his last few minutes in a taxi, which was box-stopped by three unmarked police cars. But how was he to know they were police cars? Given that he was supposedly a gangster, would the police have been on his radar? Or would he have initially interpreted what was going on as an attack by a rival gang? That would have kick-started his constitutional right to defend himself.

     In a sense it was a gang attack, of course. The Metropolitan Police are the largest armed gang on London’s streets. Something that seems to have passed AC Rowley by. Anyway, Duggan had a toy gun, said to have been adapted to fire one shot. We can’t confirm this because Michael Vaughan’s forensic report on the pistol recovered at the scene  does not seem to be on line, although the other forensic reports released to the Duggan inquest are. In these, experts tell how tried but failed to link that pistol to Mark Duggan forensically. It had blood from two other people on it, but no DNA linkage to Mark Duggan.

     That’s unsurprising, since the intel was he’d only just got the gun, and it was riding in a shoe box in the taxi. The likely scenario is that when the box-stop occurred, Duggan must have realized very quickly that either they were armed police or that they were an armed gang and he was outclassed. He most likely threw the pistol over the fence in front of him as he exited the nearside rear door of the cab.

     The police must have come around the vehicles onto the pavement from both ends of the traffic jam, as it were. The chances are Duggan saw one and tried to run away, which meant he was running at the officer who fired on him. The bullet track through his torso suggests a running position, head and shoulders forwards of hips. The police weapon was said to be an MP5, a long-barrelled shoulder-weapon intended for 100-yard shooting, loaded with +P long-range ammunition and a bullet designed to expand on impact: prohibited for use against people by a European directive, adopted by Britain, 21 years ago.

     Shoulder weapons present a number of operational problems in policing. We’ve touched on it being intended for long range shooting; there have been occasions when police have used them lethally over greater distances than they could have effectively hailed or challenged their suspects before firing. Shouldering a weapon means that your weak arm obscures your suspect’s hands, unless he’s got them above shoulder level already.

      Using high velocity ammunition in a long barrelled weapon at short range meant a through-shoot . The bullet exited Duggan and then struck another police officer. This suggests that the circumstances in which the police found (or had put) themselves was not one they’d trained for. So who let them out on the streets with live ammunition to do things for which they were untrained and unprepared? Perhaps they had trained for what happens after a box-stop and then drifted off the script, so setting themselves up for the Irish firing squad that developed. Duggan himself may have led them off the script, not having had prior training for how to respond to a police attack.

     And that’s the essential difference between him and Guy Savage. Mr Savage managed to get his surrender to armed police accepted after shots had been fired. Trained man that he is, he knew what to do to maximize his chances of surviving the police attack. Mark Duggan didn’t. He was probably trying to flee, but in all the excitement ran away from one police officer and at another. Running straight at that policeman would have been interpreted as a hostile act. So it wasn’t entirely unreasonable for the officer to open fire, although he if he’d been armed with a pistol and thus could see that Duggan was unarmed, he might not have felt any need to shoot.

      It’s too simple to say that Mark Duggan was a victim of the limited training armed officers receive and the inappropriate kit they carry. The fact is, he didn’t know how to surrender in the circumstances. If someone points a gun at you, the safest bet is to faint (or seem to). A poorly trained shooter will fire where you were before you disappeared from his view behind his own hands and when he next locates you visually he’ll assume he hit you.

      He should at least assume you’re out of the fight, and thus that you’ve surrendered. Shooting you on the ground will be harder to explain to an inquest, although not impossible, as we know from the case of Jean Charles De Menezes—another fellow who didn’t know that he needed to surrender to the biggest armed gang in London. 

Holes in the Road

The BBC contacted the SRA on this very subject in November 2013, having realized that former Royal Marine Matt Seiber was photographing damage to road furniture and posting the images on his website (http://gunfire-graffiti.co.uk). We couldn’t deny all knowledge of the phenomenon: we’ve photographed some ourselves, and were involved in one court case on the subject in the 1990s.

Modern road signs are painted on 11-gauge aluminium; these are the ones that attract bullets. In Corsica in 1988, we saw holes that appeared to have been made by SG shot—which in France is available legally only to the police. In some parts of some US States, road signs seem to be regarded as a public provision for passing shooters, rather than as a service to travellers.

We prepared evidence for a case in which Mr B was prosecuted by Northumbria’s finest in 1999. He had a shotgun that he used on a private clay pigeon shoot in the field behind his home, and a road sign 585 feet from his rural abode had holes in it.  A man parked near the road sign claimed to have been shot at by the defendant from his home. The road sign and thus the would-be victim of this supposed incident would have been in the fall-out zone for number six shot fired from the cottage, if the gun were fired at a high enough angle in their direction.

Charter gun club member and sign-writer Ken Potts furnished us with off-cuts of the aluminium he used for road signs. We found that number six shot went through it at three feet, making a single large hole but not at 21 feet, where it made multiple dents. By the time we visited the crime scene the road sign casualty had been replaced, but, working from poor quality police photographs, we assessed the damage as having been caused by a shotgun fired at the road sign at a range of no more than about seven feet.

There was a lot of clay pigeon debris and plastic wadding to be seen in the field behind the cottage, suggesting that clays were fired on from the cottage garden, at a 90-degree angle away from the road. No evidence of shots fired in the direction of the road from the cottage was discernible in the field. The jury had to decide if Mr B had turned through 110 degrees from his clay shoot to drop shot onto the road and the victim, as claimed, or not.

The charges relating to damaging the road sign were dropped in reaction to our report. What we don’t know is whether that was because our evidence was of close action against the road sign while the victim claimed the gunman was two hundred yards away, or whether it was because the evidence, in the form of the wounded road sign, had gone missing.

Had the road sign been in place, we could have formed some opinion about the age of the damage. Bullet holes in inanimate objects remain to be seen until repaired or otherwise for as long as the object exists. The Prefecture opposite Notre Dame in Paris still bears the bullet scars of the 1944 battle by elements of the police and population to rid their city of German occupation in anticipation of the French 2^nd Armoured’s arrival. War damage can also be seen around London, such as to the Obelisk pedestal on the Embankment, scarred by a bomb dropped from a Zeppelin. Visitors to Colchester, Essex,  can see bullet damage caused during the civil war in the 1640s.

The difference between buildings and road signs is that stone weathers. When aluminium is first damaged, the scratch, dent or tear looks bright silver. This weathers to a dull lead colour over time. After that, the bullet holes remain looking awesomely like bullet holes forever.

The damage seen on rural road signs may be fresh, but may be as old as the sign. We didn’t do any life tests to determine how long the damage takes to weather, so we can only say that fresh damage looks fresh, while aged damage has oxidized. The damage looks much the same whether caused a year ago or fifty.

Matt Seiber describes some of the damage he has recorded as being made by pistols. They’ve been restricted to cops and robbers since 1998, which limits the suspect list somewhat, if the damage is comparatively recent. Our observations in Corsica were that the holes were caused by road users, in the sense that the bullet wounds couldn’t be attributed to stray ammunition overshooting from a field or wood, because of the short ranges involved. The same was the case with Mr B. He’d have had to leave his property and stand on the grass verge next to the road to do the damage seen in police photographs.

We’d extend that thought to road signs generally. They face oncoming traffic and are thus edge on, as it were, to adjoining fields and are quite often shielded from the field by a hedge or other trees and vegetation. Where roads have been widened post-war, they tend to be thickly planted, particularly in cuttings. Buckinghamshire’s roads are planted with a wide variety of trees for spectacular autumn colour effects and it would be quite difficult to struggle through that lot from the field to square up to a road sign and try making holes in it.

It’s more likely, therefore, to be someone who is on the road in the first place and who probably has no business in the fields. It’s more likely to be Bonnie and Clyde testing their guns between heists than firearm or shot gun certificate holders, who got their certificates only by having somewhere safe and legal to use the guns.

It’s an offence to fire a gun on or near a public highway if doing so causes any inconvenience or interruption to another road user: unless you’re a policeman shooting Guy Savage’s tyres out. Making holes in a road sign, whether you use a firearm or a battery-operated electric drill is criminal damage. The last time we thought about this was back in 1997, when we commented darkly that it was surely no coincidence that armour-piercing ammunition was prohibited on the same day as speed cameras were legalized.

We wondered, in passing, if speed cameras had received any attention from snipers in the UK. A quick internet trawl turned up one unoccupied police camera van riddled with bullets from an automatic rifle—in the United States—and numerous reports of vandalized speed cameras. UK ones seem to suffer burn damage, although the cause is often not obvious, leaving room for the suspicion that at least some cameras commit suicide. 

A 2011 report in thenewspaper.com claimed that 44 Belgian speed cameras were vandalized in 2010, and in the five years prior to the date of the report, 49 cameras had caught fire, 19 were shot and 47 spray painted. While fire could be caused by an electrical fault within the camera, getting painted or shot couldn’t. The report also claimed that cameras had been attacked with builders’ foam (which expands to fill the space available to it), and blamed Jeremy Clarkson for the concept. Also in 2011, a bomb disposal expert was injured in the Netherlands when an improvised explosive device attached to a speed camera went off.

So much for Belgium being boring. Other reports from the same source mention camera attacks in eastern Europe, Saudi Arabia and Australia. Fire seems to be the commonest cause of damage, but in Saudi Arabia, camera vans have had to be fitted with steel grills over the windows to protect the crew from rocks thrown by passers-by. In the US, a man was hauled before the courts for attacking a camera using a catapult and marbles.

The general absence of reports of bullet holes appearing in speed cameras in the UK suggests that whomsoever made the bullet holes in road signs either has nothing against speed cameras, or that wounded road signs were shot a long time ago before cameras first appeared in 1997, or both, or even neither.

Guns Review magazine (1960-97) worried in the early 1960s about the lower classes having access to guns that they didn’t have anywhere (legal) to use. In the 19th century, after guns became more reliable and before road signs were invented, the usual victim of casual criminal damage was the weather-cock. Also in the 19th century, the Royal Mail made security guards on mail coaches buy their own powder and shot, because so much was being consumed as the coaches trundled through the countryside. They probably didn’t have road signs to shoot at then, but plenty of edible wildlife might have been suspected of planning an attack on the coach. Not to mention the occasional highwayman.

Police comments suggest that bullet holes in road signs are not particularly common, nor do they get reported often. On a scale of things, with over 20 million firearms in the UK and barely 10 per cent of them registered, the limited amount of criminal damage caused is not much to get worked up about. At least, not until road signs have lawyers.

Does the Trigger Pull the Finger?—Reviews

The SRA sponsored the publication last Spring of Does the Trigger Pull the Finger? (Spitfire Press £9.95, £7.45 post-free to SRA members: ISBN 978-1-906174-99-6). The book was co-written by SRA secretary Richard Law and journalist Peter Brookesmith, who previously collaborated on the critically acclaimed The Fighting Handgun (Arms & Armour, 1997).

Reviews on Amazon have been favourable, to say the least: three out of the four reviews posted to date give it five stars, one gives it four, and one calls the book "A work of genius", a label not often applied to either author, but neither is complaining. If doubts have been expressed, they've been about the cover. Apparently some people are concerned that a scarcely unattractive (but not scarcely clad) young lady wielding an exotic firearm is sensationalist, or trivializes the subject. Mick Fidgeon, now-redundant former firearms "manager" for Essex police, enquired (perhaps belligerently) on the Cybershooters forum: "Who's this supposed to appeal to? Academics?" Our best review yet, by Jules Whicker in Shooting Sports (October 2011) feels the need to recognize this worry in passing, but only in passing:

"Don’t judge a book by its cover, as any initial suspicions of sensationalism are quickly allayed by a reasoned, fact-based approach. Yet whilst proving not to be sensationalist, it is most certainly sensational! Blowing a blast of fresh air through the fog of prejudice and corruption that has produced the legal and bureaucratic environment that currently hamstrings shooting sports, complicates their participants’ lives, and squanders public money."

Jules Whicker, by the way, happens to be an academic.

In all this mild hoo-ha no one seems to have noticed the expression on the cover-girl's face, which may tell you something about the objectors, but which we thought fitted rather well with the sarcasm of the title. Someone else called the cover "provocative", to which we can only reply: "So we should bloody well hope!"

Mr Whicker, meanwhile, got on with reading the book, and summed it up thus:

"What we have here is a marvellously well-informed book.... "Does the Trigger Pull the Finger? should be required reading for everyone with an interest in shooting, whether pro or anti, and that should include every political candidate, Home Office mandarin, senior police officer, and news editor in the country.

"...this is no rant, or a dry political tract! Instead a seriously good read, its facts and arguments articulated in finely nuanced prose and spiced with well-timed irony and the odd—probably well deserved—splash of vitriol. All of which come together to produce a gripping drama in which truth and liberty are threatened by the encroachment of a pernicious, neurotic and sometimes bumbling bureaucratic organism, whose ultimate defeat is envisaged in an unexpected yet plausible ending. I started by questioning the presentation of the book. I’ll finish by saying: it should come with a wristband or lapel pin that those who have read it and agree with its manifesto can wear as a sign of support. This is a book to build a campaign on. Spread the word."

Mr Whicker got our point right in the X-ring. We know authors who'd forsake the bottle for a reviewer like that.

The review in the forthcoming Shooter's Journal (now in press: SRA members should get their copies early next month) is fractionally less enthusiastic, but only in the sense that Derek Bernard—an expert in firearms law and 'gun control' and its effects—thinks we don't go far enough in our reforming zeal. So it goes.

Riots, Burglars and Self Defence

Remember what Charles Clarke (Labour, Norwich South – until 2010) said in 2005, in his capacity as Home Secretary? The Daily Mail said at the time:

A householder’s right to attack or even kill an intruder has been officially sanctioned by the Government.

        People were told they could even use a knife or a gun if it was instinctive and involved only "reasonable force".

        But if they were to chase the intruder down the street they could only rugby-tackle him or land a single blow.

        The Crown Prosecution Service reckoned that there had only been eleven prosecutions and five convictions of householders in the preceding 15 years for using excessive force against intruders – figures that presumably included Norfolk farmer Tony Martin. There was enough concern for the government to issue a leaflet titled Householders and the use of force against intruders  (which has since disappeared from the Home Office website) to restate the common law right to defend life, liberty and property, using such force as is apparently reasonable and necessary at the time.

        The problem most people discover in extremis is a lack of knowledge: when does defensive action blur into offensive action? We hold that to be a training issue, as without training it’s hard to understand the difference. Basically, the actions you take to repel an invasion of your property and/or to maintain your safety and that of those who are entitled to be there are defensive. Once the intruder is out of the fight, by being felled or retreating, the defensive action is over; so a pursuit into public space is where the line is crossed and your rights to be violent are really limited to what you might have to do to effect a lawful arrest.

        The current government is making similar noises to those made by Charles Clarke in the wake of an incident in Salford, Manchester on 22 June. Four masked men, one armed with a machete, are said to have invaded the home of Peter Flanagan, leaving a short time later after one of them had been mortally wounded by an edged weapon.

        Mr. Flanagan was arrested for murder, as is usual in the circumstances. It was a month before the announcement that no further action would be taken against him over the death of John Bennell. In some respects, it’s more satisfactory that Mr. Flanagan was arrested. It means that his actions have been thoroughly scrutinized and found to be correct in the circumstances.

        But the problem remains one of weapons. Mr. Flanagan used an edged weapon, lethal force. Both the current government and the Labour government of which Charles Clarke was a member have gone as far  as saying that lethal force is OK – using a gun or a knife is OK, if you have one to hand. That leaves just three problems, all of them significant. Fortunately, the solutions to those problems are set out in our book Does The Trigger Pull The Finger? and they’re summarized here.

        The first one to address is the old Home Office chestnut that if you don’t attack a violent intruder, he is less likely to harm you; and if you introduce a weapon to the confrontation, the intruder will take it off you and harm you with it.

        It’s a lazy argument, thought up by an administration that wanted to justify ultra vires legislation they put on the statute book to deal, as they saw it, with the growing problem of youth violence on the streets. Kids carrying weapons in the early 1950s – the days before they were organized into tribes by the fashion and music industries.

        The straightforward solution is planning and training. When the issue came up on BBC Radio Four’s Any Questions shortly after the Flanagan arrest, none of the panellists understood the basic solution. The question was what do you do if awoken in the night by masked intruders in your home? The tentative answers panellists gave alluded to their perceived right act violently.

        Yeah, right. The intruders who are on your premises have a plan. They will have considered the possibility of the premises being occupied and they will have formulated their plan accordingly. They could try to do things quietly. Massad F Ayoob drew attention to a common criminal policy: his experience in the United States was that intruders tend to arm themselves with something of yours as soon as they get into the property – a kitchen knife being the typical ‘easy to find’ weapon in most households.

        So the weapon of convenience two successive governments have suggested you might deploy could already be in the hand of the intruder when you first meet him. But go one step back – you have to make sure that your intruder is on the premises unlawfully before taking any defensive action. The police tend to barge into private property wearing ski masks and crash helmets these days and must be given time to explain themselves before you throw them out again.

        One of the SRA’s founder members had precisely this experience in the early 1980s – door kicked open one Saturday morning, and four roughly dressed persons trampling in without an appointment, so our member threw them out. It turned out they were policemen with a warrant for the flat opposite, so they lacked the lawful authority to be on his premises. They got their own back by charging him with criminal damage to a police warrant card.

        Also in the 1980s, an unchartered chemist called Georgiades (1989 1 W.L.R. 759) pointed a sawn-off shotgun at intruders crashing into his premises, only to surrender immediately when they identified themselves as police. Essentially, his use of a firearm in the circumstances was an intention to endanger life, but wasn’t unlawful until the intruders proved that they had lawful authority for the intrusion.

        So, having determined that your intruders don’t have lawful authority for the intrusion, it’s time to get rid of them. The commonest plan burglars have for this moment is to run; typically, retracing their steps to where they got in, so you can minimize the risk to yourself by not blocking their way out.

        If they want to make something of your interruption, we reach the point where Government policy and advice fades out. They say you can arm yourself and you can use violence to regain control of your premises, but the there are two flaws with this advice. The first is that their advice hasn’t extended to the need to train in the use of the weapon and to practice for the eventuality.

        In a crisis, trained people do what they’ve been trained to do. Massad Ayoob made his name in the 1970s by studying police gunfights in which the police lost the engagement. He identified weaknesses in training, which cost the officers the gunfight, and sometimes their lives, when they put that training into practice on the street. The most graphic illustration came from New York. The city issued revolvers, but didn’t allow officers to carry speedloaders. Officers trained to reload their revolvers rapidly in the dark, by ejecting the dummy shells into their hand and then reloading them into the chambers. It’s a convenient way to get the feel for inserting rounds nose first into the little holes waiting for them.

        The flaw in this training is that’s what the policeman did on the street. Having fired his six, he ejected the empties into his hand and tried re-inserting them into the chambers. It’s a model of how a trained person will use his training in a crisis. The key is to get the details of the training right. When you learned to drive, one of the scenarios your trained for was the emergency stop. You hit the brake pedal to stop the vehicle and then the clutch pedal to prevent stalling the engine just before the vehicle stops moving: if you hit both pedals together, your stopping distance increases.

        Training and practice. If your technique is wrong, your ‘practice’ becomes, in Peter Eliot’s words “the repetition of error.”

        Since all this debate started in the 1950s, various non-lethal weapons have been developed specifically for defence. Taser, stun guns, rubber ball guns, pepper and CS gas sprays, to name a few.There are various shotgun cartridges that are not meant to be lethal, firing rubber balls, plastic granules, sand or bean bags, wooden dowelling and tear gas. Even less dangerous to the victim would be paint ball or smart water projection – things that tag the offender for future identification. Everyone else in the world can get pistols designed to fire paint balls or gas. We can’t, not ‘legally’.    

        The problem yet to be tackled by our Government is that previous governments have stuck most of this stuff into section five – the prohibited category of firearms, so legally they are classified as machine guns. That’s a problem. Our view is that householders should be able to go on courses to learn about these products. Then they can carry out risk assessments for their property and decide what non-lethal weapons they could best deploy against an intruder and then buy what they need. Having planned their defence and trained with the weapon they can sleep safe; if they ever need to protect their property or family, they have a plan and the tools for the job; and that should give an incident a better outcome than going into a crisis with neither the tools nor the training.

        We don’t think that the law needs changing to effect this; possession of prohibited non-lethal weapons by a trained person demonstrates lawful authority for having them, which means the householder will either not be charged or will be acquitted. That leaves the current draconian legislation in place for any scrote caught on the street with something in section 5.

        It’s got to be better for us all if active defence uses tools designed for the job. The problem with weapons of convenience is that they can do more harm than necessary: if a woman thinks she needs to defend herself from you, she’ll do your eyesight far more damage if she uses her hairspray than she would using a pepper spray.

        And that brings us to the final point here: mistaken identity. If your intruder turns out to be a drunken nephew who last stayed with you eighteen months ago and still has a door key, shooting him with rubber balls is (both for him and family relations) survivable. You can gun him down in the dark, turn the lights on, see who it is and then shoot him again for disturbing you. He’ll try to get sympathy for his bruises for weeks afterwards, but at least he can. If you’ve stabbed him, you’ll have to miss the funeral, because even if you’re not still in custody when it happens, you won’t be welcome.

        The potential need for defence, some way of the owner of a house or shop being able to neutralize superior numbers of intruders came into sharp focus with the August riots. Passive defence – be it hard shell security, smart water and security tags on high value items is not enough of a deterrent, but a shopkeeper or householder who can hurt the intruder may well be what’s needed. We’re back to training; the three men run over and killed in the Midlands defending property were on a street – or at least in a public place. Would trained men have deployed themselves in that position? Chances are, they wouldn’t and, if they’d been appropriate armed, they would not have needed to put themselves in so much jeopardy.

A World Record Norway Didn't Need

At latest report, some 85 people, most of them teenagers, were shot dead yesterday (Friday 22 July) on the island of Utoeya, Norway. The man arrested at the scene, who apparently used an automatic rifle and a handgun, was named as 32-year-old Anders Behring Breivik. He was described as a right-wing, fundamentalist Christian. His victims were attending a camp run by Norway’s Labour Party. He also claimed responsibility for the bomb that killed at least seven people in central Oslo the same day. The known death toll on Utoeya beats the previous all-time record for a spree killing by nearly 50 per cent.

All of which is horrible. The numbers are so staggering that, we suspect, more people in the UK at least will be affected by the untimely death of singer Amy Whitehouse today. This is merely human nature: people tend think they ‘know’ someone whose work they know and admire, however distant they may be personally, and react accordingly. Nearly 100 people murdered in Norway is a number, awful as it is. Which is perhaps why words fail us, crumble away as inadequate, in the face of such events, while we can be altogether articulate about the death of an Amy Winehouse (whom we didn’t know either). We know nothing of those dead young Norwegians. And yet, and in fact, all these deaths are of people whose potential has been snapped out arbitrarily and without justice, who did not, as the saying goes, deserve to die. That is dreadful to contemplate.

Beyond the confusion of emotions, we can still note some things objectively.

We pointed out in our book Does The Trigger Pull The Finger? that spree killers almost always choose ‘gun-free’ zones for their attacks. An argument, we say, for widening the number of people who might carry firearms as a deterrent to such cowards. It is not as if Norway itself is a gun-free zone. Licensed citizens may own handguns, rifles of all sorts, even fully-automatic weapons. Some 300,000 Norwegians (about 31 per cent of the population) own some 1,320,000 firearms. The law permits possession for personal protection, although carrying a firearm openly or concealed in public is prohibited (see www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/norway).

Utoeya was a gun free zone by default. Young people wouldn’t take guns to camp unless to a cadet event, and camp leaders in a civilian setting—scouts and guides—wouldn’t take guns to camp either. Nobody planning such an event and conducting risk assessments would have thought it necessary to think about defending the camp from a spree killer. Likewise, nobody would have planned for how to deal with a man dressed as a policeman who turned up without an appointment.

Young people won’t have been trained in how to evacuate the island, never mind how to evade a rampaging gunman for the time (about an hour, it seems) it would take for help to arrive. And what about that help? Chances are, local law enforcement hadn’t rehearsed an assault beach landing either, so the suspect had the whole island to himself as a free-fire zone for pretty much as long as he wanted.

In practice, preventing such incidents comes only from some preparedness on the ground. That means having people there—people who would be there anyway—who have been trained to carry and use firearms, and who can deploy in some meaningful way if there’s trouble. We know that such incidents are rare—one a decade in Britain. But they have happened. And the door is still open to it happening again, because we have yet to convince government that there is greater safety for us all in greater preparedness.

We might have convinced them, you never know; but for the time being they are preoccupied with their expenses, phone hacking scandals, and the hope of keeping the Euro afloat. So until they focus on the problem, and more particularly on implementing a solution, we face the same risk of another spree killing. The odds are the same as ever. Even now, the news form Norway might be emboldening another coward. 

Bill of Rights: Still Going Strong

We have been enjoying Lord Neuberger MR’s report  on super-injunctions. It’s a fascinating read. Not enough pictures in it for some, but you can illustrate it yourself with  pictures of people who tried not to be in the news and are anyway. One recently such ‘outed’ person was Imogen Thomas, of whom there are hundreds of photos on the internet. They left us none the wiser as to why she’s associated with a super-injunction. One informant suggested it’s to do with her new musical career, he having heard that she’s been doing gigs in Manchester.

 The issue, as explained by the Master of the Rolls, is that Parliament (which is a court) has its own sub judice rules, under which the Houses of Parliament do not discuss matters that are before the courts. Thus, each refrains from trespassing on the other’s province to ensure that the rule of law is not undermined and that a citizen’s right to a fair trial is not compromised.

The problem with super-injuctions came to light in 2008, when a question was tabled in the House of Commons on a subject that, because of the super-injunction in force at the time, the House office could not know was the subject of an injunction. A super-injunction restrains a person from both publishing the information that concerns the applicant and informing others of the existence of the order and the proceedings. A super-injunction, in other words, makes the ‘original’ injunction secret.

Had the House office been aware that there was an injunction, there would have been some behind the scenes discussion with the MP as to how to proceed. The House sub judice rules would have been considered and the matter probably not aired at that time. In any event, courtesy of the Bill of Rights (an ancient declaration sneered at by low-grade policemen and their present and former lackeys, and the judge at Ed Beck’s St. Alban’s appeal), Parliament cannot be gagged by the courts. To quote from Para 9 of Lord Neuberger’s report: “Article 9 of the Bill of Rights 1689 recognises and enshrines a longstanding privilege of Parliament: freedom of speech and debate. It is an absolute privilege and is of the highest constitutional importance.”

As it was, the injunction’s very secrecy caused it to be exposed in the House of Commons, leading to the second problem—media reporting of Parliamentary proceedings. This is protected by the Parliamentary Papers Act 1840, which provides an absolute immunity in respect of civil or criminal proceedings for Hansard—the official report of Parliamentary proceedings—and any other publication made by order of Parliament. That privilege extends to other publications reproducing what is said in Hansard with a ‘qualified’ or more limited immunity, if published in good faith and without malice. So there is a basic problem—particularly for those fond of injunctions, but also for the constitutional separation of powers between the judiciary and the legislature. If a matter under injunction is raised in Parliament, the media can then quote the official report, thus undermining the purpose of the injunction.

Since the Human Rights Act 1998 incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law—and specifically Article 8, which accords respect for privacy and family life—the courts (as Parliament anticipated) have developed the common law in light of the Convention and its jurisprudence, trying to find a balance between what should be kept private and what should not benefit from the right to a private life. In all cases, injunctions are usually temporary and are imposed to prevent publicity that could prevent a fair hearing at a later date.

It is clear that Lord Neuberger doesn’t think that the Bill of  Rights has been amended. Indeed it can’t be, since it’s only a restatement of the common law. And if that’s the case, then the whole Bill of Rights remains in force. And that includes your rights to protect yourself as necessary, and to bear arms.

Lord Neuberger says (Para 6.6): "...whether an injunction granted by the courts can extend to Parliament is most easily answered by reference to Article 9 of the Bill of Rights, 1689. Article 9 is declaratory of a longstanding privilege of Parliament: freedom of speech in debate. It provides the final legal recognition of the constitutional principle 'That the freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament.'"

Lord Brown-Wilkinson said in Pepper v. Hart (1993 AC593 at 638): '…the plain meaning of Article 9, viewed against the historical background in which it was enacted, was to ensure that Members of Parliament were not subjected to any penalty, civil or criminal for what they said and were able, contrary to the previous assertions of the Stuart monarchy, to discuss what they, as opposed to the monarch, chose to discuss.'

That judgement is best remembered for opening Parliamentary debates to the courts to help a court decide what Parliament meant by a piece of legislation. It enables us to look at the debates for clues as to their intentions where the wording of the legislation is woolly or ambiguous. It is useful when you look at the debates in 1920 when firearms legislation was first enacted, but it didn’t help us much with the 1988 Firearms (Amendment) Act. Each time the committee debates got to a difficult point, Douglas Hogg, the minister steering the bill through Parliament, said that what the wording meant could be left to the courts to figure out.

Sooner or later, and preferably sooner, either Parliament or the judiciary, or both, will have to consider the conflict between the Bill of Rights and the way the Home Office interprets firearms legislation. That will make interesting reading.

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Lord Neuberger’s report, Super-Injunctions, Anonymised Injunctions and Open Justice, can be downloaded from

www.judiciary.gov.uk/Resources/JCO/Documents/Reports/super-injunction-report-20052011.pdf