On March 13, 1996, Thomas Hamilton walked into an elementary school in
Dunblane, Scotland, with three pistols and shot dead 16 young children
and one of their teachers.

In the wake of this horrific massacre of innocents, a judicial inquiry
recommended more stringent rules for handgun ownership in Britain, but
cautioned against an outright ban.

Politicians being politicians, though, they sought to prove they were
acting to prevent a recurrence of such a shooting (as if anyone can
prevent lunatics from acting insanely) by passing a law forbidding
ordinary civilians from possessing handguns. Handgun owners were given
until February 1998 to hand in all their guns.

In all, about 162,000 handguns and 700 tonnes of ammunition were
surrendered to police.

Jack Straw, currently Britain’s foreign secretary, but at the time the
home secretary, pronounced the hand-in a “tremendous success” and
predicted it would make England, Scotland and Wales very much safer.

Tuesday, the gun-crime statistics for the first five years of this
experiment in citizen disarmament were released. And what has been the
result? The incidence of gun crime in England and Wales has nearly
doubled from 13,874 in 1998 to 24,070 in 2003. And the incidence of
firearms murder, has risen 65 percent.

Politicians being politicians, they of course have not drawn the
obvious parallel. When the statistics were released earlier this week,
no official even mentioned the total handgun ban. (Not even Britain’s
Olympic sport shooters are permitted to own handguns for competition.)

It never even occurred to British politicians and reporters to make a
connection. Banning handguns was an important symbol in the wake of the
Dunblane shootings. It was the right thing to do at the time. Its
intended consequences, realized or not, well, they’re secondary.

The ban was a “then” solution, the spiral in gun crime is a “now”
problem — different matters entirely to the chattering classes.

It’s not necessarily the case that the stripping of guns from ordinary,
law-abiding gun owners caused the explosion in gun crime by leaving the
population defenceless against armed criminals.

There is almost surely some cause and effect, though.

Another report released last year by Britain’s Home Office revealed
that since the late 1990s, robbery has jumped dramatically, too. It rose
by 28 per cent in 2002 alone and, since 1998, there has been an increase
in the annual average of muggings of more than 100,000. England alone
has nearly 400,000 robberies each year, a rate nearly one-quarter higher
per capita than that of the United States.

It is entirely likely that some of the increase in the past five years
has stemmed from an increased confidence among criminals that ordinary
citizens almost certainly have no guns in their homes.

But it is unlikely the handgun ban accounts for all or even most of the
increase. France has had a similar upward spike in robberies over the
past five years without banning guns. France, too, now has a violent
crime rate at or above the Americans’, with the exception of murder.

For some reason, no one in the industrialized world murders one another
like Americans. However, in most other categories of violent and
property crime, the rest of us are catching up.

The likely causes of Britain’s crime wave (and France’s and Germany’s
and the Netherlands’ and so on) are illegal immigration, drug wars and
extremely lenient treatment of convicted criminals. Holland is set to
deport 30,000 failed refugee claimants over the coming months in part in
hopes of reducing high levels of crime.

However, even if confiscating guns from law-abiding citizens does not
prompt new heights of violent crime, it does not follow that seizure is
a neutral act.

The best that can be said of it is that it is totally useless. As such,
it is pointless.

Yet seizure also amounts to a forfeiture of private property by persons
who have committed no crime (and thus have given the state no legitimate
reason to take their property). So its pointlessness is a deep violation
of individual liberty.

If the seizure of private guns does not prevent crime — and from the
British example it is clear it does not — then there is no common good
that could possibly justify seizure.

And if Britain’s mandatory hand-in encouraged even a few hundred
robberies and a handful of murders by emboldening criminals, then the
hand-in was a crime by the state against law-abiding citizens.

Similarly, the registry forced on Canadian gun owners nearly a decade
ago has been totally useless. If taking guns away is not enough to
prevent gun crimes, how could collecting registrations on guns to fill
government databases do any better?

The problem is criminals with guns, period. Targeting law-abiding
owners, whether through registration or confiscation, is looking in the
wrong place for a solution to gun crime.

There have been rumours out of Ottawa for months now that the Liberals
intend to make Canada’s registry less intrusive and expensive,
friendlier to “legitimate gun owners.”

Even if it is made less harsh and simpler to use, so long as it
continues to focus on lawful owners instead of criminals, it will merely
be a kinder, simpler sort of useless.