England: Gun Crime still Rising

[JohnRich 4]

Letter to the editor, by Kate Hoey, Labour MP:

Time to bite the bullet on gun ban

Dear Home Secretary,

...A partial ban on hand guns was implemented immediately, followed by a total ban as one of the first measures taken by the new Labour Government in 1997.

As I am sure your officials will tell you, there was absolutely no evidence to suggest that by banning legally-licensed cartridge pistols and closing legally-operating shooting clubs, we would all sleep safer in our beds. Yet today there are more hand guns on our streets than 10 years ago.

What the ban did do was to make perfectly decent, dedicated law-abiding citizens of England, Wales and Scotland give up their sport. At a stroke our competitive pistol shooters were forced to go abroad to train for Olympic and world competitions. Overnight thousands of men and women had to hand in their pistols.

You will recall that we hosted the Commonwealth Games in 2002 and that the ban was lifted partially for overseas competitors and UK nationals to import their pistols temporarily, in the UK case from Switzerland. The Games finished and the ban was re-introduced.

When London won the bid for the 2012 Olympics, the British Olympic Association and the governing bodies of shooting put forward a case to your department for exemptions which would allow our pistol shooters to be granted dispensation so that they could retain their sporting pistols at home without ammunition in order to do their daily 'dry training'. Registered regional shooting clubs would also be designated as a place for weapons to be used.

...the public have, I believe, realised that target pistol shooters were victims of rough justice in the 1997 legislation. An e-petition on the No 10 website for the restoration of target pistol shooting under suitable controls is gaining signatures every day.

However, somewhere in your department the paper trail has stopped and the silence is deafening. Time is running out. We now have some of the best talent in recent years... They could tell you of how disadvantaged they are competing against athletes from other countries who can train every day (unlike the three days a month they do, and then only in Switzerland). Surely, Home Secretary, you must see that implying that these young people are a risk to the public is ludicrous?

Time is also running out to train the range officials, adjudicators and administrators needed for 2012.

The solution is simple. Everyone in sport is signed up to the suggested solution of using dispensations. Please, could you make a Commons-sense decision to help our target shooters? There would be no loss of control over the ownership of pistols, no danger to public safety and no need for primary legislation.

Target shooters are reliable, trustworthy and an asset to their communities – the kind of people your department want to support. Don't you feel ashamed that most democracies have more faith in their citizens to participate in one of the oldest Olympic sports than we do?

Over to you Home Secretary – we need a decision urgently.

Yours sincerely, Kate Hoey
Labour MP for Vauxhall

Source: Telegraph

Watch out for those dangerous Olympic pistol shooters!

[DZJ 0]

I'm very pleased to see Kate Hoey take that position, and hope the Home Secretary acts on the recommendation. It's doubly satisfying to see her specifically addressing this as I happened to vote for her in 2005.

A shame again, however, to see another selective quotation from you, John. Read in full, the letter points out that "Like me you will remember vividly the horror we all felt back in 1996 when 16 children and a teacher were shot dead at a school in Dunblane by a deranged man with a gun. Politicians reacted in haste to the call for 'something to be done'" which rather undermines your oft-heard claim that the 1997 handgun ban was implemented to address the general problem of firearm-related crime.

[kallend 1,647]

Quote

I'm very pleased to see Kate Hoey take that position, and hope the Home Secretary acts on the recommendation. It's doubly satisfying to see her specifically addressing this as I happened to vote for her in 2005.

A shame again, however, to see another selective quotation from you, John.

Give him a break - he's just saving bandwidth

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[JohnRich 4]

Quote

A shame again, however, to see another selective quotation from you...

That was omitted because it was not relevant to the thrust of the story, which is the dilemma of Olympic pistol shooters, who can't conduct live practice in their own country, nor even dry fire without ammo in their own homes.

And, once again, I included the reference to the full story, so everyone could see for themself that I'm not hiding anything.

And, once again, copyright law prohibits copying of an entire story, so some things have to be omitted. Thus, the irrelevant parts which are not germane to the purpose of the story get cut.

Your charge of "selective quoting" for purposes of covering something up, is incorrect.

[damion75 0]

I don't think there are enough posts in this thread yet.

Guns are evil... no, wait I mean people are evil... er... no what? where? Hmmm.

Chill people, its not Somalia. Not that there's anything wrong with Somalia. Or Texas. Er, not that I mean Texas is like Somalia. Hmmm. Thoughts?

***************

Not one shred of evidence supports the theory that life is serious - look at the platypus.

[PaulNoel 0]

Thats why i moved to France. Maybe there is more gun crime but at least here its accepted when you slot a robber

[Skyrad 0]

It doesn't go far enough but its a start.

When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

[shropshire 0]

Side Note : We're driving past Troyes early saturday morning so we'll toot the horn to say Hi
P.S what's your nearest DZ and what's it like? we'll be heading past again in the summer.

(.)Y(.)
Chivalry is not dead; it only sleeps for want of work to do. - Jerome K Jerome