I came across additional testimony of Colin Greenwood on airgun legislation. Mr Greenwood's testimony regarding the relative ease of the production of homemade firearms is especially noteworthy.
Rich
http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200203/cmselect/cmniaf/67/2071701.htm
Examination of Witness (Questions 20 - 39)
http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200203/cmselect/cmniaf/67/2071704.htm
MR COLIN GREENWOOD
20. Personally, I think ducks are better at avoiding bricks than air gun pellets. On our recent visit to Northern Ireland, we visited the forensic laboratories there and saw the various ways in which guns could be adapted for lethal use. Do you not think there is a danger that if air guns became more readily available, that there would be that potential for adapting them for an illegal purpose?
(Mr Greenwood) We have to assume that the misusers have difficulty in getting better guns, but it is possible to take a .22 air rifle and make it fire bulleted cartridges. I will not explain how it is done, but it is fairly simple. It happens very rarely in Britain. There are some small classes of air guns where conversion does take place. We are back to this proportionality. Have we any evidence to say that if that particular gun was not converted, the person concerned would not get something else? I am sure they showed you all the Uzis, the micro-Uzis and mini-Uzis as well. We keep trying to use legislation to block off a little bit at a time and we keep failing. The overall problem gets worse, not better.
21. I think you measure failure by the fact that obviously there is still an increase in particular abuse, or crime associated with it. There is the difficult one—and it is impossible for either of us to prove—that if legislation had not been in place, then it would be worse.
(Mr Greenwood) I am sorry, sir, that is not—
22. It is a hypothetical argument that could perhaps go on for a long time. Again, I come back to the air weapon. Illegal weapons are reasonably available to those who want to misuse them in Northern Ireland—and I think that is a fair assumption. The fact that so many people have found it necessary to adapt other disguised or illegal means of shooting people is an indication that there is still a demand for that. Would you not agree that deregulation would make that demand easier to satisfy?
(Mr Greenwood) I would only agree that it would funnel it. Coming back to your first point, sir, we have experience since 1920 of whether it works or not. I would have thought that eighty years' experience would very strongly support the proposition that firearms regulation is not what some of us think it might be. In terms of Northern Ireland in particular, we know that sub-machine guns were made in little backstreet workshops—very efficient copies of the Sten gun but square. For a court case, I made a slam gun, which is a piece of pipe with another pipe going over the top. I was using gas piping, and you first think it will blow up in your hands, but I achieved higher velocities from that than I could get from the revolver from which the cartridge was made. We know that people have made guns in prison. During the war the Polish underground in Warsaw made something like 5,000 Sten guns under the nose of the Gestapo. The key question is demand: if there is demand, supply will follow from one source or another. A converted air gun is a pretty poor substitute for a backstreet machine gun.
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