WEDNESDAY 17 JULY 2002

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.

  23. Obviously, you have very, very strong views. As you realise from my accent, I come from Scotland. In your submission you say in relation to the Dunblane tragedy that Hamilton lied when obtaining a certificate. Do you think it would have made any difference if the police had known that he had lied?
  (Mr Greenwood) Cullen and the psychologists thought he would not have got an illegal gun. I am not sure that I accept that. If you are looking at single incident mass killings, the most common cause is fire. The next is home-made bombs. We know that Hamilton drove past a school with 700 pupils in it to get to the one in Dunblane. We know that licensing can never be one hundred per cent, but if you have a system of licensing, the key is the person. At the moment in England and Wales there is a slight difference between shotgun certificates and firearms certificates, which is a nonsense. The key is the person. If the person is properly evaluated and then monitored—Her Majesty's Inspectorate found that English police forces had no way of linking a conviction for armed robbery with the firearm certificates, so it was theoretically possible for somebody to be convicted of armed robbery and still have his firearms certificate, so we look at the person and do as much as we can there. If, as we know to be a fact, this man had gone into the police station and said, "I am a member of this club; it shoots on a range under a police station" when in fact he had never been there—he would never have got he certificate. What effect that would have had on a person of his mentality we really do not know.

  24. Surely, that is another argument against the position that if an air gun is available, then people will use it—it is the person who uses it? Surely, the situation is that if you remove the opportunity for that air gun to be available, then that prevents that individual using it.
  (Mr Greenwood) If you could ban all air guns, you would be right—except this question of proportionality. In England and Wales, 4 million people use air guns legitimately for very proper purposes. You could not commit a massacre with an air gun; it is one shot at a time, and very slow—much better to commit a massacre with fire or a bomb of some sort. I do not think that air guns connects in with that.

  25. The Ulster Rifle Association suggested a middle road between full regulation and full de-regulation would be useful for the introduction of air weapons users' licences. Can you see any merit in that argument?

  (Mr Greenwood) However you apply logic to firearms controls, you also have to apply practicality. This is where we are—and that is the point we start from. To suddenly say "we will deregulate all firearms" would at least get you some headlines. It is not a practical political proposition, is it? It is possible to take them down a step and see what happens, and taken them down another step and see what happens. It seems to me that it would be difficult to justify going from a full licence to nothing in one step.

  26. Only on a political basis?
  (Mr Greenwood) On a political basis, not on a logical basis.

  27. Your view would be that it would make no difference whether guns are deregulated or not?
  (Mr Greenwood) In terms of airguns?

  28. Yes.
  (Mr Greenwood) I think I have said that you would have a small amount of increase in injuries due to misuse.

  29. Would you support a middle way between deregulation and full regulation?
  (Mr Greenwood) I think that would be politically more acceptable even if it is not completely logical. I think a middle way would be a starting point from which it would be possible to go up or down. A middle way would allow the Northern Ireland Secretary to say, "This is causing problems now, we are going back" or to say, "We are going further down the road."

  30. I thought you were arguing that it would not make any difference or a very small difference.
  (Mr Greenwood) There would be a small increase in problems and I think it is not possible to take politics away from this situation. I would deregulate most firearms to some extent because I see that we are wasting an enormous amount of time in achieving that, but I would not deregulate firearms completely because it would not be an acceptable proposition.

  31. What more needs to be done by way of education to prevent juvenile misuse of airguns or other firearms?
  (Mr Greenwood) Quite a lot is being done in England and Wales. I may be a little unfashionable because I think that enforcement is the answer. I think that you deal with yobs with enforcing not by telling them that they are being warned. I would put a small amount of police resources into dealing with airgun misuse and deal with those offenders as vigorously as possible and let them do the educating because they would then go and tell all their friends what had happened to them and you have educated them afterwards. I am reminded of hearts and minds following something else.

  32. So on the basis of enforcement and then the story being carried back to their friends?
  (Mr Greenwood) Yes. I know that works because it worked for me on the ground.

  33. I want to turn to the question of children and firearms which causes a lot of concern particularly with the use of guns in schools in the States where they might have been a little older than some children. I declare an interest in that I was taught the use of firearms when I was 13, so I was under the strict supervision of those who were over 21. In your opinion, at what age should a child be allowed to handle a gun under supervision?
  (Mr Greenwood) I do not think there should be any restriction. My son and daughter were both handling cut-down air weapons as soon as they were able to and were being taught a very responsible attitude. Certainly at the age of six, my son was shooting in the garden occasionally and was highly elated when he managed to hit the little target. I would not want to set an age because children vary. Were I thinking of doing anything, I would make the supervisor absolutely liable for the actions of the child, but I would not want to put an age on handling a gun under supervision. The evidence tells us that there is a need for restriction on young people particularly with airguns and the level of misuse creeps up. At ten, they are very rare. The peak period is between 13 and 16 and then it begins to go down again. That is the peak period of misuse and therefore it seems to me that that is the group to be targeting. In England and Wales at the moment, you cannot have an uncovered air weapon in a public place. If that were enforced, it would be very effective.

  34. In Great Britain as I understand it, there is currently no minimum age at which a child can operate a firearm under supervision whereas, in Northern Ireland, the standard minimum age for the use of any firearm is 18. There is some limited acceptance between 16 and 18. The age at which a person can supervise a child is currently 18 in Northern Ireland and 21 in Great Britain. Is there not some discrepancy there that may need to be looked at?
  (Mr Greenwood) Eighteen seems a little illogical when you think that you can join the Army at 17 and they will give you a gun for nothing! I come back to logic again. I know of no problem of a supervised youngster handling any sort of firearm. I certainly was using firearms at a very early age. You find that children are very responsible with firearms in that sort of environment. They are very anxious to learn. It is the unsupervised child that is the problem. The problem there seems to be at its worst between 13 and 17. To suggest that somebody cannot own an airgun but he can join the Army and have a self-loading rifle seems illogical to me.

  35. Yet I understand that the Government have proposed reducing the absolute minimum age threshold for use in Northern Ireland to 14 to reduce the extent to which the restriction disadvantages young people in Northern Ireland in comparison to their British counterparts in competitive shooting.
  (Mr Greenwood) In England and Wales, you cannot hold a firearms certificate until you are 14 but you can be a member of a rifle club and you can use a rifle under supervision as a member of a rifle club, that is any sort of rifle. Air weapons you can use under supervision on private property. Looking at the peaks of misuse, that does not seem to be too far off. The Home Office suggested raising the age to 18 and were challenged to produce the evidence and could not produce any. People between 17 and 18 do not seem to be a particular problem at all. It is going down. I would have thought that it is very advisable to allow supervised shooting of any firearm under 14, unsupervised shooting on private property of some. British firearms law has been built up higgledy-piggledy. For instance, there is a different age for shotguns and so on. The problem is that the people who are concerned do not understand it and, if they cannot follow it, then we have no hope of compliance. It has to be simple and, at most, I think two ages, 14 and 17.

  36. You would agree that irrespective of whatever age a person might be, they should never handle a firearm until they have been properly trained in the use of a weapon?
  (Mr Greenwood) It depends what you mean by "properly trained".

  37. Well, amongst other things, that you do not point it at anybody.
  (Mr Greenwood) No, I meant whether you envisage a statutory form of training or whether you envisage what has been happening in this country for centuries. I would certainly oppose a statutory form of training. I would certainly agree with statutory supervision of young people but, as for shooting tests, they do not work. They were introduced by the Nazis in the 1930s as part of Goering's re-organisation of game shooting where he made all small farmers pool their land to produce a sizeable estate. So, they have had shooting tests since then and every year they kill nine times as many people as we do in the field. The French have introduced shooting tests fairly recently and they have a quite horrific accident rate. I would be opposed to mandatory shooting tests. I studied two or three years in which gymnastics killed more people than shooting sports. We have an enviable reputation which is not broken, so we do not need to fix it!

  38. While some of us approach the issue of controls with very great reticence, particularly when it relates to impinging on people's ability to do their work, enjoy a sport or indeed for security reasons, there are those of us who would approach fairly robustly the issue of competency and suitability. In the light of your earlier remarks that the key is the person, what mechanisms could be put in place to ensure that the wrong people do not get firearms certificates or indeed that those who do get firearms certificates have some basic competency in the use of those weapons? For example, some 28 years ago after I read my own obituary in The Belfast Telegraph, I thought it might be worthwhile applying for a personal weapon, which was approved. I went with my stamped form to the firearms dealer who gave me a gun. Nobody at any stage ever told me in which direction I should be pointing it though I had a vague idea from the movies. No one has to this day, 28 years later, tested to see if I can use the weapon or not. While any reasonably intelligent person will go out of their way to make sure that they can, equally some may not. I wonder what mechanisms should be put in place both to make sure that the right people or the wrong people do no get the guns and also that those who do have some basic competency in terms of use of it.
  (Mr Greenwood) With respect, sir, you have virtually answered your own question and it is what has happened in the United Kingdom for centuries. People who start handling firearms seek some form of instruction. If a person whom police feel will not do that applies for a certificate, they have reason to say, "This is contrary to public safety." It happens from time to time that the police say, "You have no experience. Go and have a session at a shooting school" or something like that "and then come back again." It is done on a very one-off case by case basis. It cannot apply to pistols on the mainland but it could certainly apply to pistols in Northern Ireland. What is interesting is that before Americans, with their right to keep arms and all that stuff, issue a concealed carry permit, they require the person to undertake some training with a handgun, not with anything else. They do require to be satisfied that he is competent. So, you may be making a good case in saying that, in terms of judging whether that person is going to be a danger to public safety, the police may say that, in some instances, he needs to go and have some training. Conversely, if the applicant has had guns all his life, he probably would not need to.

  39. The Government's approach to the consultation paper had been a test base system. I think there is some indication of backpedalling slightly on that to something more approaching some kind of competency in firearms handling. I take it that you are more comfortable with the latter?
  (Mr Greenwood) On a case by case basis, I think it would be useful. On a blanket basis, I think it would be unnecessary and costly. Were I in Northern Ireland, I hope you would not ask me to go on a course since I have been shooting pistols all my life and so on, whereas with someone who had never had a gun in his hand before, the police might well say to him, "We are not happy that you can handle this pistol safely. Come back when you have been down to the local pistol club and have had some instruction." Strangely, there have not been any problems with the 11,000 to 12,000 owners of firearms for protection in Northern Ireland. So, our experience tells us that the problem—