UK government kneejerks on airguns

Following the death of toddler Andrew Morton, who earlier this year was killed by a nutter firing an airgun, the government has decided to further restrict sales of airguns:

The UK Government is to impose tighter controls on airguns following the murder of Glasgow toddler Andrew Morton, BBC Scotland has learned.

The Home Office could confirm as early as Thursday plans to restrict the sale of weapons to registered gun dealers. Firearms legislation is reserved to Westminster but the Scottish Executive has been lobbying for the law on the sale of air weapons to be tightened. The changes would be included in the UK Violent Crime Reduction bill.

These proposals don’t prevent anyone from buying an airgun, they just restrict the number of outlets at which they can be sold. Even if they did prevent people from purchasing airguns, it is vary rare for an airgun to be used to kill someone, because airguns are not very powerful weapons (you’d probably do more harm to someone by hitting them over the head with one than by shooting them). And there are plenty of other potential murder weapons that nutters can use — including everyday items like bricks and knives, which cannot realistically be banned. So we can confidently predict that these kneejerk proposals are utterly pointless in that they will have zero discernable statistical effect on the level of violent crime.

The proposals will however go some way to placating the idiots who call for “something to be done” about airguns, and the newspapers who encourage them. These newspapers will probably give the government some favourable press, which is probably the point of the whole exercise. This shows how Blair measures his government’s success in column inches. Remember his leaked 2000 memo asking to be “personally associated” with “eye-catching initiatives”? Here’s the relevant passage:

On the family, we need two or three eye-catching initiatives that are entirely conventional in terms of their attitude to the family. […] I should be personally associated with as much of this as possible.

Today’s proposals almost certainly come from a similar process. The government doesn’t care whether its “eye-catching initiatives” actually make this country a better place to live in, as long as they can hoodwink enough stupid people into believing they do.

[This post originally appeared in Cabalamat Journal]