This is really annoying
Note: Alpers is one of the most vocal international anti-firearm activists.
As usual his testimony stretches the truth a bit.
______________________________________________________________________
Firearm Registration and Owner Licensing - the International Experience
California State Assembly Select Committee on Gun Violence
Testimony of Philip Alpers, gun policy researcher
Glendale, California, 1 December 1999
Mr Chairman, committee members, ladies & gentlemen.
Thank you for inviting me here to speak today. My field of research is the
international regulation of firearms. I work with police unions, government
agencies and universities in North America, New Zealand and Europe -
currently with the World Council of Churches Project on Violence in Geneva,
Switzerland. I hold accreditation to the United Nations Commission on Crime
Prevention & Criminal Justice, and for several years I have spoken at the
Crime Commission and similar forums, mainly on the licensing and registration
of firearms.
Around the world, handgun registration and owner-licensing are acknowledged
as the most effective way to minimise handgun-related death and trauma.
In almost every democracy, police see handgun registration as an essential
crime-busting tool which puts criminals behind bars every day.
There's nothing new in this. For more than sixty years, registration and
owner licensing have been the accepted norm in two of the most established
fields of crime and injury prevention - road safety and gun safety.
In both of these, two parallel systems of accountability - that is, licensing
the owner, and then registering the gun or the automobile - are closely
linked and interdependent. It's the experience of many countries that neither
measure works well without the other.
If we list the democracies which have most in common with the United States,
the line-up looks like this.
Table: Handgun Registration and Owner Licensing Around the World
Two comments on this table. First, you may have heard it said that Israel and
Switzerland exemplify armed, but safe societies. Please note that in both
countries, registration of firearms and owner licensing are long-established
public safety measures.
Secondly, this table lists only those nations which register handguns. Almost
every country on this list also goes one step further. They register all
types of firearm, long or short.
Our countries also have different rates of gun-related death and injury. The
next chart comes from the most recent comparative study from the Centres for
Disease Control in Atlanta.
Chart: Firearm Death Rates in 24 High-income Countries
You'll see that among the wealthier nations, the United States suffers the
highest rate of firearm-related death. Even taking into account last month's
update from the Centres for Disease Control in Atlanta, which showed a sharp
decrease in firearm-related mortality, the American rate of gun death per
head of population remains double that of Northern Ireland. On the next line
down, Finland has one of the highest rates of gun ownership among developed
nations. Below that, Switzerland's rate of gun death is one of the highest in
Western Europe.
So, how did our nations become so different? There is one period in recent
history which marked a watershed.
Sixty to seventy years ago, our nations took very different paths. In the
1930s, the United States decided to register all machine guns and licence
their owners. As a result of that stringent registration, machine guns are
now the firearms least used in violence. But at the same time, the 54 members
of the British Commonwealth, the nations of Europe and many others went a
significant step further. We registered not just machine guns, but also
handguns.
In developed democracies outside the United States, six or seven decades of
consistent firearm registration and owner licensing - in particular the
registration of handguns - are recognised as the cornerstone of effective gun
injury prevention.
Nobody's pretending that we foreigners are any less violent than Americans.
We're not. The big difference is in our levels of lethal violence. The
eminent Californian criminologist Franklin Zimring put it this way:
"You're just as likely to get punched in the mouth in a bar in Sydney
(Australia) as in a bar in Los Angeles. But you're 20 times as likely to be
killed in Los Angeles."
Zimring goes on to suggest that the free availability of firearms -
especially handguns in the United States - could have something to do with
this disparity.
Many countries have shown that a register of firearms acts to reduce the flow
of guns from lawful owner to criminal. In Australia, the United Kingdom,
Canada and New Zealand, the computerised firearm registry is consulted
thousands of times each day as a crime-busting tool. Our senior law
enforcement officers agree; the more guns we have on the register, the more
crimes police can solve and the more trauma we can prevent.
In one survey, 67% of police who used the gun register in criminal cases said
it helped them to solve a crime - often on several occasions.
When a policewoman was killed and a judge and other police were injured in a
bombing in Melbourne, Australia, the handgun register proved crucial in
tracing the offenders. When three people were found dead in a burnt-out
Melbourne gun shop in 1993, police had no suspects. It was the handgun
register alone which resulted in the killer being convicted for murder.
Hundreds of similar cases are in the police files of Great Britain, Canada
and New Zealand.
Tracing the gun is not merely a common Hollywood sub-plot. A gun registry
works for real police every day of the week, helping to solve crimes from
burglary to murder, from drug-dealing to terrorism.
The Australian Institute of Criminology found that a gun register aids
policing, "even when it is administratively clumsy and reputedly operating at
less than maximum efficiency."
To quote the President of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police:
"Without information about who owns guns, there is no effective gun control.
Opponents of gun control argue that the registration of firearms will not
reduce crime. In fact, it is the position of the Canadian Association of
Chiefs of Police that cost effective registration is a key component of the
new proposed gun control legislation. Registration will help ensure that gun
owners are held accountable for their firearms and do not sell [them]
illegally or give them to individuals without appropriate authorisation. It
will also help ensure that guns are safely stored. Claiming that gun
registration will not prevent crime is akin to claiming that registering cars
does not prevent accidents."
Chief MacDonald repeats the single most obvious advantage of firearm
registration - accountability.
Every mass-produced gun which is used in violence began its life as a legal
firearm in the hands of a lawful owner. Many of these guns "leak out" to
criminals, either by unlawful sale, by theft or neglect. By introducing
accountability all the way down the chain, a well-designed gun registry can
greatly reduce this lethal leakage from lawful gun owner to criminal.
Individual responsibility and accountability for each firearm in your
possession was the theme which inspired one notable American to say:
"No honest man can object to [gun] registration, a procedure much simpler
than the registration and licensing procedure applicable to automobiles. Show
me the man who doesn't want his gun registered, and I will show you a man who
shouldn't have a gun."
That was US Attorney General Homer Cummings, advocating registration in 1936.
So, how do so many countries make registration work?
Here are some common components of registration and licensing in developed
democracies.
Gun Owner Vetting (criminal history, domestic violence and mental health
safeguards)
Gun Owner Training (public safety education as a condition of licensing)
Genuine Reason (demonstrated need for each handgun; armed retaliation
discouraged by law)
Club Membership (regular attendance required at an approved pistol club)
Spousal Interview (a private interview with the applicant's current or most
recent spouse or partner)
Secure Storage (handguns stored without ammunition in a steel safe fixed to
the building)
Separate Ammunition Storage (specific prohibition on keeping firearms loaded
ready to fire)
Verification of Storage (physical inspection of private storage facilities
for all handguns)
Fraud-Resistant Licence (thumbprint, photograph, etc.)
Ammunition-Specific Licences (ammunition can only be purchased for the type
of firearm declared)
Removal of Firearms (mandatory removal within 24 hours of a domestic
protection order, etc.)
Regular Re-Vetting (gun owners must re-apply and be interviewed again at
regular intervals)
These are not the untried quirks of demagogues. These are mainstream, widely
accepted measures. They've survived more than half a century of testing in
democracies large and small, from libertarian to conservative.
To reduce the flow of guns to criminals, to prevent all forms of
firearm-related trauma, these are the public safety measures which have
worked for us.
And the public approves. In opinion polls, 70% to 90% of voters in Great
Britain, Canada and New Zealand consistently support firearm registration. In
Australia, where even 70% of shooters support registration, a major survey
taken ten months after stringent new gun laws were introduced showed that gun
control had scored for Prime Minister John Howard's new government the
highest approval rating in all 20 categories polled. To put it crudely, this
is one public health measure which wins votes.
Of course, flawless implementation is rarely possible. All our governments
have compliance problems, and just as some unregistered cars and unlicensed
drivers remain on our streets, some firearms will remain illegal. But it's
our experience that handgun registration enjoys the support of most
legitimate owners of firearms. By and large, gun owners truly are both
law-abiding people and good citizens.
No more so than in Hawaii, where handguns have been registered for forty
years with very little opposition. Five years ago, Hawaii extended its
registration system to cover all firearms, plus all transfers of ownership,
both new and second-hand, for the life of every gun.. Following the recent
mass shooting near Honolulu, in which the accused is a licensed gun owner,
the state is now considering re-registration and re-vetting of all firearm
owners at regular intervals in an attempt to weed out high-risk individuals.
Hawaii has a sixteen-day waiting period to buy any firearm, mandatory
confiscation in cases of domestic violence, assault weapons are banned and
permission to carry concealed weapons is virtually never granted to
civilians. The state's gun death rate is one-third the national average for
the United States.
Before I finish I'd like to address recent claims relating to Commonwealth
countries. It's been said that Canada, Australia and Great Britain have
suffered noticeable increases in relevant crime categories since the
introduction of new gun laws. These assertions are not supported by the facts.
Chart: Gun Death Rates in the United States, Canada and Australia
As you may know, the good news is that gun deaths in America are down 21%
since 1993.
Much the same is true in Canada, where the number of gun deaths most recently
reached a 30-year low.
In the 1996/97 Australian gun buy-back, two-thirds of a million firearms were
sold to the government at market value. Thousands more gun owners volunteered
their firearms for free, and nearly 700,000 guns were destroyed. The
equivalent in the United States would be 30 million firearms out of
circulation.
A year after the implementation of Australia's new laws, and following the
gun buy-back, the most recent figures from the Australian Bureau of
Statistics show that gun deaths in that country have dropped again, this time
to the lowest figure in 18 years.
Two years ago in the United Kingdom, civilian handguns were banned, bought
back from their owners and destroyed. In the year following the law change,
Scotland recorded a 17% drop in all firearm-related offences. The British
Home Office reports that in the nine months following the handgun ban,
firearm-related offences in England and Wales dropped by 13%.
A resident of Great Britain is still 50 times less likely to be a victim of
gun homicide than an American.
Finally, it may also be worth noting that in the industrialised nations with
lower levels of gun death than yours, the population is exposed to similar
levels of media violence. So we might ask the question: if it's true that
media violence makes guns desirable, how do all these countries differ in
making guns available?
Philip Alpers
San Francisco, California
alpers@ibm.net
------------------
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes" RKBA!
Note: Alpers is one of the most vocal international anti-firearm activists.
As usual his testimony stretches the truth a bit.
______________________________________________________________________
Firearm Registration and Owner Licensing - the International Experience
California State Assembly Select Committee on Gun Violence
Testimony of Philip Alpers, gun policy researcher
Glendale, California, 1 December 1999
Mr Chairman, committee members, ladies & gentlemen.
Thank you for inviting me here to speak today. My field of research is the
international regulation of firearms. I work with police unions, government
agencies and universities in North America, New Zealand and Europe -
currently with the World Council of Churches Project on Violence in Geneva,
Switzerland. I hold accreditation to the United Nations Commission on Crime
Prevention & Criminal Justice, and for several years I have spoken at the
Crime Commission and similar forums, mainly on the licensing and registration
of firearms.
Around the world, handgun registration and owner-licensing are acknowledged
as the most effective way to minimise handgun-related death and trauma.
In almost every democracy, police see handgun registration as an essential
crime-busting tool which puts criminals behind bars every day.
There's nothing new in this. For more than sixty years, registration and
owner licensing have been the accepted norm in two of the most established
fields of crime and injury prevention - road safety and gun safety.
In both of these, two parallel systems of accountability - that is, licensing
the owner, and then registering the gun or the automobile - are closely
linked and interdependent. It's the experience of many countries that neither
measure works well without the other.
If we list the democracies which have most in common with the United States,
the line-up looks like this.
Table: Handgun Registration and Owner Licensing Around the World
Two comments on this table. First, you may have heard it said that Israel and
Switzerland exemplify armed, but safe societies. Please note that in both
countries, registration of firearms and owner licensing are long-established
public safety measures.
Secondly, this table lists only those nations which register handguns. Almost
every country on this list also goes one step further. They register all
types of firearm, long or short.
Our countries also have different rates of gun-related death and injury. The
next chart comes from the most recent comparative study from the Centres for
Disease Control in Atlanta.
Chart: Firearm Death Rates in 24 High-income Countries
You'll see that among the wealthier nations, the United States suffers the
highest rate of firearm-related death. Even taking into account last month's
update from the Centres for Disease Control in Atlanta, which showed a sharp
decrease in firearm-related mortality, the American rate of gun death per
head of population remains double that of Northern Ireland. On the next line
down, Finland has one of the highest rates of gun ownership among developed
nations. Below that, Switzerland's rate of gun death is one of the highest in
Western Europe.
So, how did our nations become so different? There is one period in recent
history which marked a watershed.
Sixty to seventy years ago, our nations took very different paths. In the
1930s, the United States decided to register all machine guns and licence
their owners. As a result of that stringent registration, machine guns are
now the firearms least used in violence. But at the same time, the 54 members
of the British Commonwealth, the nations of Europe and many others went a
significant step further. We registered not just machine guns, but also
handguns.
In developed democracies outside the United States, six or seven decades of
consistent firearm registration and owner licensing - in particular the
registration of handguns - are recognised as the cornerstone of effective gun
injury prevention.
Nobody's pretending that we foreigners are any less violent than Americans.
We're not. The big difference is in our levels of lethal violence. The
eminent Californian criminologist Franklin Zimring put it this way:
"You're just as likely to get punched in the mouth in a bar in Sydney
(Australia) as in a bar in Los Angeles. But you're 20 times as likely to be
killed in Los Angeles."
Zimring goes on to suggest that the free availability of firearms -
especially handguns in the United States - could have something to do with
this disparity.
Many countries have shown that a register of firearms acts to reduce the flow
of guns from lawful owner to criminal. In Australia, the United Kingdom,
Canada and New Zealand, the computerised firearm registry is consulted
thousands of times each day as a crime-busting tool. Our senior law
enforcement officers agree; the more guns we have on the register, the more
crimes police can solve and the more trauma we can prevent.
In one survey, 67% of police who used the gun register in criminal cases said
it helped them to solve a crime - often on several occasions.
When a policewoman was killed and a judge and other police were injured in a
bombing in Melbourne, Australia, the handgun register proved crucial in
tracing the offenders. When three people were found dead in a burnt-out
Melbourne gun shop in 1993, police had no suspects. It was the handgun
register alone which resulted in the killer being convicted for murder.
Hundreds of similar cases are in the police files of Great Britain, Canada
and New Zealand.
Tracing the gun is not merely a common Hollywood sub-plot. A gun registry
works for real police every day of the week, helping to solve crimes from
burglary to murder, from drug-dealing to terrorism.
The Australian Institute of Criminology found that a gun register aids
policing, "even when it is administratively clumsy and reputedly operating at
less than maximum efficiency."
To quote the President of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police:
"Without information about who owns guns, there is no effective gun control.
Opponents of gun control argue that the registration of firearms will not
reduce crime. In fact, it is the position of the Canadian Association of
Chiefs of Police that cost effective registration is a key component of the
new proposed gun control legislation. Registration will help ensure that gun
owners are held accountable for their firearms and do not sell [them]
illegally or give them to individuals without appropriate authorisation. It
will also help ensure that guns are safely stored. Claiming that gun
registration will not prevent crime is akin to claiming that registering cars
does not prevent accidents."
Chief MacDonald repeats the single most obvious advantage of firearm
registration - accountability.
Every mass-produced gun which is used in violence began its life as a legal
firearm in the hands of a lawful owner. Many of these guns "leak out" to
criminals, either by unlawful sale, by theft or neglect. By introducing
accountability all the way down the chain, a well-designed gun registry can
greatly reduce this lethal leakage from lawful gun owner to criminal.
Individual responsibility and accountability for each firearm in your
possession was the theme which inspired one notable American to say:
"No honest man can object to [gun] registration, a procedure much simpler
than the registration and licensing procedure applicable to automobiles. Show
me the man who doesn't want his gun registered, and I will show you a man who
shouldn't have a gun."
That was US Attorney General Homer Cummings, advocating registration in 1936.
So, how do so many countries make registration work?
Here are some common components of registration and licensing in developed
democracies.
Gun Owner Vetting (criminal history, domestic violence and mental health
safeguards)
Gun Owner Training (public safety education as a condition of licensing)
Genuine Reason (demonstrated need for each handgun; armed retaliation
discouraged by law)
Club Membership (regular attendance required at an approved pistol club)
Spousal Interview (a private interview with the applicant's current or most
recent spouse or partner)
Secure Storage (handguns stored without ammunition in a steel safe fixed to
the building)
Separate Ammunition Storage (specific prohibition on keeping firearms loaded
ready to fire)
Verification of Storage (physical inspection of private storage facilities
for all handguns)
Fraud-Resistant Licence (thumbprint, photograph, etc.)
Ammunition-Specific Licences (ammunition can only be purchased for the type
of firearm declared)
Removal of Firearms (mandatory removal within 24 hours of a domestic
protection order, etc.)
Regular Re-Vetting (gun owners must re-apply and be interviewed again at
regular intervals)
These are not the untried quirks of demagogues. These are mainstream, widely
accepted measures. They've survived more than half a century of testing in
democracies large and small, from libertarian to conservative.
To reduce the flow of guns to criminals, to prevent all forms of
firearm-related trauma, these are the public safety measures which have
worked for us.
And the public approves. In opinion polls, 70% to 90% of voters in Great
Britain, Canada and New Zealand consistently support firearm registration. In
Australia, where even 70% of shooters support registration, a major survey
taken ten months after stringent new gun laws were introduced showed that gun
control had scored for Prime Minister John Howard's new government the
highest approval rating in all 20 categories polled. To put it crudely, this
is one public health measure which wins votes.
Of course, flawless implementation is rarely possible. All our governments
have compliance problems, and just as some unregistered cars and unlicensed
drivers remain on our streets, some firearms will remain illegal. But it's
our experience that handgun registration enjoys the support of most
legitimate owners of firearms. By and large, gun owners truly are both
law-abiding people and good citizens.
No more so than in Hawaii, where handguns have been registered for forty
years with very little opposition. Five years ago, Hawaii extended its
registration system to cover all firearms, plus all transfers of ownership,
both new and second-hand, for the life of every gun.. Following the recent
mass shooting near Honolulu, in which the accused is a licensed gun owner,
the state is now considering re-registration and re-vetting of all firearm
owners at regular intervals in an attempt to weed out high-risk individuals.
Hawaii has a sixteen-day waiting period to buy any firearm, mandatory
confiscation in cases of domestic violence, assault weapons are banned and
permission to carry concealed weapons is virtually never granted to
civilians. The state's gun death rate is one-third the national average for
the United States.
Before I finish I'd like to address recent claims relating to Commonwealth
countries. It's been said that Canada, Australia and Great Britain have
suffered noticeable increases in relevant crime categories since the
introduction of new gun laws. These assertions are not supported by the facts.
Chart: Gun Death Rates in the United States, Canada and Australia
As you may know, the good news is that gun deaths in America are down 21%
since 1993.
Much the same is true in Canada, where the number of gun deaths most recently
reached a 30-year low.
In the 1996/97 Australian gun buy-back, two-thirds of a million firearms were
sold to the government at market value. Thousands more gun owners volunteered
their firearms for free, and nearly 700,000 guns were destroyed. The
equivalent in the United States would be 30 million firearms out of
circulation.
A year after the implementation of Australia's new laws, and following the
gun buy-back, the most recent figures from the Australian Bureau of
Statistics show that gun deaths in that country have dropped again, this time
to the lowest figure in 18 years.
Two years ago in the United Kingdom, civilian handguns were banned, bought
back from their owners and destroyed. In the year following the law change,
Scotland recorded a 17% drop in all firearm-related offences. The British
Home Office reports that in the nine months following the handgun ban,
firearm-related offences in England and Wales dropped by 13%.
A resident of Great Britain is still 50 times less likely to be a victim of
gun homicide than an American.
Finally, it may also be worth noting that in the industrialised nations with
lower levels of gun death than yours, the population is exposed to similar
levels of media violence. So we might ask the question: if it's true that
media violence makes guns desirable, how do all these countries differ in
making guns available?
Philip Alpers
San Francisco, California
alpers@ibm.net
------------------
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes" RKBA!
