Mar 24 '06 - 1272 W - Vote Good + 7 :: Bad - 10 It’s time to decommission the other lethal weapons: guns and cars
Published March 14, 2006 by The Irish Examiner
By Fergus Finlay
THERE
are two sorts of lethal weapons causing untold havoc right now: guns
and cars. And it’s time we began to see them in the same light. What
that means is simple.
Cars are lethal weapons in the hands of uninsured or drunk drivers, and
guns are lethal no matter whose hands they’re in. It’s time we began to
take whatever action is necessary to get these lethal weapons off our
streets.
In
the late 1990s I spoke to a senior member of what was then the Royal
Ulster Constabulary (RUC). He was on the point of retirement, and there
was one thing, he said, he was curious about. He was reasonably
confident that many of the people (on both sides of the community) who
had previously been involved in terrorism would end up “going straight”.
Little
by little, he felt, many of them would want to get on with living
ordinary lives. But not all. And that was where he saw a potential
contrast developing between Northern Ireland and the rest of the
island.
“Up here,” he said, “we have guys with guns who are going to get
involved with crime and drugs. Down there, you have a lot of guys who
are already involved with crime and drugs, and they’re going to start
getting guns. I’m wondering which is going to be worse.”
Well,
we’ve only had to wait a few years to find out, haven’t we? It’s no
longer an exaggeration to say we are now facing a situation where whole
communities are terrorised by guns, where human life has become
incredibly cheap, and where the corrosion of hard drugs has resulted in
a wave of terror. Of course, it doesn’t affect everywhere to the same
extent - but the emergence of a hard core of criminals who are willing
to stop at nothing must surely be a cause of the deepest anxiety for us
all.
Many of them aren’t even what you would call trained or
hardened criminals. They’re just young people, almost all young men,
who live lives of total alienation, fuelled by drugs and unable to take
possession of any of the values that underpin a healthy approach to
their own community. There are bigger issues there, issues that won’t
easily respond to simplistic approaches. And there are even younger
people, children mostly, who can be prevented from heading in that
direction, and enabled to make different and better choices.
But
if the cancer of guns isn’t addressed now, and seriously addressed, it
will spread throughout the entire community. Like any cancer, it needs
radical treatment.
Side by side with the increasingly
cancerous nature of a growing gun culture, we are now accustoming
ourselves on a daily basis to news reports about ever-increasing
numbers of people dying on our roads.
The number of lives cut
short has reached proportions where we have become almost immune to the
news reports, unless the casualties run to four or five. And apart from
those who die, anyone who has ever experienced the terrible
consequences for people of, say, a brain injury caused by a car crash,
knows that the result of the carnage on our roads goes far beyond even
the large and growing number of deaths we have seen.
What’s
most worrying at one level is that those in a position to know have
seen this coming for some time, and yet the policy response has been
pathetically weak.
Never mind all the rhetoric we’ve heard in
the last week or so about new laws and tougher sentencing. Never mind
the sound of Government leaders and ministers pretending they’re really
members of the opposition. Never mind the utter incoherence and
insincerity of a response that keeps pretending the problem is someone
else’s. It’s not the judges’ problem. It’s not an issue of sentencing.
It’s not that we need more laws. It’s much more simple than any of
those things.
The hard fact is that we know, and have known
for a long time, that we need more police on the streets, and little or
nothing has been done about it. And if anyone seriously thinks that the
recruitment of a few hundred ill-trained reservists is going to make a
dent in that problem, they have another think coming.
Because
policing is a 24-hour a day, seven days a week activity, it needs five
new recruits to put one extra policeman on our streets. And on the
streets is where we need them, integrated into communities, capable of
spotting danger as it develops.
LAW is one thing, enforcement is
another. If all the laws on the statute book were enforced, we’d have
no uninsured drivers; no one being killed by drunks driving too fast;
no one in a position to produce a gun and casually shoot down innocent
partygoers; no one able to deal drugs on street corners with impunity;
no one able to shoot-up in broad daylight in our capital city and
elsewhere. We have laws for all of that, and lots more besides, and yet
hundreds - yes, hundreds - of people are being killed, and hundreds of
other lives destroyed.
There are two things we do really need
to think about doing, and they may require legislation, or even a
constitutional amendment. Both will also involve that dirty word -
amnesty.
The Government should announce a one-month amnesty on uninsured cars, and a one-month amnesty on guns.
In
both cases, people should be given the chance to get their cars
properly insured and to hand in any weapons they have. The dual amnesty
needs to be announced and as widely publicised as possible. And if
necessary, we need to enhance the guns amnesty by putting a bounty in
place - €1,000 for every gun handed in would be a small price to pay.
Once the month is up, we need to introduce the most draconian penalties possible for possession of a gun.
Give
people a choice now. Once the month is up, if you’re found in
possession of a gun, you go to jail. Full stop. There will be no need
for anyone to prove you were in possession of the gun for some unlawful
purpose, no need for anyone to associate the gun with the commission of
a crime.
Guns are deadly weapons, and their use must be eliminated.
Once
the month is up, anyone found in possession of an uninsured car, or
found drunk in charge of a car, should lose it - forever - and in
addition to whatever other penalty may be imposed. Mandatory
confiscation of cars that are uninsured is no different from taking a
lethal weapon from the hands of someone likely to do terrible damage
with it.
Taking a car away from someone who is willing to
drive while over the limit is the same as taking a gun away from
someone unable to place any real value on human life.
We spent
years trying to decommission paramilitary weapons. For most people, the
peace process couldn’t be seen as secure until guns and Semtex were no
longer part of the equation. It’s now time to start decommissioning the
other lethal weapons that are doing so much harm to our community.
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