Licence to kill must be revoked

Michael North, whose five-year-old daughter Sophie was killed by Thomas Hamilton at Dunblane with a legally owned handgun, calls for a ban on such weapons. The morning of Wednesday March 13 began for me like so many previous weekday mornings. I was a working single parent. My five-year-old daughter Sophie and I got up, dressed and had breakfast together. I then took Sophie to the Kids Club at her school and, having said goodbye to her, drove the four miles to the University of Stirling where I teach biochemistry and microbiology.

An hour later Sophie was dead. She had been shot in a hail of bullets, one of the victims of Thomas Hamilton in the Dunblane Primary School gym. She had been killed along with 15 other children and their teacher with a legally owned Browning high-power, self-loading pistol. The man who killed her had certificates which allowed him to own a number of handguns and many hundreds of rounds of ammunition, including soft nose or "dum-dum" type bullets. He had been permitted to keep his arsenal of weapons and bullets at home and to practise his shooting at Home Office approved gun clubs.

Since that day many of my thoughts have been focused on gun control, on why we as a society allow civilians to own weapons as dangerous as handguns. In May and June I spent many hours listening to the evidence presented to Lord Cullen's inquiry into the events at the school. I reached the conclusion that, no matter what drove Hamilton to commit the atrocity, it had been all too simple for him to carry it out because handguns were readily available to him. Many other crimes have been committed because guns can be kept in the home. Despite many indications to the contrary, Hamilton was assumed to be a fit person to keep guns. The fact that he was not and that it is not possible to predict anybody's fitness to keep guns is a lesson that should have been learned nine years ago.

In 1987 Michael Ryan, also armed with legally-held weapons, killed 16 people and injured 15 others in and around Hungerford. These events signalled the dangers inherent in private gun ownership and should have led to radical changes in firearms legislation. The coroner's jury said that semi-automatic weapons should not generally be available and that an individual should not be allowed to own an unlimited quantity of arms and ammunition. Little was done. It would appear that the Firearms Act that followed the Hungerford killings fell short of the recommendations of the coroner's jury - a failure for which the Home Secretary of the day must take a degree of responsibility. One type of weapon used by Ryan was prohibited, but handguns were not, despite the fact that half Ryan's victims were killed with a Beretta pistol. At the time it was said that the Hungerford incident was a one-off. Clearly it was not, and we have to ask questions about whose views should be taken into account, a minority who claim a right to own lethal weapons for sport, or the majority whose concerns are with public safety and self preservation.

I have been told by senior politicians that the United Kingdom already has some of the tightest gun laws in the world. This may be so, but they were clearly not tight enough and there is no room for complacency. At present a firearms certificate can be granted for a handgun to anyone who can show good reason for possessing it, and that need only be the wish to target-shoot. If a shooter persuades the police that he needs different guns for different shooting disciplines then he can have any number of handguns, perhaps as many as 30. It might be expected that with ownership of as dangerous an instrument as a gun the onus would be on the applicant to prove beyond all doubt that he is and will continue to be a fit person to hold a firearms certificate. However, under present legislation the certificate will be granted unless the police can demonstrate that the applicant is not a fit person, something which they appear to find very difficult to prove. Only 1-2 per cent of firearms certificate applications are refused. Once granted, the certificate allows a person to hold guns for three years before renewal (there were even moves to relax this to five years). During that period the behaviour of the gun holder could change dramatically as a result of domestic problems, drinking or mental illness. At the start of 1995, a police constable involved in the renewal of Hamilton's gun licence expressed doubts about his suitability, yet he was still granted a licence for another three years. We now know the dreadful consequences of that decision.

Surprisingly there has been little academic research undertaken on gun ownership in the UK. Funding has not been available. This dearth of information has allowed statements from the gun lobby to go unchallenged. The gun lobby often bases its arguments on selective evidence from the United States, where the gun culture is different from that here - making direct comparisons inappropriate. However, studies involving a number of countries show a clear link between the number of legally held guns in homes and the incidence of gun-related death, murder and suicide.

The lack of adequate research was highlighted a few weeks ago when the Home Affairs Select Committee reported on gun legislation, a somewhat irrelevant exercise in view of the more detailed Cullen Inquiry. The evidence taken by the committee was limited. Oral evidence was taken only from the police and the gun lobby, not, for example, from any victims' groups or from anyone who could comment on the effects of guns on public health. The independent adviser to the committee was the editor of a gun magazine which had fiercely attacked both the police and anti-gun campaigners. The committee split along party lines, with the Conservative majority voting against a ban on the private ownership of handguns.

The preference of the Tory majority was for tightening certification, requiring applicants to find two countersignatories (currently only one is needed) and their GPs to provide information. This asks too much of outside parties. Informed medical opinion indicates that it would be impossible to predict the future behaviour of a gun owner and ensure that his weapons were never misused.

If you cannot be absolutely certain that every person owning a handgun will be safe, then in my view there is only one possible course of action: the banning of the private use of handguns. Handguns are only used for a pastime - target-shooting - but were designed for another purpose, killing, and are the most dangerous of weapons. They are easily concealed: Thomas Hamilton was seen entering Dunblane Primary School but no one would have been able to tell he was carrying guns. Many bullets can be fired rapidly from semi-automatic weapons. Even single loading pistols can be reloaded rapidly: Thomas Hamilton's killing spree lasted only three minutes but within that time he fired over 100 rounds of ammunition - including the bullets which killed my daughter.

Handgun owners claim they have a "right" to shoot and that the vast majority of them are responsible. However if we are to compare rights, the "right" to own a gun comes very low down on a scale in which the right to be safe and protected from lethal weapons and the right to life are paramount. All gun owners must also accept some responsibility for the behaviour of their fellow shooters. It is their organisations which lobbied against changes after Hungerford, and some of these organisations have behaved in an outrageous way since March; witness the recent attack on a Dunblane parent by the National Pistol Association. It is gun lobby spokesmen who feed misinformation to the media; for example, in order to deflect the issue from legally-held guns it has been claimed that Hamilton had access to illegal weapons, an accusation for which there is no evidence. It is gun magazines which are full of the macho images of the gun culture. It is shooting disciplines which include targets in a human form (what they describe as humanoid). We have heard more than one individual equate the possible loss of their handguns or part of their livelihood with the loss of our children. They must be reminded that target shooting is, after all, just a pastime. There are alternative pastimes which can provide the pleasure that they seek. There are no alternative lives for our children.

Lord Cullen's report will be published in a few weeks. We have no idea what his recommendations will be nor how the Government will respond to them. Whatever Cullen says and the Government does, it is clear that there is considerable strength of feeling among the general public that significant changes must be made to firearms legislation.

The Snowdrop Petition against the private ownership of handguns attracted 705,000 signatures by the time it was handed in to Parliament on July 3. In July, the Gun Control Network was launched by a group including academics, lawyers, and the parents of victims killed in Hungerford and Dunblane, who wish to work towards a gun-free environment. Among our initial objectives are the prohibition on all handguns and a ban on mail-order purchase of guns and ammunition. The Dunblane parents have been in the vanguard of the campaign for tighter gun control. But we are also grieving and will need help to carry the campaign into the future.

Michael North is a reader in the department of biological and molecular sciences, University of Stirling. Those wishing to support tighter gun control can contact the Dunblane Snowdrop Petition, PO Box 14975, Stirling FK8 2ZE, and the Gun Control Network, PO Box 11495, London N3 2FE but should also write to MPs, local councillors and newspapers to express their views.