Irish and UK dopers only – seeking cite [r.e. carrying guns]

Factual Questions
1

I need assistance of people from Ireland or the UK only. I have been asked to produce formal cites for something which seems an obvious fact. I must stress that I am seeking factual cites, not debating the underlying issue.

Suppose you are on the high street, in Ireland or UK. A man passes, and you realise that he is armed with a gun. He is not a soldier or policeman. He is not actively threatening you or anyone, just passing by peacefully with a gun. It may be holstered, concealed or carried in hand.

Clearly, he is breaking the law. Our first concern is that he plans to hold up or shoot someone. However, it appears this is not his purpose and that he just likes to carry a gun for personal reasons.

I felt that people in my country would find this weird, not just law-breaking. They would feel he was a danger to others because he was carrying a dangerous weapon. They would question his sanity if he was not a criminal.They would immediately inform the authorities that someone who was either a criminal or a mentally disordered person was carrying a gun on the street.

Now, that seems obvious to me, because of the prevailing culture in these islands. However, I can find no cite to support this. The US concept of right to bear arms is foreign to us, and I can only find it in discussions of “odd things Americans do”. Local sites belonging to the hunting/shooting communities do not seem to focus on it - they are more concerned with cutting red tape, like licensing and regulation. There are many reports of disturbed men brandishing weapons (e.g. Abbeylara case, Ireland), or killing people (e.g. Dunblane case, UK), and political and media responses to that kind of case. But I can’t trace a useful reference on normal attitudes in the situation I describe.

I am seeking factual cites on the direct issue of common Irish and UK attitudes to gun-carrying in public. Can anyone point me towards useful cites in these islands? I wish to stress again that this thread is not for a debate of the merits or morality of gun-carrying - I’m looking for established facts on attitudes.

2

It is not just the carrying of firearms, its the carrying of anything that looks like a firearm, so this means replicas and the like.

In addition to this, posession of firearms is very tightly controlled, in effect auto handguns are banned.

3

BBC article on the difficulty of getting a gun license in the UK. Not much about attitudes though - it’s a difficult thing to find a cite for.

Nothing on Ireland that I can find.

4

Slight hijack, but as an American living in the USA, all of this would be true in the state where I live. I’ve lived in four states and have never in my life seen someone openly carry a weapon who wasn’t a police officer. Most places I’ve lived, it’s illegal to do this.

I think the gun-loving nature of America is a bit, erm, distorted on this particular message board.

5

Right. As an American, I have to say you very rarely see people carrying firearms even in places where it is legal to do so. Even if those places have what is called a ‘gun culture’ of people using firearms recreationally. It just isn’t common at all.

6

The culture has changed too. Growing up in Nebraska in the 1970’s my buddies and I would go hunting and plinking. We were to young to drive, so we would walk out into the countryside. No one gave us a second glace as the five of us walked down the street. Most of us carried both handguns and rifles. We were 14-15 at the time.

7

It has certainly changed in the UK, as 12 year olds in the early 80s, me and my mates would go out every day with air rifles and pistols and muck about, shooting each other, streetlights, birds, the usual stuff - it’s what kids did. If we were caught, we’d have got a clipped ear from parents and if the police had caught us, we’d have got a good bollocking from them too.

These days, if Mrs Smith looks out of her window and sees some kids mucking about with a pistol, the local bobby won’t sidle up, confiscate it and give out a few slaps. No, when the call goes in, all hell breaks loose. There will be helicopters, ARVs, flak jackets, the works, regardless of who might be armed, child or not, it’s a Major Incident.

I certainly wouldn’t let my kids muck about with a black GAT gun like we did - not because they might hurt themselves, but because they may very well find themselves being targetted by screaming marksmen. Failure to obey immediately means a good chance of getting shot, and a surprised 12 yr old is likely to behave in an erratic manner…

In the OP, the scenario states that a man passes with a gun in the street. If I saw that, I’d be heading the other way, fast, because he obviously IS a criminal or mentally ill. Either way, there will soon be lots of guns and tension in that street, and someone may possibly get shot. It won’t be me! A legit gun owner simply wouldn’t carry his weapon because he felt like it, it’s drummed into him about gun security when he gets his Section 1 FAC.

The ensuing storm when the authorities react to gun reports is now well known, so anyone who is carrying obviously doesn’t care, they are obviously a danger.

IMHO, Mr Plod’s keen-ness to get his toys out and scramble a SWAT team has caused the public to be more disturbed by a sighting of a gun, rather than because they are concerned about guns per se. Plod can then use public attitude to tool up more officers, to get more excited about firearms incidents, and so the circle continues.

I did have a Section 1 FAC years ago, but gave it up, it was simply too much hassle to pursue a sport when people who have no idea what it entails were so keen to interfere, legislate and criminalise - all in knee-jerk reactions to avoidable tragedies. Ah well, they feel self-important, so who cares?

The thing is, little boys are all fascinated by guns…

8

I know the OP stipulates answers from the UK and Ireland only - but here comes a Yank anyway with the only cite of a study that roughly meets the other stipulations so far.

If you’d prefer to wait until someone from the UK finds one, please ignore the spoiler.

[spoiler] from Gun Culture and Symbolism Among U.K. and U.S. Women

[/spoiler]

9

It’s not necessarily a frightening or unusual thing in the UK. I see people carrying guns quite frequently - shotguns and .22 rifles in leather cases usually - in fact, someone stopped me and asked me directions to the gun shop the other day as I was walking to the train station.

The gun shop is here- about a quarter of a mile from my house.

The people I see carrying guns are always on their direct way to the shop, or back from it to their vehicles, not just wandering about.

10

[moderating]
Michael of Lucan, we like having thread titles that explain what the thread is about. For that reason, I’ve changed the title of your thread from “Irish and UK dopers only – seeking cite” to “Irish and UK dopers only – seeking cite [r.e. carrying guns].”
[/moderating]

11

I don’t know how old you are, but I’m 34 and I did all this stuff too, less than 20 years ago. I think you may be exaggerating a bit as to how much things have changed - I’m not sure that a kid with an air rifle would attract the whole SWAT treatment.

I (inadvertently, via a ricochet) shot my friend’s little brother in the leg with my air rifle. That prompted the end of our fun, as another of my friends was the son of the local policeman, and he (in a purely unofficial capacity) confiscated our rifles. The local bird population heaved a huge sigh of relief, no doubt.

12

Michael of Lucan, I understand that you’re writing about attitudes in the UK, but it seems as if you’re contrasting them to those in the U.S. (If I’m wrong, disregard the rest of this post.)

You’re seeking cites to prove that your average Brit, seeing a man carrying a gun down the street, “would find this weird, not just law-breaking. They would feel he was a danger to others because he was carrying a dangerous weapon. They would question his sanity if he was not a criminal. They would immediately inform the authorities that someone who was either a criminal or a mentally disordered person was carrying a gun on the street.” You think this is so because “[t]he US concept of right to bear arms is foreign to us,” and you add that “I can only find it in discussions of ‘odd things Americans do.’”

My contention is that your average American, seeing a man carrying a gun down the street, would find this weird, whether or not it was law-breaking in that particular jurisdiction. They would feel he was a danger to others because he was carrying a dangerous weapon. They might question his sanity if he was not a criminal. They might even, depending on the location, inform the authorities.

Other than at a shooting range or in the field with hunters, I’ve seen another civilian carrying a gun exactly once in my life. The man was a bodyguard for a famous singer who’d suffered a tragedy in the past—I understood completely why he had it, and I assumed it was properly registered and that he was trained to use it. Even so, the presence of a gun in a Manhattan office building freaked me out just a tad.

Echoing what Erdosain and Derleth said above, guns aren’t carried on the street all that often around here. (Dopers in Texas are free to disagree.)

13

I’m not in the UK, but if the OP is looking for hard cites on the subject, they could try the letters or editorial sections of one of the handful of UK Shooting magazines that still remain, or possibly the Letters To The Editor of a major newspaper.

Otherwise, I’m not sure how you’d actually find a proper reference for such an assertion without simply getting a sample of people from the UK to state their views on the matter and using them as primary sources.

14

Try it and find out. I’m 40, my air rifle was pretty basic, a BSA Airsporter. My friend’s kid has something that looks just like a sniper’s rifle, it’s camo painted and has a laser sight! Big difference, especially if you only glimpse someone carrying it.

When a call to the police is made, they don’t hear “there’s a kid with an air gun shooting my greenhouse glass, come and nick him” they just hear “GUN”. The only person authorised to decide it’s a kid with an airgun is a police Inspector, and he’s not going to make that call on the basis of a telephone description from a member of the public - standard procedure dictates he will deploy armed units, neutralise the suspect, then decide if the incident is an example of a dangerous criminal foiled, or a false alarm.

Only a sensible bobby who sees the little tyke with his airgun and legs after him might treat the incident proportionally, but only if he doesn’t radio it in. A non firearms trained officer is not allowed to decide that a kid is only carrying an airgun, and recent cases of kids shooting other kids with REAL guns in Manchester and London show that some may be properly tooled up.

Enough people have been subjected to ARV roadblocks when dicking about with water pistols, and there was the highly publicised case of the chap who got drilled by police who had received a report he was carrying a sawn-off shotgun. He had a table leg in a bag (and was shot so many times he even had entry wounds in the soles of his feet).
Derrick Bird’s rampage and Raoul Moat’s last stand have made the police very sensitive about firearms, no Inspector is going to find himself interviewed on TV, asked “Why didn’t you stop him when the first 999 call went in?”

Trust me, these days, if Mr Plod thinks you have a gun, he doesn’t ask nicely!

15

I’m from the UK, and until this thread I’d never considered how I’d react to seeing someone carrying a gun. I’ve never seen a civilian with one. I can’t imagine there would be many cites available, as I can’t see the reason to do a survey on these attitudes.

I live in Nottingham, so it’s not like there’s a shortage of guns about, although less now than ten years ago, but I doubt anyone carries them openly.

16

If what you’re looking is my personal opinion - hailing from small towns in the southern England and cities like London and Bristol - I’d say it would widely be considered strange and frightening for someone to be walking down the street carrying any type of gun, either open or concealed, unless there was some very obvious reason like it was a hunting rifle near a common hunting area in the countryside. Not only is it basically illegal to carry a gun but it’s illegal to carry any sort of offensive weapon for self-defense purposes - if police catch you with a baseball bat in your car and you tell them it’s for self-defence, they’ll arrest you (that happened to someone I know), and most people wouldn’t think that was very strange. Pistols are flat-out illegal - you can’t even shoot them in firing ranges. Even the police don’t generally carry guns.

There’s no concept of the ‘right to bear arms’ and there’s none of the linkage between guns and patriotism/frontier spirit/freedom and so on that there is in the States. It’s not necessarily just a ‘culture’ thing: the fact that pistols are illegal in any context obviously means that if someone is carrying a pistol, they’re much more likely to genuinely be dangerous than in the States. Over there it could just be some harmless regular guy who bought it at the local gun store. Over here you’d instantly think - how the hell did they get that? But there is certainly an element of culture to it as well. When the Dunblane school shootings happened popular sentiment swung firmly towards tightening gun restrictions. I have to say people here find it genuinely astonishing when there’s a school shooting tragedy in the US and you see people on TV arguing, in all seriousness, that “if only more people in the school had been carrying guns this wouldn’t have happened…”. I’d say that’s a strand of thinking that simply doesn’t exist in the UK.

17

I do not believe this is correct. Plenty of people can be armed. For example, some politicians in Northern Ireland were allowed to carry guns (my search-fu is lacking here, alas). As are off-duty police in Northern Ireland. Farmers and vets may also carry firearms for the purposes of pest control and putting down animals.

As casdave’s cite noted, the details are complex, but I think your starting point is false.

18

This may be true but it’s fairly pedantic. On the UK mainland the only people allowed to carry a handgun would be those with a special license for pest control or on-duty armed police response units in uniform. That’s not “plenty of people” - for practical purposes, it’s almost no one. Even a pest control license does not allow you to walk around armed, there has to be a good reason why you’re carrying it at that exact moment. Hunting rifles and shotguns can be legal but the same thing applies - even if you have a license for them you can’t just walk around the street carrying it because you feel like it.

Vanishingly rare exceptions aside, if you see someone walking through the streets of London or Edinburgh carrying a gun, that’s illegal. If it’s a handgun, the gun itself will be illegal.