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Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Janet Fookes): Order. Time is up.

7 pm

Mr. Robert G. Hughes (Harrow, West): I warmly welcome the Bill and the extent to which my right hon. and learned Friend the Home Secretary has acted on the issue of handgun control. I also pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland for the part that he has played in ensuring that the Government have come as far as they have. We should be quite clear about the fact that the Bill is not a knee-jerk reaction by the Government. The Cullen inquiry was conducted over many months, and now, after considered reflection, the Bill has been introduced and we are debating it, after which hon. Members will have to decide what will happen.

Although I welcome the Bill and the Government's actions, I firmly believe--from some of the noises that have been made on the Conservative Benches, some hon. Members believe differently--that there is no distinction between .22 calibre weapons and other handguns. I plan to table an amendment to the Bill in Committee which, if selected, would propose to ban all handguns.

The question that we must ask is: what will be the effect of legislation on .22 shooting and gun ownership? Is it safe to allow .22s to be kept in the manner proposed in the Bill? I have heard two versions--both from Ministers, so at least one version must be right--of what will happen. The first possibility is that compensation will be used by target shooters to buy a .22, and therefore the number of people with .22s will increase greatly.

The second possibility is that .22 target shooting will not prove popular with target shooters--as my local target shooters have told me--and the restrictions will be so rigorous that the sport will disappear. Both outcomes cannot happen.

It would be unacceptable if the first possibility were to happen, and we ended up with more .22s and a return to the gun culture that many of us would like to be abolished in the United Kingdom. If the second possibility is more likely, perhaps we should--as the hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw) said--be a bit more honest and say at the outset that we will ban .22s.

The issue is not simply a matter of licensing. I have heard Conservative Members in this debate say--from a sedentary position or by intervening--that Dunblane was the fault of Central Scotland police and an example of the licensing system not being operated properly. Of course there were faults in the licensing system, but the Cullen report states, time and again, that no licensing system

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could stop another Thomas Hamilton. Very helpfully, the British Shooting Sports Council made it clear that it agrees with that statement. It said:

"no matter what system of checks and paperwork is maintained in such circumstances, it would be a simple matter indeed for a shooter intent in recovering his guns to enter a competition, provide evidence to his club secretary that he had done so, recover possession of his complete gun together with ammunition for it, and perpetrate an outrage".

So everyone is agreed that it is not merely a matter of licensing, and that we must go further.

If we are to consider allowing .22s to be kept under the conditions set out by the Government, we should, first, consider those weapons. We must be clear that the .22 is the chosen weapon of Mossad, the Special Air Services and, allegedly, of professional assassins. Moreover, the shooters' lobby--to which I am again grateful--praised .22s as being better, easier to use and equally lethal.

Page 117 of the Cullen report states:

"It should not be supposed that .22 rimfire cannot be as lethal as other ammunition. The BSSC pointed out that at point-blank range and aimed at vital parts of the body .22 cartridges would be as lethal as 9 mm."

At the bottom of the page, it states:

"The BSSC pointed out that due to the lower recoil forces involved in .22 rimfire it was possible to fire a greater number of controlled and carefully aimed shoots in a given space of time than was possible with centrefire."

So we cannot rely on the fact that those weapons are safe.

Those weapons were not safe for Mr. Duncan Allman, a father of three who was shot at his gun club, where he was acting as the range officer. Not one proposal in the Bill would have done anything to save him. Perhaps someone should explain to the families of Robert Kennedy, Yitzhak Rabin or Ronald Reagan--who was nearly killed with a .22--that .22s are safe. Perhaps someone should explain it to James Brady, who was disabled and nearly killed by a .22. In my judgment, and in the judgment of the shooting fraternity, .22s are equally lethal, and they should be banned.

I share the view expressed by hon. Members on both sides of the House that, in general, target shooters are reasonable people who simply want to go about their law-abiding activity of shooting at targets. I have spoken to many shooters in my constituency and have visited the gun clubs that some of them use. I pay tribute to their reasonable approach in their discussions with me, even after I came to the view that we should ban their sport. I must agree with the hon. Member for Blackburn, however, that the BSSC has done nothing to help the case of shooters; in fact, shooters have been let down very badly by the BSSC. At paragraph 9.110 of his report, Lord Cullen states:

"throughout the Inquiry the BSSC who acted as the umbrella body representing the interests of the shooting community at large were opposed in principle to any restriction on the availability of handguns; and objected not merely to the suggestion of one kind of ban or another but also . . . to various measures which stopped short of a ban."

We have seen that type of belligerence and negative attitude in this debate.

Some aspects of the campaign by shooting organisations should be rejected by the House, and hon. Members who support shooting organisations in this

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debate should make it clear that they distance themselves from those aspects. The action against Ann Pearston, from the Snowdrop campaign, has been an absolute disgrace. She became involved in that campaign, although she had never been involved in politics before. In a whispering campaign by shooters, she has been accused of being a poll tax evader, of being at Greenham common and of raising money for the IRA. All those allegations are false, but no apology has ever been given or statement withdrawn by the shooters. The Dunblane parents--my God, one would have thought that they had suffered enough losing children who were barely more than babies--have been described by the National Pistol Association as "the enemy". What a disgrace. They have received hate mail from shooters for a long time.

Mr. John Carlisle: Will my hon. Friend give way?

Mr. Hughes: I shall be happy to take an intervention when I have finished this point.

Is it not a disgrace that the people who lost their children have had to have their mail diverted so that others can sift it before they see it?

Mr. Carlisle: Perhaps my hon. Friend ought to know that after the comments that I made--I hope to catch your eye later and refer to them, Madam Deputy Speaker--I received hate mail and death threats. I have received some extraordinary letters from people threatening my life. The traffic is not all one way. We should not be trading emotions, but my hon. Friend ought to know the facts from the other side.

Mr. Hughes: Naturally, I deplore what has happened to my hon. Friend as well, but Mr. Marcus Harrison, who has already been mentioned in the debate, clearly does not deplore what has happened and regards such behaviour as merely part of the rough and tumble of the campaign.

The Dunblane parents have been accused of coercing children to sign the petition and have been libelled as having misused council facilities. On the day on which they first saw the Cullen report, they received a picture of all of them cut out of a newspaper with the word "Bastard" written across it. What sort of people are we dealing with?

We are dealing with public policy in the proper way. This way of legislating has a longer history than the hon. Member for Blackburn suggested. There are historical precedents after incidents such as the Peterloo riots for the House deciding to change public policy because of what has happened. We have that responsibility and I hope that we shall exercise it by banning all handguns.

7.11 pm

Mr. Chris Mullin (Sunderland, South): It is not hard to understand why there has to be a three-line Whip for Conservatives tonight. With the exceptions of the hon. Members for Harrow, West (Mr. Hughes) and for Harrow, East (Mr. Dykes) and one or two others, the Conservatives are clearly opposed to the Bill.

I welcome the Bill as a first step, albeit an inadequate one, towards limiting the enormous growth of weapons in private hands. The ban on handguns, however, does not go far enough--it should be total. I particularly welcome the ban on mail order weapons.

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Some have argued that the Bill is a panic response to a single event and is therefore bound to be botched. I agree that it is a panic response to a single event, but the event that caused the panic that gave rise to the Bill was not the tragic massacre at Dunblane; it was the public reaction to the report produced at the beginning of August by the Home Secretary's hon. Friends on the Home Affairs Select Committee. I strongly suspect that, until that time, the Home Secretary had hoped to get away with no more than a little tinkering. He had hoped that his hon. Friends on the Select Committee would provide cover for that minimalist approach. Only when he saw the public reaction to the report did he decide to act. Within a few hours of the publication of the majority report, anonymous Home Office briefers were already trying to draw a little distance between the Government and Conservative members of the Select Committee.

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