Examination of Witness (Questions 87 -
99)
TUESDAY 7 DECEMBER 1999
MR COLIN
GREENWOOD
Chairman: Good morning, Mr Greenwood. I am sorry
for the delay, but, as you know, we were late starting. Mr Winnick.
Mr Winnick
87. May I begin, Mr Greenwood, by thanking you
for your lengthy but very informative paper, which you must have
taken a tremendous amount of trouble to produce, and I, for one,
and I am sure the same is true of my colleagues, am grateful to
you. You, Mr Greenwood, take the view that is expressed on page
32, Part I, that the real problems and the real danger to society
remain unaddressed, regarding firearms; what are these real problems
to which you refer?
(Mr Greenwood) I think, Sir, they have
been touched on but not dealt with. The fact is that crime is
committed with illegally-held firearms, almost exclusively, and
we can demonstrate that with the figures that the Home Office
have finally produced about homicide, which show that legally-held
firearms are used in only a very small proportion of domestic
homicides, they are never used in gang warfare, we can also conclude
that they are never used in robbery, because robbery is, as it
were, a graduate offence. There have been an awful lot of studies,
people move to robbery, you do not start a criminal career by
committing an armed robbery at a bank, you graduate to that; by
the time you get to that point you are a prohibited person. It
follows that the vast majority of firearms used in robbery are
illegally-held firearms, and their availability is well demonstrated,
when you begin to look at some of the sources of firearms used
in crime. I do not actually mention it, but it occurred to me,
listening to the other evidence, many years ago Mr McVicar was
on the run from Durham Gaol, he is now a criminologist, of course,
and a respectable person; whilst he was on the run he earned his
living as a gun-minder, he had 90 firearms when he was arrested
and he was hiring them out for other people to use in crime. None
of those firearms were or ever had been legally held. An Inspector
in the Metropolitan Police did a survey of firearms recovered
after robbery, went through to the laboratory, looked at each
firearm, looked at all the records; none of them had been legally
held. So the effect which further legislation would have on public
safety is minute.
88. Hamilton did have a legal certificate, and
which you deal with, but then, of course, you refute the argument
that the laws which have since been passed were necessary after
Dunblane?
(Mr Greenwood) I say, very clearly, Sir, that the
laws that then existed were treated in the most cavalier fashion
by Central Scotland Police. I have produced for you the evidence[1];
now, clearly, I am not in a position to re-interview all the witnesses.
It was not addressed by Lord Cullen, but Hamilton applied for
a firearms certificate on the basis of membership of a club; he
was never a member of that club, and if he had been that club
was not a club authorised to use the type of weapon which he acquired.
And he did that systematically, time after time after time.
Chairman
89. Was it never picked up?
(Mr Greenwood) It was never picked up by the police,
and never picked up by Lord Cullen. Cullen talks, "Oh, at
this time he was probably a member of such and such a club, and
might have been a member..." For a person to be granted a
firearms certificate for target-shooting, it is normal to have
to prove that you are an active member of a particular club which
is authorised to use that class of weapon; it was not done at
all, as far as the evidence shows, none of that was ever done.
He was given a .270 stalking rifle when he was not a member of
a club which used those rifles; he was given full-bore pistols,
on the basis of being a member of a club which used a range under
a police station, which was certified only for .22 pistols. There
is a massive area of the Cullen Inquiry about which there is something
seriously wrong. If a person like Hamilton gets the idea that
he can do what he wants, he will get any sort of firearm he asks
for, we start on step one of the progress towards that tragedy.
Mr Winnick
90. You refer to, and use the word more than
once, "hysteria", Mr Greenwood, as being the public
and parliamentary reaction after the terrible tragedy at Dunblane.
Do you really think the word "hysteria" is justified?
(Mr Greenwood) Yes, I do; because a problem was exposed,
not for the first time—
91. Exposed, or exploited?
(Mr Greenwood) Exposed; the problem was exposed by
the tragedy itself, not for the first time. There was an immediate
assumption that the solution lay in an inanimate object, and it
was impossible to get anybody, and, with great respect, I have
to say, politicians in particular, to look rationally, it was
impossible to get Lord Cullen to look rationally, at what I believed
to be the most important aspect. Because this sort of tragedy
appears to be a new phenomenon, probably dating from the 1960s;
such incidents before that are so rare, there was one in New Zealand
in 1949, which is explicable, they are so rare as to be something
that you could not put a handle on. Now, they have become so common.
Nobody has bothered, nobody has bothered to ask why this has become
a problem, why have we now got the phenomenon of the amok killer,
the single-incident mass killer, not just in this country, not
just in America, all over the world; and there are some answers
which bear on what was being said about police intelligence, it
is very incomplete. And I do not advance it as an answer, but
one of the things common to all these killers, that I have looked
at, is a peculiar relationship with the mother; they are loners,
and it is not just one or two of them, it is most of them. Now
I am not suggesting that everybody who has a peculiar relationship
with his mother is going to be a mass killer, but it does point
out, to me, that a proper scientific study of the problem would
isolate factors that the police should be looking at when they
are granting firearm certificates or shotgun certificates. It
is not beyond the bound of possibility to say not that we could
have identified Hamilton in advance, or Ryan, or any of the others,
but that we could have been provided with some sort of framework;
nobody has even tried to do that. I think that is the real problem.
92. Does that mean, Mr Greenwood, that you are
in favour of greater use of intelligence systems, within and between
police forces, to check on the suitability of applicants?
(Mr Greenwood) I would be in favour of the introduction
of intelligence systems.
93. You would be?
(Mr Greenwood) Well, if we look, in 1991, a Superintendent
from Devon and Cornwall did a study, and we have heard mention
about the renewal period, it has been suggested that it should
be taken back down from five to three; that assumes that people
become criminal, or insane, at regular, three-yearly or five-yearly
intervals, that certainly cannot be true. Both Campbell Beattie
and Her Majesty's Inspector of Constabulary checked up, the HMI
found that in 12 police forces he inspected one of them had a
system where a person arrested for robbery was notified to the
firearms department; the rest of them just allow the system to
continue that the officer in the case will probably remember.
Probably more important still, legally-held firearms are used
mostly in domestic homicide, and that sort of crime, man shoots
his wife, it usually is the man who shoots his wife but not always,
women have more subtle methods.
Mr Howarth
94. Name them?
(Mr Greenwood) I dare not, Sir. No domestic killing
is an isolated incident. There has been an awful lot of research,
again, in this field; it starts with domestic disputes, it then
develops to something more than that. There is no system for reporting
these incidents to the firearms department. The number of people
with whom the firearms department deal who are "suspect"
is minute, one or two in each department, who might be borderline
cases, but there is no system for passing through this intelligence
to one central point in relation to the holding of firearms so
that it can be analysed by somebody who, hopefully, has done some
research into what the problem is; because everybody who falls
out with his wife is not going to kill her next.
Mr Winnick
95. Mr Greenwood, you have, of course, a close
interest in firearms, you were, in fact, an adviser, were you
not, to a previous Home Affairs Committee?
(Mr Greenwood) I was, Sir.
96. And for 16 years you were the editor, am
I not right, of Guns Review?
(Mr Greenwood) That is correct.
97. And would I be right in saying, and looking,
for example, on page 25 of Part II of your very informative paper,
you seem to come to the view that the imposition of controls on
firearms is undesirable; paragraph 94: "There has yet to
be a single follow-up study" sentence? Would that not indicate
that, by and large, with some exceptions, as you have just indicated,
on checking up on applicants, you believe that the imposition
of controls, the more recent after Dunblane, and before, served
no really useful public service?
(Mr Greenwood) The imposition of controls, in the
manner that they have been imposed in this country, by this Parliament,
has been largely a waste of time, because—
98. I am sorry to interrupt; not just the more
recent legislation but before as well?
(Mr Greenwood) There has been no logical legislation
on firearms; every piece of legislation has been in the immediate
aftermath of some tragedy or other, at a time when thinking was
not the top priority. And so I look at the figures for all crimes,
I look at the system of controls, I look at the forced reduction
in the number of people permitted to shoot, and if you care to
do a graph of something like armed robbery, and numbers of firearm
and shotgun certificates, you will see they produce a cross; as
the number of legitimate firearms owners goes down, the use of
firearms in crime goes up, and the two things are not correlated
in any shape or form. And, if you look at the figures for robbery,
we have seen what can be done, because it has been done by Commander
Penrose and the crime squads, and so on, who, since 1993, have
produced a massive reduction in the use of firearms in robbery,
not by imposing further controls but by a campaign of targeting
the criminals who were using firearms. And it is the only time
this century that the use of firearms in crime has fallen, and
the figure that was quoted over here, of a 2.5 per cent reduction
in the use of pistols in crime, is merely a continuum of that
reduction and not in any way related to the 1997 Act.
99. But your philosophical viewpoint, Mr Greenwood,
which you have explained in your paper, a historical study of
firearms, is that, basically, there is a right of people, private
individuals, to hold firearms?
(Mr Greenwood) You misread what I have said was the
case.
1 Not printed. Back
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