Hands up

The Daily Post reports that in just the first three months of 2009, air weapons were used in two armed robberies in North Wales and a threat to kill. Last year an attacker used an airgun to threaten a woman in a sexual assault, and in another incident a BB gun was involved in a conspiracy to commit murder. The RSPCA said the weapons were also being used to inflict shocking injuries on animals each year.

One teenage victim has called for the weapons to be banned.

Guns are an emotive target, and, once again, the sound bite-hungry media suggest banning is the answer. But is banning anything the answer to controlling excess?

When hand guns were banned, following the Dunblane incident, many felt relieved, yet gun crime has risen inexorably, even faster than before guns were banned. In fact, gun crime rose by an astonishing 46% in the two years following the ban. The big problem is that banning something only affects the law-abiding. It means the decent folk - the vast majority - can't get hold of a gun, but those who use them with nefarious intent have no trouble. In most inner-city areas it's easier to buy a gun than car insurance, although we've never thought getting decent car insurance was that easy. However, that's another story.

In North Wales, a very large number of people hold firearms certificates, yet Gun crime here is way below that in any of the big cities, even accounted for on a per-head basis. So how do we stop the incidents mentioned above?

Once again, although it's becoming a predictable anthem, we're down to upbringing. Boys love guns. They love guns because they see so much about guns on the TV and in the cinema. Studies in the US suggest it's because so many teenagers feel disenfranchised - impotent and powerless in their society. Guns equate to power, power buys them the right to belong to a gang and gangs make them feel valued and important. It's probably impractical to ban gangs, teenagers or boys under the age of 30, despite what some might wish, so we're back to looking at the causes, rather than the symptoms. It won't come as a seismic shock to anyone to discover that the majority of boys who 'go off the rails' lack a stable family background. In other words, they almost always don't have a father who's around and they do have a mother whose idea of decent care is to provide two television sets and a spare ashtray. Or, put more accurately, they have a biological female whose competence in raising a family is on a par with Herod's child-minding skills.

Social workers are limited in what they can do, and there's even an argument that by supporting weak and inadequate parents they perpetuate the problems for society, although the recent Baby P case has meant that both the Judiciary and the social agencies are taking a lot more kids into care. But the real issue remains: when are we, as a society, going to start looking at the whole idea of becoming a parent as something rather more important than a one night, often inebriated, stand?