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Stricter gun control is again top of the news. With the assassination of a small town mayor at the country’s main airport and arbitrary gunfire during the New Year carousing, people are crying for action once and for all. Howling loudest is the National Police. But it is the wrong group to call for stiffer rules on firearm licensing or penalties for shootings. For, it’s like the loafer lecturing officemates against sloth. There are enough gun controls. Congress enacted only last July stricter screening for gun ownership, as the PNP cut back on permits to carry. What’s needed is law enforcement -- the malingering PNP’s job.
The PNP supposedly is better trained and equipped than ever. Yet it hasn’t solved the 2013 New Year’s Eve killing of a little girl by nearby gunfire in Caloocan City, or the maiming of two lads elsewhere. This is a far cry from the investigation of similar homicides in the ‘70s in Cavite and in 2005 in Manila by drunken revelers firing in the air. It may have taken a decade to jail the retired soldier whose bullet killed a neighbor in the first instance, but they got him nonetheless. In the second, diligent lab and fieldwork pinpointed the barangay officer whose indiscriminate shot hit a sleeping girl in the head. In the wake of the Caloocan killing of seven-year-old Stephanie Nicole Ella, city and national detectives joined forces, and the PNP bragged about its central crime lab in Camp Crame. The case remains unclosed. The sleuths proved impotent, and the ballistics repository exposed to be dismally lacking because its funds looted by superiors. This is in spite of annual licensing, at about P5,500 apiece for a million private firearms, being one of the state’s biggest revenue earners.
The PNP needs to learn that stricter gun laws do not necessarily lessen violent crimes. Australia in 1997 bought back and destroyed more than 630,000 private guns, for an astounding P500 million. A decade later homicides were found to have dropped nine percent, and armed robbery 0.3 percent. Experts attributed it to the deterrent effect of trebled crime solving. In the same period, assaults rose 40 percent, and sexual assaults 20 percent.
Britain imposed stricter gun controls half a century ahead. Yet it suffers frequent massacres by crazed or terroristic unlicensed gunmen using automatic rifles. Criminologists have noted that, in almost all cases, the killers were able to roam the streets for hours, shooting at will un-accosted, because civilians and most cops were unarmed.
Figures elsewhere disprove the ability of controls to reduce gun-related crimes. In Russia where 4,000 in every 100,000 adults have guns, the murder rate in the 1990s was 20.52 per 100,000. In Finland in the same period the gun ownership rate was 39,000 per 100,000; murder was 1.98 per 100,000.
Quick arrests of gunmen deter shootings. American gun owners invoke a constitutional right to bear arms. A citizen of age can purchase as many long and short firearms as he wishes, so long as registered. By law of averages there should be hourly massacres by licensed but psychotic gunmen. There aren’t, because US cops always get their man within hours.
The issue is focus, which the PNP lacks. To prevent indiscriminate firing by policemen, the brass makes a show each New Year of taping the muzzle of official firearms. Yet it’s an open secret that most city cops possess unlicensed personal guns. Such loose firearms — about 400,000 in police and civilian hands — are the ones fired in New Year revelry or daily killings. Despite the PNP’s spotty files, licensed firearm holders would think twice to shoot unless in extreme self-defense. For, their expensive guns would be confiscated, with no chance of retrieval even if acquitted, to end up in the confiscator’s collection. That’s how loose forearms proliferate.
This New Year’s Eve the PNP requested the Armed Forces too to control soldiers’ random firing. That’s only for show. Generals condone as too light such dangerous acts by subordinates. Besides, the Army refuses to register its half-million firearms with the PNP, even if confidentially. This year the PNP also ordered private security agencies to tape their 350,000 or so licensed firearms. Yet, on record, most such agencies are owned or run by retired cops, all masters of maintaining secret arsenals. If the PNP can’t stop street urchins from exploding firecrackers, what more adults firing guns.
The PNP has failed as well to curb the weekly assassinations by gunmen on motorcycles. The modus operandi has acquired an official name — “R-I-T” (riding-in-tandem) — yet the brass has not seen it fit to profile the assassins. At first they mostly came from Abra, Batangas, and Masbate, targeting the hirers’ political or business rivals. With police inability to stop them, the murderers-for-hire have proliferated, to prey on media critics or petty rival suitors, for as low as P2,000 and a bottle of gin.
The cops have failed as well to reduce armed robberies inside malls. This is despite the frisking at entrances by security guards. So what does the PNP propose after the Martillo (Hammer) Gang smashed jewelry shop glass counters inside yet another mall last week? This: all shoppers shall herewith be forbidden from wearing fashionable dark glasses or baseball caps.
Meantime, the number of loose firearms increases each year. For, the PNP has not made any serious effort to flush them out. Instead, through ever-harsher rules to renew licenses and permits to carry, it is discouraging registration by new gun purchasers.
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