It’s time to decommission the other lethal weapons: guns and cars

THERE are two sorts of lethal weapons causing untold havoc right now: guns and cars. And it’s time we began to see them in the same light. What that means is simple.

Cars are lethal weapons in the hands of uninsured or drunk drivers, and guns are lethal no matter whose hands they’re in. It’s time we began to take whatever action is necessary to get these lethal weapons off our streets.

In the late 1990s I spoke to a senior member of what was then the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). He was on the point of retirement, and there was one thing, he said, he was curious about. He was reasonably confident that many of the people (on both sides of the community) who had previously been involved in terrorism would end up “going straight”.

Little by little, he felt, many of them would want to get on with living ordinary lives. But not all. And that was where he saw a potential contrast developing between Northern Ireland and the rest of the island.

“Up here,” he said, “we have guys with guns who are going to get involved with crime and drugs. Down there, you have a lot of guys who are already involved with crime and drugs, and they’re going to start getting guns. I’m wondering which is going to be worse.”

Well, we’ve only had to wait a few years to find out, haven’t we? It’s no longer an exaggeration to say we are now facing a situation where whole communities are terrorised by guns, where human life has become incredibly cheap, and where the corrosion of hard drugs has resulted in a wave of terror. Of course, it doesn’t affect everywhere to the same extent - but the emergence of a hard core of criminals who are willing to stop at nothing must surely be a cause of the deepest anxiety for us all.

Many of them aren’t even what you would call trained or hardened criminals. They’re just young people, almost all young men, who live lives of total alienation, fuelled by drugs and unable to take possession of any of the values that underpin a healthy approach to their own community. There are bigger issues there, issues that won’t easily respond to simplistic approaches. And there are even younger people, children mostly, who can be prevented from heading in that direction, and enabled to make different and better choices.

But if the cancer of guns isn’t addressed now, and seriously addressed, it will spread throughout the entire community. Like any cancer, it needs radical treatment.

Side by side with the increasingly cancerous nature of a growing gun culture, we are now accustoming ourselves on a daily basis to news reports about ever-increasing numbers of people dying on our roads.

The number of lives cut short has reached proportions where we have become almost immune to the news reports, unless the casualties run to four or five. And apart from those who die, anyone who has ever experienced the terrible consequences for people of, say, a brain injury caused by a car crash, knows that the result of the carnage on our roads goes far beyond even the large and growing number of deaths we have seen.

What’s most worrying at one level is that those in a position to know have seen this coming for some time, and yet the policy response has been pathetically weak.

Never mind all the rhetoric we’ve heard in the last week or so about new laws and tougher sentencing. Never mind the sound of Government leaders and ministers pretending they’re really members of the opposition. Never mind the utter incoherence and insincerity of a response that keeps pretending the problem is someone else’s. It’s not the judges’ problem. It’s not an issue of sentencing. It’s not that we need more laws. It’s much more simple than any of those things.

The hard fact is that we know, and have known for a long time, that we need more police on the streets, and little or nothing has been done about it. And if anyone seriously thinks that the recruitment of a few hundred ill-trained reservists is going to make a dent in that problem, they have another think coming.

Because policing is a 24-hour a day, seven days a week activity, it needs five new recruits to put one extra policeman on our streets. And on the streets is where we need them, integrated into communities, capable of spotting danger as it develops.

LAW is one thing, enforcement is another. If all the laws on the statute book were enforced, we’d have no uninsured drivers; no one being killed by drunks driving too fast; no one in a position to produce a gun and casually shoot down innocent partygoers; no one able to deal drugs on street corners with impunity; no one able to shoot-up in broad daylight in our capital city and elsewhere. We have laws for all of that, and lots more besides, and yet hundreds - yes, hundreds - of people are being killed, and hundreds of other lives destroyed.

There are two things we do really need to think about doing, and they may require legislation, or even a constitutional amendment. Both will also involve that dirty word - amnesty.

The Government should announce a one-month amnesty on uninsured cars, and a one-month amnesty on guns.

In both cases, people should be given the chance to get their cars properly insured and to hand in any weapons they have. The dual amnesty needs to be announced and as widely publicised as possible. And if necessary, we need to enhance the guns amnesty by putting a bounty in place - €1,000 for every gun handed in would be a small price to pay.

Once the month is up, we need to introduce the most draconian penalties possible for possession of a gun.

Give people a choice now. Once the month is up, if you’re found in possession of a gun, you go to jail. Full stop. There will be no need for anyone to prove you were in possession of the gun for some unlawful purpose, no need for anyone to associate the gun with the commission of a crime.

Guns are deadly weapons, and their use must be eliminated.

Once the month is up, anyone found in possession of an uninsured car, or found drunk in charge of a car, should lose it - forever - and in addition to whatever other penalty may be imposed. Mandatory confiscation of cars that are uninsured is no different from taking a lethal weapon from the hands of someone likely to do terrible damage with it.

Taking a car away from someone who is willing to drive while over the limit is the same as taking a gun away from someone unable to place any real value on human life.

We spent years trying to decommission paramilitary weapons. For most people, the peace process couldn’t be seen as secure until guns and Semtex were no longer part of the equation. It’s now time to start decommissioning the other lethal weapons that are doing so much harm to our community.