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The 1972 Mckay Report on Firearms Control
Posted: Mon Apr 20, 2015 8:56 am
by Gaz
I have just received a copy of the above document in the post after a 7-month paperwork battle with the Home Office.
It's a 2" thick pile of double-sided photocopied paper and it's going to take me about a week to read, let alone scan, digitise, OCR and then publish online.
Anyone on here interested in its contents? I suspect Sim and IainWR might be.
Colin Greenwood had this to say about the McKay Report:
38. In December 1970, HM Chief Inspector of Constabulary, Sir John McKay, was formally asked to review the current law on firearms. He set up a working group consisting of chief officers of police, Scottish Office and Home Office officials. Though there were some meetings of sub groups with representatives of shooting organisations, there was no real consultation and the entire proceedings were confidential.
39. Although the study was formally authorised in December 1970, preparatory work must have been going on for at least a year prior to that because the Staff Officer to HM Chief Inspector of Constabulary visited Cambridge in the autumn of 1969 seeking information about research being conducted by a senior police officer and offering to share available information. He was briefed on the progress of the research and when it became clear that the study raised doubts about the effectiveness and efficiency of the system all contact was cut off and no liaison took place. The researcher concluded that the Working Party was not interested in information which did not conform to its pre-determined results.
40. The McKay report was produced in September 1972, but has never been made public. It is known, however, that the first of 70 conclusions reached in a summary of the report was that a reduction in the number of firearms in private hands was a desirable end in itself. The report contained no evidence to justify this conclusion.
edit to add:
This is conclusion number 1 from the report:
1. We are satisfied that the holding of firearms by private individuals does contribute to crime committed with firearms; and we concluded that a reduction in the number of firearms in private hands is therefore a desirable end in itself.
Re: The 1972 Mckay Report on Firearms Control
Posted: Mon Apr 20, 2015 10:20 am
by IsleShoot
Yes please.
Op Solitare is coming to town soon and it'd be good to have a copy of the report to wave at C.C. Marsh.
Re: The 1972 Mckay Report on Firearms Control
Posted: Mon Apr 20, 2015 10:46 am
by 20series
Gaz
Do you have any figures on how firearms incidents in a given year, and how many of those involved legally owned items??
Alan
Re: The 1972 Mckay Report on Firearms Control
Posted: Mon Apr 20, 2015 10:55 am
by saddler
20series wrote:Gaz
Do you have any figures on how firearms incidents in a given year, and how many of those involved legally owned items??
Alan
Have you got a copy of Greenwood's book?
Lots of such data in that
Re: The 1972 Mckay Report on Firearms Control
Posted: Mon Apr 20, 2015 12:13 pm
by Racalman
Me too please.
If you need a hand with digitisation I have a scanner with document feeder.
Re: The 1972 Mckay Report on Firearms Control
Posted: Mon Apr 20, 2015 12:18 pm
by Sim G
The elusive McKay report!! Nicely done.... As rare as rocking horse poo....
Re: The 1972 Mckay Report on Firearms Control
Posted: Mon Apr 20, 2015 12:28 pm
by saddler
Sim G wrote:The elusive McKay report!! Nicely done.... As rare as rocking horse poo....
...and less valid than horse poo, as at least the latter can be used as fertiliser
Re: The 1972 Mckay Report on Firearms Control
Posted: Mon Apr 20, 2015 12:34 pm
by Chuck
Has it been redacted to any great degree GAZ.
Well done!
Re: The 1972 Mckay Report on Firearms Control
Posted: Mon Apr 20, 2015 2:15 pm
by Gaz
20series wrote:Gaz
Do you have any figures on how firearms incidents in a given year, and how many of those involved legally owned items??
Alan
Nobody does. The Home Office deliberately muddy the waters and don't count legally owned firearms separately in crime stats. Shotguns and handguns are broken out separately from the main mass of firearms crime figures but, again, are not broken down by legally owned or otherwise.
Ages ago I did ask a police force whether a firearm used in a particular crime was lawfully held. They couldn't answer me, they said, because they didn't collect that data and would instead have to reverse-engineer an answer by locating the gun from that crime in their evidence storage area, reading off the serial number and then running that through the NFLMS computer and seeing if anything came back.
Quite simply, the police are not ordered to record whether a gun involved in a crime is lawfully owned or not. That helps muddle the picture and make it easier for politicians to claim that crackdowns on lawful ownership improve gun crime stats when we know (but can't prove empirically) that that's absolutely not the case.
Chuck - so far I haven't seen any redactions at all. I think it's the whole document.
Re: The 1972 Mckay Report on Firearms Control
Posted: Mon Apr 20, 2015 7:00 pm
by Strangely Brown
Was this the report that was known as a "Green Paper" at the time, which then led to the HBSA being formed in 1973?