How can we prevent gun crime in the UK?

I have sent this to my MP.


House of Commons
London SW1A 0AA




Psychological profiling for Gun Licence owners

While we in Britain have a low incidence of gun crime due to strict licensing laws, the tragedy in Newtown Connecticut should make us ask whether we can make ourselves even safer.

Mass murderers of the kind who acted in Newtown have been studied by forensic psychiatrists, and they have a well-recognised psychological profile called the “pseudocommando”. The term was coined by Dr Park Dietz in 1986, and the concept has endured since then. Traits include the typical male, loner, preoccupied with firearms, paranoid, bearing grudges, powerless, insignificant, a student of other mass killings, and capable of meticulous planning.

Now psychology may not be a precise science, but it certainly is capable of putting together a questionnaire. Salient questions can be gathered onto a couple of pages of A4, and gun licence holders and new applicants can be required to fill them in. In order to check against false entries, licence holders and applicants will have to gather a few - say 5 - friends and neighbours together to confirm their assessment of him. The process of gathering supportive backers will place a significant block in the way of potential mass murderer among the gun license applicants, since they tend to be loners.

Of course, potential killers could get illegal guns. But once the police know of their interest in getting guns, they could pay random house visits, with a sniffer dog who can tell us if there is any ammunition in the premises.

Libertarians might object that this is an invasion of liberty. It is a decision: should the police invade the liberty of potential mass murderers every so often, or would we rather put up with occasional periods of national upset because a number of innocent people have been slaughtered?

I would be very grateful if you would put this proposition to the Minister responsible.

Many thanks

With best wishes for a peaceful Christmas

UK economy: stimulus needed. Osborne or rational?

Although Economics is the study of a ferociously complex and unpredictable system, it is also capable of being at times, fairly simple.

A banker on BBC says of the UKs economic performance in 2012 that inflation cuts into peoples' income, which puts their spending down, which reduces their demand in the economy, which reduces production and trade, which throws people out of their jobs, which puts their spending down, and so on.

Quite true. Negative feedback. A downward spiral.

To overcome the downward spiral a stimulus is required.

There are two approaches to this stimulus.

Chancellor Osborne believes that the best stimulus is to stimulate private businesses by

• crippling the competition by running down public services (under the flag of reducing the deficit), which throws people on the dole, increases Social Security payments and burdens the NHS.
• reducing tax on the rich, who can then send their extra money to tax havens abroad
• reducing regulation on business who can send their extra money abroad

Rational economists believe that the best stimulus is to stimulate the whole economy by

• creating housing, which provides jobs and saves money.  
• providing insulation  that reduces householders heating bills which provides jobs and takes people out of fuel poverty.
• stimulating renewable energy industries, which provides jobs and helps our descendants to live in a normal climate.

This is the basic choice. Obviously there is more to it, and the work of economists is to quantify the gains and losses attached to each choice, but on a first look, qualitative basis, it looks as if the rational approach wins hands down over the Osborne approach. 

How do we stop mass shootings like Newtown?

The world watches in mute incomprehension as the USA undergoes another convulsion of gun-driven mass murder, this time of 6 and 7 year old kids - and the gun lobby springs back resolutely into its defensive position with a few well-rehearsed lines:

1. It's people, not guns that kill. Blaming guns is like blaming obesity on spoons.
2. The Second Amendment (Holy Writ) gives us the right to bear arms
3. The problem is that the teachers and school (and the kids??) staff were not armed. They would have shot the murderer.

Let's look in more depth at their arguments.

1 It's the people not the guns.
By coincidence, there was a mass attack in China last week too. Someone went on the rampage in a school. With a knife. 20 children were injured. Not killed, injured. Get that, Republicans? Guns are designed to kill efficiently. That's why GI's are armed with guns, not knives or spears.

Yes, guns are an instrument, like spoons. Yes, guns are more efficient than spoons killing for the purposes of. It is undeniable that in a country that has easy access to guns, they will be used to kill.


2 The Second Amendment
Like any other appeal to Holy Scripture, this needs contextual evaluation. The Second Amendment is talking about muzzle loading muskets which need three minutes to reload, not automatic machine guns that spray 300 rounds a minute.

Here we need a Portia to come to judgement. The Second Amendment is all about the right to bear arms. It does not mention ammunition. This is the key point. Here is Chris Rock arguing that if bullets cost $5000 each, there would be no more "innocent bystanders". Every bullet would be a carefully planned operation.

The beauty of going for ammunition control instead of gun control is that ammunition can be identified by sniffer dogs, so it is harder to smuggle.

3 Not enough guns.
The right-wing Cato Institute has a "study" on this. Their "paper uses a collection of news reports of self-defensewith guns over an eight-year period to survey the circumstances andoutcomes of defensive gun uses in America."
Hmm. News reports. Not really an impeccable source of data for an objective scientific study. Anecdotes from participants, or maybe court witnesses. Their conclusion: "The estimates of defensive gun userange between the tens of thousands to as high as two million eachyear."

To balance this news-based Cato Institute "study", here are four scientific studies showing that more guns = more homicide.


So on this basis, the Cato Institute, the NRA, and the whole pandemonium of right-wing US demagogues successfully oppose gun laws.

OK. Let us, for the sake of argument, assume that in some cases, a crime is stopped because some righteous citizen pulls a gun and kills or disables a would be mugger, killer or rapist. Let's assume that the "good" done in these cases outweighs the harm done in cases where an innocent person is mistaken for a criminal, or where the vigilante's shot goes astray and injures or kills a bystander.

Even in that case, is that a good reason to arm a large section of the population? Cato argues "The vast majority of gun owners are ethical and competent.". That still leaves a minority that are not. And of the morally upright vast majority, not all will be 100% accurate with a handgun, especially in a red-hot situation. Accidents will happen.

But still the gun lobby presses on with its propaganda. They spread the fear with images like this:

In short, the USA is addicted to guns. It is in a paranoid cycle. They needed guns to fight off the Redcoats in the War of Independence, and to fight off Native Americans who were justifiably unhappy at the invasion of their lands, and to fight off outlaws, and now they need them to fight off armed robbers, muggers, burglars and rapists. The country is awash with guns, so it needs
More guns to neutralise the threat posed by the guns already there. And the arms industry, of course, needs to sell arms - more each year, otherwise their shareholders will abandon them. The USA is in a vicious circle. It is addicted to guns.

Addiction is a powerful thing. Sometimes it can be managed by going cold turkey, but sometimes gradual withdrawal is needed. Obama needs to take a long view. Maybe this round he will limit assault rifles and handguns a bit more. He could even limit ammunition stocks. But he is not going to be able to change the fact that the USA is awash with guns.

But, in my opinion there is one thing that Obama could do that would significantly change the game. It is something that the NRA, the Republicans, the foaming libertarians and the rest cannot complain about, because it actually uses objection #1 - "it's people that kill, not guns".

Obama should legislate for psychological profiling of gun owners.

Mass murderers - the ones that go on a shooting spree, as in Newtown, or Columbine, or Dunblane -  have a well-defined psychological profile.

The term "pseudocommando" was coined by Dietz in 1986 for mass murderers, and has been added to since then. Traits include the typical male, loner, preoccupied with firearms, paranoid, bearing grudges, powerless, insignificant, a student of other mass killings, and capable of meticulous planning.

Now psychology is not a precise science, but it sure can put together a questionnaire. Salient questions can be gathered onto a couple of pages of A4, and the results can be processed. Of course, the gun licence applicant could lie. So they will have to gather a few - say 5 - friends and neighbours together to confirm their assessment of him. The process of gathering supportive backers will place a significant block in the way of the potential mass murderer among the gun license applicants, since they tend to be loners.

Of course, potential killers could get illegal guns. But once the police know of their interest in getting guns, and can pay random visits - with a sniffer dog who can tell us if there is any ammo in the house, or the shed.

Yes, this is an invasion of liberty, and libertarians will object. So the politicians will have to make a decision: should they invade the liberty of potential mass murderers every so often, or would they rather have occasional periods of national upset because 20 innocent children have been slaughtered?

It's a tough call. But hey, that's what politicians are for.

Cooking fat: don't flush it, put it to good use.

There is a Christmassy message from London's sewermen here. 

London's sewermen looked out

on their fat-blocked sewers

fat had fallen round about

fat from turkey dinners

fat is flushed both day and night

by those sewer sinners

fat should not be flushed but binned

'cos it blocks the sew-ers

They plead that fat from Christmas dinners be not flushed down the sink, as it congeals and forms "fat bergs" in the sewers.

It seems that 500 tonnes of fat will be flushed into the sewers over Christmas.

500 tonnes of fat can be converted into about 500 tonnes of diesel fuel.

500 tonnes of diesel equates to about 500,000 litres of diesel.

Which could power a small diesel car doing 50mpg for 10,000 miles. About a year's worth.

Let's assume Londoners eat three times as much on Christmas Day as they do on the average day.

About 100 cars that could be powered by the domestic fat thrown away down London's sewers.

London has about 7 million people - about 12% of the UK population.

Therefore if we collected all the fat thrown down domestic sinks each year, we could power 800 cars each year.

This is of course a tiny proportion of the cars on Britain's roads. There are about 30 million cars in the UK. If we assume that only one third are used each day, that is still 10,000,000 cars.

So the 800 fat-powered cars are only 0.008% of the total.

Nevertheless, 800 is 800. It is probably a large chunk of the fleets run by water companies.

More to the point, it represents a huge improvement in the efficiency of our sewers, since they save on a huge amount of time and effort spent clearing out the fat.

What we need is to pour superfluous cooking fat into, for example, empty plastic milk bottles, and put them out with the recycling.

This also provides useful jobs for the people who collect and process the fat. Smelly messy work, but no more smelly and messy than the vital services supplied by Thames Water's excellent sewerpersons.

Who have also done a Gangnam stylepublic message on sewer abuse.