SHOOTING | PISTOLS
Handgun Ban Tests a British Olympian
Rebecca Blackwell/Associated Press
British athletes are competing in the Olympic cartridge pistol competition for the first time since 1996, doing something that is illegal for nearly everyone in the country.
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
Published: July 31, 2012 81 Comments
LONDON — Sixteen years ago, it was Britain that was trying to make sense of a mass shooting, with the nightly news filled with grieving relatives and old family photographs.
Rebecca Blackwell/Associated Press
Georgina Geikie practicing the 25-meter pistol, one of two events she will compete in at the London Games.
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A 43-year-old named Thomas Hamilton was the gunman, and his killing floor was not a midnight movie showing but a primary school in Dunblane, Scotland. He killed 17 people, all but one of them children, before committing suicide.
But the reaction here could scarcely have been more different from the one in the United States to the mass shooting in Colorado. With outrage still white hot, gun opponents in Britain organized a successful campaign for a gun ban, and by the end of 1997 Parliament had outlawed the private ownership of nearly all handguns.
It is against that backdrop that Georgina Geikie, a 27-year-old English barmaid, will approach the firing line at the Royal Artillery Barracks here Wednesday. She is the first British athlete to compete in an Olympic cartridge pistol competition since 1996, and she will be doing something that is illegal for nearly everyone in the country — and until recently was illegal for her as well.
There is Ping-Pong diplomacy and perhaps soccer can indeed explain the world, but no Olympic sport has the political dimension of shooting. It is as universal as any activity; more countries have a representative in the Olympic shooting events than all others except for judo, swimming and track and field.
But there is an almost complete divergence between the United States and Britain, whose laws and public attitudes toward guns lie at nearly opposite ends of the spectrum.
Members of the United States Olympic shooting team seem no more inclined than gymnasts or fencers to talk about politics, preferring to discuss the finer points of their sport.
At a media appearance here, the shooting team members answered the perhaps inevitable questions about Aurora, Colo., with practiced forbearance: target shooting and gun massacres have nothing to do with each other, they said; safety is a priority for sport shooters; they were as shocked and saddened as anyone by the killings, which took place about 90 minutes from their practice site.
Whatever happens as a result of the rampage in Aurora, there is almost no chance that it will affect their sport. Beyond that assurance, officials with the team acknowledge that the benefits of the strong and loyal gun culture in the United States go far, particularly in an activity that is expensive but not particularly prominent.
“We have one of the larger direct-mail campaigns of any of our sports,” said Buddy Duvall, executive director of the USA Shooting Team Foundation.
Contributions to the team come in from gun enthusiasts, and firearms bearing little resemblance to those at the Olympics are sold in Web auctions, with the proceeds going to the American team.
Then there is Britain.
“Olympics to Boost Shooting,” read a news release from the British shooting team. One of the team’s top shooters, Peter Wilson, said in the release that he hoped the main legacy of the Olympics “is that people start to have a positive outlook on shooting.”
Wilson uses a shotgun, which, like rifles, air guns and some significantly modified pistols, remains legal here. The guns used in three Olympic shooting events, the ones involving cartridge pistols, were banned altogether in 1997.
Since then, anyone wanting to practice had to do so on the Continent or at least in Northern Ireland, where the laws are looser. There were no exceptions: an up-and-comer like Geikie and a veteran like Mick Gault, who was awarded the Order of the British Empire as one of the most successful British competitors of any sport, both kept their guns in Switzerland and traveled there on weekends to practice.
“It was the end of our sport for a while,” said Margaret Thomas, an orthodontist and former Olympian. She quit shooting pistols after the ban, considering it too much trouble. Now she is Geikie’s coach.
Those who kept at it faced some unusual arrangements. At the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester, pistol event competitors were handed their guns only after being locked in the firing range, and they had to return their pistols to officials before the door was unlocked.
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Georgina Geikie, an English barmaid, during qualifying earlier this week.
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With the 2012 Games approaching, Britain’s strict laws posed something of a problem, even after officials granted an exception to allow the pistol events to go on as scheduled. The problem was the British team itself.
“It would have looked absolutely ridiculous if we were not allowing our shooters to practice here,” said Kate Hoey, a member of Parliament for the Labour Party and a former sports minister who has supported lifting the ban.
In 2008, government officials granted a temporary exemption loosening, but not lifting, the ban. Competitors were allowed to practice in Britain in the three events that used banned guns. The number of licenses to allow certain sport shooters to own pistols was capped in the low double digits, and only four ranges in the country were authorized for target practice.
The exemption was not looked on favorably by gun control advocates like Chris Williamson, another Labour member of Parliament.
Citing a regular and steady tally of gun fatalities in Britain that have not drawn as much attention as massacres like the one in Dunblane and a more recent rampage in Cumbria, Williamson says additional restrictions are needed, if not an outright prohibition on all guns. Among the rules he is pushing is a ban on keeping guns at home, more aggressive regulation of air guns and yearly mental fitness tests for gun owners.
Williamson said he did not have anything against target shooting, adding that the competitors should still be able to practice their sport. But he acknowledged that additional regulation might make practicing more difficult.
“We’ve got to get control of this,” he said. “If that means we may be a little less competitive in this Olympic sport, then I think that’s a price worth paying.”
Sport shooters are hoping the exemption for those practicing for the Olympics will be extended, at least until Rio de Janeiro in 2016.
There is where Geikie may come in. She is not spoken of as a gold medal hope (though some newspapers have referred to her as the Lara Croft of Britain, after the buxom English pistol-brandisher of the “Tomb Raider” franchise), but gun advocates say a strong performance by Geikie would help their cause.
“What we really need is another successful shooter,” said Hoey, the Labour member of Parliament. “If only she could do really well and get some publicity, then it’s really much easier.”
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