UK shoots itself in the foot

Prompted, no doubt, by the hugely successful prohibition on the private ownership of handguns, UK police chiefs are planning a gun amnesty:

“A firearms amnesty is being planned for early in the New Year to try to reduce levels of gun crime.”

An inspired idea! I am quite sure that Britain’s urban desperados will be rushing, RUSHING down to their local police station to meekly surrender their Browning Autos and AK-47s.

“A ban on ownership of handguns was introduced in 1997 as a result of the Dunblane massacre, when Thomas Hamilton opened fire at a primary school leaving 16 children and their teacher dead.

But even since the ban, gun-related crimes have soared, with one study suggesting handgun usage had gone up by as much as 40 percent two years after the ban.”

The truly galling thing about this is conspicuous absence from the media of the various anti-gun campaigners who were infesting the airwaves barely five years ago assuring us that a complete ban on private gun ownership would reduce crime, make us all a lot safer and eradicate what they referred to as ‘gun-culture’ from Britain. Not a single one of these people have been brought back on air to be challenged or asked to explain themselves. I doubt that they ever will not least because many of them are still in government.

“The Home Office is considering a minimum five year sentence for anyone caught possessing a gun and setting up a national database and a new agency to trace illegally held weapons.”

In that paragraph, the future lies mapped out. The ‘amnesty’ will prove useless and the criminal use of guns will continue to spiral. Faced with mounting pressure to ‘do something’ the Home Office will impose minimum sentences for handgun possession of five years (or, possibly, ten years as some are arguing for). The result will be that heat-packing gangsters will be far more likely to shoot it out with the cops rather than surrender as well as more likely to ‘silence’ anyone they believe might snitch on them. I see dead people.

Because there is no foreseeable prospect of a policy re-think, I suppose that this whole horrid panoply of unintended consequences will simply have to play out. The British have a penchant for learning things the hard way.