I would like to think it means something that this story is in the Metro, a London free paper, but it is probably there only because the video of the robbers running for their lives is so funny. Other than where it appears, there is nothing unusual about the story. Gun use for self defense seems quite common.
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News can travel fast these days, but this particular bit of news took its time reaching me. It started in Covent Garden, then went to Oddity Central, then to here, in Canada, and from there to here, which is based somewhere (I think) in a southern state of the USA, where I read it, I being about two pleasant little walks away from Covent Garden. And now it is here:
According to this, this gun is still perfectly legal here in Britain. Nevertheless, my first thought was (hence that link): isn’t there some kind of law here against replica guns? Call it the chilling effect. Would you prefer me to be more serious about guns in Britain? Not tonight thank you. The subject is too depressing. June 14th, 2012 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I am off to southwestern France to coincide with the London Olympics. I shall be swimming in the Med, guzzling delicious red wine and food, reading some gloriously downmarket novels, enjoying the tranquil scenery, and also, avoiding shit like this:
May 8th, 2012 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
A vast amount of data at US-based intelligence and research organisation, Stratfor, has been stolen by the group styling itself “Anonymous”. As reported today, WikiLeaks has, or is in the process of, publishing millions of emails written by persons at that organisation over a 7-year period. And Stratfor’s CEO, George Friedman, has resigned. Er, no he hasn’t – it was a fake story, apparently. Curiouser and curiouser.
So writes a person called Michael Lee. His article focuses on Anonymous’ actions. He continues:
And this:
Publishing the details of housands of credit card details, addresses and other important information has nothing to do with holding the rich and powerful to account. And in any event, being rich is not, in and of itself, a legitimate reason for a bunch of hackers to claim that wholesale theft of data is somehow in the “public interest”. Now WikiLeaks, run by Julian Assange, is involved. As some regulars might know, unlike some other Samizdata contributors, I consider WikiLeaks, and those who aid and abet its publication of such private data, to be near-criminal in its recklessness. It has put journalists’ sources in jeopardy, or it least is careless about them in some cases, which is hardly grounds for celebration by anyone who takes freedom of expression seriously. This story from Africa is particularly troubling. This item by the BBC shows how WikiLeaks does not give a damn about the damage it does so long as it can claim to be striking a blow against organisations it dislikes:
Well it may be that the final sentence has some basis in truth, but as Assange surely knows, a lot of journalists get sources inside large organisations for their stories, be they government civil servants or company types. An investigative journalist looking into corporate or government activities could not operate without such contacts, even in a world where Freedom of Information legislation operates. And there is a real risk that serious sources will be blown and their careers ruined by indiscriminate publication of such vast amounts of information. The key word here is “indiscriminate” – there is no sign of any attempt to filter, let alone consider how some of this data could fall into the wrong hands and cause harm to innocents. In case anyone brings up the matter, the leak of such a vast number of emails, and hacking of data about hundreds of thousands of credit card details, is hardly the same as say, the discovery of emails at the University of East Anglia that confirmed suspicions that AGW alarmists were playing fast and loose with the evidence. In that case, a Freedom of Information Act request was used to find out about the emails. In other words, a proper process was insisted upon. And I am not aware that global warming skeptics have tried to hack Al Gore’s bank account details. And now it appears, in an update, that some pranksters are trying to claim that a person has resigned from his job when he hasn’t. This is all getting very juvenile. February 27th, 2012 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is one of the more ridiculous incidents of security theatre that I have read. I know it is preaching to the converted to post such a link to Samizdata, and the increasingly farcical nature of the United States government surprises no one who reads here, but the post deserves to be spread far and wide. Reading Mike Masnick’s account of how the knuckleheads providing “security” at the US Capitol conduct themselves, one can better visualize the inherent idiocy of the entire operation. January 28th, 2012 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Recently widowed Sarah McKinley from Oklahoma shot and killed a man who broke into her house, according to ABC News, via Huffington Post, via Michael Yon’s Facebook page. An accomplice also broke in, but he ran away after hearing the gun shot and gave himself up to the police. Oddly, he has now been charged with murder. Says Sarah:
For propaganda purposes it helps that she is media friendly: articulate and not weird. An article on examiner.com mentions other women who have “refused victimisation” recently. I wonder if Feminists for Firearms might make a successful counter-meme to Mothers Against Guns. The ABC video states that the police called the killing “justified”, and goes on to explain that 30 states, including Oklahoma, have the castle doctrine. In the other states you are required to retreat if you can, though the law expert interviewed could not think of anyone in the USA who had ever been imprisoned for killing an intruder. Most such cases get thrown out by the grand jury, as in the case of Joe Horn even though he shot burglars attacking his neighbour’s property. What a civilised state of affairs. January 6th, 2012 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
There was an item on the local London TV news early last night about a bunch of cooks who, when confronted by a bunch of crooks, defended themselves, their restaurant and their diners. Yes, here is the story, from earlier in the month, at the time of those riots. Remember them?
Later in the evening, the looters returned, and the diners were ushered by the staff to the safety of the downstairs wine cellar. Which seems like a craven retreat, and in a way it was. But the personal cash and valuables of the diners were what the looters were after, and they were again thwarted. The significance of the TV coverage I saw this evening wasn’t just that all this happened, but that the TV coverage was so sympathetic to the restaurant staff for doing what they did. The Ledbury (which I had never heard of until now) has apparently won some kind of vote of excellence for its food, organised by a restaurant guide, and the general atmosphere radiating from my TV was: hurrah! Good for them, and the perfect excuse to tell the story, again, of those heroic deeds by the heroic Ledbury staff a few weeks ago. A few further thoughts occur to me. → Continue reading: Praising the defenders of the Ledbury (again) September 2nd, 2011 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am delighted to see that some people are ‘taking the law into their own hands’ and not just abandoning their communities to the barbarian thugs…
Firstly, to those blaming ‘immigration’ rather than the welfare state, and the utterly grotesque way the state demands you do not protect what is yours, well people would do well to emulate the Turkish and Kurdish community in Britain. Indeed the looters we see on television and streamed over the internet are so multi-racial it must gladden the hearts of the Welfare Statists who created them. So when the police decry ‘vigilantes‘, I would point out that communities can often do a better job at protecting themselves than the police can and the folks who got out on the streets, not to loot but to defend their neighbourhoods, well they are the real heroes here. The safety of you and your property is only tangentially of interest to the state (certainly they want to tax what you own, so to that extent they do indeed care about your life and property), but as demonstrated starkly over the last few days, the state also created the conditions that led to these riots and is therefore rather uneasy about punishing people who, after all, only do what the state does every day only without having to smash any windows. A community of few people with rifles and something worth protecting are not such a soft target to thugs, even armed thugs, compared to a disarmed general population looking vainly for the Plod to save them. But for all sorts of reasons, the British state has so effectively propagandised this country that to even suggest armed self-defence puts you on the lunatic fringe… so crowbars and cricket bats it is then. If these last few days shows anything it is that when push comes to shove, only you and your neighbours can defend against what can only be called barbarian scum. Contrary to what the state would have you believe, you have the right to defend yourself and your property that morally supersede any law that would deny that right. The rioters ‘took the law into their own hands’ so I applaud those Turks and Kurds (and many others whom the Guardian would not be so keen to report on) who did the same… they took the law back from the barbarians with and put it where it belongs: in their own hands. The state is not your friend, so do what you have to do and if you drive off some thugs, do not call the police after it is all over as nothing good will come of that. August 10th, 2011 | 69 comments - (Comments are closed)
When you read this kind of thing in a newspaper, it’s bad. But when you read it at cricinfo …:
The headline above this says: “Test likely to begin despite riots”. One of the more depressing things about these riots is the way that the only thing that the Police can think of to say to us non-looters and non-arsonists is: “Don’t join in” and “Let us handle it”. If the bad guys start to torch your house, let them get on with it. If they attack your next door neighbour, don’t join in on his side. Run away. Let the barbarians occupy and trash whatever territory they pick on and steal or destroy whatever property they want to. There was a fascinating impromptu TV interview with some young citizens of Clapham last night, not “experts”, just regular citizens, one of whom stated the opposite policy. Law abiding persons should get out of their houses, he said, en masse, and be ready to defend them. The trouble with “letting the Police do their job” is that in the precise spot in which you happen to live, or used to live, their job probably won’t start, if it ever does start, for about a week. In the meantime, letting the Police do their job means letting the damn looters and arsonists do their job, without anyone laying a finger on them, laying a finger on them being illegal. This is a doomed policy. If most people are compelled by law to be only neutral bystanders in a war between themselves and barbarism, barbarism wins. The right to, at the very least, forceful self defence must now be insisted upon. The Police, as we advocates of the don’t-disarm-the-victims-of-crime policy have been pointing out for decades, can’t be everywhere. They cannot instantaneously attend every crime, and magically prevent it. Only the potential or actual victims of crime can sometimes immediately prevent or immediately punish crime, provided only that they are not forbidden to. Says Instapundit:
Precisely. The best thing about these riots is that they have distilled and aggregated the folly of the “let the Police see to it” policy into a large and combined event, and they have done it right next door to where our political class lives. These riots are not confined to Birmingham, or some such second-tier city. They are happening in the backyard of our rulers, even as they hurry back home from Tuscany. For the last few decades the don’t-get-involved, let-Them-handle-it policy has applied only to more isolated crimes, or to riots only way beyond our capital city, which has meant that its doomed nature has impacted only upon those individuals or local populations attacked by criminals, not on the nation as a whole as perceived and lived in by those ruling it. Now our rulers can see this policy in vividly dramatic “action” (i.e. inaction), live on TV, and near enough to where they live for them to be scared, along with everyone else. And the rest of us will see them turning into the kind of vengeful right wing monsters they despise, as soon as their own houses are attacked. Which they well might be. I recall reading about a yob who stole something from a street stall in Nigeria, many years ago. He was promptly set upon by a mob, of stallholders and their customers, and beaten up. Are you civilised? It depends which side your mobs are on. All our mobs, except the little mobs that are the Police, are anti-civilisation. I own a cricket bat, inherited from my late Uncle Guy (whom I wrote about towards the end of this ancient blog posting), with “G Micklethwait” written on it. I hope I don’t find myself thinking about using it during the next few days, but I have already checked where it is. August 9th, 2011 | 91 comments - (Comments are closed)
Reading about the arrest of what appears to have been an extremist planning an attack on Ft Hood, Texas, I was struck by the contrast with the Oslo attack last weekend.
The point being that a legal gun shop owner is more likely to call the police than a black market arms supplier would. Now if we could only get all the gun rights people in America to realise the advantages of legal outlets for drugs as well… July 28th, 2011 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
I never had a mammogram and never hope to get one, and far from dreading mastectomy, the subject makes me positively canty: I could get a better fit in a shoulder holster. – Florence King, “The New Hypochondriacs”. July 27th, 2011 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
What a pity there is no culture of personal defence and widespread concealed carry in Norway as it would have been nice to see one of the victims shoot back at the bastard. – A sentiment much echoed in various armed self-defence forums regarding the recent atrocity in Norway. July 24th, 2011 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
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