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I was struck by two contrasting emotions upon reading this editorial in the Telegraph. First, pleasant surprise that views of such obvious common sense have found their expression in a major British news organ but, secondly, dismay that this fact should come as a pleasant surprise at all.
“Since the Government’s “total ban” five years ago, there are more and more guns being used by more and more criminals in more and more crimes. Now, in the wake of Birmingham’s New Year bloodbath, there are calls for the total ban to be made even more total: if the gangs refuse to obey the existing laws, we’ll just pass more laws for them not to obey. According to a UN survey from last month, England and Wales now have the highest crime rate of the world’s 20 leading nations. One can query the methodology of the survey while still recognising the peculiar genius by which British crime policy has wound up with every indicator going haywire – draconian gun control plus vastly increased gun violence plus stratospheric property crime.”
For those of us who knew only too well that this was going to be the result of the absurd and destructive war on self-defence there is a certain amount of satisfaction to be had from having been proved right. But, equally, a mounting despair at the seemingly wilful refusal of most Britons to learn from, or even acknowledge, the evidence that is staring them smack, bang in the face.
Even now, the straightforward truths expressed in this leader would be totally absent from the thoughts of any British journalist and even if that were not so, I suspect none would dare put them into print. We have Mark Steyn to thank for this serice.
“After Dunblane, the police and politicians lapsed into their default position: it’s your fault. We couldn’t do anything about him, so we’ll do something about you. You had your mobile nicked? You must be mad taking it out. Why not just keep it inside nice and safe on the telephone table? Had your car radio pinched? You shouldn’t have left it in the car. House burgled? You should have had laser alarms and window bars installed. You did have laser alarms and window bars but they waited till you were home, kicked the door in and beat you up? You should have an armour-plated door and digital retinal-scan technology. It’s your fault, always. The monumentally useless British police, with greater manpower per capita on higher rates of pay and with far more lavish resources than the Americans, haven’t had an original idea in decades, so they cling ever more fiercely to their core ideology: the best way to deal with criminals is to impose ever greater restrictions and inconveniences on the law-abiding.”
It may seem bizarre these days, but I grew up believing and parrotting the lockstep axiom that the British police ‘are the best in the world’. It is an assertion that may appear obnoxiously arrogant but, considering how things used to be, may be understandable. There was a time when the British police were charged with enforcing laws that were, for the most part, sensible and it was a task to which they devoted their energies with commendable vigour all whilst remaining routinely unarmed and fostering a public perception that they were both honourable and decent. → Continue reading: The sleep of reason
Michael Peach, the home educating house dad, doesn’t only write about home education. He has this to say about the current state of British gun control:
Two teenage girls have been shot dead in Birmingham. Details are sketchy as nobody wants to talk to the police but it seems they were shot outside a party and a car was riddled with bullets, at least thirty shots were fired. Already the call has gone out for stricter gun control with the government now considering a minimum sentence of five years for carrying an illegal weapon.
This misses the point completely. The situation is this … the bad guys have got guns. No amount of extra sentencing is going to change this. It is time to stop messing around and let the good guys have guns too. Would the gunman or gunmen have been able to fire at will if he thought someone else was going to fire back. He / they had a gun and could just take their time and fire at will knowing they were totally unthreatened. Just the thought that he might get shot himself would have made him think twice before going on the rampage.
As is now being proven everyday on the streets of the UK Gun control does not work.
And yes, this was the same incident that Perry de Havilland noted here yesterday.
The significance of this is not just what Mike says, although heaven knows it’s true enough; it’s who he is. Britain’s home-educators are a less God-fearing and more string quartet playing, Labour voting, Guardian reading, vegitarian, sandal-wearing, woolly knitting, woolly wearing, woolly minded lot than those of the USA. If just a tiny number of those people even get to hear that someone like them thinks that the gun problem in Britain now is that people like us don’t have enough guns, then the long term beneficial effect could be enormous. This is, after all, an extremely simple idea to grasp, even if your first reaction to it is one of pure horror, and once someone has put the notion in your head, it is hard to shake it out.
In the USA, if I get the picture right, believing what Mike says is fairly normal, and in some parts almost de rigeur. Not everyone does believe it, but everyone knows that others do even if they don’t. Right? (Commenters feel free to correct me if I need it.) In Britain, such is the primitive state of this debate that the number of people willing to say things like this in public, such as on the radio or even in a blog, is as close to zero as makes hardly any difference. But as we all know, the difference between hardly anyone and actually no-one can be all the difference. So special kudos to people like Mike who are willing to say such things.
In general, Mike’s blog is well worth the regular attention of samizdata readers.
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.
Since we at Samizdata are only too aware that most of our readers are not British, we take a particular relish in introducing our readers to the rich and fruity idioms of British slang. We see this as a kind of cultural export.
In this tradition, may I refer you to the expression ‘Taking the Piss’. It means being disrespectful to the point of effrontery or the process whereby, having caused injury or offence to someone, the ‘piss-taker’ then goes on to compound said injury or offence for no obvious reason except contempt.
As always, these terms are best illustrated by a real-life example, so here is quite the most blatant example of ‘taking the piss’ that I can imagine:
“The burglar injured by Tony Martin after he broke into the farmer’s home is suing him for £15,000 compensation for loss of earnings.”
I burgle your home then I sue you for trying to stop me. See, that’s called ‘taking the piss’.
“Brendon Fearon, 32, wants the compensation because he has supposedly been unable to find a job since suffering the gunshot injuries in the raid on Martin’s Norfolk home..”
This thing is expecting the rest of us to believe that, had it not been for Tony Martin’s buckshot lodged in his jacksy, he’d have been abroad actively seeking honest, gainful employment. Get the picture?
“The writ gives a number of reasons for Fearon’s claim, including his leg injuries, which prevent him finding work, concern about his “long-term sexual functioning” and becoming “very tearful” when watching a film in which someone dies.”
Woe, woe and, thrice, woe! Fearon may be unable to breed new Fearons. And I too, get ‘very tearful’ when I watch the world go stark, staring bonkers.
“He is also said to claim that he is afraid of fireworks, no longer enjoys ju-jitsu and kick-boxing and becomes depressed when TV shows contain gunfire.”
I know exactly how he feels because I become depressed by the horrible feeling that his ludicrous claim will, like as not, succeed.
Self-defence is not necessary because we have the police to protect us, right. That’s their job. That’s what we, the tax-payers, pay them to do. So, we can all sleep safely in our beds at night, knowing that the agents of the state will keep us safe from those who would do us harm.
That’s the theory; this is the practice:
“Police have launched an inquiry into why it took officers an hour to respond to an emergency call from a Jewish couple who were the victims of a terrifying burglary at their Southgate home.”
Well, as long as there’s no ‘hate speech’ involved, it probably isn’t a real emergency.
“Officers eventually arrived at 6:40am, long after the intruders had driven off with their haul in the couples’ two Mercedes saloons.”
Laughing their arses off, I’d wager.
““Although I am disgusted with the police who should have been there to help us, they have been very supportive and efficient since. It was just a break-down in communication and it shouldn’t have happened.”
‘It shouldn’t have happened’!!. Oh, that’s all okay then. As long as this kind of thing ‘shouldn’t happen’, we can all go back to sleep again.
Last week I watched a typical British Channel 4 documentary about the “hunt for the Washington snipers”, shown last Thursday evening. It told a reasonably convincing factual story, and you didn’t get the feeling of axes being ground. There were some routine clichés involved, but not, you felt, because the programme makers wanted to push them, merely because those clichés seemed, to them, the things to say.
The most obvious such cliché was the claim, emitted more than once, yet undermined by a lot of the facts being presented as well as reinforced by others, that “the media” were interrupting the investigation.
From where I sat, the media pretty much were the investigation. The police, in the person of the sublimely named Chief Moose, seemed merely to be a rather helpless, hopeless clearing house for clues, and a maker of appropriate public speeches after each successive murder. “This is terrible. If you know what happened, call us.” They did nothing that a bunch of geeks in an upstairs student lodging couldn’t have done, or so it seemed.
As the blogosphere has already explained, the clinching Clue (a vehicle description and a vehicle number plate) was only released to the general public by those Media, despite the best efforts of Moose and his men to stop this Clue getting around.
Now, aside from a bit of teasing about the wretched man’s name which I’m afraid I can’t resist (a name which only a very daring novelist of the Tom Wolfe variety would have presumed to make up if telling such a story – and damn me there’s another name!), I’m not here to sneer at Chief Moose. Moose was only operating within a model of police work that has been the dominant “narrative” of how you do these things since as far back as the days of J. Edgar Hoover. Faced with a complicated and important crime, such as a string of lurid murders of non-lowlife people, you centralise information. It’s like a military operation. You no more rely on “the public” or “the media” to win your battle for you without your paternal control and guidance than you would expect a similarly anarchic arrangement to scam Nazi Germany about where the Normandy landings were going to happen (i.e. scam them into thinking it wasn’t Normandy). That kind of thing has to be a big old hundreds-of-people-at-hundreds-of-desks job.
And in the dying days of the “old” media, there is still a rationale to this. The point is, the old media are pretty much like a big old government bureaucracy, except not as sensible. In many ways the old media combine the bad features of a government bureaucracy (ignoring vital clues, obsessing about irrelevant clues, institutionalising the silly prejudices of a few powerful people) with the bad features of a mob (all following the most vigorously mobile mob-member however silly, trampling in a herd over the top of vital clues, jumping to silly conclusions).
A key moment in the Washington snipers story concerned the immediate fate of that vital Clue. Moose’s worry – and it was a perfectly genuine one – was that The Media would shove The Clue up on nationwide TV, and the Bad Guys would see The Clue before anyone else who had also seen The Clue had got around to spotting the Bad Guys in the vehicle referred to by The Clue, and the Bad Guys would dump the vehicle and carry on murdering from a different vehicle. Bye bye The Clue. Four more non-lowlife bodies. More Moose nightmares.
But now enter the blogosphere. → Continue reading: Chief Moose versus the Wolves – on not letting the Bad Guys see The Clue coming at them until it’s too late
A police officer was shot and seriously wounded after stopping a motorist in North London.
In the West Midlands, two men have been fatally shot in separate incidents.
Just what is wrong with these people? Don’t they know that guns are supposed to be banned in Britain?
A British court today has ruled that Darren Taylor, a burglar who was stabbed to death with his own knife by homeowner John Lambert, was lawfully killed.
Taylor and his accomplice, Ian Reed, both high on drugs and drink, burst into the Lambert’s home and held a knife to the throat of Mrs Lambert, demanding £5,000 from the couple. In the ensuing melee, John Lambert managed to kill Taylor and drive off Reed.
When the police finally arrived, they arrested Mr Lambert for murder, although all charges were later dropped against him whilst the surviving criminal, Ian Reed, was sentenced to eight years in prison for robbery.
It would be nice if there was a presumption of innocence when the cops show up and see situations such as these. After all, when the cops shoot a man dead for no good reason at all, it is just taken as a given that it was lawfully done. In John Lambert’s case, his rights were ultimately upheld but it is hard to escape the feeling that there is one rule for agents of the state and another for its subjects.
A Canadian Samizdata reader alerted Samizdata to a story in Canada’s National Post. The Post reports that costs for Canada’s gun registry have overrun by a factor of 500. No, that’s not an overrun of 500% (which would be bad enough) but a final cost of five hundred times the original estimate. Did I say final? I meant cost so far; it’s not final yet.
Well, at least Canadians are safe now. Only they’re not. He adds:
“Herewith is another example of why gun registration programs don’t work. Canada has a history different from the US with respect to firearms (which explains, in large part, why this became law in the first place). I think that violent, gun-related crime in Canada’s urban centers has probably increased since 1995 (but I don’t have any hard evidence to support this assertion). I can say that, in Toronto, there was a series of gang related shooting in October where every weekend (for a month) different gang members ended up dead in different parts of the city. Further to this, the gun control law has had no impact on the Hell’s Angels in Montreal.”
As chance would have it I had posted earlier today about how Simon Jenkins of the Times should not believe all that Michael Moore says about Canada being a paradise of trust. Moore is right about one thing. America does have an anomalously high murder rate. But all the strategies put in place by countries who boast that their lower murder rate is the result of gun control, and that they therefore need more of it, keep on failing. Expensively.
That would have been a good sign-off line, but I’ve one more thing to say. I was struck by the sentiments of Allan Rock, a Liberal Party bigshot who the opposition attacked for keeping mum about the spiralling costs of the gun registry. The report said:
Mr. Rock defended the registry, saying it has “saved lives” and reinforced “Canadian values” by distinguishing Canada from the United States on the issue of gun control.
Were his actual words as thin and shabby as this paraphrase implies? Does he really see mere difference to the United States as a merit in itself?
I don’t recall ever having reproduced an article in full on this blog and, only on the rare occasion, will I publish a letter in full. This is one such occasion and the quality of the letter merits it:
Modern changes ignore old gun laws
“Sir – Alan Judd is hesitant to advocate a “firearms free-for-all” (Comment, Dec 2), but one might recall that, before the First World War, when almost any British citizen could possess and carry any gun without a licence (and frequently did so, for there was a massive domestic firearms industry), armed crime in London ran at only two per cent of what it is today.
In 1946, the year the Home Office first moved against the licensing of pistols for self-defence, there were only 25 armed robberies in London: today, we have more than that every fortnight.
Confusion over our right to self-defence has not arisen because, as Mr Judd at one point suggests, we have “renounced” that capability. It is a right enshrined in our central constitutional document, the Bill of Rights of 1689, which is still in force as statute law. The right to possess arms for self-defence was one of only two rights of the individual guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, and was indeed the ultimate surety of the subject’s other liberties.
While it had been the Restoration disarmament of Protestants that provoked the arms provision of the Bill of Rights, the equal right of Catholics to self-defence was guaranteed in the same year, and case law upheld the right to bear arms for self-defence through to the 20th century.
When the first Firearms Act was introduced in 1920, it was recognised that the normal justification for owning a revolver was self-defence; it was only in 1946 that the Labour Home Secretary indicated that this would no longer necessarily be accepted as a good reason.
When the Home Office advised Lord Cullen, in the prelude to the pistol ban of 1997, that “as a matter of policy” British law did not permit the citizen any weapons for self-defence, it was therefore asserting a new policy without legal foundation that simply chose to ignore the Bill of Rights.
It is the text of a letter written to the Daily Telegraph by a gentleman called Richard Munday whom I know not but admire much, not just because he is correct, but also because he has not forgotten his heritage.
Unlike our political rulers and most of fellow citizens who have shed their birthright like dead skin in the headlong rush to serfdom. But despite having been so outrageously and cynically trampled underfoot the 1689 Bill of Rights is still the law of the land and it does, indeed, bestow on every citizen the right and ability to defend their life, liberty and property.
However, the Bill of Rights is an Act of Parliament and, since no parliament can bind its successors, it could easily be repealed by another Act of Parliament. The fact that it has not yet been so repealed is doubtless due to the Old Bill being more honoured in the breach than in the observance.
So dragging the glorious old Bill of Rights from its musty chest and waving it in the face of the policeman who will come to arrest you for exercising your rights is all very back-stiffening in theory and may earn your day in Court to shout your case. But, in practice, the merest hint of any such happening would spur HMG into passing a repealing Act which would sail smartly through the House of Glove Puppets with nary a whisper of dissent nor a turn of a single hair.
And that would be that. Back to square one.
Still, the publication of Mr.Munday’s most righteous missive brings a twitch to my jowels. It proves that some people have not buckled to the maladies of crass hysteria and infantile paranoia. Some people remember what freedom really means and more and more of them are prepared to shout it from the rooftops.
Instapundit reports that the Cato Institute is having a go at gun control in their nation’s capital city. Makes sense. The media people don’t have to go far for the story, unless they’re scared of course, what with the law not having yet been changed the way it should be.
Reynolds links to Fox News, who make it clear that Cato is really rolling up its sleeves and getting stuck in to the issue.
The CATO Institute, a public policy research group that bases its work on libertarian principles, is crafting a legal challenge to Washington, D.C.’s law, claiming that all Americans have the right to defend themselves.
“The Second Amendment provides an individual right for a person to bare arms, not a collective right, not a right of the states, not a right of the militia, but a right on each and every person,” said Bob Levy, a senior fellow in constitutional studies at CATO.
I don’t think that’s quite what Bob Levy said. Seriously, I never thought I’d see this particular spelling mistake done for real.
I briefly toyed with the idea of posting this under the ‘Humour’ category but, the trouble is, I am not making this up. I couldn’t possibly make this up.
In a country where virtually all forms of private firearm ownership have been outlawed, there was a march today in South-East London by a group calling itself ‘Mothers Against Guns’ in protest at rising gun violence.
But that thigh-slapping irony descends into tragi-farce:
“The march had to be re-routed away from the crime scene of the early morning shooting outside Pharaoh’s Pub in Peckham Road.
Police confirmed one man was killed on the spot and that another was in a stable condition in hospital after the incident.
Sometimes I feel as if this isn’t a nation anymore. More like an open-air Theatre of the Absurd.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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