(9)

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.

(24)

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:

It's not an easy decision to make, but it was either going to be him or my son. And it wasn't going to be my son. There's nothing more dangerous than a woman with a child.

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.

(24)

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:

It's not an easy decision to make, but it was either going to be him or my son. And it wasn't going to be my son. There's nothing more dangerous than a woman with a child.

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.

(25)

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?

Chefs and waiters leapt to the defence of members of the public enjoying an evening at The Ledbury, an upmarket restaurant in Notting Hill, London.

Thugs and rioters armed with bats and wearing hooded tops forced their way into the two star restaurant before demanding diners hand over their wallets and wedding rings.

But staff and others fought back with kitchen tools before leading customers into the wine cellar for protection.

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.

They are going to have a very hard time disarming people who cook for a living. Better yet, incorrigible optimist that I am, I sense that the penny may at least be starting to drop that the Police can't be everywhere.

I wrote a piece here at the time of the riots, in which I regretted the way that all the Police could say at the time of the riots was for honest citizens to stay off the streets and not get involved and generally keep their heads down and not behave as these restaurant guys did. The thinking of the Police being that if members of the mere public confronted rioters, how would the Police know who to arrest? But the defence of civilisation against barbarism cannot be organised merely to make like convenient for the Police. Battle must be joined, and the footsoldiers in this battle are, or ought to be, us. If that complicates things for the Police, tough.

I don't blame the Police for the wetness of their public pronouncements at the time of the riots. They have to take their lead from the politicians, and I don't think most of us would want it any other way. Nor, more fundamentally, do I blame the Police for the fact that they can't be everywhere. If the Police were able to be everywhere, they would have to exist in numbers so huge that they would themselves constitute a huge threat to the rest of us, to say nothing of a huge drain on all of our resources. "More bobbies on the beat" just cannot be the answer, and if this little spot of TV coverage is anything to go by, that notion may finally be getting around.

The essence of the crime problem in the UK is not an insufficiency of police; it is a whole crop of utterly wrong assumptions about how we, the public, should, that is to say should not respond, and not be allowed to respond, and should be disarmed to the point where we are helpless to respond, to criminals. We, not the Police, are in the front line of this thing. We should not be urged to flee the field. We should be positively encouraged to go into battle, no matter how much this may complicate the paperwork that the Police then have to trudge through after we have done our bit. There is nothing wrong with us taking the law into our own hands. On the contrary, the more of us do this, the better. Taking the law into our own hands, and enforcing it, is good. This should not be confused with taking the law into our own hands and breaking it, by becoming criminals ourselves. It should not be a crime to defend one's own person and property, as forcefully as will achieve this.

In particular, those looters who, after their first attack had been beaten back, returned to the Ledbury should then have been ambushed and arrested, with whatever degree of force would have done the job, regardless of whether any mere Police were present or not. For that to have happened would require a transformation in the attitude of our rulers to the rights of the public when confronting criminals. The sooner such a transformation occurs the better.

Those riots, I am now more and more convinced, did us all a favour. By dramatising the lawless state of Britain, and dramatising it in London, in places like fancy restaurants patronised by people with wallets and adornments seriously worth stealing rather than just in a few already-underclass-dominated housing estates, the riots created a set of circumstance where the only answer for our rulers was for them to start thinking along the lines I expound in this posting. And if members of the public are heroes when they square up to rioters and looters, why are they not heroes when they confront criminals of the more usual sort, by similar means and in accordance with similar principles? Exactly the same principles apply to small skirmishes between the public and those who would prey upon them as apply to riot control. Again, when it comes to preventing crime, the Police cannot be everywhere, and it is daft to imagine that they ever could or should be.

If the transformation I seek does occur, one of the reasons will surely be that the politicians have now run out of our money, with which to pay even the policemen that they now employ. They are even now cutting Police numbers. Fine by me. As I say, Police numbers are absolutely not the point. The point is the rules that we are allowed to play by, by which I mean fight by, against the criminals. (Just imagine how very differently that riot would have turned out if we here in London enjoyed the blessings of concealed carry laws.)

If you are a regular reader of Samizdata, then you will have read similar arguments to these many times before here. I do not apologise for the repetition. If important ideas are to be spread effectively, they have to stated not just the once, but again and again and again.

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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...

When the trouble came, hairdressers, sales assistants and butchers were among the scores of Turkish and Kurdish workers who stood outside their businesses in Green Lanes, Haringey, from 8pm having been warned by police to expect trouble.

The Guardian filmed others – some armed with baseball bats – on guard outside shops and restaurants in Kingsland Road, only a mile away from Hackney's burning high street. Three workers from Re-Style Hairdressers were among those out in Green Lanes, after word spread that an attack was imminent at about 4pm
[...]

"We were outside ready and expecting them," said the manager of Turkish Food Market, who asked not to be named. "But I felt very panicky because we are not safe from either the rioters or police. We put all of our efforts into this shop. It took 20 years to get it like this. But we do not know about our rights. I'm scared that the police and the government will attack us if we defend our businesses. We are being squeezed between the two."

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.

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When you read this kind of thing in a newspaper, it's bad. But when you read it at cricinfo ...:

The riots and looting in Birmingham were copycat incidents following events in London over the previous days. The vandalism was concentrated around the city centre, with masked young men and women going on a rampage from early evening, looting shops and destroying property.

They started by snatching mobile phones and handbags from pedestrians, followed by kicking, punching, breaking windows of shopping centres, banks, pubs, restaurants, forcing people to shut down these establishments. Groups of two or three suddenly grew larger and created an atmosphere of panic and fear. Through the evening and night riot police were on the main streets, armoured police vehicles and other cars scanned the roads, and a helicoper hovered overhead.

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:

Unlike L.A., there are no Korean shopkeepers with AR-15s to help contain the looting.

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.

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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.

Private First Class Naser Jason Abdo, was arrested Wednesday after making a purchase at Guns Galore in Killeen, Texas, the same ammunition store where Maj. Nidal Hasan purchased the weapons he allegedly used to gun down 13 people and wound 32 others on Nov. 5, 2009.

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...

(9)

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".

(18)

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.

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Violence must be replied to with violence. The only time I would suggest turning the other cheek is when firing off the left shoulder with a rifle after taking cover in a doorway.

- Perry de Havilland commenting here

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Well, call Ghost Busters if you like but for heaven's sake do not call the Plod.

When a gang of travellers trespassed on her land and allegedly threatened to cut her throat with a chainsaw, Tracy St Clair Pearce dialled 999, expecting protection and reassurance from the police.

But while they took a statement and visited the nearby traveller camp, officers came back and confiscated her shotgun, saying it was a “sensible precaution”.

Well Tracy got quite a life lesson, eh? Where on earth did she get notion the State gives a damn about her right to self defence from some predatory 'Traveller' thugs?

The rule is simple... are you a home owner? Never. Ever. Call. The. Police.

They are not there to protect you. Just file this under 'the State is not your friend'...

(10)

Praveen Swami, diplomatic editor of the Daily Telegraph, has a good piece - although I might quibble on one or two points - concerning the problem of Somali piracy, about which I have written several times here at Samizdata. I am not going to add further comment to what I have already said, but I was impressed by this article and a longish comment attached to it by a person with the signature of "IgonikonJack". It is pretty good. And another, by "itzman", refers to the issue of "letters of marque".

A related point is that I have been reading Wired for War, by PW Singer, and it has fascinating things to say about some remarkable new technologies as apply not just in areas such as robotics and pilotless aircraft - those "drones" - also in the innovations now under way in the nautical world. They will surely play a part in any move to suppress piracy, but as Singer points out, the bad guys can increasingly get their hands on technology as well, and often by entirely legitimate means. This is all the more reason why libertarians, who are sometimes at the cutting edge of thinking about alternatives to government-imposed laws, as in the case of legal writer Bruce Benson, should get involved in how to address issues such as piracy.

In the Daily Telegraph article I link to, is the fact that, at the time of writing, more than 1,000 people are being held hostage by Somali pirates. If the same amount of people had been taken hostage on civil airliners, say, I think the major powers of the world might have adopted a more robust view by now.

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I am sure most of our readers will get a kick out of this assuming they have not already heard about it.

A former beauty queen blew away a thief who broke into her home in Florida. Think of it as evolution in action...

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The current eruptions of civil unrest and protest across North Africa and the Middle East - no wonder oil prices are surging - has also thrown into unflattering relief the issue of Western arms sales to some regimes, such as that of Libya. And no doubt the argument will be made that, for example in the case of the recent, unlamented Blair/Brown governments in the UK, the administration put export earnings (oil, arms contracts) above such niceties as basic morality or even, arguably, long-term national security.

But here is a thing: according to Shariah law, it is prohibited for Muslims to invest in things such as the arms trade. Making weapons of war is put on the same banned list as pork, gambling, usury and pornography (sounds like all the really good things, Ed). So let me get this straight: some of the most fanatically Muslim regimes on the planet, such as Saudi Arabia, insist on sweeping prohibitions on making arms, but are more than keen to spend all that oil wealth on buying Typhoon fighters or whatever. This is surely an example of the contortions that Islamic law imposes on people. Another case being usury, as I have noted before.

Of course, all belief systems, secular and "religious" variety, come up against the issue of awkward realities and human hypocrisy. But when you next read a story bashing Western arms manufacturers for shipping instruments of death to the Middle East, perhaps it would be well to remember that the locals are apparently banned from making these instruments, but some of them are quite happy to reach for the wallet and buy them.

And lest you think this is just an issue for Islam, it is arguable that even those investors who put money into "ethical" funds that avoid arms trades would do well to reflect on where they think governments buy weapons for even strict self defence? I make this point in case anyone claims I am singling out Islam in general; I mention it in this case since obviously, much of the current buying of weapons is being driven by the Middle East.

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It appears that the shipping insurance industry, taking increasing hits from the sheer volume of kidnappings by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean, has decided to come up with some new responses to this. Market forces in action.

Watching a Channel 4 programme last night about a recent capture of a vessel and subsequent shootings, a figure came out that about 780 people hostages are still being held captive by these vermin. Kerist.

Here is a previous posting on the issue by Perry back in 2009. Here is another comment on this issue by yours truly, responding to a particularly silly claim.

Brian Micklethwait has also written on this issue over at his blog.

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Predictably in the wake of the shooting of a US politician and her surrounding admirers by an incoherent leftist (but I repeat myself), the journalistic profession continues to show just how completely they do not understand the subject they write about.

It is too painful for a nation traumatised by Tucson to reflect how these virtues have been betrayed once again by the insidious gun culture of America; by the pathetic weakness of laws which allow criminals and madmen to get their hands on real weapons of mass destruction that can fire hundreds of bullets in a minute; by the gun lobby’s intimidation of politicians in vulnerable seats; by the greed of the gunmakers who nowadays prefer to manufacture weapons more suitable for mass murder than for individual defence.

Yet far from gunmakers (who are a trivial political force) driving this debate, never was there a more truly 'grass roots' movement in the USA than the one which supports the right to keep and bear arms. Moreover 'individual defence' is only one of the reasons the Second Amendment exists... the primary reason for this piece of constitutional artifice is to keep the population armed as a counterweight not to criminals, well private sector criminals that is, but to the state itself.

But to expect a mainstream journalist writing for a British newspaper declaiming about US affairs to understand that... well I suppose that is like expecting a rodent to suddenly start quoting Shakespeare. It just ain't going to happen. People like journalist Harold Evans have hardly blinked as personal liberties have been remorselessly eroded across the western world and when they call for yet more state controls, their opinions should be judged accordingly.

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Reflecting on the Wikileaks issue - see Perry's post on Samizdata on Saturday - it occurs to me that one group of folk who must be a bit miffed by the leaks are parts of the anti-war side, especially those of a conspiracy theory cast of mind. For example, where is the leaked memo that "proves" there was some evil Jewish/neo-con/international banker/armsdealer/insert villain of choice conspiracy to blow up the WTC and then blame it on bin Laden? And I note that one of the leaked cables suggests that the Saudis are very alarmed by the geo-political ambitions of Iran, and want the West to contain it. Well, that surely fits with what a lot of those supposedly bloodthirsty neocons around George W Bush had been saying. And so on.

The leaks have done damage, no doubt about it, and unlike Perry, I am not so sangine about the overall impact of Wikileaks as far as rolling back the state is concerned. This is one of those things I find hard to be able to prove conclusively one way or the other; generally speaking, the more openness, the better, and the fewer hiding places for governments, the better. I also think, however, that leaks of secrets that may harm self defence efforts of genuinely liberal states against terrorist groups, if they occur, are enough to send such leakers to jail on the grounds of being reckless in offering, however unintentionally, aid to such groups.

But it is, nonetheless interesting that none of the dottier conspiracies swirling around 9/11 have yet to appear. The reason is that such conspiracy theories are bunk.

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What follows was not written by me but by a friend of mine, Niall Kilmartin. As will be apparent, he has known me since university. - NS

***

At the end of a recent post about lefties making laws for us because they think we're like them, Brian Micklethwait asks what similar errors we make. I think I can answer with examples from his own post.

First, he talks of gun control freaks - people so violent that if they had guns to hand during temper tantrums, they'd murder - and suggests that these people want guns banned because they think we're the same as them. Here he does have a specific, documented, public-domain example of a gun-control advocate with a domestic violence history. But let me offer a rival example.

In the week I first met Natalie Solent, she was sitting in the Oxford University D&D club chatting to two friends of mine whom she'd just met. An accident occurred outside and my friends went to help - thus incidentally establishing their bona fides as caring people to her. That situation resolved, they sat down again and - as my friends have a tendency to do, for some reason - began talking about guns. Natalie then was in some ways not Natalie as we now know her. As she told me later, if that accident hadn't happened, she would have written them off in the unthinking way of many British people: "They like guns, guns are for killing people, so they must like the idea of killing people; I'll not pursue their acquaintance."

Natalie, as she then was, is far more representative of how left-wingers think than Brian's example. No doubt Brian's example is useful in debate: "We're not the only violent ones. In fact, we're not specially violent. In fact, if we can look at some among our opponents for a moment... ". But as regards political fundamentals, that argument is so like the left's tactics, that it's fair to use it only when debating with them. My friends' reaction to the accident persuaded Natalie to change her mind a little. You would have got nowhere with her by saying, "You only think that because you're so violent yourself". It would be very like some accusations against the Tea Party: propaganda failures because it is so obvious to Tea Partiers and their friends that they are not true.

Brian's next illustration is even worse, because he has no public domain example, just speculation about some guy who thinks homosexuality will destroy civilization if tolerated because it would destroy his mental equilibrium if he tolerated it. In a world of ten thousand million (is it?) human beings, this guy may well exist. But in my (far from complete) knowledge of the Anglosphere public domain, past and present, I cannot offhand come up with an example. I can however think of counter-examples.

Before we meet them, however, let's meet a counter-argument. Turn the argument about homophobes being repressed homosexuals around and assert that homosexuals are really repressed gynophobes or androphobes. Here I can think of public domain examples. Women staff at Bletchley Park said that if a woman so much as spoke to Alan Turing when he was not expecting it, he would visibly shrink into himself in alarm. When the gynophobia is in itself so clear, it's a fair diagnosis that the homoerotic symptoms are mere side-effects.

Now look instead at, for example, Noel Coward. If I were willing to argue like a leftie, I could diagnose gynophobia. Think of his joke about the queen of Tonga at the coronation. As the enormous queen and diminutive ambassador from Pakistan passed in their shared carriage, someone asked him who that was with Queen Salote: "Oh, I think that's her lunch." Think of the plot of Blythe Spirit: the two women make the man's life hell quarrelling over him and eventually kill him. A clear diagnosis of gynophobia? Or a clear diagnosis of comic genius? Certainly, if Noel Coward was terrified of women, he handled it very much better than Alan Turing - unless you claim his homosexuality shows his bad handling of it, but then we're into circular reasoning.

In short, a hand-count of examples of people who are or may be assuming that laws should be written to deal with people like themselves does not a true-for-all-cases proof make. Arguing with some supporter of Canada's current laws against hate speech, I'd think it very fair to push Brian's argument. But with anyone more reasonable, I would not pretend to know things I don't know.

But as I said, I can offer counter-examples as well as counter-arguments. Many decades ago, my mother was raised, in humble circumstances, in a very straitlaced small Scottish town, attending the local school, but when she was 13 years old, she knew plenty about homosexuality - because she had a classical education. And there was nothing unusual about this level of classical knowledge even among ordinary people: many of you will know the In Parenthesis anecdote about the WWI Welsh private assigned to latrine duty who defended the utility of his task with the words "Don't you know the army of Artaxerxes was utterly destroyed for lack of sanitation?" (I love this anecdote because it's so easy to say "for lack of sanitation" in an appropriately-Welsh accent.)

My mother, aged 13, imagined that homosexuality was one of those things, like polytheism, human sacrifice and slavery, that had been common in the past but had died out under the beneficent influence of Christianity. Not that anyone told her that - it was a 13-year old's way of understanding what she was taught in the light of where and when she lived. (My mother aged 16 had become aware that "died out" was putting it too strongly.) Until half a century ago there were many people like her - people who were not taught to respect Socrates because he was homosexual, any more than they were taught to respect him because he owned slaves, or worshipped Zeus and Athena. Although they saw homosexuality as a perversion, they were taught to respect Socrates, and to see Athens killing him as a tragedy - not as good riddance to a nasty pervert. They knew exactly what they believed, but they were also taught to know intimately and respect a culture, and people in that culture, who had very different values from theirs.

Now imagine presenting to these past people - who would certainly fail the Haringey council "anti-homophobia" test or similar - the idea that they believed what they did because they thought tolerated homosexuality would destroy civilization. They would have thought of two responses.

- They would have thought of Sparta, where the idea that homosexuality destroyed a civilization is a possible thesis. The Spartans made homosexuality obligatory for their military training, and (uniquely amongst Greeks), had a positive, rather than just contemptuously tolerant, view of female homosexuality. The Spartans suffered a 90% decline in their citizen body during the classical period; eventually it destroyed the old Sparta. The Spartans had customs - marriage-by-capture, willingness to let visiting nobles sleep with their wives - which it's easy to explain by saying that their homosexuality was easier to learn in their teens than unlearn when it was time to procreate. So yes, if it is promoted enough, our ancestors would have argued, homosexuality can indeed destroy a civilization.

- But they would have set this level high, because they would also have thought of Athens. In Athens, philosophers taught that men who desired other men showed better taste than men who desired those inferior creatures, women. (And so women who desired women showed bad taste, but then women were inferior, so they would sometimes show bad taste - no need to get in a tiz about it.) Athens did not suffer a decline in its citizen body. If Athens destroyed itself - as one can argue it did - it was for other reasons. Just as with teenage-Natalie and guns above, so for our ancestors - and, today, for those who reject political correctness - Brain's explanation is simply an irrelevance.

These I think show ways in which we can avoid the vulgarities of left-wing argumentative methods. When you're forced to debate with such people, it may be fair to use their own tactics of pick the (unrepresentative) example or even invent the hypothetical (irrelevant) example. With anyone fairer, understand what they believe and the reasons why they do.

So much for Brian's post. One last reflection: writing this raised a question for me - and gave me my answer. People who defend Canada's anti-free-speech laws say they must because the alternative is the laws of the past. I'm sure that's just another of the lies the left uses to keep us in line. But suppose (God forbid!) they forced me to believe it? Suppose I had to choose between evils: between Canada's laws today and the laws of my mother's youth? Actual sex acts are by their nature private. Free speech is by its nature public - more effectively subject to law. In his first letter on the French revolution, Burke lists requirements for liberty: "... a simple citizen may decently express his sentiments upon public affairs ... even though against a predominant and fashionable opinion...". So I have my answer.

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Here at Samizdata we've only paid rather sporadic attention to this whole TSA grope and change (a phrase we have surely not heard the last of) thing, our most thorough airing of the issue so far having been in this posting and in its comments. But over at Transport Blog there is an excellently link rich posting about it all, compiled by Rob Fisher.

In particular Rob notes a Slashdot commenter (on this) saying something which particularly deserves to get around:

I don’t even think the TSA should be the one scanning the people at all, it should be the individual airlines. That way you can choose to pay for your security if you really want it, and competitive practices can find the optimal solution.

Indeed, and this was mentioned in passing in the comments on that earlier Samizdata posting. Safety doesn't need to be imposed by governments. People want safety, but they also want other things (fun, convenience, speed, comfort, not to be embarrassed or humiliated by neanderthals, etc.) and it should be up to people to make the trade-offs for themselves.

Personally, I suspect that an under-discussed aspect of all this is that a lot of people in the USA (as in many other places), and in particular just now in positions of authority and influence in the USA, think that air travel is evil and that curtailing it, by whatever method that works, is just terrific. These people are fast losing the argument about why air travel is evil (global warming blah blah blah), but the terrorism thing gives them an excuse to just keep on hacking away at the abomination (as they see it) of regular people regularly taking to the air. And the more that regular people squeal that they ain't gonna fly no more, the merrier these flying-is-evil killjoys will feel about it all. Protest from the ranks of the newly immobilised is good because that means that it's really working.

(59)

Instapundit linked a while back to a very short blog posting entitled Why are anti-gun activists so violent? This being in connection with a news story about a politician accused of abusing his wife.

The question seems to be rhetorical, but I can think of at least one possible real answer, which you arrive at by reversing the question. Why are violent people inclined to be anti-gun activists?

If you are yourself of an unusually violent disposition, and if you yourself sometimes believe that, had a gun been handy for you, you might have been tempted to kill your wife with it during a domestic disagreement, and you simply add in that one crucial extra assumption so often added, so wrongly, in so many situations, to the effect that most others are just like you, then it would make sense to say that you and your fellow men-on-the-verge-of-a-murderous-tantrum ought to be denied the means of committing murder. Arming the majority, in your eyes, is no answer, because the majority shares your own tendencies. That would only make things far worse.

In my opinion, an amazing number of mysteriously vehement, evidence-defying opinions can be better understood once you understand that the expresser of such opinions is unthinkingly assuming that most others are, in some particular respect, just like him.

Consider another quite common figure in our world: the repressed homosexual, who assumes that most "heterosexuals" are, like him, homosexuals who manage to suppress their natural homosexual urges. Such a person quite logically believes that homosexuality constantly threatens to overwhelm society (merely because it actually only threatens to overwhelm him) and to bring child-rearing and with it civilisation itself to an abrupt end.

Another consequence of the unexamined assumption that everyone is like me is that society becomes quite easy to plan from the top, because we all have the same tastes, preferences, ambitions, beliefs, and ways of going about things, don't we? Us deciding about how to satisfy other people's wishes does no great harm, because we effortlessly know what these wishes are. They are just like ours!

I first collided heavily with this everyone's-like-me notion not in political discourse, but in the course of doing, of all things, career counselling. A client who thinks that everyone else wants what he wants is caste down into unnecessary pessimism about his own chances of a happy life. He desperately wants to be a hotel manager. But so does everyone else! Brain surgeons, motor mechanics, professional sportsmen, hairdressers, estate agents, popular novelists - all these unfortunates are merely frustrated hotel managers. So what chance can he possibly have to buck this universal trend? The same inevitable fate awaits him. He is doomed to eke out his living by becoming a movie star (who occasionally gets to play a hotel manager), or some such hideous and soul-destroying compromise. Shining a torch on such everyone's-like-me assumptions can provoke lasting happiness. Hey, I might get what I want after all! There are far fewer people in the race I'm trying to do well in than I thought!

In what way does my sometimes vehement libertarianism result from assumptions that I make about others mostly being like me? What do libertarians generally assume to be true of people generally, which actually isn't?

(5)

This news story, if it turns out to be accurate, should cheer up the retailers of booze at airports.

(32)

Rand Simberg makes a subtly profound little point, in an email to Instapundit, as reported by Instapundit in an addendum to this posting, which links to a piece about newspapers that provide a spew of complicated reasons for not printing stuff that Muslims might be offended by, omitting only the real reason, which is that they're scared.

"So who are the ‘Islamophobes’ again?"

The point being that the Islamophobes are clearly not those who publicly defy Islam's threats and attacks and who just go ahead and publicly criticise it anyway and publicly mock it anyway. Where's the "phobia" in that? No, the phobia - the fear - is being shown by those who refrain from such criticism and such mockery, because they are afraid, and are afraid even to admit that they are afraid (because that too might be interpreted as an implied criticism of the thuggishness of that which they are refraining from criticising or mocking).

Although I have long been irritated by the suggestion that to fear Islam is in any way irrational, I had truly never thought of this particular point. Next time you dare to criticise Islam for being, oh, I don't know, evil, or something along those lines, and somebody says you are an Islamophobe, say: "Well, yes, I am a little bit scared of Islam because it is indeed scary. But you are even more scared of it, so scared that you dare not admit the truth of what I am saying. You are even more of an Islamophobe than I am."

This is a meme that deserves to get around.

With apologies to all those who had worked this particular thing out years ago.

(20)

This is fascinating, and must strike the Briton of today, with the UK's draconian restrictions on the use of guns, as a very alien sort of blog post. I got some insight into the sort of ideas and methods he is discussing when I did a 4-day defensive handgun course in Nevada back in the September of 2002 with an American friend of mine.

One thing that strikes me is how some of Eric's observations on the need to be "tactically aware" of your environment when seeking to be safe can apply not just to anyone thinking about firearms, but more generally. For instance, when I have entered a nightclub or pub, or thought about entering one, I tend to avoid those places where I cannot see any easy way to get out, or if there are folk in there who almost radiate menace. It does not have to be an issue of physical appearance, either - the tone of voice often sets my alarm bells off.

And one good piece of advice in the comment thread: if you want to drink booze, do not carry a gun. It seriously interferes with reaction times. And even in the UK, where you can still do stuff like shooting clays, avoid the sauce if you go on a sort of jolly day out. I have heard of some right twerps getting nearly killed because they were guzzling alcohol on driven game shoots, etc.

(17)

I am not going to attempt a detailed analysis of the shooting of Erik Scott in Las Vegas because it has already been done. I would suggest you read it and then listen to what our own police experts have to say.

I do have opinions of my own on the general situation. I bet we will find some person of coastal liberal persuasion at Costco soiled their knickers at the sight of a perfectly legal weapon and made an hysterical and totally misleading call to 911. With nothing but the terror-stricken voice of an idiot to go on, the 911 operator primed the responding police for a deadly response. Then, to top it off, the responding officers were incompetent.

The officers should be sent to remedial training. But the real guilt seems to me elsewhere: I sincerely wish the person from Costco who initiated the fatal chain of events could be charged with manslaughter.

I will now wait for our more than competent police commentators to chime in...

(24)

I've had a busy day, so do not have time for much Samizdata-ing, but I think that most of us will be agreeing that this is quite good news:

Irish homeowners can now legally use guns to defend themselves if their homes are attacked under new legislation.

Yes it's not good when your home gets "attacked under new legislation". Sorry. Carry on.

The new home defense bill has moved the balance of rights back to the house owner if his home is broken into "where it should always have been", say top Irish police.

The police association of superintendents and inspectors, the AGSI, stated that "the current situation, which legally demands a house owner retreat from an intruder, was intolerable".

I know, I know, it probably doesn't go far enough, but it is a step in the right direction. I particularly like what "AGSI" said. Wish we had something like AGSI here. Our policemen have the default position which just goes: leave everything to us sir. As in: leave everything to us and if you dare to do anything except surrender, just because we only got there a day late, we'll arrest you.

Thank you Guido, where this piece is currently number two on his list of "Seen Elsewhere" stuff.

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Proof that the US remains a very different nation to the UK at the moment. I just caught this Supreme Court decision via Bloomberg.

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I have only two quibbles about this otherwise excellent press release by Sean Gabb of the Libertarian Alliance. One, I don't believe Sean was ever "speaking in London", as the press release claims. I believe he just sat down and wrote what follows, probably in his home on the south coast. Two, the word "premature" seems an odd way to describe the ending of a similar killing spree in the USA in 2002, by the better armed citizenry that they mostly have over there. Was this interruption to be regretted? The first blemish above is just a pet hate of mine, probably best ignored. And the second I put down to Sean's eagerness to get his press release out quickly, which I applaud. Indeed, this press release was how I first heard about this horror:

The Libertarian Alliance, the radical free market and civil liberties institute, today calls for the relegalisation of civilian gun ownership in the United Kingdom as the only way for ordinary people to protect themselves against gun massacres. [This news release is prompted by the killings of at least five people on the 2nd June 2010 in and around the Cumberland town of Whitehaven.]

Speaking today in London, Dr Sean Gabb, Director of the Libertarian Alliance, comments:

"This outrage will certainly bring calls from the police and other victim disarmament advocacy groups for further gun control. However, bearing in mind that civilian ownership of handguns was outlawed in the two Firearms Acts of 1997, we fail to see, unless the murder weapon was a shotgun, what there is left to be outlawed.

"The Libertarian Alliance notes that these shootings would have been extremely difficult in a country where the people were allowed to arm themselves. We understand that the killer, Derrick Bird, was able to drive in perfect safety around Whitehaven, shooting people at random. None of his victims was in any position to return fire. Only when armed police could eventually be brought in did he feel it necessary to run away.

"In the United States, at least one campus shooting was brought to a premature end by armed civilians. The same is true in Israel, where many members of the public go about armed. Only in a country like England, where the people have been systematically disarmed, can a killer go about like a fox among chickens.

"The Libertarian Alliance believes that all the Firearms Acts from 1920 onwards should be repealed. The largely ineffective laws of 1870 and 1902 should also be repealed. It should once again be possible for adults to walk into a gun shop and, without showing any permit or proof of identity, buy as many guns and as much ammunition as they can afford. They should also be able to use lethal force, at home and in public, for the defence of life, liberty and property.

"Only then will ordinary people be safe from evil men like Derrick Bird."

Indeed.

How many more such slaughters must be perpetrated in Britain before it is realised that making guns really, really, really illegal, which disarms everyone except those willing to break all such laws and go out a-slaughtering, is only making things far worse? I remember the Hungerford Massacre, which went on for as long as it did because the police had to get guns from London, which took hours. After which, inevitably, they made guns even more illegal. The Libertarian Alliance predicted further massacres, and we were not wrong.

The more rural parts of Britain used to be full of guns, and were, partly because of this, very law abiding. Not any more, on either count. Why do such killing sprees now happen? Because, now, they can.

(7)

Via Instapundit, is an academic paper on the issue of how merchant vessels can protect themselves from pirates. This will not break new ground for Samizdata regulars, of course, but I recommend it.

Talking of merchant shipping, if this volcanic ash problem continues to mess up air travel, then merchant shipping is likely to get a boost in the short run. Bring brack the transAtlantic ocean liners, maybe. Here's a website where you can even buy such monsters of the sea. Bit out of my price range, alas.

(96)

In Britain, a woman alone in her own home cannot even brandish a knife to defend herself, let alone actually use one.

The youths approached the kitchen window, before attempting to break into her garden shed, prompting Miss Klass to wave a kitchen knife to scare them away. Miss Klass, 31, who was alone in her house in Potters Bar, Herts, with her two-year-old daughter, Ava, called the police. When they arrived at her house they informed her that she should not have used a knife to scare off the youths because carrying an "offensive weapon" – even in her own home – was illegal.

The lesson here is simple: never call the police. Never. Ever. They would have arrived too late to protect her had it turned violent and in any case Myleene Klass, who acted commendably by making it clear to intruders that she would defend herself and her child, was the only person who actually faced the possibility of arrest when the police did arrive.

If you have to defend yourself, do not call the cops afterwards and if possible leave the scene as soon as you can, no matter how clear it is that you are the aggrieved party. And if worst comes to worse and you get into a violent confrontation in your own home with an intruder, try to make sure your story is the only one the cops will hear (under no circumstances try to detain the scrot for the coppers to collect).

And if the cops do show up, just remember that your statement is not about speaking truth from a position of innocence, it is about not giving the state any pretext to arrest you. Stay nothing about what happened until your lawyer arrives.

Just remember that arresting you for daring to defend yourself is easier than looking for some criminal who attacked you because the police know where you live and getting any arrest shows up as a positive result in their statistics. Ideally just defend yourself and do not call them at all afterwards.

Myleene, you had the right instincts and you have my respect... your only mistake, and it is a big one, is to assume the cops in the UK are on your side and a young mum home alone with her child was legally entitled to defend herself. They ain't and you are not. You have the moral right to do whatever it takes to defend yourself from intruders, but the police have no interest in such niceties.

The state is not your friend.

(40)

Bravo to the security men aboard the MV Maersk Alabama, who when approached and fired on by Somali pirates, fired back and drove them off.

Placing armed security men aboard ships vulnerable to pirate attacks has always been the obvious solution to the problem of piracy. How could anyone have thought that hugely expensive warships designed for real wars, operating under preposterous rules of engagement, was ever the solution to a profusion of scabby predators with small arms zooming about in small fast boats worth a few thousand dollars at most? There simply is no excuse for this having taken so long to implement, but kudos to Maersk for doing the right thing... firearms are a great deal better than relying on a hail of beer bottles.

But I would urge Maersk to invest in a pair of .50 cal HMGs per ship to discourage the more redoubtable of the Somali pirates from upping the ante by taking a Dushka off the back of a 'technical'. An additional advantage of using heavy machineguns is it makes sinking the attacker and hopefully killing the pirates more likely, which can only be beneficial in both thinning out the herd and encouraging these predatory scum to find a less hazardous line of work.

And then there is always this humorous private sector approach... and the funny thing is, it would probably not only work but also be oversubscribed and profitable for a while, at least as long as the supply of 'big game' lasts.

(5)

An unusual little back page story...

When they forced their way into Miss Kausar’s home, her father Noor Mohammad refused their demands and was attacked. His daughter was hiding under a bed when she heard him crying as the gunmen thrashed him with sticks. According to police, she ran towards her father’s attacker and struck him with an axe. As he collapsed, she snatched his AK47 and shot him dead. She also shot and wounded another militant as he made his escape.

Sweet. The world needs more people like Rukhsana Kausar.

And an addition 'bravo' to all the people across the globe to held up the Mighty Forks and protested the obscene 'celebrations' of the sixtieth anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party taking power.

Fight the power.

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"The fact that compensation would often not be forthcoming either because of inability to catch the offender or inability to pay if caught would motivate us to take out "crime insurance", which in turn would motivate the insurance company to catch such criminals as it profitably could. Criminals would have plenty to fear from these highly motivated companies, who of course would acquire from their clients the right to such compensation as they could exact, at least up to the level of full resitution. It would be interesting to know whether the net effect would be more satisfactory than the current system, but when you consider the all-but-total failure of the punishment system actually employed in, say, the United States and Canada, it is difficult to believe that it wouldn't be a major improvement. Everyone agrees that we have very far to go in the way of improving our system of responding to crime. It is a sobering thought that getting rid of one of the most spectacularly cost-effective systems in the history of mankind short of war is perhaps even less likely to be seriously considered than is abolition of war."

Jan Narveson, The Libertarian Idea, pages 230-231.

(8)

There is a certain grim satisfaction in reading this story, on how one UK government minister - seen as a potential future Labour leader - has announced, without telling Gordon Brown, that the case for compulsory ID cards has been scrapped.

Of course, the real issue remains that even without compulsory ID cards, we have a state database on every person in this country; and the aggregation of data about us gets more intensive, and is unlikely to be reversed regardless of the outcome of the next election. Too much money has been spent, too many corporate interests have been bought, for that to stop.

(43)

There is a bit of a debate going on over at The Corner, the National Review's group blog, on whether the 150-year sentence meted out to Ponzi scheme fraudster Bernard Madoff is excessive. Well, given that the man is 71 years old, it is academic anyway since he will die in the slammer. But clearly, the length of the punishment is symbolic, though the judge could be accused of grandstanding - it might have been easier simply to sentence Mr Madoff to life imprisonment and have done with it.

From a philosophical point of view, I am not sure whether such a sentence has much of an effect in deterring future fraudsters; the trouble with the notion of restituting victims of crimes, however, is that what on earth can a convict like Madoff do to pay back his victims tens of billions of dollars? If he did some kind of work until he dropped dead, it would be unlikely that he could generate a fraction of the wealth that has been taken from people. In some cases, folks lost their entire life savings. Now the snarkier folk out there might say, well, his victims were all incredibly rich so they will not suffer, but that is nonsense. Theft is theft; if you have honestly built a fortune and some shyster takes the lot, that's a crime, period.

But there is a problem with the idea of compensating victims when the size of a fraud is this huge. I'd be interested in what commenters think might be some practical solutions.

(9)

This, by Clay Shirky, is a truly fascinating blog posting. And the bit of it that I am about to quote (which is as far as I have so far got in it) is (to use a word I usually resist) awesome, at any rate in its long-term potential impact:

Just to pick one example, one I'm in love with, but it's tiny. A couple of weeks one of my students at ITP forwarded me a project started by a professor in Brazil, in Fortaleza, named Vasco Furtado. It's a Wiki Map for crime in Brazil. If there's an assault, if there's a burglary, if there's a mugging, a robbery, a rape, a murder, you can go and put a push-pin on a Google Map, and you can characterize the assault, and you start to see a map of where these crimes are occurring.

That does not sound 'tiny' to me. It sounds huge. Finally, here might be a system worth reporting crimes to.

What this says is that those maps you see in TV cop shows will stop being a cop monopoly and become something everyone can consult, and contribute to. A golden age of private sector law enforcement beckons. In the words of the title of the blog (now alas not alive any more) where this particular posting appears: "Here comes everybody". And against everybody, the criminals will be put back on the defensive where they belong, in other words where they were before TV took almost all law-abiding citizens off the streets (by showing them such things as TV cop shows), leaving behind only actually existing (as opposed to TV fantasy) government policemen, idiotically droning their mantra: leave it to us. Which has worked really well, hasn't it?

Apologies to all those to whom this is stale news, what with this blog posting being based on a speech that was delivered exactly one year ago tomorrow. But if only a small fraction of the Samizdata readership has not seen this posting before, then from where I sit this is a very good mission accomplished. My thanks to Lynn Sislo, for mentioning it here.

(10)

The Counter-Terrorist Unit is using a new strategy to stress test the alertness of their officers and the resilience of their response. By employing some buffoon as their leader, who makes little or no effort to conceal top secret information, the North West CTU entered Jack Bauer territory in order to round up the inevitable band of Pakistanis who just happen to be enjoying the lifelong learning offered by our universities (truncated for their purposes):

Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick was photographed entering Downing Street carrying a briefing note headed SECRET, on which details of an undercover operation against a suspected Al-Qaeda cell could clearly be seen.

The document set out the strategy for for the operation, an investigation into a suspected cell based in the north west of England and allegedly plotting an attack in the UK, including details of suspects and how the police intended to arrest them.

The bumbler has already been tainted by the Damien Green affair, but it takes real quality to walk around with SECRET tattooed on your forehead. Rather fitting that the fools who set up the surveillance society forget that it is a two way street. Watch and you will be watched! Since our security depends upon confidence, could we demote this tarnished officer to the role that he deserves: Sarjeant at Arms in the House of Commons, where he will be amongst those of his own kind.

(15)

Jacqui Smith on "The Politics Show" turned in another performance in evasion and Newspeak that I was unsure what she actually said. Not as bad as Simon Sion about the Further Education Councils but a mirror of distortion nonetheless. She is being interviewed prior to the publication of the government's updated counter-terrorist strategy. Part of this agitprop approach allows Gordon Brown to write his hyperbole in The Observer, claiming credit for the success of others.

Part of the problem on counter-terrorism strategy is assessing its context, its capabilities and its outcomes. If you read Brown's article, his assessment of the threat from Al-Qaida is straightforward: who would disagree that they are our primary threat. Zero in on his statements and we become more sceptical of the claims and the results.

They are motivated by a violent extremist ideology based on a false reading of religion and exploit modern travel and communications to spread through loose and dangerous global networks.

They are an ideology; they are a religion: their beliefs are more widely shared than Brown states, especially amongst the British Muslim population. Jacqui Smith identified the rise of extremism as a root problem but was unwilling to define an extremist. First, know your enemy. When we read Brown state that our defence is the duty of every individual, we heartily agree. In practice, this is piety shrouding inaction:

And there is a duty on all of us - government, parliament, and civic society - to stand up to people who advocate violence and preach hate, to challenge their narrow and intolerant ideology - in public meetings, in universities, in schools and online.

But accept that our arbitrary laws on hate speech may leave you open to arrest and detention. Who arrested the Islamic extremists in Luton? This doublespeak permeates the entire article with faint aroma of Brownie beans: expenditure, exaggerated claims and comparisons, and the image of Britain as a world-beater. When was Brown ever misperceived as humble?

I believe that this updated strategy, recognised by our allies to be world-leading in its wide-ranging nature, leaves us better prepared and strengthened in our ability to ensure all peace-loving people of this country can live normally, with confidence and free from fear.

In the world of Jacquistan, the words on the page protect us; in reality, their attempt to make political capital of this duty leaves me suspecting that policy is subject to increased political meddling and control.

The more we move into the world of Jacquistan, the more I fear another attack.

(26)

Quite possibly the greatest video ever...

... the pure essence of speaking truth to power. This video has no sell-by date.

a tip of the kevlar battle-bowler to Clark Carter

(16)

Chinese crew used beer bottles to fight off pirates

While I salute the captain and crew of the Zhenua 4, I cannot help thinking that guns might have been more convenient. What, exactly, is the difficulty over providing them?

(62)

Matthew Parris today:

For me, Thomas à Becket and Canterbury Cathedral spring to mind. I picture an infuriated Prime Minister bellowing at a flat-screen television: "Will nobody rid me of these troublesome leaks?" Who the four knights were who took it upon themselves to act upon the presumed wishes of a maddened monarch, we may never know, but when Mr Brown insists that he didn't actually know, it is possible to believe him.

Just what I was thinking. And just like Henry II before him, Gordon Brown will have to carry the can for this, and suffer whatever is now the equivalent of an annual public flogging. Constant references to this from now on in the history books, is my guess. For the point is that although Ministerial and Prime Ministerial protestations of ignorance about this absurd outrage may be true, Ministers and the Prime Minister have spent the last decade creating the atmosphere within which "anti-terrorist" policemen would indeed come to think that such conduct as arresting an opposition politician is some kind of duty.

Coincidentally, and perhaps I'm wrong to defy Godwin's Law but I'll do it anyway, I have recently been reading this book (more from me in connection with it here), which concerns the various big decisions taken between 1940 and 1941 by the various war leaders: Britain resists, Roosevelt helps Britain, Stalin decides that Hitler won't invade Russia, Hitler invades Russia, Japan attacks USA, Hitler declares war on USA, that kind of thing. The final one is: Hitler decides to murder the Jews. And in that horrifically more portentous matter you get the same thing, of Hitler not being personally pinnable down with anything like exact foreknowledge of this or that particular burst of slaughter. Nothing was ever put into writing and signed Adolf Hitler. But he was responsible nevertheless, because he created the atmosphere within which his underlings did their worst. He set the tone.

Well, now, in this by comparison farcical little episode, Gordon Brown set the tone, and lesser creatures went to work. And I'm very glad it has happened. During my adult lifetime, I have watched politicians get cleverer and cleverer at enacting policies not by announcing them, debating them, and then doing them, but by just doing them, a little bit at a time, slice by slice, with no one slice being big enough to unite the potential opposition, but the resulting dish nevertheless amounting to a huge and often deeply disagreeable change. Think: EU. In such an atmosphere, you actually cheer when, emboldened by the silence that greets the usual and thin kind of slice, they instead make a grab for a much thicker slice. For suddenly it is clear to all what went on, and what has been going on for a decade and more.

What the hell? Why don't we just arrest the bastard and do him over for a few hours? Who the hell f---ing cares who Damian f---ing Green is? Yeah, go for it. Time these f---ers learned their f---ing lesson.

Yes, comparisons with Hitler are over-dramatic, as are the more common comparisons being made now in all the other pieces like this one being scribbled and blogged by all the other no-name scribblers and bloggers like me, with Robert Mugabe's hideous misrule of Zimbabwe. Matthew Parris mentions them in his piece, quoted above, noting their oddity yet ubiquity, but not ridiculing them any more than I do. For that is what goes on at the very bottom of the slippery slope we are on here. Those are the comparisons that spring to mind, even as you realise that they are out of all proportion. They go to to kind of deed this was, to its dramatic structure, so to speak, even if the scale and intensity of this particular deed was trivial by comparison.

As far as Damian Green was concerned, this has been wonderful. He is probably now having more fun than he ever has before or ever will again. And yes, it is Damian and not Damien. Who knew? Not me, until today.

I include references to f---ing and f---ers very deliberately. That our rulers now swear a lot more than they used to is all part of that atmosphere, that tone, that they have been so busily creating. It is an atmosphere in which there are now so many laws, and laws which are so sweeping in their scope, that all are now guilty. The law simplifies down to the question: do they like you? If they really really do not like you, look out, they'll come for, and find or make up the laws they need as they go along. That a front bench politician has been, very publicly, on the receiving end of this parody of the idea of law is cause not for rage and more swearing, but for rejoicing.

(7)

I agree with all those who are now saying that the England cricket tour of India should not be interrupted, in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. My understanding of terrorism is that what makes it such a headache to defend against, given that in India people generally are not allowed to carry guns (correct?), is not knowing when or where they might strike. But if you have a number of set-piece, high profile events to defend, with definite times and places attached to them, you can. It will be cumbersome and tiresome, and expensive, with lots more frisking of people who look like they might be terrorists, and lots more frisking of people who do not look at all like terrorists, both to avoid upsetting people who look like terrorists and to make sure that any terrorist plan deliberately not to look like a terrorist is also guarded against. But if the authorities and people of India are willing to put up with all that, then so should our cricketers be.

I am even opposed to the final two one-dayers being cancelled, although I daresay the Indian authorities would not have had the time to make their dispositions, given that the one-dayers would have been very soon. But the test matches should definitely go ahead, including and especially the second one, which they have already, regrettably, moved from Mumbai to Chennai. I guess the Mumbai police have enough on their hands already, or think they have.

Playing those two one-dayers would have changed nothing in a cricketing way. 5-0 to India would almost certainly have become 7-0 to India, but playing those games, and the Mumbai test in Mumbai, would have made another and bigger point. I daresay that, because of their disappointing cricket, England's cricketers are not now very highly regarded in India. This would be a chance to get back into India's good books. Risky? Maybe, a little. But also, given the money now disposed of by India's cricket fans and by Indians generally, to make this small stand against terrorism might also been, you know, rather lucrative. But headlines like Pietersen wants security assurances don't strike the right note at all. This guy had a great chance to make a much more positive statement than that, but he muffed it.

As James Forsyth put it yesterday:

Imagine how we would have felt if after the 7/7 bombings the Australian cricket team had headed to Heathrow.

And commenter CG added:

Some of the star players in the Australian Rugby League team wanted the team to pull out of their English tour in 2001. When they were told that they would be replaced by more willing players, and may not get their places back, they decided to come after all.

I know, I know. The reckless courage of the non-combatant. But I didn't stop using London's buses and underground trains in the immediate aftermath of 7/7, still less run away to the country.

(31)

I have written about this subject before as an urgent issue of security, and surely the topic of piracy must be at the top of countries' security agendas now that a large oil tanker has been seized. It makes me wonder what insurers such as Lloyds of London must think: surely, if shipping fleets want to keep insurance premia down, an obvious solution must be to arm, or better protect, such vessels. I do not know what the law is about whether ships, operating in international waters, on carrying weapons on board merchant vessels. In centuries past, vessels of the East India Company, for instance, were frequently as well armed as many naval vessels. They had to be.

If this problem gets worse, then it is not just the navies of the western powers, such as those of Britain or the US, that might have to think about protecting shipping routes more aggressively. I think that the rising economic power of India must take on more responsibility to guarding some of the shipping lanes in the Indian Ocean. India, after all, is a prime beneficiary of globalisation and global trade. For that matter, China probably will have to think about protecting its shipping more effectively, as must jurisdictions which engage in much ship-borne trade such as Singapore and Australia and Brazil.

One of the reasons why a strictly isolationist foreign policy does not work is that in the real world, the web of global trading routes from which we all benefit have to be protected. Free market transactions must be protected against predators. That means things like naval bases or agreements between states to protect certain shipping routes, for example. If states cannot do this, but somehow expect merchant ships to continue conveying the goods which drive the world economy, pressure to let merchant ships carry weapons will be irresistable.

Some time ago, I read the Frederick Forsyth novel, The Afghan. I won't give away the plot but piracy is a key part of it. Any security policy, including an anti-terrorist one, must take account of seaborne threats. It might seem rather obvious to point this out in an island nation like the UK, but a large proportion of our economic produce is conveyed over the wet stuff. If the anti-terror experts have not addressed themselves fully to this issue, they had better start doing so. Maybe this hijacking might have a galvanising effect.

Here is what the US navy has been doing.

(9)

One of the hardest things for a libertarian to do at the moment is to maintain any kind of optimism or sense of confidence that his or her ideas will catch on. The danger is that if one sinks into despair, then that despair will come across as a form of defeatism, which turns into a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. If I have a criticism of one of the head honchos of the UK-based Libertarian Alliance, Sean Gabb, is that he used to wallow so much in this sort of "we are all doomed" schtick that I almost imagined, that in a perverse kind of way, that he was secretly rather enjoying it and that it was all a bit tongue in cheek. Funnily enough, at last year's annual LA conference in London - the next one is held this weekend - I sensed that Mr Gabb had cheered up a bit. Even so, reasons for to be grim about civil liberties issues remain but sometimes I think that momentum might be slowly changing at the level of public debate. Increasingly, if the government comes out with some new measure, it is geeted with a sort of wearied resignation or outright derision; enthusiasm for such measures are few, or supported by obvious toadies and fools.

Take this story in the Daily Telegraph today. The outgoing Director of Public Prosecutions, no less, talks about the UK embracing the politics of fear:

Outgoing Director of Public Prosecutions Sir Ken Macdonald warned that the expansion of technology by the state into everyday life could create a world future generations “can’t bear”.

Maybe they will not just bear it, but do something about it.

In his wide-ranging speech, Sir Ken appeared to condemn a series of key Government policies, attacking terrorism proposals - including 42 day detention - identity card plans and the “paraphernalia of paranoia”.

Paraphernalia of paranoia - that is a nice turn of phrase.

(50)

Make: has a wonderful way of dealing with security cameras.

This balloon-based anti surveillance camera project by Brooklyn-based artist William Lamson is an easy way to fool even the most sophisticated forms of surveillance technology. Helium filled rubber balloon set to the correct height and covered with enough static electricity to stick to any surface, such as a public camera. Now if only they made robotic pins for security officers to pop them.

(16)

I ran across an interesting quote by linguist Steven Pinker in the july 5th issue of New Scientist:

"My next book will be on the decline of violence and its implications. Rates of murder, warfare, genocide, torture and deadly riots are lower now than at any moment in human history. Assuming that we have't changed biologically, then what has changed in our psychology and soceity to make that possible?"

The interview went on to suggest several reasonable possibilities, including the spread of the concept of a fair and impartial judiciary but left out two which I think may be very important: wealth and freedom.

(28)

Such are my internetting skills that I had to go here first, and then to here, before finally getting to here, the final here being a Telegraph piece about the restoration to the people of Britain (or maybe, it's hard to tell, the mere restatement of) the right of forceful self-defence.

Home owners and "have-a go-heroes" have for the first time been given the legal right to defend themselves against burglars and muggers free from fear of prosecution.

So, if someone breaks into my flat in the dead of night, and I get lucky with my late uncle's old cricket bat which I still keep handy just in case, I won't have to be quite so fearful of legal complications.

There is, after all, something to be said in favour of lame duck governments, desperately trying something – anything – in order to save a few fragments from the forthcoming electoral wreckage.

My guess is they were ploughing through the tedious and now desperately dispiriting rigmarole of yet more focus grouping, with very little to show for it indeed other than deepening hatred of the government, until suddenly someone piped up with something about "if I break the skull of a burglar when all I was trying to do was protect my home I didn't do anything wrong" or "it's ridiculous that old men who fight back with their walking sticks get arrested but not the scumbags who attack them", or some such. And the entire room exploded with unanimous agreement. And then they tried it on a few more focus groups, and got the same response. And since this is an actual policy proposal, and not a mere howl of loathing, and since nothing else seems to be persuading anyone that this government is not a total disaster when it comes to restraining criminals in any way whatsoever, why not give it a try? "I mean, at least we could make an announcement." Which is what I of course suspect this to be. The government screws up the small print in every other law it passes these days, so I expect this law, in the unlikely event that it ever materialises any time soon, to be just as bad, and quite possibly to be yet another few sneaky steps in the wrong direction rather than any sort of step in the right one.

No matter. That this government is even pretending to talk sense about the right to forceful self-defence - instead of the usual evil tripe about waiting several days for the police to show up, maybe, with counselling pamphlets - is a huge improvement in the political atmospherics of my country. Many of this government's supporters will be thrown into well-deserved torment and angst on this topic. Unreconstructed lefties will regard this announcement as just one more reason why the forthcoming collapse of this government really doesn't matter, which is all to the good. Saner lefties, still determinedly wrong about such things as income tax but less wrong about this topic, will feel free to make themselves heard, and to praise their government for this bold initiative. The opposition will scrutinise the proposal for evidence of the duplicity that I pretty much now assume. And, you never know, it just might be genuine.

Meanwhile, am I allowed to say, sotto voce, that I did, sort of, see this coming? I wonder if those who commented derisively on the apparently absurd optimism of that earlier posting saw this latest proclamation coming. Even I am amazed at how quickly the tide may now be beginning to turn. Because, restoring (or maybe just re-stating for the benefit of judges and policemen who now assume other things) the right (itself no small thing) to forceful self-defence leads will lead directly to further discussion, about the means of actually being able to set about doing such defence. I have my cricket bat. So, how about a gun? The principle has now been conceded. Now let's talk practice.

Definitely a small victory, and maybe, just maybe, something slightly bigger than that.

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At my education blog late last night, I found myself putting, in connection with this (which is a story about how two French science students were brutally murdered in London yesterday), this:

It’s somewhat off topic for this blog, but I say: allow non-crims be be armed!

It may yet happen. London, full of disarmed non-crims and armed crims, is rapidly becoming like New York used to be but is now so conspicuously not, a "crime capital". Any decade now, something might just give. Or, to use the language of this blog, the lesson might be learned.

Something about the extreme savagery of that double murder yesterday made me think that now was the exact time to be saying such a thing, not just to those few of my devoted libertarian friends so devoted that they read that education blog of mine, but also to any eco-friendly home-schoolers or weary school teachers who happen to drop by there. Suddenly, the anti-gun-control message felt very right, like an idea whose time, finally, might have come.

Having blogged my fill about that and other things, I read some bloggage by others, which happened to include a piece by Bishop Hill, which I really recommend you to read all of. The Bishop offers an interesting speculation about the origins of all the authoritarianism and surveillance that now afflicts our country.

He starts by noting the dramatic superiority of the USA now compared to Britain now, when it comes to public safety and sense of public menace. In the USA there is now lots of the former. Britain is rife with the latter. In the USA, they can now defend themselves. But here in Britain, we have surrendered the means of doing that, so we must depend upon the state to defend us, and must permit it to be ever more overbearing and intrusive and ever less impeded by safeguards that date from a time when people trusted themselves more than they trusted their rulers. It's not that Britain is now ruled by pure totalitarians, or by any obvious totalitarian urge, merely that totalitarianism seems to be our only hope to protect us against chaos. It isn't that we really do trust our rulers, merely that we feel we have no choice. But it isn't working, not least because woolly liberals have refused to allow the necessary prison sentences to be handed down, even to those miscreants who are still caught.

Looked at this way the root cause of the wave of authoritarian legislation which threatens to swamp us is not authoritarianism so much as "woolly liberalism". We won't punish criminals adequately, so we get more criminals. We won't allow the law-abiding to uphold the law, so our streets get swamped with CCTV. Witnesses can't defend themselves, so we have to allow anonymous evidence in court. Women can't defend themselves from rapists, so they shouldn't go out alone. The opinionated can't defend themselves from retribution, so better to legislate them into silence.

We find ourselves between the horns of a dilemma. The idea of rearming the populace is greeted by most "right-thinking" members of the middle classes as evidence of a kind of madness, an idea to get you cast out from polite society. "We don't want to end up like America", they will say, as they check the locks on their doors and windows, and test the burglar alarm one more time.

But the alternative is to continue our increasingly precipitous slide down the slippery slope that ends up with the UK resembling North Korea.

America or North Korea. You decide.

And, as I say, he already has decided. As did I, many years ago.

In the USA there has already been a sea-change, in favour of the right of the individual US citizen to bear an arm (forgive my imperfect grasp of the language of liberation here). The Supreme Court has decreed against only criminals having guns. And it is not now just the unwild West that is more peaceful and secure than Britain. New Jersey and New York are now far more comfortable to walk about in than they used to be.

But if Bishop Hill is right, then there is another sea-change happening in Britain which is relevant to all this. Oh, we are not yet willing to accept guns in our own hands, rather than just in those of criminals. But we do now seem to be turning against the surveillance state. It is yielding nothing in the way of safety against the criminals; it is merely becoming something else to fear. We sense that we are trading our birthright – "Magna Carta, did she die in vain?" as the old but now newly relevant Tony Hancock joke goes – in exchange for ... nothing. Those woolly liberals may be reluctant to send robbers and murderers to prison, certainly not for long enough for them to be old and defeated when they get out again. But at least some of the woolly liberals remain uneasy about our Ancient Liberties. And now the general public is starting seriously to share such worries. All those lost data discs are working the very magic we here hoped they would. The Database State is starting to seem seriously scary, not just for the power it is amassing, but because of its inability to control this power, let alone use it for our benefit. It does not protect us. It is but one more huge thing to fear. It hoovers up everything it knows or thinks it knows about everyone and everything, and then leaves it all on trains and in taxis. Who knows where else it is leaking? The Database State has become like one of those medieval bad kings, tyrannical and ineffectual in equal measure, like Edward II or Richard II, or like King John, the original object of Magna Carta herself.

When, in politics, the question changes, the answers can be startling, to those who didn't see what just happened. If the Database State will not - and, actually, must not - protect us, who, or what, will? If that now becomes the new question, then rolling back gun control might just become one of the new and newly respectable answers. At the root of the idea of the rule of law is that we do not trust Them, and prefer instead to trust ourselves, fallible though we may also be. When it comes to the use of violence to resist and deter violence, that notion may just be making a British comeback.

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So the Supreme Court's opinion in Heller really has me wondering. Will this have any effect on the practice of so many police departments, especially big city ones with bright shiny SWAT teams, to use middle of the night no-knock raids when a less dramatic approach might have been a better choice? Will it encourage better investigations of exactly who's home they are breaking into before they begin battering down doors?

I suspect but haven't checked that most of these raids occur in jurisdictions that do, quite likely to soon be 'did', not permit armed self defense in one's home. I further suspect the unspoken reasoning was too often, 'Don't worry about it. If they're not bad guys, they won't be armed'.

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I’ve spent more than a decade working as a nightclub doorman. I’ve been involved in hundreds of violent incidents, including many away from the club. I can state unequivocally that in situations where some of these punks decide they’re going to pick on myself, or someone with me, with the intention of stealing our property, terrorising us or just for shits and giggles, on the occasions I’ve been armed, the situation has suddenly resolved itself when I produce a weapon.

A doorman, quoted at the blog of Rob Fisher, occasional commenter over these parts.

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On her blog over at the Spectator website, Melanie Phillips, a writer with whom I generally agree on certain things, not least the right of Israel both to exist and defend itself, writes what I think is a poor article on David Davis' recent decision to hold a by-election in his parliamentary seat to highlight the loss of civil liberties:

Much is being made in some quarters of the apparent gulf between the view taken of David Davis’s resignation by the political and media village (he’s lost the plot/is a one-man plot/is a monstrous narcissist) and the public (he’s a hero fighting for Britain’s ancient liberties). I can’t help but see all this as yet another example of the replacement of reason by emotion. I can certainly see that Davis has touched a popular chord among people who feel passionately – and I have much sympathy with this – that MPs no longer act in the public interest and no longer speak for them but instead are machine politicians whipped by their party leadership into a systematic denial of reality. I also sympathise with the general view that the state is encroaching more and more oppressively into people’s lives – the abuse by local councils of anti-terrorist legislation being a case in point. To that extent, the quixotic Davis is surfing the popular tide of anti-politics, which explains much of the support he is getting and is not to be under-estimated.

"Much is being made". Yes, that is because the loss of civil liberties and the spread of the database state has reached the point where ordinary members of the public - those ghastly people - are getting riled. David Davis is a sufficiently paid-up member of the human race to have spotted this. But to dismiss his action as some sort of Dianaesque emotional display, rather than what is in fact a pretty shrewd, calculated act seems a bit patronising. And then we get to the reasoning that explains why Ms Phillips dislikes what Mr Davis has done:

Second, he says he is against 42 days because he stands for the hallowed principle of not locking people up without charge. So does that mean he is against the 28 day limit as well? And if he is, then surely he has to be against the 14 day limit that preceded it, and the seven day limit before that. Indeed, according to the principles he has laid down he has to be against any detention before charge at all. Similarly, he says he’s against the whole ‘surveillance society’ including speed cameras, DNA databases, CCTV and so forth; yet he also says he’s not against all of this, and doesn’t want to get rid of all DNA testing because some of it is perfectly sensible. So what exactly is he fighting for? And why couldn’t he do so within his own party, which largely takes precisely the view he professes? Has he given this any systematic thought at all? Despite his SAS image and multiply-broken nose, is he not merely beating his chest and emoting, in tune with the sentimental irrationality of the age?

Well, leaving aside the snide remark about his "SAS image", I am not sure how Mr Davis would reply to all of those points but his recent remarks make it pretty crystal clear that he is against the holding of DNA on innocent people, for example, or even shorter periods of detention without trial. Ms Phillips, presumably, is in favour of all the above and more.

Then we get an argument that Mr Davis is in favour of all this "emotional" civil liberties stuff because he is insufficiently aware of the threat Britain faces from Islamic terrorism:

It also strikes me that there is a strong and quite vicious sub-text to the support he has been getting within certain political circles, which are backing him against what they call the ‘neo-cons’ in David Cameron’s circle -- by whom they mean in particular Michael Gove and George Osborne. The thought-crime committed by these two is to analyse correctly the threat to this country posed by Islamism and to support America in its fight to defend the free world. The anti neo-cons believe, by contrast, not merely that Britain must put critical distance between itself and American interventionism, but that the threat to Britain from Islamism is hugely exaggerated, both from within as well as from without. It is in that context that they maintain that 42-days is unnecessary because the dire warnings about the likely threat to this country are unproven and that the extension of the detention limit is instead a Trojan horse for the willed erosion of our ancient liberties.

The reasoning is weak. It does not seem to cross her mind that one might be as concerned as the next man about terrorism - as I am - without feeling the need to chuck out long-standing protections of the individual that were not even removed - or at least only shortly - during emergencies such as the Second World War. It may be that some people on the right dislike the "neocon" argument out of some naive attitude about terrorism, or some sort of hatred of Israel/America, etc, but that does not appear to be the case with Mr Davis. As far as I can tell, he is very much from the Atlanticist tradition of conservatism.

Ms Phillips is also playing to the bad argument that to be a defender of liberty is to be a softie on security. We have to absolutely nail this terrible idea that you can trade off one against the other.

By contrast, here is a cracking article that takes Mr Davis very seriously indeed.

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The other day I referred to a PJ O'Rourke gag which made the crack about a guy marrying Angelina Jolie for her brains (as opposed to her looks). Thinking about it, it was actually not a very good joke, even though it did not imply that Jolie was unintelligent, far from it. Anyway, it turns out that she is indeed smart and has a fair amount of guts as well:

"The pregnant mother of four told the U.K.'s Daily Mail that she owns guns similar to the ones she used in "Tomb Raider." Jolie and partner Brad Pitt are not against having weapons in their house for security reasons, she says."

"If anybody comes into my home and tries to hurt my kids, I've no problem shooting them," she said.

Jolie, 32, has starred as a heat-packing vixen in several action movies - two "Tomb Raider" films, "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" and the upcoming futuristic thriller, "Wanted."

"I can handle myself," she said. "There's a side to me that people know is humanitarian, and there's a side to me that's a mommy. But there's also the side that likes to get down and dirty and run and jump around and fire guns."

If the NRA wants a replacement for its former figurehead, Charlton Heston, they could do a lot worse than Ms Jolie.

Do readers have any other examples of Hollywood/other actors and actresses who have come out in favour of self defence like this? There must be some, surely.

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I am glad to see that a long-standing US friend of mine, Russell E. Whitaker, is back posting to his blog, which has had a bit of a haitus due to the man's shift from California to New York and his being incredibly busy with work. Russell writes a lot and has a lot of knowledge of martial arts. Thanks to him, I started to go to Bujinkan classes in London's Hammersmith. It is great fun and an extremely useful set of skills about self-defence, although physically tough as well to learn. Unfortunately, due to work reasons - I had to work late in the evenings last year - I was not able to attend as much as I liked last year but that has changed and I intend to resume. In the meantime, I have started to fence. Fencing, I find, is even more physically demanding than Bujinkan (yes, really). Initially, I am learning to use the foil, a very light sword where you score if you hit the opponent on certain parts of the body. Depending on which type of sword one uses, you score differently by hitting certain body parts. Of course fencers wear lots of protection these days so there is little chance of getting injured although you cannot afford to be reckless. I find it incredibly good for eye-hand co-ordination. I have also learned that one needs to do lots of stretching exercises since fencing requires people to be flexlible. My knee joints felt pretty sore the following morning after a class. It is a good incentive to get really fit.

Our lead instructor is a Frenchman - French seems to be the language of fencing - and another instructor is a Hungarian. More than half of the class are women, who are often much better than the men.

On the subject of fencing, we all have our favourite films. There are some great sword fighting scenes in Cyrano de Bergerac, Le Bossu, and in the excellent Ridley Scott film, The Duellists (starring Harvey Keitel).

For those interested in fencing as a sport, here's a book worth looking at. But in the end, if you want to have a go, you have to go to a class. One word of warning: the kit can be expensive, so it is best to go to a few classes, use the class stuff to see if you like it first.

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"The background to this method of policing is that NuLab became increasingly irritated with the police detecting crime. This tended to militate against the working classes (few question the link between poverty and crime). Being so unutterably incompetent, NuLab were were unable to tackle poverty (unless by increasing it, they can claim to be tackling poverty). One solution to this was to make crime detection a more egalitarian process. By criminalising "anti-social" behavior that was more likely to committed by the middle classes (speeding, hunting etc), then issuing directives for police to ramp up their response to such infractions, the thinking was that this would highlight how criminality was not the preserve of the put upon working classes.

On top of this, there existed a situation whereby the number crunchers claimed that the fear of being a victim of crime far outweighed the reality of being a victim of crime. Hence the emphasis shifted away from tackling crime i.e oppressing the working classes, to tackling the fear of crime. This had a cheap solution: high visibility policing. It is this thinking that lead to the introduction of those decaffeinated police officers known as "PCSOs", along with the requirement for high visibility vests worn with officers. This type of thinking also results in situations such as the Forest Gate incident, whereby the number of officers present seems to far outweigh the threat and the inclusion of the press in high profile operations. All of these things are designed to tackle the FEAR of crime, not crime itself."

From one of our readers, "Fed_Up", commenting on my recent encounter with the police. Thanks for the comments. The one here raises the issue of class. It is sometimes said that these days, the cops, or at least some of them, are the "paramilitary wing of the Guardian newspaper". This represents a significant shift in the cultural/political standing of the police over my lifetime.

Consider this: there is no doubt that during the 1980s, when the Conservatives were in power, some of the police powers used at the time got on to the statute books with relatively little complaint from what I might loosely call "the right". Not everyone was complacent, of course. Libertarian Alliance Director Sean Gabb and the LA's founder, the late Chris R. Tame, were early in pointing out at the time that no consistent defence of liberty makes sense if it is confined purely to economics, a point that some Tories to this day don't seem to grasp. While coppers were pinching Rastafarians in Brixton and hitting coalminers on the head in Yorkshire, a lot of the middle classes were happy to look the other way. As an unashamed middle class Brit with mortgage, happy marriage and decent job, I am the sort of person, I suppose, that has in a certain way been radicalised by the CCTV state, or "parking warden culture", as one might call it. It is important to understand, however, that the sort of petty exercise of power has been going on, sometimes unremarked, for years. So I certainly don't feel sorry for myself. I am, more than anything else, depressed at the fatuity of "security theatre" policing. It must, at one level surely, gnaw away at the morale and self respect of decent coppers. But there is no doubt that the role and status of the police has changed and so has the type of person that might be attracted to making a career in it.

I must say I am still stunned by the open admission of one commenter on my earlier posting that random searches are good for "fishing expeditions". We were not very kind to him on the previous thread. Justifiably.

For a good take on what has been going on with policing in the US, Gene Healy of the CATO Institute think tank has a sharp analysis. Several US readers expressed their horror at what is happening here in Britain; I am afraid that things are not so great in parts of the US, either. And as for France, etc.....

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Hollywood illiberals such as George Clooney and Michael Moore made a career of sneering at the ageing Charlton Heston, which was almost enough to make me join the NRA. True, many of Heston's conservative views might be as dated as his movies. But a willingness to take up arms for human freedom is one reason why we still don't live on the planet of the apes.

- Mick Hume, reflecting on the stance on the right to bear arms that was taken by the late, great Charlton Heston. Here is a wonderful tribute to Heston by the US actor, Richard Dreyfus. Dreyfus is a 'liberal' in the American usage; his comments show real class and generosity of spirit.

(4)

Heathrow Airport is a horrible place: overcrowded, dirty and unable to cope with the volume of traffic. A few days ago, Terminal 5 was opened. As a result of the demented decision by the British Airports Authority, the Spanish-owned company which has a monopoly franchise on UK airports, to blend international and domestic passengers going through the terminal, BAA has decided to fingerprint everyone who goes through terminal five. Soon all passengers going out of Heathrow, and other BAA airports, such as Gatwick, will be affected. The queues will get worse, and ironically, so will the vulnerability of passengers to terrorist attack during peak times. One hates to think what it will be like during the summer holidays and over the Christmas break.

Richard Morrison has a good old rant in the Times of London today about this issue. He points out that BAA has introduced the system at its own behest, not because of the government. For once, a libertarian cannot just bash the state for this, at least not as the direct culprit. I have no problem per se in a private airport operator setting certain rules which customers are free to ignore by going elsewhere, but as BAA has a monopoly, it hardly is a model of free market capitalism. BAA was privatised initially with its monopoly largely intact, which was a mistake. Of course, if passengers feel safer going to airports which demand iris scans, fingerprints, ID cards, body searches, intense questioning, and all other manner of intrusions into privacy, by all means go to these places. For the rest of us, even those who fear terrorism, we might prefer to take our chances and travel like free law-abiding adults, rather than convicted criminals.

For a good, sober look at the trade-offs with security measures and the unintended bad effects of things like this, this book is a good place to start. The author is not some hard-line civil libertarian and quite friendly to a lot of security ideas, but he understands that there is no security system in the world that is fail-safe and argues that it is about time people were allowed to weigh the risks more intelligently.

(5)

In a recent interview ("When nature is one step ahead", New Scientist, 2008 02 09) marine biologist Raphael Sagarin has little to say about security that a libertarian could disagree with:

You can look at virtually any question about security through a biological lens, from how to develop weapons systems to how to organise government departments. You look at what the most successful organisms do to solve their security problems, and then you try to use that. One clear lesson is that the species of systems that have been around the longest, adapted to many different environments and captured the most resources have a structure of fairly limited central control, with a lot of autonomy.

He believes DHS should be broken up into a number of smaller organizations; that TSA carries out actions which are an incredible waste of resources and that some of the best work the government does is through small organizations like DARPA.

It is a very interesting read if you can find it.

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Thanks to Nick Cowen of the Civitas Blog, I have just been reading another of those man facing prosecution for defending himself stories:

A shopkeeper could be charged with murder after an armed robber who tried to steal the day's takings was stabbed with his own knife during a struggle.

Tony Singh, 34, described as a hard-working family man who often works 13-hour days, was ambushed as he shut his shop on Sunday evening by Liam Kilroe, 25, a career criminal who was armed with a knife.

Mr Singh fought back and, after a fierce hand-to-hand struggle, Kilroe was seen by witnesses to stagger away clutching the knife to his chest. Kilroe was taken to hospital, where he died, and Mr Singh was detained by police. He is now waiting to discover whether he will be charged, and is on police bail until February 29 pending further inquiries.

Lancashire police confirmed that papers had been sent to the Crown Prosecution Service, which will decide whether Mr Singh should be charged with one of three offences: murder, manslaughter or assault.

Mr Singh, who suffered injuries to his neck and back during the struggle and had to be treated in hospital, insisted yesterday that he had acted in self-defence. ...

I suppose the authorities have to consider the possibility that Mr Singh may have done something wrong despite all appearances to the contrary, but in this case they appear, unless this report is way off the mark, to have no evidence of any such thing. It could be that the police routinely hand over all the evidence in such cases to the CPS, no matter how heroically the shopkeeper behaved and no matter how completely the villain got what he deserved and how completely the heroic shopkeeper did the rest of us a favour by, as it turned out in this case, killing him. And whereas in theory there could be a prosecution, the chances of one actually materialising are very remote. In which case this is a story about lousy journalism.

But, as Nick Cowen points out, what the shopkeeper appears to have done is what the criminal justice system failed to do. He punished an already arrested and many times previously convicted career criminal, who should have been in jail already but who was actually roaming the streets trying to commit more robberies. The justice system should have stopped that, having already had every chance to do so. Tony Singh's heroism showed up what a lousy job it was doing.

The phrase "taking the law into their own hands" is often used by the authorities in circumstances like these. But by the look of it, Tony Singh didn't so much take the law as catch it and save it from being smashed, after the authorities had themselves dropped it. And you can't help suspecting that, in the eyes of the authorities, this was the real crime here. Why couldn't he just have handed over the money like a sensible chap?

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With the occurrence of yet another violent attack on a crowd of disarmed people in the news, Glenn Reynolds suggests we start sueing the universities. If a University or any other organization defines its facility as a 'Gun-Free Zone' it has an implied contract duty to protect you, and if it has failed to take measures to do so is in breach of that contract.

Think of it this way: you have a constitutional Right of self defense. When a property owner or government makes entry onto that property contingent upon waiving that Right, they imply they will in return defend you against harm. This is not all that different from a situation I faced a decade ago as a C-level manager at a UK ISP. If our net news feeds were wide open, we were a common carrier; but if we put any sort of filtering into effect we were expressing editorial control of content and therefor liable for what we missed, be it child-porn or whatever.

Let the fun begin!

(26)

...All the wonderful tools of liberty. But... but... I see not a single example of that German-Swiss engineering marvel, the SIG-226, as featured on this blog's masthead!

(23)

Christopher Hitchens reckons the CIA should be scrapped for its many recent screwups, including the latest fiasco over the NIE report about Iran. I agree, although the question is largely academic: governments are not known for scrapping institutions that go awry. But the NIE fiasco - which actually might endanger our security since Iran is still trying to produce enriched uranium - does add to the impression that security services are in danger of becoming the problem, not the solution. And the recent issue surrounding alleged destruction of taped evidence of torture does not exactly square with an institution operating under the rule of law, as Andrew Sullivan has put it recently, although Sully has not drawn the logical inference that the CIA should be closed down.

Here is the crunch paragraph from the Hitchens piece. Read it all:

And now we have further confirmation of the astonishing culture of lawlessness and insubordination that continues to prevail at the highest levels in Langley. At a time when Congress and the courts are conducting important hearings on the critical question of extreme interrogation, and at a time when accusations of outright torture are helping to besmirch and discredit the United States all around the world, a senior official of the CIA takes the unilateral decision to destroy the crucial evidence. This deserves to be described as what it is: mutiny and treason. Despite a string of exposures going back all the way to the Church Commission, the CIA cannot rid itself of the impression that it has the right to subvert the democratic process both abroad and at home. Its criminality and arrogance could perhaps have been partially excused if it had ever got anything right, but, from predicting the indefinite survival of the Soviet Union to denying that Saddam Hussein was going to invade Kuwait, our spymasters have a Clouseau-like record, one that they have earned yet again with their exculpation of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It was after the grotesque estimate of continued Soviet health and prosperity that the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued that the CIA should be abolished. It is high time for his proposal to be revived. The system is worse than useless—it's a positive menace. We need to shut the whole thing down and start again.

Question: should the same logic apply to MI-6?

(147)

This YouTube video on the Volokh Conspiracy shows a truly outrageous incident where a policeman in the USA tasers a man who was at no point threatening anyone and who was actually calmly walking away from the policeman. The longer CNN coverage gives more context and makes it more clear to me that this was a completely unjustified use of force.

Yet more proof no state should have a monopoly on the means of violence. The incident is astonishing and at least it does show the value to the public (and without doubt to honest decent policemen) of having all traffic stop incidents videoed.

(21)

It seems to me that we've reached the point at which a facility that bans firearms, making its patrons unable to defend themselves, should be subject to lawsuit for its failure to protect them. The pattern of mass shootings in "gun free" zones is well-established at this point, and I don't see why places that take the affirmative step of forcing their law-abiding patrons to go unarmed should get off scot-free.

- Instapundit

(19)

We have said this kind of thing here many, many times, and will say it many, many more times, but I think this puts it particularly well:

People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that's the exact opposite of a civilized society.

The rest of it – the posting is by "marko" and is entitled "why the gun is civilized" – is equally eloquent. It is quite short and anyone who is inclined to will have more than enough time to read it all.

It is particularly refreshing to read an American arguing against gun control without once mentioning the US Constitution. I am not opposed to the US Constitution, most of it, but I think that Americans should spend at least some of their time explaining why most of it is right, instead of just taking it for granted as a stack of unchallengeable axioms. When they do argue without relying on this document, it certainly makes it easier for us foreigners to link to them. [M]arko's argument is not American only; it is universal.

(16)

Quite a lot has already been written about the British government's demented suggestion that security of public transport will be improved by installing airport-style security checks at 250 "strategic" railway stations (places, presumably, such as Paddington, St Pancras, Victoria and Liverpool Street in London). Bloody marvellous. A hint of the chaos this will cause, the enormous economic damage and ruination of the railway industry that will ensue, struck me this morning as I took a Tube ride from Covent Garden to Victoria on my way to work from an early meeting in the City. Victoria's Tube station was closed due to "overcrowding on the platform", according to a public announcement. The crush of crowds was terrible. Now, just work it out, gentle reader. Imagine in say, two or three years hence, if Gordon Brown's daft idea takes root: massive queues at London railway stations in the evening rush-hour as people struggle to get home, huge groups of people milling around stations waiting to be passed through security. A perfect target for a terrorist, you might might think.

You might indeed think that. I bet a few of the more intelligent police and security service folk realise that. But not Gordon Brown. I am no longer convinced that Brown is particularly bright, in fact. We have long been assailed with this image of a brooding, obsessive Scot with his books and his clever ideas. Cleverness? I think his intellect should be regarded like one of those flakier tech stocks in the late 1990s - greatly over-priced and due for a rapid fall. I already sense that this process is under way. Let the selling continue.

(8)

Blogger Patrick Lasswell had a real world encounter of the 'dial 911' kind that shows whilst civic virtue is a good thing, it is even better when the upstanding citizen has a firearm to hand when investigating a disturbance.

Hiding in my front yard from a shotgun armed maniac last night made me reflect on my libertarian leanings. The Second Amendment never seemed so clear to me as an individual right as I waited for the police to arrive, and waited. I was carrying only a telephone and a flashlight, and updating the 911 operator as the lunatic passed twenty yards from my position it occurred to me how very much I appreciate owning rifles, and how very, very far away they were at the moment.

Read the whole thing. Fortunately the encounter in question was 'merely' alarming, yet clearly there was potentially for a shooting and thus Patrick was in violation of Jeff Cooper's First Rule of Gunfights: have a gun.

Patrick, you live in the USA so you have no excuse to emulate the disarmed civilian population of Britain.

(35)

"My faith in airport security has never been the same since I noticed that the man confiscating the shaving foam in my hand luggage (while leaving me with the razor) had the word HATE tatooed on his knuckles."

- Daniel Finkelstein.

(14)

There is a direct connection between this:

It's rather telling that the UN's American defenders fail to directly address an indisputable fact: U.N. Human Rights Council's subcommission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights has endorsed a report denying the existence of a human right of self-defense, and the subcommission, pursuant to the report, has declared that all national governments are required by international human rights law to implement various gun control provisions - provisions which, by the UN's standards, make even the gun control laws of New York City and Washington, DC, into violations of international law because they are insufficiently stringent. (See page 14 of the draft BYU article.)

... and this:

The Somalian model has spread across the planet, from the Congo to chaotic East Timor to Afghanistan, where the Taliban have violently resurfaced, to Iraq. Populations are taken hostage, terrorized, and sacrificed, the spoils of wars by local gangsters. Under various pretexts - religion, ethnicity, makeshift racist or nationalist ideology - commandos contend for power at the point of AK-47s. They fight against unarmed populations; most of their victims are women and children. Terrorism is not the prerogative of Islamists alone: the targeting of civilians has been used by a regular army and by militias under the command of the Kremlin in Chechnya, where the capital city of Grozny was razed to the ground. Where the killers appeal to the Koran, it is still primarily Muslim passersby who suffer. Algeria, Somalia, and Darfur (at least 200,000 dead and millions of refugees in just a few years, with the Sudanese government, protected by China and Russia, acting with impunity) are live laboratories of the abomination of abominations: war against civilians.

The answer to the problem of gangsters terrorising unarmed populations is, and I know there are many who genuinely think that this is a cure worse than the disease (hence all the benign support for this malign UN repression): let the populations be armed.

(8)

I was going to write the following comment on a blog article written back in 2005 by a US Muslim political activist who is calling for the repeal of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution:

I would like to thank you for writing this article.

Having a Muslim political activist call for American civilians to be disarmed in their own country is just about the best politically supercharged endorsement for civilian gun ownership I can imagine. If the NRA was paying you to write this, it was money well spent (that is just rhetorical of course, I am sure they did not and you probably actually believe what you are saying). Please, keep writing more along this line!

But I decided not to. There is a well known axiom: "Never interrupt the enemy when he is making a mistake"

I hope he is still writing such articles.

(0)

Kim du Toit, a regular commenter on these parts with a blog of his own, links to this story about a self-defence shooting in Dallas, Texas. Just scroll down and read the comments from the cop at the end. Absolutely superb.

The left-leaning Observer newspaper (UK), meanwhile, carries a hostile piece about gun ownership in the US and the amount of gun crime there. The problem is that the article does not really take into account the rather glaring fact that in Britain, a country with the fiercest gun laws this side of Alpha Centauri, there has been a lot of gun crime in our cities lately.

Here is an except:

An average of almost eight people aged under 19 are shot dead in America every day. In 2005 there were more than 14,000 gun murders in the US - with 400 of the victims children. There are 16,000 suicides by firearm and 650 fatal accidents in an average year. Since the killing of John F Kennedy in 1963, more Americans have died by American gunfire than perished on foreign battlefields in the whole of the 20th century.

The problem with all these sort of statistics, I reckon, is that they need to be put into context. Cultures matter: in parts of Europe, such as Switzerland, gun ownership among the adult population is widespread, but gun crime is low, and that fact cannot just be attributed to all that healthy Alpine air. In the US, gun crime is closely linked to drug gangs, and I gently venture to suggest that the War on Drugs, which is a disastrous policy, is the culprit. The statistics given by the Observer - it provides no source - do not tell us whether gun crime is rising or falling, or is stable, or what other categories of crime are like. Nor does it adjust for population levels to compare with other countries where gun ownership might be quite high. It may of course be that some crime, such as acts of domestic violence, would drop if gun ownership was outlawed, but what would happen to things like domestic burglary, for example? I certainly would not want to burgle anyone's home in Texas for the fairly obvious reason that I would end up very dead.

(0)

I first wrote this article intending it to be a comment on this thread at the Volokh Conspiracy. It grew so big and wandered 'through every room in the house', straying away from the specific topic so I decided not to inflict it on them. Instead, Samizdatistas are the lucky beneficiaries. Seriously, I presume most of you will skip it. That is fine. Here is the amendment as it appears in the US Constitution.

Amendment II

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

In reading the Federalist Papers it appears obvious, at least to me, that 'the militia' and 'a well regulated militia' are two entirely different things. Hamilton clearly describes in #29 a great deal of commitment and training required to "acquire the degree of perfection which would entitle them to the character of a well-regulated militia" [my underscore] and speculates that for "the great body of the yeomanry, and of the other classes of the citizens" it "would be a real grievance to the people, and a serious public inconvenience and loss".

In #46 Madison calculates the number of "a militia" at 1/8 of the entire population.

The highest number to which, ... a standing army can be carried ... does not exceed one hundredth part of the whole number of souls; ... This proportion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence."

Clearly Hamilton's "well-regulated militia" and Madison's "militia" are entirely different and together with the title of the New York statute that Eugene Volokh cites,"An Act for Settling and Regulating the Militia ...", suggests that the degree of regulation of the militia was a continuous scale.

(0)

But for those of you who find discussing it a little dry, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds and Breitbart.tv for the pointer.

(0)

The Brave One is a good film, and I would encourage people to go and see it. Even though this means putting money into the pockets of Time Warner, which is hardly my favourite corporation.

- warning: spoilers follow ...

[Alas, remainder of article was lost in a server crash on 22nd Oct 2007. Bugger]

(2)

Burma is a good example of 'gun control', i.e. a state of affairs where firearms are a legal monopoly of the government forces. One side has good intentions and the other side has loaded rifles, and the result (so far) has been the same as it was in 1988 - or even back in 1962 when the late General Ne Win first set up his socialist administration.

However, me being a cold hearted man whose mind starts to wander even when shown scenes of murder and other horror, the situation reminds me of the philosophy of David Hume. This mid 18th century Scottish philosopher claimed that government was not based on force - but rather that it was based on opinion. Hume did this to mock the claim that there was a great difference between the 'constitutional' government of Britain and the 'tyranny' of France - under the skin both sides are basically the same, was his point.

This was part of David Hume's love of attacking what his opponents (such as Thomas Reid) were to call "Common Sense". David Hume was involved in what are now called 'counter intuitive' positions. Hume claimed (at times) that there was no objective reality - that the physical universe was just sense impressions in the mind. This did not stop him also claiming (at times) that the mind did not exist, in the sense of a thinking being, that a thought did not mean a thinker - that there was no agent and thus no free willed being.

Whether David Hume actually believed any of this - or whether he was just saying to people "you do not have any strong arguments for your most basic beliefs - see how weak reason is"... is not the point here. The point is that many people. including many people who have never heard his name, have been influenced by the ideas of David Hume.

For example, Louis XVI of France did not actively resist his enemies, going so far as ordering others, such as the Swiss Guard, not to resist, because he had read David Hume's History of England - it was his favourite book. In his history Hume claimed that Charles the First did not get killed because he lost the Civil War (as a simple minded ordinary man might think) - but because he had fought back against his enemies at all. If he had not resisted his enemies, they would have seen no need to kill him (a clever counter intuitive position).

So Louis XVI did not resist. It is possible that he was given cause to doubt Hume's wisdom right before his enemies murdered him, and so many others, but we will never know the answer to that I suppose.

In Burma, as in so many other places, many people seem to have thought that opinion, namely the good intentions of the majority, were more important than firepower - they appear to be mistaken.

"You are showing lack of respect for the dead" - perhaps, but I am warning people not to stand against men with rifles when you are unarmed. Get the firepower, one way or another, and learn how to use it, then you may have a chance at liberty - you can not have it, or keep it, without firepower. And that remains true even if you win some soldiers over to your side with appeals to their reason.

(13)

David Shayler, the ex-M15 spook, always struck me as being only 90 cents to the dollar. I bumped into this character a few years ago at a bash hosted by Privacy International, a perfectly sensible campaigning group. This item if it is true (via the Register), suggests I am right about the dark-haired one.

Methinks M needs to tighten up the recruitment criteria.

(21)

A public service warning! You surf the internet at random using FireFox (which generally you should), you may stumble across a website, which could infest your machine with a virus. But this is nothing new, I have heard about these evil websites full of Trojans and other nasty viruses and I know better... I hear you cry. Apparently, this particular attack does not require a download. Which means that is unlikely to be trapped by your anti-virus software, certainly in the short-term.

Protecting yourself for now is fairly simple. You will need to make a trivial modification to your FireFox settings.

To do this, start FireFox, enter the URL “about:config”, scroll down, and for each of the following entries make sure it is set to “true”.

If it isn’t, right-click the line and choose “Toggle”, which will set the value to “true”

network.protocol-handler.warn-external-default
network.protocol-handler.warn-external.mailto
network.protocol-handler.warn-external.news
network.protocol-handler.warn-external.nntp
network.protocol-handler.warn-external.snews

This will at least give you a warning that Firefox is being asked to do something suspicious; you will have to judge for yourself whether it is nasty.

Thanks to Alec Muffett and Geoff Arnold for the heads up and advice.

(27)

An article, found by via The Register , gives a new example of a taser self-defence device that is being marketed to women - in pink. That strikes me as pretty patronising, although maybe not deliberately so. After all, why would not any woman want a taser in a suitably no-nonsense colour like black or red? The makers of these things have obviously not met my wife.

As far as I know, use of tasers by UK citizens other than the police or armed forces is illegal (I would be interested to know what the law is in various places). There is still quite a bit of controversy about their use by the police here. Here is an article on the subject.

(49)

It will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that when I come to the USA, I use the opportunity to and do some shootin' and visit my weapons-in-exile (such as one of which is featured on the Karl Popper book at the top of the page, although technically that particular 9mm weapon belongs to my fairer half, my otherwise identical piece is in .40 cal). Of course this trip was no exception and so I have been rescheduled my ongoing homages to the Yuengling Brewing Company until the evening and headed to one of the more remote parts of Pennsylvania to frighten the wild life and try to resurrect some rusty rifle and pistol skills.

As mere possession of a handgun is illegal, it is at times like this that just how far Britain has fallen really hits home. For all its many and variegated flaws, in the USA enough people with some attachment to liberty have managed to fight off the worst excesses of those authoritarians who favour crime victim disarmament. It is interesting that many PA Democrats are actually quite pro-gun, even though many politicos in that sinkhole called Philadelphia are quite authoritarian and anti-gun (note that NRA ratings are not all that good an indication of a politician's true position). It is good to see that the right to self-defence and to own and shoot guns is widely respected even on the political left.

However man does not live by guns alone and the USA has many other things to offer...

Apple pie and a dawg... how American is that, eh?



Big Ice Cream, Big Bikes, Short Shorts... I must be in the USA again!

Back in London tomorrow. Oh crap.

(9)

I am an avid reader of science fiction, and the use of futuristic fiction as a source of ideas is a welcome development. The best science fiction is that which explores the boundaries of our concepts whether in the mind, the computer or how we relate to each other. This is one of the advantages of defending the freedom of the mind, the expression of which is usually described as freedom of speech

Anti-terror chiefs in the United States have hired a team of America's most original sci-fi authors to dream up techniques to help them combat al-Qaeda.

Ideas so far include mobile phones with chemical weapons detectors and brain scanners fitted to airport sniffer dogs, so that security staff can read their minds.

The writers have also put government scientists in touch with Hollywood special-effects experts, to work on better facial-recognition software to pick out terrorists at airports.

The Department of Homeland Security has set aside around $10 million - one tenth of its research budget - for projects dreamt up by the best brains in futuristic fiction.

Whilst DARPA is a useful channel for futuristic ideas, ten percent of a research budget handed over to any project is not such a good idea. Once the institutional apparatus is set up, with a secretariat to flesh out the innovative ideas, and the bureaucratic accretions which turn gold to mud, what will be left. A few nuggets from the civil service quicksand.

More useful is the Sigma organisation set up by Andrew Arlen some years ago, if it survives the seductive sirenic call of the public sector:

Mr Pournelle said the facial recognition plan was one of a number that aimed to replicate ideas seen on television shows such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and NCIS, a similar show. "In real life, the computers are still nowhere near as good as they are on TV," he said. "It's just one of several high risk, high pay-off projects we have suggested.

He is a member of Sigma, a group set up by fellow writer Arlan Andrews to pursue "science fiction in the national interest. Mr Andrews, who predicted handheld, electronic books long before they became a reality, said: "We spend our entire careers living in the future. Those responsible for keeping the nation safe need people to think of crazy ideas."

How unusual that CSI, paraded as an authentic and naturalistic program, can be classified as science fiction, on the grounds that the technology deployed is probably three or five years ahead of our current capabilities. Yet, the same confusion may dazzle the Department of Homeland Security. The politicians will reach for science fictional solutions when actual success probably stems from incremental graft on current processes and clear procurement and privatisation.

Research is often touted as a PR solution for public sector problems. Treat this with scepticism.

(78)

This quote is from a year ago, January.

Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker was happy to hear the bill was defeated. "I'm sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly's actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus."

And this editorial was written last August.

We must give due criticism to the University for its decisions that put students in greater danger than was necessary. By that I am not so much referring to the decision to allow morning classes to take place, but rather the decades-old policy that prohibits students, faculty and staff from legally carrying firearms on campus. This ban even goes so far as to include those who have valid Concealed Handgun Permits.

For those of you who have not heard yet, 32 people died at Virginia Tech today.

Here was Virginia Tech's solution to a mass killer on campus.

(26)

Guns cause violence, like flies cause garbage

- Zink Mitchell

(34)

This story catches the eye:

The UK's Jedi community today expressed concerns that government plans to ban Samurai swords could hinder their freedom to wield lightsabres in public.

The UK's Home Office today issued a consultation paper ahead of legislation intended to ban Samurai blades by the end of the year. In a bid to "protect the public", replica Samurai swords will become illegal to import, sell and hire in Britain.

The quote marks around "protect the public" are deserved. Quite how such a ban will "protect" anyone is a mystery. The ban on handguns has not led to a dramatic fall in gun-crime, as the recent spate of shootings in London demonstrate all too plainly. If swords are banned to prevent crimes, why not go the whole hog and ban kitchen knives?

Come to that, why not take up the idea of banning opposable thumbs? Human beings - we are not a feature, but a bug!

(38)

Everything I have heard and read tells me that this kind of thing used to be true in Britain.

I live in a very small street with only eight houses, but delivery vans come down here at least twice a day. Fed Ex and that other company. People have a lot of parcels delivered by not the Post Office these days. The internet brings us gifts every day.

They bash on the door a few times, then put the parcel down and walk off. One time, a delivery man hid the parcel under our doormat. I guess he thought it was more valuable-looking than usual (true- it was Lego/s). Nobody expects parcels to be stolen from doorsteps. Everywhere I’ve lived in England, that would be insane. I never minded about crime when I lived in the UK, but that was before experiencing life in a place that feels this safe. It's wonderful.

I heard a story from my brother-in-law about Nottingham in the thirties. Apparently, in a very poor part of town and at a very poor time, as was the practice in such places in those times, a man used to come round with a big leather bag, collecting rent, in cash. This man was not liked. People went hungry to ensure that he got his cash. But it never occurred to him or to anyone that this was a stupid thing for him to do, because it was not stupid. Anyway, one day, he left his bag in the middle of the street for some reason, full of cash, unattended. A while later he came back and collected it, untouched, all the money still there. Those were the rules.

But stories like that about long-ago Nottingham are far easier to dismiss than the contrast that Alice Bachini-Smith describes from her own direct and hugely contrasting experiences. To tell me that I am wrong about 1930s Nottingham only involves saying that the story has become exaggerated over the years, as maybe it has. To tell Alice that she is wrong means telling her that she is wrong about her own experiences. It means calling her a liar, pretty much.

As to why things worked like this in most or even all of Britain in the past and still do work like this in the more law abiding parts of America, well, that is another argument. The reasons are quite complicated, I would say. (For instance, I have long believed architectural design to be part of the story.)

I recall publishing an interesting piece for the Libertarian Alliance by the historian Stephen Davies entitled Towards the Remoralisation of Society about these kinds of arguments. This was published in 1991 but since then the story in Britain has surely changed rather little and if anything has got somewhat worse. (Here and here are some more recent writings by the same author, the former being a book that you have to buy, but the latter being a blog posting that you can actually read.)

(11)

If you're unhappy and you know it, ring the cops.
If you're unhappy and you know it, ring the cops.
If you're unhappy and you know it, and you really want to show it...
If you're unhappy and you know it, ring the cops.

If you're unhappy and you know it, jump up and down.
If you're unhappy and you know it, jump up and down.
If you're unhappy and you know it, and you really want to show it...
If you're unhappy and you know it, jump up and down.

(The original version of this post was rather obscure, so I have expanded it. I also felt that a musical setting would render the advice of the Minister on how to assist an old woman being beaten up more memorable to citizens anxious to do the right thing in these difficult times.)

(23)

... on TV programmes he (quite sensibly) does not watch. Her Majesty's Government was actually doing something about Big Brother. Granting him more arbitrary power. The Telegraph's legal editor explains:

[The Serious Crime Bill] allows judges, sitting without juries, to make orders which, if breached, would put us in prison for five years.

Two conditions must be satisfied before the court can make a serious crime prevention order. First, the judge must be satisfied that someone has been "involved in serious crime" - anywhere in the world.

To be "involved", you do not have to have committed a serious offence, or even helped someone else to have committed it. All you need to have done is to conduct yourself in a way that was likely to make it easier for someone to commit a serious offence, whether or not it was committed.

And what is a serious criminal offence? Drug trafficking and money laundering, of course. But also fishing for trout with a line left unattended in the water. Depositing controlled waste without a licence. And anything else that a court considers to be sufficiently serious.

Read the whole thing here. The Bill itself is here. Observers of government will notice that it is, unusually for important legislation, being introduced in the Lords. I would welcome any theories why.

(13)

A mailing from the Royal United Services Institute invites me to a conference in April:

The Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) is both the backbone and the lifeblood of the country. It comprises the assets, services and systems that support the economic, political and social life of the UK. Any disruption, damage or destruction to all or part of the CNI could result in grave consequences for the functioning of government, the economy and society. Clearly the CNI is vital to the country’s well-being but the planning and implementation of its security is a Byzantine process; the CNI is a complex and uneven environment with ownership and responsibility spread across the public and private sector.

The threats it confronts are myriad including terrorist attack, industrial accidents and natural disasters. As demonstrated during the July 7 bombings, the Buncefield Disaster, and the foot and mouth outbreak, the CNI is a labyrinthine web of interdependent vulnerabilities that requires a coordinated and coherent response across its entirety to ensure its effective security and resilience in the face of such threats.

Dangerous rubbish. This is an epitome of the statist miscomprehension of complex systems, of economies and ecologies. 'It is messy; we must coordinate it,' they say. There are vital things that can be identified in advance as such, and other things not necessary to the 'backbone of the country', they think.

But the connections in a natural web are flexible, or they don't get established in the first place. "Interdependent vulnerabilities" are what make systems adapt, the source of resilience. In unmanaged, open, systems everything is important and everything is unimportant: all things contribute their part to everything else (and you can't directly measure their contribution), but competition ensures they are all redundant and replaceable.

The response to 7 July was a demonstration of improvisation by thousands of separate actors - millions if you count all those who took simple decisions to get out and walk, rather than passively waiting to be evacuated by the authorities, which would have been the orderly, planned, way to do it. London was functioning again in a day, despite, not because of, the "strategic interventions" that restricted the recovery of traffic flow, and filled the streets with police.

Livestock farming in Britain almost didn't survive the Deprtment for Rural Affairs' "coordinated" response to the last "foot and mouth" outbreak. Fortunately at the time DEFRA lacked the powers to coordinate more farmers out of business. The department didn't see it like that: Its plans were frustrated, and that's why things were as bad as they were. The 'defect' has been eliminated by the Animal Health Act 2002 and the Civil Contingencies Act 2004.

Nobody in government had to tell Tesco's dealers to buy up more petroleum in Rotterdam when the Buncefield depot caught fire. The state way is a 'strategic reserve' of petrol under armed guard somewhere, distributed eventually by rationing according to who is important enough to get it, after declaration of a suitable emergency. As it was, loss of 20% of the country's stocks overnight caused scarcely a single car journey to be cancelled - apart from those of the people no longer commuting to the flattened industrial estate.

Those ex-commuters would not be comforted by the thought that distributing tiles or soft drinks is not "critical" and not to be guarded by the state. What they do matters to them and their customers. When I want petrol, petrol matters; when I want tiles, they matter. We are all equally made poorer by the unavailablilty of either, because we can't predict what we will want. Nor can the state.

How dare the planners decide for me what it is I want, as they do implicitly when they define some workers, some structures, as "key"? Well there's a confirmation bias at work. What the state can best monitor is important (invisible, uncontrollable processes couldn't be); so those who work for it are. Chaos is bad. State plans are designed to control chaos; therefore they do, and any unfortunate or unforseen consequences are just the remnants of chaos uncontrolled. Bad things are not in the plan, so not of the plan. They are part of the failure to squeeze out doubt, never caused or exacerbated by wrong or unnecessary decisions by the authorities.

The misunderstanding at the heart of planning is a fundamentalist belief that order and simplicity are public goods. They aren't. It may be good to have them in your own life - if you want them. It is probably necessary to have them in managing a task, running a business, playing a game; to make any well-defined single goal attainable. Clarity in shared procedural rules is highly desirable. But if we want to live in a world where the goals and threat aren't well defined, where we have a choice, and where how we live is not vulnerable to simple shocks from unexpected angles, then universal order and simplicity are bad. Conflict and competition, difference and redundancy are good. The more disorder, uneveness, and complexity our society has, the richer our lives, and the better equipped we are collectively to meet disaster by routing around damage.

(96)

Does anyone in London know who this piece of shit is? This creep assaulted Jackie, one of our intrepid Samizdatistas, so if you recognise him, please either let us know (e-mail link is in the sidebar) or if you prefer call British Transport Police on 0800 40 50 40. For the story, see here.

(35)

A brigadier general (retired) writes to The Times:

Last week, a security scanner at the Waterloo Eurostar terminal detected a credit-card-sized toolkit in my overnight case as I set out for Paris on business. ...

Read the whole thing. It is not long.

I am reminded that we are only a fortnight since St Crispin's day.

He that outlives this day and comes safe home
Will stand a-tiptoe when this day is named
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall see this day and live t'old age
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbors
And say, "Tomorrow is Saint Crispian."
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars
And say, "These wounds I had on Crispin's day."
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day.

What did you do in the "War on Terror," Daddy?

(8)

NO2ID has demonstrated how it is possible to clone the Home Office's wonderful new ePassport while it is still in the post, without taking it out of the envelope.

The Home Office is unconcerned: with classic disingenuity its spokesman told The Guardian, which carried the first part of an unfolding story:

By the time you have accessed the information on the chip, you have already seen it on the passport. What use would my biometric image be to you? And even if you had the information, you would still have to counterfeit the new passport - and it has lots of new security features. If you were a criminal, you might as well just steal a passport.

But of course the Home Office does not care. If there is a conflict between your personal security and official convenience in logging the details of passports at borders - which is what it means by 'improving the security of passports' (note plural) - then there was never any doubt which would win.

An Anonymous Coward on slashdot pinned it down:

The basic problem isn't the algorithm they choose. It's that their goal is incompatible with security.

They wish to establish a world where all people can be instantly identified, correlated with commercial profiles, and tracked wherever they travel.

How can this be done "securely"? It cannot.

Thank you, Admiral Poindexter.

(83)

I will be spending good sized chunks of the year in Laramie, Wyoming over the next few years due to the company I and my partners in space formed this month. With a part-time return to the free world in the offing, I am (as one would expect of a Samizdatista) looking forward to the renewed exercise of that most basic of human rights, without which the rest are at someone else's sufference: the Right to Self Defense. I have some preferences in this regard, but I do not consider myself a know-it-all or even a know-it-mostly on the pros and cons of current firearms.

I lean towards two handguns, one for hidden carry and one for open carry. Basically one for town and one for country, where the former is for defense against two legged varmints and the other is for discouragement of four-legged or no-legged varieties one might acciidentally annoy while fossil hunting. I lean strongly towards the Glock 27 for a hidden carry piece. I have been partial to it ever since Russ Whitaker introduced us about four years ago. For back-country I have long felt that Colt Revolvers have the history of reliability and effectiveness I would be looking for, but I am not sure whether a better choice would be the classic Colt .45 or a Colt .38. I can not see a need for the stopping power of a .45 unless I decide to play with Grizzily bear cubs while mama is watching... something I have no intention of doing.(*)

I would love to hear some discussion on others experience, especially any native Wyomans. The majority of my firearms experience is with the typical western Pennsylvania type target and hunting rifles and shotguns; also I am not familiar on a personal basis with the likely threats and behavior of wildlife outside of those Pennsylvania hills.

I would also appreciate information on appropriate Wyoming training courses as I am fully cognizant that after 17 years retraining is the responsible thing to do to ensure the safety of myself and those around me.

There might be statists in them thar hills...
Photo: Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

* No, I would really, really not want to face an angry mama bear with something which would probably only piss her off unless you got it just right while retreating at high speed in the opposite direction...

(9)

This via Reuters:

A 70-year-old British pensioner, trained in martial arts during his military service, dispatched a gang of four would-be muggers in a late-night attack in Germany.

"Looks like he had everything under control," a police spokesman from the German town of Bielefeld said of the incident last Friday.

The man, a native of Birmingham who now lives in Germany, was challenged by three men, demanding money, while a fourth crept up behind him. Recalling his training, the Briton grabbed the first assailant and threw him over his shoulder.

When a second man tried to kick him, the pensioner grabbed his foot and tipped him to the ground. At this point, the three men, thought to be aged between 18 and 25, fled, carrying their injured accomplice with them.

The pensioner, whose name was not immediately available, suffered light abrasions.

Well, some of our older citizens are not pussies, it seems. I trust and hope that this guy gets a commendation for dealing with these scum in such an exemplary manner.

I have taken some lessons with these guys, and I can strongly recommend them for those in decent physical shape (and that does not mean you have to be a big tough bruiser, either. There is something positively encouraging about watching a petite woman throw off an attack by a 6 foot-tall rugby player type).

(21)

The Pearce household is getting a paper shredder to cut up all those documents: old bills, etc, that can be used by thieves to steal a person's identity. It is, as this BBC report shows, a major problem. I do not imagine for a second that identify cards will significantly reduce this problem. In fact they may merely open up a whole new avenue for fraud. So, I am getting a shredder.

This looks like a decent website on where to get these machines.

(Those more fortunately blessed with space can of course just chuck this stuff on the bonfire.)

(38)

The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be persuaded to the path of righteousness by propaganda, they can certainly be corrected by good men with rifles.

- Jeff Cooper (10 May 1920 - 25 September 2006)

(16)

Jeff Cooper, the man many people will associate with the modern art of guncraft in the United States, has died at the venerable age of 86. Anyone who has learned to shoot a handgun, rifle or shotgun to a high standard is likely, certainly in the United States, to have heard about this man, about the disciplines and standards he laid down. A few years ago I spent four gruelling but extremely enjoyable days at the Front Sight course in Nevada and there is no doubt that such places of learning took much of their inspiration from people like Jeff Cooper. A fine man, and a life well led.

(12)

Great respect is due to Cato's Radley Balko, who has tirelessly campaigned against the the 'no-knock' search and entry powers employed by law enforcement agencies in the United States. I was surfing around the blogs and came across this story a few days after it broke. This is a glimmer, a start in what hopefully may be a change in the law. Radley's work on the Cory Maye case is a bit of a result for blogs, too. This is a US issue, but as we know with stuff like eminent domain, it is always worth we Brits watching developments like this for signs of similar trends closer to home.

Jim Henley has related thoughts on the issue.

(22)

So now before British police will carry out raids on Muslim terror suspects, they will consult with a group of Muslim 'community leaders' before acting (i.e. they will in effect ask permission from the same people who have so conspicuously failed to prevent the need for such raids in the first place). And of course one can only wonder at the potential for the targets of such raids being tipped off.

So tell me, did the Metropolitan Police ask for permission from, oh I dunno, the Catholic Church maybe, before raiding possible IRA terrorist suspects in London for fear of upsetting the delicate sensibilities of the UK's Irish community?

This is beyond parody.

(29)

He said to them, "But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one".

- Jesus Christ, according to Luke 22:36 (New International Version)

(50)

Canada has much stricter gun laws than in the United States, and so, one would assume, is a far safer place if one believes in the idea that the way to make society safer is to reduce access to items that can be used to kill. Well, generalisations are of course always dangerous, but I am not quite sure how this horrific story from Canada quite fits inside the gun-control argument. On the BBC television news this evening, the news announcer explicitly referred to the contrast between laws in Canada and the United States and expressed great puzzlement over the Canadian shootings.

UPDATE: here is another account of the story, with an update on the number of injured.

(8)

At least 14 people were arrested on Friday night in south London as part of an anti-terror operation by police. Developing...

(10)

Economist Joseph Stiglitz writes in the Financial Times (sorry, subscription required to get to the link) that normal competitive pressures to improve service are not working in the British airports industry. The privatised British Airports Authority, now owned by Spanish based group Ferrovial, has nothing much to gain, he argues, from improving security because it gets no real benefit in terms of consumer response, but it does have an incentive to boost profits through cost cuts, which must, he says, come into conflict with security. Does he have a point?

The way in which BAA operates seems to me to be, at first glance, greatly influenced by government and its regulatory agencies, so I think it would be hard to come down too much on BAA's neck in this case. The regulatory environment surrounding the current security furore is largely driven by government and looks likely to remain so. So it is probably academic to speculate how security would operate in a 'pure' free market environment. If it were possible for people to shop around for different levels of security, it would be interesting to see how businesses would responsd. If airlines could directly negotiate their own security policies with the customer without having to mediate via an airport business or government, then you might get an interesting spectrum. Some airlines would market themselves as high-security, enforcing tough checks on passengers, banning certain types of luggage. If you want to fly on such an airline, fine. Other airlines might go for a more relaxed approach, and passengers would fly in the knowledge that they were taking more of a chance in exchange for not having to put up with intrusive security. Come to that, I am in favour of busineses such as child-free airlines, for reasons spelled out by Jeff Randall recently).

And even if BAA were to remain dominant as an airports landowner, if passenger numbers dropped off alarmingly due to heavy-handed security and massive delays, then sooner or later shareholders of BAA would revolt, or sell the business, and new entrants to the airports business would offer something better. The problem with this subject of course is that we have become so used to the idea of a whole network of big airports being run by one former state-established company that it is sometimes hard to imagine something different. But it could change and there is plenty of thinking that can and should be done on how to use the incentives of the market to improve passenger service and give people the security they want.

Some related thoughts about airports and privatisation issues here.

(45)

The news that one is not even allowed to take anything as threatening as a book on an aircraft or a bottle of Evian water - unless bought from an overpriced airport shop, no doubt - got me thinking about how the more customer-conscious airlines might try and deal with this. Millions of businessmen and women, for example, take stuff like laptop computers and documents to read on a trip to and from their meetings. These folk often pay business class rates and are valuable customers. I fly around Europe a fair deal to business meetings and it would seriously mess up my work life if I was not able to read anything on a trip. If I am forced to put my laptop in the main luggage, there is always the risk that the machine gets broken (this is no minor problem). It is also a real problem if people cannot take water with them to drink on flights, since flying typically is dehydrating and makes jetlag worse. These may appear niggling issues but actually they make a lot of difference to whether folk will fly or take other forms of transport. So what are the airlines to do?

Well, for a start, an airline could have a bunch of laptops in the aircraft and offer people the chance to use them, simply by giving them a disk which they can use to download stuff they want from their own machines and then use in a machine provided by the airline. If the overhead lockers are no longer needed for handluggage, then perhaps that free space could be filled with books, drinks, iPods, and other gadgets to help folk pass the time.

Flying is being turned into an experience in which passengers, even though they are paying customers, are treated as near-criminals. It is no excuse for the airlines to shrug their shoulders and blame all of this on the security services. They must think of imaginative ways to make travelling as pleasant as possible in the current worrying security environment. If they do not do so, then frankly they can expect little sympathy from me if they subsequently experience financial troubles. We must not, and cannot, let the nihilist losers of radical Islam bring our lives to a halt. Remember: the best revenge is to live well.

(24)

One of the pleasures of living in Texas is the vigorous gun culture - I have never lived anywhere else where people talked as openly in any setting about guns and shooting. We are also blessed with a reasonably sane concealed carry permit (you can qualify in one day of training) and self-defense laws.

Having availed myself (along with my wife) of said permit, we are currently acquiring some hardware. Since my wife has what can be a longish walk to her car from her office, near a neighborhood that isn't as savory as I would want, we outfitted her first with a dandy little 9. She already has a solid piece of German metal (my wedding present to her; romantic, no?), but it was a little too solid to lug around.

Personally, I'm a .45 guy - I like a pistol that says "puts big holes in people". My current hogleg could hardly be less portable, and there is a surprising dearth of truly portable .45s. Thank goodness Kahr finally came out with companion for the wife's piece.

(4)

The government is now proscribing two successor organisations of Al-Mujahiroun. These are Al-Ghurabaa and the Saved Sect, two cloaks for the continued radicalisation and recruitment of Muslims on British soil. However, they are not being banned because they pose a threat to our security, but for the glorification of terror.

Al-Ghurabaa and the Saved Sect are the first two organisations to be banned under new laws outlawing the glorification of terrorism.

John Reid, the Home Secretary, laid an order in Parliament making it a criminal offence for a person to belong to or encourage support for either group.

It will also be illegal to arrange meetings in their support or to wear clothes or carry articles in public indicating support for either group.

One can oppose this ban on utilitarian grounds: the individuals who organise these groups will merely band together and continue their activities under a different guise. If the symbols or pickets are written in Urdu or Arabic, what policeman or member of the public could ever understand the acts that they were glorifying. Such a placard may as well state "Ronaldo forever". The practicality of this ban is in grave doubt. At best, there is a slender chance that it may hinder the recruitment of those we should fear most: white Muslims who can walk unhindered and cause the greatest headache for the security services

But utilitarian arguments trade on the ground that the prohibitionists choose to stand upon. No matter how much we may oppose the precepts of these two groups, proscription is wrong. Liberty includes allowing the supporters of terrorist acts to stand up and air their views for all to witness. If they are not linked to acts of violence, and do not step beyond the boundaries of our traditional laws on incitement, who are we to gag and silence those we do not wish to hear. Security is not bought by stopping your ears or allowing the state to stop them for you. You cannot rely upon your own vigilance in identifying those who pose a threat to you, once the state has silenced them and you.

(17)

Paul Routledge in the Mirror (not a permalink, sorry) offers a follow up to the "Bollocks to Blair" story covered here by Brian the other day:

"Getting fined worked," he says. "I had only sold two before the police came. Once word got round, people took pity on me and everyone wanted one. I ended up selling 375."

But more scarily...

The cops asked for the shirt seller's eye colour, shoe size and National Insurance number to keep track of him "in case he reoffended".

Once you know that, you know what the fuzz are up to - building a national database of people they don't like.

Well that we knew. In fact the government is building a database of everybody just in case it might not like them - or might have some reason to 'assist' them personally (as a matter of 'enabling' a more 'active citizenship,' you understand) by telling them what to do - at any time in the future.

For myself I'm only surprised the cops did not take careful note of the brand of footware, and take his footprints for the national footprint database, which they have recently acquired the power to do - I kid you not. Or perhaps they did...

(53)

John Lettice in The Register calmly points out how so much 'anti-terrorist' activity and supposed 'terrorist threat' arises from the dogs of war chasing their own tails:

Real terror cases and claimed terror plots frequently include plans to attack major public buildings, tall buildings (e.g. Canary Wharf), international airports, and references to CBRN weapons use. Few if any of those that have been "frustrated" or documented so far include convincing plans (even plans, full stop) for actually mounting the attacks, sourcing the deadly poisons and constructing the weapons. Transcripts meanwhile are peppered with lurid and unfeasible attack ideas (often sounding uncannily like the sort of thing a mouthy teenager would say to impress his mates) and references to 'terror manuals' which often turn out to be dodgy survivalist poison recipes and/or the ubiquitous Encyclopaedia of Jihad which, as it includes references to tall buildings, is a handy fall-back if the prosecution is in want of a target list.

Read the whole thing here.

Meanwhile we have testimony from an amateur bomber that makes it pretty clear how coherent the 'mouthy teenager' Islamist ideology and planning is:

He says non-Muslims of Britain "deserve to be attacked" because they voted for a government which "continues to oppress our mothers, children, brothers and sisters in Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq and Chechnya."

Jabbing his finger emphatically, he warns: "What have you witnessed now is only the beginning of a string of attacks that will continue and become stronger until you pull your forces out of Afghanistan and Iraq and until you stop your financial and military support to America and Israel."

(From The Guardian)

This quote no longer appears on the BBC site. Maybe they think it is somehow persuasive. But the misconceptions that Blair's government can have any influence on the Russians in Chechnya, that it oppresses (rather than in fact succouring) the Palestinians, or that it provides financial support to either Israel or the US, ought to show how clueless these guys are about the real world. As should the idea that bombing the general population can make any difference to the policy of a state. (What touching faith in democracy!) As should the empty braggadocio of continuing, stronger, attacks. Compare that with what we've actually seen: outside the Middle East only wildly sporadic and variable isolated actions.

Unfortunately, if there's anything more stupid than Mr Tanweer it is the fear-frenzy of the mainstream media. What has been continuing and strengthening is fuss and panic. A fevered but entirely vacuous piece by Gordon Correra, BBC Security Correspondent says: "Shehzad Tanweer's videotape provides more evidence linking the London bombers to al-Qaeda." Er, no it does not. It provides evidence for the not very shocking hypotheses that videotapes made for purposes of self-satisfaction can travel almost anywhere in a year, that post production is cheap and easy these days, and that the chief function of 'al-Qaeda' is as a brand-name. Mr Correra has spent too much time reading 'security' briefings and too little considering celebrity sex tapes. A clip in a video package of someone drawing a circle on a map has more worldwide effect than any physical activity in a real place, just as watching Paris Hilton, et al., has led to more considerably more sexual stimulation than they could ever have achieved personally.

This isn't a clash of civilisations; it is a clash of fantasists. It is just a pity that both sides have some capacity to do real harm to the peaceful lives of non-players.

(23)

Gun Control: The theory that a woman found dead in an alley, raped and strangled with her panty hose, is somehow morally superior to a woman explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound.
- found on the WAGC website.

(hat-tip to commenter Marcy Quice)

(52)

Driving through Adelaide this morning, I idly turned my radio on, not something I normally do. But I happened to hear the South Australian police minister explaining to a couple of bemused hosts that the government here had made the possession of crossbows illegal. The radio hosts were bemused, not so much because of yet another assault on the tattered remains of Australian liberty, but because crossbows hardly seem like a problem hereabouts. It is not like you see gangs of youths roaming the streets with crossbows, after all.

The minister explained that there was a case in New South Wales a few years back and the government was keen to clear up 'loose ends'. Apparently you can still possess one if you can prove you have a 'lawful use' for it; the Australian notion of liberty is that you are free as long as you enjoy the good grace of the powers that be.

Youths are hardly likely to be carrying crossbows, but they may well be carrying knives. I read this morning's Daily Telegraph and came across an op-ed calling for a crackdown on knives, which are becoming a serious problem. Going by some of the comments to that op-ed, it's a fairly popular idea with the 'Torygraph's' readers as well. To be fair, Shaun Bailey does point the finger at the weakness of the criminal justice system, which is causing young people to take to knife ownership with such enthusiasm.

However, he also blames 'culture', which sounds to me like the old leftist excuse whenever someone did the wrong thing; that 'society is to blame'.

We need to look at the material that youngsters have rammed down their throats every day. Magazines such as Zoo, Nuts and MaxPower. Programmes and films such as World Wrestling Entertainment, Get Rich or Die Trying, and MTV, City Gangster flicks and the whole music culture in general. If we want our youngsters to stop being violent, we need to stop showing them violent material, especially so early in their development. As a colleague said to me, the music industry is "peddling death to our children".

What would change the culture is a change in society so that perpetrators of criminal behaviours face the full consequence of their actions; I suspect that would have a far greater impact on 'youth culture' then any 'initiative' to meddle with our culture; or to take away from lawful citizens their legitimate right to defend themselves. Which is where sloppy thinking like Shaun Bailey's op-ed will take us to.

(3)

It appears that so-called "animal rights" thugs' targetting of scientists and attempted intimidation of investors has backfired, at least in terms of trying to win around public opinion to their cause. Well, it is true that the majority of Britons loathe such groups, but I don't think these folk are really concerned about winning hearts and minds as so much working out their own damaged psychological problems through a "cause" that gives them a sense of power and fame. The sadness of it all is that the case for advancing animal welfare - hardly a trivial issue - gets lost in the noise. For all that I am an unapologetic meat-eater, I certainly think everything practical should be done to minimise suffering of animals. In fact, one of the great things about growing advances in the fields of biotech, genetic engineering and the like is that it reduces the need for animal testing, possibly removing it altogether.

Green terrorism is not something cooked up by science fiction. It is all too real and threatens immense damage to our economic and material wellbeing. Maybe the famously sentimental British animal-loving public are getting the point.

(29)

The BBC mentioned a small section of something I said to one of their reporters on the subject of more armed police in the UK. I am somewhat bemused to find myself nominated by the Beeb as a spokesman for the Libertarian Alliance, a worthy organization for sure but although I am a member, I do not speak on behalf of it.

The broader sense of my remarks to the journalist was not that I oppose the notion of armed police per se but that I supported the right of everyone to be armed. However my reservation regarding more plod with guns in the UK was that the shooting of that hapless Brazilian demonstrated that when they use force in error, far from a policy of transparency and accountability, all we will get is lies and fabricated accounts of what occured. As a result, the fact the institution which fosters and protects these liars deserves neither our support nor more guns as they clearly cannot be trusted with the ones they have.

Moreover the notion of 'what has gone wrong with society' was referring to the idea that does not seem reasonable to leave fixing societies ills to the very people and institutions which are most responsible for those ills... i.e. the regulatory state, and that includes its armed officers.

(9)

The government provides free guidelines and advice which allows business to assess the risk of a terrorist attack. The website, "Continuity Central", released a publication today entitled "Protecting Against Terrorism" summarising guidelines for businesses. This was not a public relations exercise by our political masters but a common sense response to requests from those businesses that have thought about the possibility of a terrorist attack.

The Security Service, in partnership with Home Office and Cabinet Office, have updated existing protective security guidance for organisations with a duty of care for others. This guidance, entitled 'Protecting Against Terrorism' has been published in response to requests from businesses to have a hard copy version of the guidance on the website

Yet, the majority of small businesses must be unaware that there are free guidelines of this nature. Has this government, renowned for its expertise in public relations, promoted a booklet that would save lives? Was this a press release that the mainstream media responsibly reported because they understood that smaller enterprises do not belong to organisations with the resources to monitor such subjects?

The release of relevant publications is a vital opportunity to raise awareness of the preventive actions that organisations and individuals can take to mitigate a terrorist attack. This press release sunk without trace on a day when the Home Office launched a campaign for reducing forced marriages amongst immigrant groups, announced new funding for racial equality and community cohesion and issued new regulations on the work of the Criminal Records Bureau. All admirable goals for some I am sure but I would argue that they are of less importance than raising security awareness amongst small businesses and the self-employed

You may rest assured that New Labour has its priorities right: the politically correct client bank must come first.

(7)

U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney wounded a fellow shooter of quail in an accident. Well, I guess it shows what a gulf now exists between the U.S. government and our own. I cannot imagine a single senior Labour politician who would spend time out shooting. (Imagine John Prescott doing it. Actually, don't). The story reminds me of another deputy leader, the late William Whitelaw (a decorated soldier in the Normandy WW2 campaign), who managed to fire some buckshot at someone during a grouse shooting meeting in the Scottish highlands.

Many politicians in the past have enjoyed the pastime of shooting game. Many MPs were landed gentry, who could not wait to get out of smelly London in the summer months and, once the game season started in August, would blast away at hapless birds, bagging them in prodigious quantities. And several paid the price. Robert Peel, Prime Minister in the 1840s, suffered a nasty buzzing in one of his ears after a gun went off too close. Salisbury and Churchill shot game, as did Macmillan and Alec Douglas Home. Across the big pond there was no greater hunter of game, of course, than Teddy Roosevelt.

All that tradition is fading out. I cannot imagine Tory leader David Cameron shooting game (imagine how that would jar with his trendy image) although his ancestors probably nailed whole flocks of pheasants in their time.

Anyway, the lesson of all this is that if you find yourself in the company of a politician holding a shotgun, stand well behind.

(8)

"Perhaps the meek shall inherit the Earth, but they'll do it in very small plots . . . about 6' by 3'."

Robert Heinlein, quoted at this excellent legal website with stacks of quotations about self defence.

(6)

One of our team brought this bit of aviation humour to my attention.

It is guaranteed to give you a bit of a smile.

(78)

MP Andrew Dismore has blocked attempts to clarify the law on self defence in Britain being proposed by MP Anne McIntosh, because he thinks it would be 'vigilante law'.

Well I have thought for some time now that non-state use of force in defence of life, limb and private property is exactly what is needed in this country and to make no apology for robustly defending what is yours. Take the law into your own hands because it is indeed yours to take, not Andrew Dismore's to deny. I realise that if you are old, infirm or a small woman living alone, the fact the state has disarmed you means you have no option whatsoever but to surrender your property and just pray the criminal(s) will not harm you, but those of us still physically able should be encouraged to use whatever weapons they can find at hand to assert some self ownership. Just do not make the mistake of calling the Police in Britain after the fact if you can possibly avoid it as they work for the likes of Andrew Dismore and are not there to serve you.

You may not have the legal right to fight back effectively, but you will always have the moral right to defend yourself and what is yours. Look at it this way, if you are the only one left alive after some son of a bitch breaks into your house, well, that means it is going to be hard for him to sue you or contradict your version of events, doesn't it. If they do make it out, then just clean up the mess and deny everything.

Vigilante law? As so many members of the political class in Britain leave us with little alternative, I am all for it. When the state fails in its most fundamental duty, it is time for society to remember whose law it really is. If you are able to, fight back, just keep in mind you will be fighting back against the state as well and act accordingly when the plod turns up a few hours or days later to 'protect' you.

(33)

It is not hard to understand why the government does not regard mugging as so serious a crime that it should always lead to a jail sentence, provided "minimal force" is used.

As the government have long made it clear that people should not defend their property with force against people who try to take it by force, they regard just handing your money and goods over as sensible and responsible behaviour. In short, they think the way to prevent violent crime is to stop people resisting and therefore remove the need for muggers to use actual violence rather than just the threat of it.

In other words, they want to make muggers more like tax collectors. Is that really so surprising?

(54)

There is controversy over the fact the Metropolitan Police are using 'dum dum' bullets (which is a term used by people who know nothing about firearms to describe any bullet designed to expand upon impact).

The reason a police force or anyone with a legitimate need to use a weapon in self-defence (i.e. far more people than just the police) would use a handgun firing expanding bullets is to (1) prevent the bullet exiting the target's body and thereby use all the kinetic energy to inflict a wound rather that... (2) leaving the bullet with enough energy that it goes clean through the intended target and wastes energy making a hole in a wall behind them or, much worse, making a hole in an innocent bystander.

It is a scandal that the Metropolitan Police killed an innocent Brazilian man and then lied about the sequence of events that led up to that happening. It is not a scandal that they used expanding bullets to do it. Would the ignorant twits in the media and various clueless Islamic 'spokesmen' trying to make this into a story have preferred that the cops not only killed an innocent man but also killed or injured someone else in the train by using non-expanding military style full metal jacket ammunition? It would be a scandal if they were not using expanding bullets.

The whole point of shooting someone is to cause them serious harm so that they cannot harm you or anyone else. In what way is it somehow morally preferable to use a weapon which does not cause as much harm per round-in-the-target, thereby requiring you to just shoot more bullets into them to kill or incapacitate them?

The only dum(b) dum(b)s here are the various Muslim idiots quoted in the Guardian article and their friends in the media who think this should be an issue.

(20)

Despite the urging of much of Brazil's ruling classes to support the measure, the world's first national referendum which put the proposition to ban the sale of firearms was smashed decisively by a 2:1 margin.

The people who are baffled why so many common people in a murder wracked country like Brazil would oppose such a measure need to realise that it is precisely because the country has such problems with violent crime that people need the means to protect themselves.

As I have said on other occasions - the right to keep and bear arms: it's not just for American anymore.

Maybe more Brazillians in London should be armed as well...

(34)

In these days of concern about violent Islamists running amok on our cities, it is always important to remember that other sources of violence can be found, such as the so-called animal rights campaigners:

A children's nursery has become the latest target of animal rights threats, forcing it to stop providing child care vouchers to parents working for the animal testing group Huntingdon Life Sciences.

Leapfrog Day Nurseries, part of the education business Nord Anglia, said it was reviewing whether extra security measures were needed at its Peterborough nursery, which is nearest to the Life Sciences headquarters in Cambridgesire. It said it already employed "stringent security measures" to protect the children in its care.

Threatening a kiddies' nursery. They must be so proud.

On a related matter, here is a fine essay taking the incoherent doctrine of animal rights apart. In my view, the doctrine is incoherent, although at the same time I think humans should seek to treat animals as kindly as possible, which is a very human-centric opinion to hold, of course.

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One of the things blogs do is edit the news, that is, look at lots of it, and point readers to the best stuff. And when it comes to this story - about a jeweller who chased and was then shot at by a robber, and who was struck in the chest by one of the shots - what counts is this picture:

Maybe other organs have this too, but I first found it, after seeing it on the ITV news, at The Sun. Well done them.

But hang on. Is it not supposed to be illegal even to carry a gun, let alone to fire it at people? These criminals. No respect for law and order.

If the jeweller had been armed, or if he only might have been, the robber would have known it, and this event would probably not have happened. Which in this particular case might have been a shame, because this really is an excellent picture.

In general, I hasten to add, I am against armed robbery, which is why I so completely despise the laws here in Britain which ensure that only armed robbers are armed when they unleash their villainy.

(46)

It is fair to say that I do not always agree with what I read over at the Lew Rockwell blog, considering its position on foreign policy to be sometimes naive to the point of downright obtuse. (That should get the comments fired up nicely, ed). That said, this article drives home very effectively what might be one of the few silver linings of the terrible effects of Hurricane Katrina: it may undermine respect for the wonders of Big Government and underscore the importance of local initiative in times of great danger.

And this article by David Kopel certainly adds to disquiet about what certain state officials are up to.

(50)

How else can you interpret the authorities intention to disarm people in New Orleans? We are not talking looters here, we are talking about people with legal weapons.

(147)

This is not the first article with this title I have written but if some of the accounts coming out of New Orleans prove to be genuine and fair accounts, then I suspect a whole new generation of people who agree with my tagline have just been created on the Gulf Coast of the United States. This was written by a pair of paramedics who were trapped in New Orleans.

We decided we had to save ourselves. So we pooled our money and came up with $25,000 to have ten buses come and take us out of the City. Those who did not have the requisite $45.00 for a ticket were subsidized by those who did have extra money. We waited for 48 hours for the buses, spending the last 12 hours standing outside, sharing the limited water, food, and clothes we had. We created a priority boarding area for the sick, elderly and new born babies. We waited late into the night for the "imminent" arrival of the buses. The buses never arrived. We later learned that the minute the arrived to the City limits, they were commandeered by the military.

These are clearly admirable self-reliant people here, not a bunch of welfare addled 'do nothings' incapable of independent thinking. They came up with a solution to their problem and the state simply stole it from them.

And if this is true, I can think of no better justification to openly state that people should own firearms to defend themselves not just against criminals but from agents of the state when there is a crisis.

We organized ourselves and the 200 of us set off for the bridge with great excitement and hope. As we marched pasted the convention center, many locals saw our determined and optimistic group and asked where we were headed. We told them about the great news. Families immediately grabbed their few belongings and quickly our numbers doubled and then doubled again. Babies in strollers now joined us, people using crutches, elderly clasping walkers and others people in wheelchairs. We marched the 2-3 miles to the freeway and up the steep incline to the Bridge. It now began to pour down rain, but it did not dampen our enthusiasm.

As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and of the commander's assurances. The sheriffs informed us there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move.

We questioned why we couldn't cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the 6-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans.

And the real stunner...

Unfortunately, our sinking feeling (along with the sinking City) was correct. Just as dusk set in, a Gretna Sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces, screaming, "Get off the fucking freeway". A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our food and water.

Once again, at gunpoint, we were forced off the freeway. All the law enforcement agencies appeared threatened when we congregated or congealed into groups of 20 or more. In every congregation of "victims" they saw "mob" or "riot". We felt safety in numbers. Our "we must stay together" was impossible because the agencies would force us into small atomized groups.

In the pandemonium of having our camp raided and destroyed, we scattered once again. Reduced to a small group of 8 people, in the dark, we sought refuge in an abandoned school bus, under the freeway on Cilo Street. We were hiding from possible criminal elements but equally and definitely, we were hiding from the police and sheriffs with their martial law, curfew and shoot-to-kill policies.

Ok, now would someone like to tell me why these people (a) should not have been armed (b) would not have been entirely justified using deadly force against the 'law enforcement' officials who, at gunpoint, did their damnedest to reduce their chances of survival?

We have heard accounts by authorities of crazed looters inexplicably shooting at contractors who were just trying to repair essential infrastructure. You know what? Maybe that is what happened and maybe not. I find myself thinking the official version of a great deal of what went on is far from the truth. Yet all we are ever going to see on CNN is pictures of heroic cops and National Guardsmen saving the day.

Unless this account proves to be a hoax or a gross misrepresentation of what happened, nothing less than a root and branch purge of the power structures in Louisiana will be enough. This is a true national scandal of the highest magnitude. I am appalled but not entirely surprised.

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This article contains some pretty damning stuff.

Behind the scenes, a power struggle emerged, as federal officials tried to wrest authority from Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D). Shortly before midnight Friday, the Bush administration sent her a proposed legal memorandum asking her to request a federal takeover of the evacuation of New Orleans, a source within the state's emergency operations center said Saturday.

The administration sought unified control over all local police and state National Guard units reporting to the governor. Louisiana officials rejected the request after talks throughout the night, concerned that such a move would be comparable to a federal declaration of martial law. Some officials in the state suspected a political motive behind the request. "Quite frankly, if they'd been able to pull off taking it away from the locals, they then could have blamed everything on the locals," said the source, who does not have the authority to speak publicly.

[...]

Louisiana did not reach out to a multi-state mutual aid compact for assistance until Wednesday, three state and federal officials said. As of Saturday, Blanco still had not declared a state of emergency, the senior Bush official said.

Yup, let the finger pointing begin. However although I am rarely loath to heap scorn on the state for cocking things up, it does need to be kept in mind that this is the worst natural disaster in US history and any blame laying needs to keep a sense of proportion (ha, as if) as expecting the state to magically solve even the most unexpected problems with seamless efficiency is at best (and I do mean at best) rather like relying on a well meaning but hopelessly alcoholic uncle to be there for you when things go badly wrong. Well, he might come up trumps but it is probably not a good idea to expect him to be there when you need him.

I also expect membership in the NRA and other similar groups to surge as people re-learn the lessons of the Los Angeles riots: the state might help you pick up the pieces after the fact and a policeman might come around to draw a nice chalk line around the bodies of your murdered loved ones, but when the veneer of civilisation cracks, you had better have a gun and be psychologically prepared to use it because the reality is that when the predators turn up, you are on your own.

Hat tip to Tom Pechinski

Update: LGF has some more as the blamefest starts to gather steam.

(22)

UK authorities may be faced with a bit of a struggle in extraditing a man, now in Rome, for his alleged involvement in the failed July 21 terrorist attacks on the London transport system, according to this report.

So could some nice person remind me what the EU-wide arrest warrant is suppose to achieve, exactly? Oh, er, wait a minute...

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To run from armed police who are shouting at you (rather than shooting at you) at any time is an extremely bad idea... to do so at a time like this in London is utter madness.

Anyone running from armed cops who have challenged them first in London today should expect to get shot dead given the clear and present danger we are in... but that does not makes this any less of a horror. If Jean Charles de Menezes just reacted idiotically to the situation he found himself in, that does not mean we should feel distain for him.

We really need to know exactly what happened and why, but shooting a man dead who is suspected of being a suicide bomber and who is running away and trying to board a train(!) when being called on to stop is not the incorrect response. It was a tragedy of execution (in ever sense of the word) but not an incorrect policy.

(27)

It could have been so much worse. Another sunny day in London and another series of attacks. Mercifully, as far as I know, no-one has been killed. My fellow Pimlico friend, Andrew Ian Dodge has a good take on the details. Tim Worstall has views here, including ideas on what the motivation of the attacks were in this case.

It appears that at least one person involved in the attacks has been arrested. Perhaps CCTV recordings of the attacks could yield more evidence. What this latest incident suggests is that CCTV, long bemoaned by us libertarians, can certainly record valuable evidence after a crime has been committed but that is not much consolation to the victims. The outrages are certainly going to give further ammunition to the police in arguing that every cubic metre of London needs to have a camera in it. I think that in public spaces that are paid for by the public and clearly key potential targets for terror groups, CCTV has its uses and it is pretty silly to get oxidised about it. But, and it is a big but, such things are clearly no deterrent. (Thanks to U.S. libertarian blogger Jim Henley for prodding me to write about this).

I was in the Aldwych area of London - near the London School of Economics, when the attacks happened. I first heard by a mobile call from my fiancee. Walking back to the office, it was remarkable how relaxed everyone was. In fact, the strained looks on some people's faces had more to do with the English batting implosion against Australia at the cricket.

Meanwhile, in reflecting on the cultural issues prompted by the current mayhem, go read this fine and no-holds-barred article in the Spectator.

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Whilst watching the BBC news' report about the horrific terrorist attacks against Shi'ite civilians in Iraq, I was astonished to hear the following uttered:

Ominously, there are increasing calls for locals to take up arms and defend their communities.

Excuse me? These poor people have just had the centre of their community blown out and many people killed but the desire to defend themselves is denounced by the BBC as... ominous? It might tell you something about what is happening in Iraq but it also tells you quite a lot about the mindset at the BBC.

It seems to me that locals taking up arms to defend themselves against terrorism directly are exactly what the USA should be encouraging whole heartedly. The fact is that people will start doing so regardless of the wishes of the USA if the security situation continues to deteriorate, so not only would it be pointless to try and stop them, why not make a virtue of necessity and show that the occupying powers welcome Iraqis becoming more self-reliant and willing to confront these murdering bastards themselves?

Iraqi territorial para-militaries could be quite an asset fighting the insurgency precisely because they are not going to be centrally directed, at least to some extent. Counter-insurgency by its nature relies on more than just firepower, which the US has in abundance. It also relies on local knowledge and a willingness to be ruthless, something pissed-off locals could certainly provide. The idea that Al Qaeda can only be fought in Iraq 'top down' (i.e. directed from Washington using US and Iraqi government forces) is probably a mistake, so arming the people who are taking the brunt of the attacks seems a pretty sensible way to go.

(14)

In another of the cases dumped on an unsuspecting public today, the last day of the US Supreme Court's session, the High and Mighty Nine reiterated that a municipality cannot be expected to provide competent police protection for its residents. The only twist was that this time the plaintiff was trying to hold the local coppers liable for failing to enforce a restraining order issued by a court.

The bad guy in question violated a restraining order to kidnap his daughters from his ex-wife's front lawn. After being informed that the perp had announced he was taking the girls to an amusement park in Denver, the local constabulary neglected to call the Denver police or go to the amusement park. Their effort was limited to trying to contact the perp on his phone, and "keeping an eye out" for his truck.

Ultimately, he was killed in a shoot-out with police. After they had tracked him to his mountain hideaway? Not exactly. He was shot in front of the police station. One suspects that he was double-parked, and had blocked in the cruiser detailed with making the morning donut run.

Oh, the three little girls? They were found dead in his truck. Heaven forbid, though, that the municipality should be held to standards of ordinary care.

(25)

British expats living in Spain are taking to handling their security themselves... and why not? Refusing to just throw your hands up in despair when the state proves unable to protect you is just acknowledging that you, not the state, are ultimately responsible for your safety. Vigilantes? Maybe, but why should that necessarily be a dirty word? Sometimes the reality is that 'taking the law into your own hands' is exactly the correct thing to do, and in any case these people are hardly hanging brigands they catch from the nearest lampposts.

(25)

There have been some interesting discussions across the blogosphere about the role of arms in resisting tyranny, many sparked off by what is going on in Zimbabwe. But whilst I am very much in favour of civilian ownership of firearms that are suitable for all manner of uses, I think many 'on my side of the aisle' overstate the direct benefits of not allowing the state to have a monopoly on the means of violence. Certainly I do not buy the argument that arming the Tiananmen Square protesters would have prevented the massacre that occurred.

However what arming the population does is not prevent tyranny (at least not on its own), but rather it raises the marginal cost of tyranny. The in your face reality of most tyrannies around the world is that it is not enforced on a daily basis by armies with tanks and helicopters (against which a few AK-47's will do little) but rather by a couple swaggering officious policemen with little handguns pushing their way into people's houses. Now those folks are the ones a few privately held weapons can truly work wonders with when it comes to the bottom line reality of force, not because privately held weapons will actually be used to kill or intimidate directly but simply because those policemen know that whilst they have the authority of the state behind them, right there and then in that house, there are very real limits to just how far they can push things, which is exactly how it should be.

Sure, they can come back with 50 soldiers in armoured personnel carriers if needed, but if that is what they have to do every time they want to intimidate someone, well, that is a much bigger investment of time and effort. Do not underestimate the value of increasing the marginal cost of tyranny. For example widespread gun ownership in Zimbabwe probably would have a major impact at mitigating the shambolic Zimbabwean governments ability to carry out much of what it does even if it does not directly lead the Mugabe's well deserved downfall.

Guns in private hands work, but it is just one piece of a much larger question and I suspect claiming they are a panacea for the ills of bad governance is not doing the pro-liberty side any service at all.

(36)

This kind of thing used to enrage me. Then it got to the stage where it embarrassed me. Then it began to perplex me. But now, I am almost entirely resigned.

Go on, do your very worst. Bring it on:

A&E doctors are calling for a ban on long pointed kitchen knives to reduce deaths from stabbing.

A team from West Middlesex University Hospital said violent crime is on the increase - and kitchen knives are used in as many as half of all stabbings.

The researchers said there was no reason for long pointed knives to be publicly available at all.

Next: Doctors call for ban on opposable thumbs.

(91)

There is a question concerning the relationship between guns and gangsterism that bedevils third world countries but the control of arms sounds suspiciously like that other 'success story': the war on drugs. Jack Straw's keen attempt to follow the NGOs on this matter was publicised at a press conference today where he attempted to internationalise this issue through an "arms control" treaty. It is not surprising that this immoral act is perpetrated by the Blair administration: a clique that is unable to understand the simple connection between the rule of law and a well armed citizenry.

Straw argued that existing treaties covering chemical, biological and nuclear weapons should be matched by a new treaty covering smaller weapons. And he acknowledged that such weapons "account for far more misery and destruction across the world". "The new treaty needs to include a wide range of signatories, including the world's major arms exporters," he said. "I certainly do not underestimate the difficulties of that. Many nations are concerned that a new arms trade treaty may restrict their defence industries; constrain their foreign policy; and lead to constant legal challenge of export licence decisions. Their approach may initially be one of scepticism, at best. "But in order for it to work properly, a new arms control treaty will need to include as many of the world's nations as possible - especially those with strong defence industries of their own.

The Control Arms Campaign is co-ordinated by Oxfam and Amnesty International. They view the proliferation of firearms as a key threat to peace and security. They are right in that technology has lowered the cost of owning firearms and has allowed the strong to plunder the weak; governments or gangs to maim, murder and steal. (although the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 did not require firearms, just edged weapons).

However, their solution is old-fashioned, insensitive to local conditions, and designed to reinforce the status quo in many states, rotten as they are. Their solution is global arms control:

Governments must introduce new laws and measures to incorporate the principles of the Arms Trade Treaty. They must also close the loopholes in their arms controls so that they can strictly monitor end use and effectively control arms brokers and licenced production overseas. They must stop the misuse of arms by security services and introduce systems of accountability and training for them, introduce measures for disarmament when a conflict has ended, develop good justice systems for prosecuting those who misuse arms, enforce all arms control legislation and develop and implement a national action plan to address and solve the country's arms problems.

Communities and local authorities must help collect and destroy surplus and illegal weapons, introduce community education programs to end cultures of violence, provide assistance to victims of armed violence, and provide alternative livelihoods for those who depend on violence for a living.

Only the police are considered suitable to carry guns in protection of communities if they follow the requisite standards, set down by the United Nations:

International standards do exist to control the use of guns and other methods of force by police and other law enforcement officials, but in many countries they are not being followed.These standards centre on the UN Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials and the UN Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials. At their heart is the principle of what constitutes legitimate force. Police must sometimes be permitted to use force or lethal force, in order to do their job of keeping communities safe and protecting themselves and the public from life-threatening attacks. But the force used must not be arbitrary; it must be proportionate, necessary and lawful. And, crucially, it must only be used in self defence or against the imminent threat of death or serious injury.

Self defence for the private individual in defence of life, liberty and property is not included within this 'solution'.

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"You can kill burglars" was the message that came blaring forth from the tabloid press with that flourish of heady triumphalism that usually accompanies a victory-for-the-common-man story (and which, on closer scrutiny, nearly always means that the government has just fucked over the common man good and proper).

To the cursory eye, the impression given is that the government has backed down and responded to public pressure for a change in the law to give citizens more rights to fight back against intruders and attackers. In reality, the government has done no such thing. Instead, those various branches of the state responsible for law enforcement have collaborated on a public statement:

Anyone can use reasonable force to protect themselves or others, or to carry out an arrest or to prevent crime. You are not expected to make fine judgements over the level of force you use in the heat of the moment. So long as you only do what you honestly and instinctively believe is necessary in the heat of the moment, that would be the strongest evidence of you acting lawfully and in self-defence. This is still the case if you use something to hand as a weapon.

As a general rule, the more extreme the circumstances and the fear felt, the more force you can lawfully use in self-defence.

None of which sounds unreasonable per se, but all of which is merely a re-statement of the law as it currently stands. This is not a change of heart or a climbdown or a fresh start or anything else of that nature. This is just yesterday's bill of fare, re-heated and served up with a garnish of finely-chopped press release.

In essence this is political chaff; a big bunch of glittery tinsel ejected into the air in order to deflect the heat-seeking missile of public disquiet. It appears to have done the trick.

As I have said before, the law does need changing in order to more accurately reflect the pre-1967 Common Law positions but, more than that, there needs to be a reversal of the last half-century's worth of anti-self-help culture.

On the downside, we are still a long way from any of that change but, and on the upside, at least the ball is now in play.

(19)

Months before I arrived in Los Angeles this past December, my friend Robert Avrech told me, "When you come to LA, I will take you shooting." Robert, an Orthodox Jew and veteran of the Yom Kippur War, has written about what Jewish law says about private ownership of guns, and has taught his wife and daughters how to load, unload, and shoot various guns. Could I have had a better teacher for my first time shooting?

And yes, that is right: Despite being born and raised in the USA, I had never touched a gun until my recent visit to LA. I was raised not to respect the power of firearms, but to fear them. I was raised to believe that the responsibility for personal defense lies not with the individual, but with the state. I was raised to believe a lot of wrongheaded, backward things about guns and what the US constitution says about them.

Our shooting expedition took place at the LA Gun Club, in a not-so-nice area of Los Angeles. Robert, who is a screenwriter and producer as well as a publisher, told me that if one ever sees a shooting range scene in a film, it was most likely shot at the LA Gun Club. The place itself is impressively stocked with a wide range of rental guns, ammunition, targets, t-shirts, and all the other accessories that a gun owner could want.

Of course, the clientele was made up of your typical right-wing gun nuts.

As Robert explained to me, Asians in LA realise more than most the necessity of being proficient shooters, as they are one of the most besieged communities and amongst the very first targets whenever a riot breaks out.

In case you cannot tell, I really enjoyed my first time shooting. I found the Springfield a bit too powerful for my girly arms, but the 'cowboy gun' - a Ruger - was very much to my liking. It was easy to load, a breeze to unload, and very fun to use.

I have a lot more training to undergo before I am a confident shooter. Alas, it looks like I will not be taking that training in London - or anywhere else in Britain - anytime soon. And with the regulations that the legislature insists on piling upon American gunowners, I would advise US-based readers to exercise their freedom to bear arms while they still can.

(20)

There is an article in the Spectator which seems a bit complacent to me:

If a violent criminal breaks into my house I, too, may react violently, but if I do so I doubt whether I shall live in fear of ending up like Tony Martin. This is because the law already accepts the right to self-defence and does so in such a way as to take into account an individual�s assessment of the threat in the heat of the moment. Strip away the Tony Martin case, which unfairly dominates all discussion on this topic, and just look at other recent cases. In November 2002 the retired businessman Anthony Spray heard somebody trying to open the door of his Cumbrian home and went downstairs, armed with an air rifle, to investigate. Seeing a figure at the now open door, he shot 19-year-old Paul Evans in the eye from a distance of four feet. Evans, it transpired, was not a burglar: he had mistaken Spray�s house for a B&B where he was staying. As a result of his mistake, Evans lost an eye, yet Spray was not jailed: he was given a 12-month suspended sentence and ordered to pay £3,000 compensation.

Riiight. So the author of this piece, Ross Clark, thinks that the case of Tony Martin, the west Norfolk farmer jailed for killing an intruder at his farm and injuring another, is just a freak, a one-off case which need offer no special insights into the rights of self defence. The Spray case, as is clear, still resulted in the householder being convicted, albeit not having to serve a term of imprisonment.

Clark's piece is not without merit. He argues that the United States has achieved a large fall in crime due, he claims, to such factors as 'zero tolerance' policing, tough sentencing and the like. No doubt these have played a part but it is a distortion to suppose that America's much lower level of aggravated burglaries is not partly linked to widespread ownership of firearms and a different approach on the part of the courts to householders using force to defend themselves.

Clark is correct to state that hard cases make bad law. He is, however, dead wrong to suppose that apart from the Tony Martin case, there are no examples of homeowners having been prosecuted for self defence. And it is abundantly clear that burglars have got the message: raiding a person's home is a low-risk activity in Britain, as Perry de Havilland's former neighbour, the late City financier John Monckton, found out last year.

Fortunately, we have the historian Joyce Lee Malcolm to set us straight on the real lessons to be learned from recent trends in British and American policy on self defence and the law. I urge everyone interested in this issue to read her book if they haven't already done so.

UPDATE: In thinking through the Spray case mentioned above, I do accept that it was right for the householder to compensate a man mistaken for a burglar, but the suspended jail term strikes me as quite wrong although I have not studied all the particulars of the case, including whether the householder had been the victim of multiple burglaries in the past, like Tony Martin.

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If you live in Britain and you do not think crime, casual violence and the background of anti-social behaviour is mounting problems based on the evidence of your own eyes, then stop reading now and keep taking the NHS prescribed Prozac. For all the rest of you, take a look at this report by Civitas.

Of course the government and police claim the truth lies elesewhere. No prize for guessing who I am inclined to believe.

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Tory MP Patrick Mercer has tabled legislation to 'rebalance' the right to defend life, limb and property in favour of the victims of crime.

And how exactly will that make a lone 60 year old woman safer if someone breaks into her house? Please remember that it was a Tory government which decided she will have no right whatsoever to have effective means to defend herself by restricting firearms.

The Mercer Bill is welcome but all it does is make Britain a little bit safer for houses containing one or more adult males from their late teens to their late sixties who are actually capable of picking up a blunt instrument and taking on an intruder with a reasonable chance of success. The unpalatable truth is that most people are not able to effectively defend themselves against your typical house intruder (one or more young men between 16 and 35) unless they have an effective weapon. And that means a gun.

"God made man but Colonel Colt made them equal"

(34)

And here (just in case you missed the comments on the previous posting) is yet another circumstance where an armed populace would have really helped:

One man has died and five other people are in a critical condition after being attacked by a man with a knife.

Scotland Yard said a man drove around the areas between Enfield and Haringey in north London in a red Hyundai stabbing people on Thursday morning.

Officers are investigating if there is a link between the attacks and the murder of shopkeeper Mahmut Fahri.

A man, who police say has a history of mental illness, is being held in connection with the attacks.

"History of mental illness" is today's euphemism for maniac, it would seem.

Personally I believe that people would not even think of behaving like this if they knew that everywhere they went on such rampages they would be confronted by the armed and the respectable. And I further believe (although I would welcome intelligent contradition about this) that this includes maniacs, who (and I believe there have been quite sophisticated experiments about this) are actually quite responsive and rational about altering how they conduct themselves, when faced with predictably different rewards and predictably different punishments. What maniacs lack is not rationality; it is merely any semblance of good manners.

See also: Hungerford Massacre. This slaughter was caused by gun control. It was not only caused by gun control, but it could not possibly have occurred in the way that it did without gun control. The police had to get guns from London. And it all happened at the precise historical moment when, for the first time since cheap firearms were invented, a country town like Hungerford no longer contained any. Simultaneously, crime throughout the British countryside was rocketing. The response to Hungerford was to tighten the screw that had illegalised self-defence in the first place.

This good woman has already been linked to from here today, but there cannot be too many such links out here in Blogland, I say.

I know that, for some, the way we here at Samizdata.net keep banging on, so to speak, about gun control (iniquity and fatuity of) is a bit dreary and predictable. But there is actually a bit of a buzz in Britain now about this issue, and any decade now this country might see some big changes in the right direction. Provided we keep buzzing and banging on.

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Self defence, wrote William Blackstone, the 18th-century jurist, is a "natural right that no government can deprive people of, since no government can protect the individual in his moment of need". This Government insists upon having a monopoly on the use of force, but can only impose it upon law-abiding people. By practically eliminating self defence, it has removed the greatest deterrent to crime: a people able to defend themselves.
- Joyce Lee Malcolm