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For the first time in a long while I am prepared, temporarily at least, to suspend my animus towards the BBC. When they are prepared to publish an article called ‘Why Britain needs more guns’ by the outstanding Joyce Lee Malcolm then they have earned a respite from my relentless hostility. Nay, they may even by the worthy recipients of a nod of appreciation.
“The price of British government insistence upon a monopoly of force comes at a high social cost.
First, it is unrealistic. No police force, however large, can protect everyone. Further, hundreds of thousands of police hours are spent monitoring firearms restrictions, rather than patrolling the streets. And changes in the law of self-defence have left ordinary people at the mercy of thugs.”
Amen to that. Testify, Sister Joyce!!
And, yes, it is on the BBC website. No word of a lie. Go and check the link yourself if you don’t believe me. Yes, you could have knocked me down with a feather as well.
Since they have invited comments from their readers this will give ample opportunity for the British ones to rant, scream, pull out their hair, void their bowels and otherwise hissy-fit themselves into a cocked hat. But that doesn’t matter because the truth has been spoken and it’s out there in black-and-white for every anti-self-defence nut to see and try, in vain, to rebut.
This is a good start. In fact, and I don’t want to runoff at the mouth here or jump the gun (pun gleefully intended) but I do believe that we could be getting just a little bit of traction with this issue. About bloody time, too.
I honestly fail to understand all the fuss over the Judicial decision not to incarcerate burglars. It is perfectly understandable in light of the fact that, in London, the burglars are not even going to be apprehended in the first place.
Burglaries in London are only going to be investigated if the crime is “deemed solvable”, according to new guidelines for the Metropolitan Police.
What they mean by ‘deemed solvable’ is if the investigating officer actually finds the felon climbing out of a householders window wearing a zorro-mask and holding a bag marked ‘swag’. Short of that, they can’t be bothered. A complaint to the police from a householder that a burglar has assaulted them may stir the sediment in their feet and, naturally, they will still whip themselves instantaneously into a frenzy of righteous froth should a burglar ever complain that a householder has assaulted him. After all we can’t have people getting away with that sort of thing, can we.
However, mass voluntary redundancy is not on the agenda just yet:
Crimes which will be given priority must come under four categories: serious crimes like murder and rape, major incidents, hate crime and incidents that are the priority of a particular borough.
‘Priority of a particular borough’ and ‘hate crimes’ are largely synonymous and is likely to lead to victims of burglary or theft fabricating an element of racist abuse in order to get their complaints taken seriously. Thus the incidence of ‘hate crime’ will dramatically rocket and prompt politicians to hastily enact even more anti-hate legislation.
Also, I wonder how long it will be until ‘low-profile’ (i.e. non-politically sensitive) murders and rapes are quietly dropped from the agenda?
Hopefully though, some sections of the public wll begin to appreciate that the police, like all other nationalised industries, are indifferent to their customers. Equally, they may begin to re-evaluate the assumed social contract which the state is now unilaterally shredding.
In the long term, this may be good news. Though not such good news, I fear, in the short term.
My good friend and now literal comrade-in-arms Tom Burroughes visited me in the U.S. a few months ago, centering his visit around a side trip to Front Sight Firearms Training Institute in Las Vegas, Nevada. Tom has written up his impressions from his attendance at a 4-day Defensive Handgun course on my blog site.
Tom nowhere mentions this in his blog article, but I will: a few years ago, he wrote a nice little piece for the Libertarian Alliance called The Joy of Shooting: Preserving Freedoms by Making Regular Use of Them (pdf file). Re-reading his earlier piece, I’m particularly happy for him that he took the opportunity to get much more training. He acquitted himself well in the rigorous 4-day course in the desert, and I look forward to his next visit: I fully expect him to re-visit Front Sight… the next time, to become a rifleman. Good work Tom!
Russell Whitaker
Thanks to Chris Tame of the Libertarian Alliance Forum for flagging up this story by Marc Morano of CNS News:
A man who turned the tables and fatally shot a would-be carjacker in Nashville this week deserves a “good citizenship” award for fighting crime, according to a national gun advocacy group.
According to published reports, Billy J. Brown stopped at a convenience store in South Nashville at around 1:00 a.m. on Dec. 29 to get a snack. When he got back into his car, he was surprised by two carjackers demanding that Brown start driving.
Instead of following orders, Brown pulled out his gun and shot and killed one of the carjackers who had jumped into the backseat, according to police and press reports. The other carjacker fled the scene, but was later apprehended by police and reportedly admitted to the attempted carjacking. Brown has not been charged with any violation of the law, but the local district attorney is expected to review the case.
“I hope there is some agency at the state level that is prepared to reward this guy or give the guy an award appropriate to the circumstances,” said Joe Waldron, executive director of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, in an interview with CNSNews.com.
“[Brown] deserves some kind of a good citizenship award,” Waldron said.
→ Continue reading: “A complicated issue”
I was struck by two contrasting emotions upon reading this editorial in the Telegraph. First, pleasant surprise that views of such obvious common sense have found their expression in a major British news organ but, secondly, dismay that this fact should come as a pleasant surprise at all.
“Since the Government’s “total ban” five years ago, there are more and more guns being used by more and more criminals in more and more crimes. Now, in the wake of Birmingham’s New Year bloodbath, there are calls for the total ban to be made even more total: if the gangs refuse to obey the existing laws, we’ll just pass more laws for them not to obey. According to a UN survey from last month, England and Wales now have the highest crime rate of the world’s 20 leading nations. One can query the methodology of the survey while still recognising the peculiar genius by which British crime policy has wound up with every indicator going haywire – draconian gun control plus vastly increased gun violence plus stratospheric property crime.”
For those of us who knew only too well that this was going to be the result of the absurd and destructive war on self-defence there is a certain amount of satisfaction to be had from having been proved right. But, equally, a mounting despair at the seemingly wilful refusal of most Britons to learn from, or even acknowledge, the evidence that is staring them smack, bang in the face.
Even now, the straightforward truths expressed in this leader would be totally absent from the thoughts of any British journalist and even if that were not so, I suspect none would dare put them into print. We have Mark Steyn to thank for this serice.
“After Dunblane, the police and politicians lapsed into their default position: it’s your fault. We couldn’t do anything about him, so we’ll do something about you. You had your mobile nicked? You must be mad taking it out. Why not just keep it inside nice and safe on the telephone table? Had your car radio pinched? You shouldn’t have left it in the car. House burgled? You should have had laser alarms and window bars installed. You did have laser alarms and window bars but they waited till you were home, kicked the door in and beat you up? You should have an armour-plated door and digital retinal-scan technology. It’s your fault, always. The monumentally useless British police, with greater manpower per capita on higher rates of pay and with far more lavish resources than the Americans, haven’t had an original idea in decades, so they cling ever more fiercely to their core ideology: the best way to deal with criminals is to impose ever greater restrictions and inconveniences on the law-abiding.”
It may seem bizarre these days, but I grew up believing and parrotting the lockstep axiom that the British police ‘are the best in the world’. It is an assertion that may appear obnoxiously arrogant but, considering how things used to be, may be understandable. There was a time when the British police were charged with enforcing laws that were, for the most part, sensible and it was a task to which they devoted their energies with commendable vigour all whilst remaining routinely unarmed and fostering a public perception that they were both honourable and decent. → Continue reading: The sleep of reason
Michael Peach, the home educating house dad, doesn’t only write about home education. He has this to say about the current state of British gun control:
Two teenage girls have been shot dead in Birmingham. Details are sketchy as nobody wants to talk to the police but it seems they were shot outside a party and a car was riddled with bullets, at least thirty shots were fired. Already the call has gone out for stricter gun control with the government now considering a minimum sentence of five years for carrying an illegal weapon.
This misses the point completely. The situation is this … the bad guys have got guns. No amount of extra sentencing is going to change this. It is time to stop messing around and let the good guys have guns too. Would the gunman or gunmen have been able to fire at will if he thought someone else was going to fire back. He / they had a gun and could just take their time and fire at will knowing they were totally unthreatened. Just the thought that he might get shot himself would have made him think twice before going on the rampage.
As is now being proven everyday on the streets of the UK Gun control does not work.
And yes, this was the same incident that Perry de Havilland noted here yesterday.
The significance of this is not just what Mike says, although heaven knows it’s true enough; it’s who he is. Britain’s home-educators are a less God-fearing and more string quartet playing, Labour voting, Guardian reading, vegitarian, sandal-wearing, woolly knitting, woolly wearing, woolly minded lot than those of the USA. If just a tiny number of those people even get to hear that someone like them thinks that the gun problem in Britain now is that people like us don’t have enough guns, then the long term beneficial effect could be enormous. This is, after all, an extremely simple idea to grasp, even if your first reaction to it is one of pure horror, and once someone has put the notion in your head, it is hard to shake it out.
In the USA, if I get the picture right, believing what Mike says is fairly normal, and in some parts almost de rigeur. Not everyone does believe it, but everyone knows that others do even if they don’t. Right? (Commenters feel free to correct me if I need it.) In Britain, such is the primitive state of this debate that the number of people willing to say things like this in public, such as on the radio or even in a blog, is as close to zero as makes hardly any difference. But as we all know, the difference between hardly anyone and actually no-one can be all the difference. So special kudos to people like Mike who are willing to say such things.
In general, Mike’s blog is well worth the regular attention of samizdata readers.
Prompted, no doubt, by the hugely successful prohibition on the private ownership of handguns, UK police chiefs are planning a gun amnesty:
“A firearms amnesty is being planned for early in the New Year to try to reduce levels of gun crime.”
An inspired idea! I am quite sure that Britain’s urban desperados will be rushing, RUSHING down to their local police station to meekly surrender their Browning Autos and AK-47s.
“A ban on ownership of handguns was introduced in 1997 as a result of the Dunblane massacre, when Thomas Hamilton opened fire at a primary school leaving 16 children and their teacher dead.
But even since the ban, gun-related crimes have soared, with one study suggesting handgun usage had gone up by as much as 40 percent two years after the ban.”
The truly galling thing about this is conspicuous absence from the media of the various anti-gun campaigners who were infesting the airwaves barely five years ago assuring us that a complete ban on private gun ownership would reduce crime, make us all a lot safer and eradicate what they referred to as ‘gun-culture’ from Britain. Not a single one of these people have been brought back on air to be challenged or asked to explain themselves. I doubt that they ever will not least because many of them are still in government.
“The Home Office is considering a minimum five year sentence for anyone caught possessing a gun and setting up a national database and a new agency to trace illegally held weapons.”
In that paragraph, the future lies mapped out. The ‘amnesty’ will prove useless and the criminal use of guns will continue to spiral. Faced with mounting pressure to ‘do something’ the Home Office will impose minimum sentences for handgun possession of five years (or, possibly, ten years as some are arguing for). The result will be that heat-packing gangsters will be far more likely to shoot it out with the cops rather than surrender as well as more likely to ‘silence’ anyone they believe might snitch on them. I see dead people.
Because there is no foreseeable prospect of a policy re-think, I suppose that this whole horrid panoply of unintended consequences will simply have to play out. The British have a penchant for learning things the hard way.
Since we at Samizdata are only too aware that most of our readers are not British, we take a particular relish in introducing our readers to the rich and fruity idioms of British slang. We see this as a kind of cultural export.
In this tradition, may I refer you to the expression ‘Taking the Piss’. It means being disrespectful to the point of effrontery or the process whereby, having caused injury or offence to someone, the ‘piss-taker’ then goes on to compound said injury or offence for no obvious reason except contempt.
As always, these terms are best illustrated by a real-life example, so here is quite the most blatant example of ‘taking the piss’ that I can imagine:
“The burglar injured by Tony Martin after he broke into the farmer’s home is suing him for £15,000 compensation for loss of earnings.”
I burgle your home then I sue you for trying to stop me. See, that’s called ‘taking the piss’.
“Brendon Fearon, 32, wants the compensation because he has supposedly been unable to find a job since suffering the gunshot injuries in the raid on Martin’s Norfolk home..”
This thing is expecting the rest of us to believe that, had it not been for Tony Martin’s buckshot lodged in his jacksy, he’d have been abroad actively seeking honest, gainful employment. Get the picture?
“The writ gives a number of reasons for Fearon’s claim, including his leg injuries, which prevent him finding work, concern about his “long-term sexual functioning” and becoming “very tearful” when watching a film in which someone dies.”
Woe, woe and, thrice, woe! Fearon may be unable to breed new Fearons. And I too, get ‘very tearful’ when I watch the world go stark, staring bonkers.
“He is also said to claim that he is afraid of fireworks, no longer enjoys ju-jitsu and kick-boxing and becomes depressed when TV shows contain gunfire.”
I know exactly how he feels because I become depressed by the horrible feeling that his ludicrous claim will, like as not, succeed.
Self-defence is not necessary because we have the police to protect us, right. That’s their job. That’s what we, the tax-payers, pay them to do. So, we can all sleep safely in our beds at night, knowing that the agents of the state will keep us safe from those who would do us harm.
That’s the theory; this is the practice:
“Police have launched an inquiry into why it took officers an hour to respond to an emergency call from a Jewish couple who were the victims of a terrifying burglary at their Southgate home.”
Well, as long as there’s no ‘hate speech’ involved, it probably isn’t a real emergency.
“Officers eventually arrived at 6:40am, long after the intruders had driven off with their haul in the couples’ two Mercedes saloons.”
Laughing their arses off, I’d wager.
““Although I am disgusted with the police who should have been there to help us, they have been very supportive and efficient since. It was just a break-down in communication and it shouldn’t have happened.”
‘It shouldn’t have happened’!!. Oh, that’s all okay then. As long as this kind of thing ‘shouldn’t happen’, we can all go back to sleep again.
Last week I watched a typical British Channel 4 documentary about the “hunt for the Washington snipers”, shown last Thursday evening. It told a reasonably convincing factual story, and you didn’t get the feeling of axes being ground. There were some routine clichés involved, but not, you felt, because the programme makers wanted to push them, merely because those clichés seemed, to them, the things to say.
The most obvious such cliché was the claim, emitted more than once, yet undermined by a lot of the facts being presented as well as reinforced by others, that “the media” were interrupting the investigation.
From where I sat, the media pretty much were the investigation. The police, in the person of the sublimely named Chief Moose, seemed merely to be a rather helpless, hopeless clearing house for clues, and a maker of appropriate public speeches after each successive murder. “This is terrible. If you know what happened, call us.” They did nothing that a bunch of geeks in an upstairs student lodging couldn’t have done, or so it seemed.
As the blogosphere has already explained, the clinching Clue (a vehicle description and a vehicle number plate) was only released to the general public by those Media, despite the best efforts of Moose and his men to stop this Clue getting around.
Now, aside from a bit of teasing about the wretched man’s name which I’m afraid I can’t resist (a name which only a very daring novelist of the Tom Wolfe variety would have presumed to make up if telling such a story – and damn me there’s another name!), I’m not here to sneer at Chief Moose. Moose was only operating within a model of police work that has been the dominant “narrative” of how you do these things since as far back as the days of J. Edgar Hoover. Faced with a complicated and important crime, such as a string of lurid murders of non-lowlife people, you centralise information. It’s like a military operation. You no more rely on “the public” or “the media” to win your battle for you without your paternal control and guidance than you would expect a similarly anarchic arrangement to scam Nazi Germany about where the Normandy landings were going to happen (i.e. scam them into thinking it wasn’t Normandy). That kind of thing has to be a big old hundreds-of-people-at-hundreds-of-desks job.
And in the dying days of the “old” media, there is still a rationale to this. The point is, the old media are pretty much like a big old government bureaucracy, except not as sensible. In many ways the old media combine the bad features of a government bureaucracy (ignoring vital clues, obsessing about irrelevant clues, institutionalising the silly prejudices of a few powerful people) with the bad features of a mob (all following the most vigorously mobile mob-member however silly, trampling in a herd over the top of vital clues, jumping to silly conclusions).
A key moment in the Washington snipers story concerned the immediate fate of that vital Clue. Moose’s worry – and it was a perfectly genuine one – was that The Media would shove The Clue up on nationwide TV, and the Bad Guys would see The Clue before anyone else who had also seen The Clue had got around to spotting the Bad Guys in the vehicle referred to by The Clue, and the Bad Guys would dump the vehicle and carry on murdering from a different vehicle. Bye bye The Clue. Four more non-lowlife bodies. More Moose nightmares.
But now enter the blogosphere. → Continue reading: Chief Moose versus the Wolves – on not letting the Bad Guys see The Clue coming at them until it’s too late
A police officer was shot and seriously wounded after stopping a motorist in North London.
In the West Midlands, two men have been fatally shot in separate incidents.
Just what is wrong with these people? Don’t they know that guns are supposed to be banned in Britain?
A British court today has ruled that Darren Taylor, a burglar who was stabbed to death with his own knife by homeowner John Lambert, was lawfully killed.
Taylor and his accomplice, Ian Reed, both high on drugs and drink, burst into the Lambert’s home and held a knife to the throat of Mrs Lambert, demanding £5,000 from the couple. In the ensuing melee, John Lambert managed to kill Taylor and drive off Reed.
When the police finally arrived, they arrested Mr Lambert for murder, although all charges were later dropped against him whilst the surviving criminal, Ian Reed, was sentenced to eight years in prison for robbery.
It would be nice if there was a presumption of innocence when the cops show up and see situations such as these. After all, when the cops shoot a man dead for no good reason at all, it is just taken as a given that it was lawfully done. In John Lambert’s case, his rights were ultimately upheld but it is hard to escape the feeling that there is one rule for agents of the state and another for its subjects.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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