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One of the reasons for my absence on the blog was grieving for my motorbike that was stolen several weeks ago.
For some time now, my mood have been alternating between a profound sense of loss and anger with a burning desire to have my bike back preferably covered with puréed remnants of those who deprived me of it.
I decided to replace it as soon as possible and managed to do so earlier this week. The world seems a happier place, however, not as happy as it ought to be given that I am on two wheels again. This is because I had to switch to a different type of motorbike, which would not necessarily be my first choice.
For the uninitiated, my previous motorbike, Suzuki GSX-R600, is a pure sportsbike designed for a racetrack. It is a highly desirable motorbike both for joy riders but more importantly for thieves who sell them as parts for race bikes. This was certainly the reason my bike was stolen since the various security devices that I had installed would make it impossible to ride by anyone else.
My new bike, a Ducati Monster Dark 900, is a very different affair – bigger engine, stylish and urban. It is still desirable but to a different group of thieving criminals who I hope will be deterred by the bike’s security.
Both are top of the range in their category, so why am I not completely satisfied? The point is that I have been forced to change my preferences because there is a ‘market’ for the bikes I really like and their parts. Short of putting my dream bike in a bomb shelter and/or booby-trapping it with Semtex or some other owner-friendly material, there is nothing I can do to stop those thieving bastards from continuing to steal my sportsbikes.
There is a point to the stolen bike saga and it’s to do with property rights and their protection. My lovely Suzuki was the second sportsbike that I have had stolen in the last two years, so naturally, I have been wondering what to do about this – it is a problem that obviously will not go away, in fact, is getting worse. The local police have admitted that they can’t do anything to stop it and gave me a friendly advice, bordering on counselling, to treat the constant infringement on my property rights as the price one has to pay for living in Central London.
Perhaps, if my local council (a local government body in London) installed secure parking for motorbikes, it might make it more difficult for the thieves who would look for a more convenient bounty… Or perhaps if my street had CCTV cameras, the thieves would avoid it (or more likely find some clever ways of disabling them or simply ignore them)…. Or if the local residents decided to hire private security that would constantly patrol the area, the thieves might be permanently deterred…
I like the third option. Residents in three streets in Kensington (a desirable residential area in Central London) decided to do just that and the crime rate has been reduced to almost zero in the year the secret pilot scheme has been running.
As expected, the reactions have been mixed. The Sunday Telegraph reported this with a generally positive take:
Eldon street is a public street but the uniformed man with an Alsatian at his side making its way between the stucco-fronted buildings of one of London’s most desirable roads is not a public servant; he is not a policeman but a private – albeit highly-trained – security guard who keeps this Kensington avenue free from crime. The catch is that residents have to pay for the peace of mind they now enjoy; the scheme is funded by payments of up to £1,000 a year from householders.
However, the scheme has not left everyone happy. It was criticised by the Police Federation, which represents rank-and-file officers. The chairman of the constables’ branch of the Metropolitan Police Federation, said it was “denigrating the role of the policeman”:
The Government has announced it wants to introduce civilian auxiliaries under police control and also accredit private security firms to patrol streets…but by doing so, they are taking away the role of the police officer as a professional person and also getting policing on the cheap.
Hmm, £1,000 a year doesn’t seem so cheap, constable. Or perhaps your understanding of the cost is skewed by the knowledge of how much of taxpayer’s money is spent on ineffective policing…
The final twist on the story, which worried me more than finding the extra money on top of the local tax, was a throwaway line by the same policeman:
If rich communities can afford to do this, it is unfair on those areas which can’t.
I am not sure whom I detest more now – those who steal my property or those who take my money to protect me and my property, fail and then prevent me from doing so myself and from blowing up the criminals to the kingdom come. Let me think about that while getting used to riding my Ducati Monster Dark…
Roger Dorrington, the father about whom I reported on Wednesday following his conviction for beating up the drug dealer who was divvying up heroin with Dorrington’s children in their family home, has been told by Judge David Griffiths that he will not have to pay the drug dealer £250 after all.
However the conviction still stands and he will have to do 100 hours of ‘community service’ for the crime of defending his children against a predatory heroin dealing trespasser. If Judge Griffiths wants him to actually serve his community, I can think of no better way of him spending that 100 hours than for Dorrington to explain, slowly and graphically, to the idiot on the bench what the reality of trying to prevent two teenage children from destroying themselves with heroin is actually like in the real world outside Southampton Crown Court.
Judge Griffiths is just doing what the state expects him to do by demanding that all British subjects be prostrate in the face of any actual threat in which the state does not choose to intermediate itself. Justice for Roger Dorrington and the very survival of his two children does not even enter into that equation. The state is NOT your friend.
Roger Dorrington is a builder with two teenage sons, called Nick and Joseph, who have a problem with heroin. There is another man called James White who provides them with that heroin since they were 14 and 15 respectively, in return for money. As most people would correctly surmise, the British state says it is illegal to sell heroin to children like Nick and Joseph.
Now as a libertarian, I think that blanket prohibitions are not the way to deal with the problems caused by addictive drugs like heroin. But I also think that addictive drugs are a problem and that this is best dealt with via social mechanisms like families and in particular ‘robustly engaged’ fathers like Roger Dorrington. However in the here and now of Britain 2002, heroin is a Prohibited Class A drug and the state would have us believe that this makes dealing such drugs A Serious Matter which should be left to the state’s blue clad enforcers.
Now Roger Dorrington is by all accounts a fine caring father to his children and thus does not want drug dealer James White giving Nick and Joseph heroin. As a result he warned the man to stay the hell out of his family house. So when Dorrington came home unexpectedly and found White cutting up heroin in his own house, he beat the drug dealer up and ejected him from his property.
White complained to the police and Dorrington was arrested for assault. White was not arrested at all in spite of the fact he brought a class A drug into Dorrington’s house to give to Dorrington’s children. People must not ‘take the law into their own hands’ says the state and yesterday a judge ordered Roger Dorrington to pay £250 (US $360) to the injured drug dealer and do 100 hours of ‘community service’. Dorrington says he will refuse to comply with either order and will no doubt suffer more later as a result.
So what exactly is going on here? Well it is not about justice, but then nothing whatsoever any state does is in reality about justice. It is not even about The Law, which is certainly what states say they are about in their tenuous claim to be legitimate expressions of a society rather than a vast engine of criminality. No, it is about what is the true priority of nation states. It is about power. 9 times out of 10, if a person sells (highly illegal) a class A drug (possession of which is illegal) on private property from which they have been explicitly excluded (illegal trespass), this will not rouse the state to do anything at all… yet when a private individual himself uses force to prohibit three illegal acts on his own property the state arrests the enforcer of its own laws and does not arrest the violator of several of its other laws.
This is the true face of the modern British state and yet more proof of what both Frédéric Bastiat and Thomas Paine said about State and Society being two fundamentally different things. States only provide justice incidentally en-passant to enforcing their laws. It seems now even that pretence is fading. The only illegal acts that truly stirs Leviathan from its theft bloated torpor is a challenge to its own monopoly of violence backed enforcement. The state not only wants you helpless, it takes concrete measures to make you helpless. No wonder they took our guns away.
The following news item appeared on the Reuters website this morning. It certainly proves the point that martial arts can be useful as a form of self defence for women. One wonders how long it will be before a victim-disarmament twit tries to ban it.
Professor Reynolds weighs in to the ongoing debate in the USA about arming airline pilots
“I trust airline pilots — and for that matter airline passengers — to protect me far more than I do underperformin’ Norman Mineta, or Tom Ridge.”
I am only too well aware of the number of calls for allowing passengers to arm themselves following 9/11. I was one of those voices. However, on second thought and third thought, I’m wondering if it may not be a bit of a ‘Naomi Klein’ (i.e. a ‘No-Brainer’).
Now before anyone starts calling me a ‘gun-grabber’, let me categorically confirm that my unambiguous support for RKBA remains undiminshed but having your sidearm on an aircraft does not, sadly, make you any less of a sitting target. If we agree to armed passengers then surely it must be all passengers or none and if all passengers can carry guns then what is there to stop, say, three or four terrorists carrying their ‘toolbag’ onto the flight as well? The answer is, nothing. This gives us a very thorny problem when it comes to the kind of slime who crash passenger jets into buildings: it is not just that they are murderous, they are suicidal as well. That makes them very difficult, nay impossible, to deter.
The world of heavily armed passengers is a gilt-edged invitation to Islamofascists whose only desire is to kill as many Westerners as possible. Just how breathtakingly easy would it be to arrange for a team of these nuts to board a 747 with all their automatic weapons and, following take-off, at an appointed moment they all get up, take their catches off and let rip?
I realise that the Islamofascists would themselves get cut down by return fire but two points to note: a) they will not mind in the least. Indeed they will expect it and b) just how many sleepy/drunken/canoodling/reading/slow-witted/elderly/very young innocent people will be slaughtered in a surprise attack, trapped in a steel capsule where they have they nowhere to run and nowhere to hide?Also, whilst one or two bullets piercing a fuselage may not cause the plane to crash, we’re talking about a serious fire-fight here and surely that could.
Some may suggest that strict racial profiling would plug this gap but I rather fear not. Even supposing the killers match the profile (which they may not) many Egyptians, Saudis, Iraqis could easily pass for Greek, Portuguese, Spanish, Brazilian or Italian (with fake passport to match).
No, I regret to say that the idea of arming passengers would work as a very effective deterrent to your average dorky white European terrorist who is happy to see other people die for the ’cause’ but is rather more precious about his own worthless hide. Nihilistic Islamofascists with a death wish are a different order of animal who might gleefully see a measure like this as a golden opportunity to unleash carnage at 30,000 feet.
Police in Manchester will be patrolling the streets armed with machine-guns in response to a massive upsurge in gun-related crime
“Recently, the level of firearms incidents particularly in areas of south Manchester has reached an intolerable level,”
You see, gun control really does work!
You know those “what I’ve always said” things, which actually thousands of others have been saying for even longer. Well I’ve always said that we, the forces of enlightenment, the good guys, need to get our hands on more stories where the gun hasn’t been in evil hands and done harm, but in good hands and done good. And when we do get our hands on such stories we should spread them in all directions.
So here is just such a story (“Woman shoots, kills armed intruder in West Seattle”) from the Seattle Times, picked up by a very promising blogger fellow named Glenn Reynolds, on a little thing he calls Instapundit. This Reynolds chappie has a definite future as a blogger. The Instapundit hit rate will now explode …
And it’s getting closer to home. A man in his 20’s has been shot dead on the dancefloor of a North London nightclub. The club is situated about 400 yards from my front door.
Harry Browne’s American Liberty Foundations has successfully raised funds for another TV ad and it will be airing today, Saturday the 20th, on the Fox News Channel. “Intruder” will air three times so look for it in these slots:
* Noon to 3 PM Eastern
* 11 AM to 2 PM Central
* 10 AM to 1 PM Mountain
* 9 AM to Noon Pacific
It’s absolutely guaranteed to drive the anti-gun crazies over the edge.
I received the following short notice from Jim Babka this morning:
‘Intruder’ to air on Fox News Channel this weekend
‘Intruder’, our ad making the case that people using firearms prevent 2 million criminal acts each year, will air on Fox News Channel this Saturday and/or Sunday. I wish I could give you more details, but we won’t have the “flight times” for the ads (from the network) until Friday.
So if you are in the USA, please keep your eye out for Friday’s LibertyWire!
Thieves tried to grab a diamond necklace from U.S. entertainer Liza Minnelli while she was honeymooning with her new husband David Gest. The Oscar-winning star was the victim of an attempted robbery when the car in which she was a passenger stopped at traffic lights in Holland Park, west London.
That should boost the British tourist trade – not!
The splendid Julia Gorin puts the boot in right where it is needed regarding the psychopathology of the Anti-gun male
He often accuses men with guns of “compensating for something.” The truth is quite the reverse. After all, how is he supposed to feel knowing there are men out there who aren’t intimidated by the big bad inanimate villain? How is he to feel in the face of adolescent boys who have used the family gun effectively in defending the family from an armed intruder? So if he can’t touch a gun, he doesn’t want other men to be able to either. And to achieve his ends, he’ll use the only weapon he knows how to manipulate: the law.
Read the whole thing. Prepare to laugh until it hurts.
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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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