We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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The London based Libertarian Alliance has issued a press release about an outrageous case in Britain in which a man who defended himself from knife wielding home invaders finds himself on the wrong end of the law:
“Drop all charges against householder who killed burglar. This man is a hero“, says free market and civil liberties think tank.
58 year old John Lambert, of Spalding, Lancashire, has been released on bail following two days of arrest after the death of one of two burglars who had broken into his home and put a knife to the throat of his wife, according to press reports.
During a struggle to defend himself and his wife Mr. Lambert killed the burglar with his own knife. Rather than suffering the indignity of arrest and police inquiries Mr Lambert should be hailed as a hero and public benefactor. So claims the Libertarian Alliance, Britain’s most radical free market and civil liberties think tank.
Libertarian Alliance spokesman and Director, Dr Chris R. Tame, says:
“It is a sign of a morally corrupt society that Mr Lambert should have been held by the police for two days and is even now facing the insult of further police inquiries. In a free and moral society the individual has the complete right to self defense, including the use of deadly force, against those who attack and rob them. Any one who invades the home of another constitutes a deadly threat to its inhabitants, and should be dealt with accordingly. Mr Lambert has behaved both honourably and morally in defending himself, his wife and his property – and is a public benefactor by ridding society of one more predatory looter who threatened the safety of us all.
Yet again it is quite clear that the police, like all nationalised industries, have no real interest in their “customers”, but would rather persecute both those who defend themselves and other easy targets. Whilst the restoration of law and order in this country depends upon many things – including the removal of legal impunity from children and adolescents, the restoration of strict sentences and real punishment for real crimes, the return of capital punishment, full restitution by criminals to their victims, the abolition of victimless “crimes” and pointless persecution of politically incorrect lifestyles, and the overthrow of the culture of socialist excuses and social determinism – a great step forward would be the full legal recognition of the right of individuals to defend themselves and others – and indeed, the restoration of their right to do so with firearms and other weapons.
A message must be sent to the criminal vermin that the workers of this country are not prey, that people will fight back, and that the police and the judicial system will no longer side with the predator rather than the victim.”
A 16 year-old boy has been killed in a drive-by shooting in Nottingham. At this stage, there appears to be no motive.
The idea pornography is responsible for rape is just plain silly. Of more interest is the very strong case that arming women decreases rape by a huge factor (see Multiple Victim Public Shootings, Bombings And Right To Carry Concealed Handgun Laws: Contrasting Private And Public Law Enforcement“ by Lott and Landes).
The gist of this seminal (no pun intended) study is hidden carry laws substantially decrease crimes against persons and decrease rapes by an even larger amount. Even a small number of woman with concealed weapons is enough to cause a significant drop in the rape statistics.
Two men have been killed and a third seriously injured after being shot by armed men in a pub in South London
Two people were shot, one of them fatally, in a West London restaurant today
Three men have been admitted to hospital, one of them in critical condition, after a shooting on a Glasgow Housing Estate
I was perusing Bill St. Clair’s most worthy End the War on Freedom blog and was so inspired that for no reason in particular I felt like posting this pictures of myself doing what comes naturally.
Note the AK-74 style muzzle brake… makes the weapon very controllable even on rock and roll but everyone sure as hell gets to see where you are firing from! Photograph was taken by excessively tall good buddy and would-be evil world ruler Willi Zahn.
A woman is seriously ill in hospital after been hit by a stray bullet fired as a result of a gunfight in South London
A man is also fighting for his life after being shot on the doorstep of his home in Berkshire
Strange how this issue is kept strictly off of the political and media radar. Not a word about it on the BBC
But this is from the London Evening Standard
SCOTLAND YARD has ordered police in north London to wear bullet-proof vests at all times because of soaring gun crime — the first time such an order has been made in mainland Britain.
Officers in Haringey have been told protective armour should be worn on the streets even on routine patrols after a dramatic rise in the number of firearms offences.
In the past 12 weeks there were 300 emergency calls in Haringey in relation to alleged firearms, 109 of these resulted in evidence of guns being used or seen.
Bob Elder, chairman of the Police Federation’s constables’ branch, who is based at Haringey, said: “My colleagues are increasingly worried. In Haringey there are 999 calls about firearms activity on an almost daily basis.
“There is a heightened awareness of firearms issues in boroughs such as Haringey and Hackney and there is now a directive that officers should wear body armour on operational duty as a health and safety issue.
“We have pretty strong gun laws in this country but they do not seem to be having any effect.”
Is it possible that we taxpayers could have body-armour as well? Or would it be unsafe in private hands?
On Saturday night, 3 men were shot in Palmers Green, North London. One was killed, the other two are in serious condition
Last night, a man was shot and seriously wounded by an armed intruder in Brixton, South London
The Metropolitan Police have announced a London-wide campaign to tackle the growing problem of gun-related crime
I’m new to bloggery, so please everyone bear with me while I get the hang of it.
Guns. Much is made by libertarians of mass civilian gun ownership, and this does matter, especially politically. But with crime, the mere right of civilians to own a gun, even if most of us choose not to exercise that right, is, I surmise, critical.
If you are thinking of becoming a career criminal, then the difference between a world in which just a few civilians are weird enough to own guns and crazy enough to use them against intruders, and one in which such people are so rare as to be for all practical purposes non-existent… is all the difference. It’s the difference between being shot on about your hundredth robbing expedition (i.e. quite soon), and not being shot ever.
The difference between half the population being armed and all of it being armed is, in contrast, not much of a difference. So, you get to do about one unmolested robbery before the hospital or the morgue beckons, instead of no robberies at all. Not a big distinction.
I sense that we in Britain have perhaps – what with all the new restrictions following the Dunblane massacre – moved from the first of these two gun-worlds to the second.
For decades, the number of robberies you could hope to get away with before getting seriously hurt has been climbing steadily, but you still had to be very short-sighted to become a robber. That didn’t stop everyone, but it did stop most. Gun wimps like me could live safe from most potential robbers, because the robbers didn’t know for sure that we were all gun wimps.
Now, everyone’s a gun wimp. Now, I surmise, robbers can reasonably hope to rob for life.
I have a personal stake in this. On the radio a couple of years ago I announced that there was a big increase in violent crime under way, not because I knew this to be true, but because for the sake of my argument I needed it to be true. (I wasn’t expecting a gun argument, and hadn’t been attending to recent crime news properly.) Sadly, it seems that I was right.
The following is the text of a letter sent to the London Daily Telegraph and published on 5th January 2002
SIR- It is perhaps not surprising to read of the rapid increase in armed crime (report, Jan.3 )
Since the authorities have banned the legal ownership of guns, the market in illegal arms has been stimulated and is no doubt very strong. Also, the treatment meted out by the authorities to people such as Tony Martin and the exhortations of the police to the public to yield passively to armed assault have given criminals the message that the public – unarmed whether it likes it or not – can be expected to be easy targets
It appears that some people (albeit a few) are starting to get it
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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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