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LONDON — When I arrived in London, I expected to find a very depressing situation for gun rights, as the formerly robust British right-to-arms is nearing extinction. Yet there are signs that the public is waking up to the failure of gun prohibition. To be sure, the present circumstances in Britain are awful. A world-class British rifle shooter explained to me that he never tells ordinary people that he is a marksman, for fear of their reaction. British shooters today, like homosexuals in Oklahoma in 1950, feel so intimidated by the hostility of the surrounding culture that they must be careful not to expose themselves, except to known members of their minority group. The British government is more abusive than ever to people who use force for lawful protection, and as accommodating as ever to violent criminals. The news that two Britons carried out a terror bombing in Israel has not resulted in calls from the government or from the "posh," non-tabloid press for cracking down on the clerics who incite terrorism. The tabloid Express takes a harder line. The bombers grew up in England in a secular, English-speaking, integrated environment, but then fell under the influence of hateful clerics in England, so the connection between terrorist incitement and terrorist action is clear enough. The civil-liberties merits of tolerating terrorist clerics is far outweighed by the massive loss of liberty for non-terrorist citizens that would follow the nearly inevitable advent of jihad bombings in Great Britain. Non-terrorist criminals
also continue to get an easy ride from the government. Some teenagers
who perpetrated an unarmed gang homicide on a random stranger were last
week sentenced to terms of 2-4 years. The same week, reports the Evening
Standard (4/29), "An evil young killer who stabbed a complete
stranger through the ear with a hunting knife" was sentenced to seven
years in prison. Meanwhile, the government is introducing a five-year
mandatory minimum for carrying a gun illegally. So, merely carrying a
gun merits a sentence in the same range as murdering someone. A masked man with a cape and a mask who was on his way to a costume party intervened to save someone who was being beaten by a gang of thugs. The local police spokesman was very unhappy with the man's altruism, since only the police are supposed to resist criminals (Daily Mail, 5/3). A gun "amnesty"
has resulted in the surrender of about 25,000 arms, and was proclaimed
a great triumph by the government. Civil-libertarian Stephen Robinson
noted in the Telegraph: "The police were strangely reluctant
to specify how many of the guns were handed over in inner city areas,
fueling the suspicion that many of the weapons were family heirlooms.
. . . Many appear to have been handed in by the elderly and law-abiding
who fear becoming criminalized in a society in which private gun ownership
is slowly being outlawed." The 1997 extermination
of Britain's pitiful minority of handgun target shooters did not directly
increase crime, since existing laws made it impossible for a lawful handgun
owner (or any other lawful gun owner) to use a firearm for self-defense.
Rather, the handgun confiscation of 1997 was the continuation of a trend
that began in the 1950s that has resulted in the destruction of the law-abiding
gun culture, and the suppression of every form of non-government use of
force against criminals. As a result, criminal violence and a criminal
gun culture are 50 times more prevalent than they were in the early 20th
century, when there were no antigun laws, and no laws against the use
of reasonable force against violent criminals. Of course, there's a long way to go between the beginning of popular recognition of a problem and the repeal of the government policies that caused the problem. But the British do appear to be making the tentative first steps in the right direction, and that's a notable change from last decade. |
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