Wouldn’t you feel safer with a gun?

Sheldon J · November 23rd, 2007, 12:11 PM

From http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/com...cle2409817.ece maybe they finally get it.

Quote:

From The Times
September 8, 2007
Wouldn’t you feel safer with a gun?
British attitudes are supercilious and misguided
Richard Munday

Despite the recent spate of shootings on our streets, we pride ourselves on our strict gun laws. Every time an American gunman goes on a killing spree, we shake our heads in righteous disbelief at our poor benighted colonial cousins. Why is it, even after the Virginia Tech massacre, that Americans still resist calls for more gun controls?

The short answer is that “gun controls” do not work: they are indeed generally perverse in their effects. Virginia Tech, where 32 students were shot in April, had a strict gun ban policy and only last year successfully resisted a legal challenge that would have allowed the carrying of licensed defensive weapons on campus. It is with a measure of bitter irony that we recall Thomas Jefferson, founder of the University of Virginia, recording the words of Cesare Beccaria: “Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”

One might contrast the Virginia Tech massacre with the assault on Virginia’s Appalachian Law School in 2002, where three lives were lost before a student fetched a pistol from his car and apprehended the gunman.

Virginia Tech reinforced the lesson that gun controls are obeyed only by the law-abiding. New York has “banned” pistols since 1911, and its fellow murder capitals, Washington DC and Chicago, have similar bans. One can draw a map of the US, showing the inverse relationship of the strictness of its gun laws, and levels of violence: all the way down to Vermont, with no gun laws at all, and the lowest level of armed violence (one thirteenth that of Britain).

America’s disenchantment with “gun control” is based on experience: whereas in the 1960s and 1970s armed crime rose in the face of more restrictive gun laws (in much of the US, it was illegal to possess a firearm away from the home or workplace), over the past 20 years all violent crime has dropped dramatically, in lockstep with the spread of laws allowing the carrying of concealed weapons by law-abiding citizens. Florida set this trend in 1987, and within five years the states that had followed its example showed an 8 per cent reduction in murders, 7 per cent reduction in aggravated assaults, and 5 per cent reduction in rapes. Today 40 states have such laws, and by 2004 the US Bureau of Justice reported that “firearms-related crime has plummeted”.

In Britain, however, the image of violent America remains unassailably entrenched. Never mind the findings of the International Crime Victims Survey (published by the Home Office in 2003), indicating that we now suffer three times the level of violent crime committed in the United States; never mind the doubling of handgun crime in Britain over the past decade, since we banned pistols outright and confiscated all the legal ones.

We are so self-congratulatory about our officially disarmed society, and so dismissive of colonial rednecks, that we have forgotten that within living memory British citizens could buy any gun – rifle, pistol, or machinegun – without any licence. When Dr Watson walked the streets of London with a revolver in his pocket, he was a perfectly ordinary Victorian or Edwardian. Charlotte Bront� recalled that her curate father fastened his watch and pocketed his pistol every morning when he got dressed; Beatrix Potter remarked on a Yorkshire country hotel where only one of the eight or nine guests was not carrying a revolver; in 1909, policemen in Tottenham borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by (and were joined by other armed citizens) when they set off in pursuit of two anarchists unwise enough to attempt an armed robbery. We now are shocked that so many ordinary people should have been carrying guns in the street; the Edwardians were shocked rather by the idea of an armed robbery.

If armed crime in London in the years before the First World War amounted to less than 2 per cent of that we suffer today, it was not simply because society then was more stable. Edwardian Britain was rocked by a series of massive strikes in which lives were lost and troops deployed, and suffragette incendiaries, anarchist bombers, Fenians, and the spectre of a revolutionary general strike made Britain then arguably a much more turbulent place than it is today. In that unstable society the impact of the widespread carrying of arms was not inflammatory, it was deterrent of violence.

As late as 1951, self-defence was the justification of three quarters of all applications for pistol licences. And in the years 1946-51 armed robbery, the most significant measure of gun crime, ran at less than two dozen incidents a year in London; today, in our disarmed society, we suffer as many every week.

Gun controls disarm only the law-abiding, and leave predators with a freer hand. Nearly two and a half million people now fall victim to crimes of violence in Britain every year, more than four every minute: crimes that may devastate lives. It is perhaps a privilege of those who have never had to confront violence to disparage the power to resist.

Richard Munday is editor and co-author of Guns & Violence: the Debate Before Lord Cullen

Duisburg · November 23rd, 2007, 12:15 PM

I would feel safer but wearing a concealed gun would not stop some guy who I can't even see from 200 meters from taking me out or from being caught by surprise from behind and getting my throat slit or a suicide bombing. Having my gun on me does not make me deathproof but I feel that it gives me an evolutionary leg-up so to speak

OPFOR · November 23rd, 2007, 12:20 PM

So, there is a spark of intelligence left in the UK after all...

Janq · November 23rd, 2007, 01:12 PM

This was posted at the time it was actually printed, in September.
Run a search on "supercilious" and it should pop up.

- Janq

Supertac45 · November 23rd, 2007, 05:41 PM

We had a Brit Nurse at our joint for awhile. She hated guns and the N.R.A. Makes you wonder how people get so stupid.

Duisburg · November 23rd, 2007, 06:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Supertac45

We had a Brit Nurse at our joint for awhile. She hated guns and the N.R.A. Makes you wonder how people get so stupid.

no offense friend but in countries that had monarchies, cast systems and a landed gentry (where liberalism was defined as wanting a constitution and basic human rights) regular and everyday people were not allowed to hunt, the aristocracy was which explains why -after the aristocrats faded away- the regular and every day people still think of hunting and firearms the same way.
Europe was founded on history while America was founded on philosophy

P95Carry · November 23rd, 2007, 07:53 PM

As can be seen - there are voices of reason over there - sadly tho they are such a small minority they have little or no effect.

I still maintain it'd need something akin to a revolution there to change this sorta thing for the better. The ''rot'' is way too well set in.

QKShooter · November 23rd, 2007, 09:55 PM

Google search stabbings and Great Britain and you'll discover that the Bad Guy Brits have quickly discovered alternative methods for doing the same Dirty Deed. Murder is in the mind and not in the hand.

B52 · November 23rd, 2007, 10:01 PM

I went TDY to GB in 2003. I got mugged in London and all I was thinking was you are lucky this didn't happen in the U.S. because the slime ball would have been eating .45acp lead. I was so pissed, I told the bobbies what happend and they didn't do squat. I couldn't even carry my spyderco there, the scum bag got 20 pounds, I guess I should be happy I didn't get stabbed. The U.S is the best country in the world, even though some folks here are a little loco...

retsupt99 · November 23rd, 2007, 10:43 PM

The English deserve EVERYTHING that they have voted for...if we in the U.S. do not wake up, we'll be in the same boat.

Stay armed...stay safe!

November 23rd, 2007, 12:15 PM	#2
Duisburg Senior Member Join Date: Jun 2007 Location: Duisburg, Germany Posts: 625	I would feel safer but wearing a concealed gun would not stop some guy who I can't even see from 200 meters from taking me out or from being caught by surprise from behind and getting my throat slit or a suicide bombing. Having my gun on me does not make me deathproof but I feel that it gives me an evolutionary leg-up so to speak __________________ If the 2nd Amendment was defined and broadly implemented as the 1st, 4th and 5th Amendments, it would be required for you to have a gun

November 23rd, 2007, 12:20 PM	#3
OPFOR VIP Member Join Date: Dec 2006 Location: Baghdad Posts: 2,448	So, there is a spark of intelligence left in the UK after all... __________________ "It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way."

November 23rd, 2007, 01:12 PM	#4
Janq VIP Member Join Date: Nov 2005 Posts: 2,922	This was posted at the time it was actually printed, in September. Run a search on "supercilious" and it should pop up. - Janq __________________ "Killers who are not deterred by laws against murder are not going to be deterred by laws against guns. " - Robert A. Levy Monday, March 12, 2007 -- Op Ed -- The Washington Post

November 23rd, 2007, 05:41 PM	#5
Supertac45 VIP Member Join Date: May 2006 Location: Michigan's U.P. Posts: 2,959	We had a Brit Nurse at our joint for awhile. She hated guns and the N.R.A. Makes you wonder how people get so stupid. __________________ Les Baer 45 Sig Man N.R.A. Patron Life Member M.C.R.G.O.

November 23rd, 2007, 07:53 PM	#7
P95Carry Assistant Administrator Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: South West PA Posts: 25,366	As can be seen - there are voices of reason over there - sadly tho they are such a small minority they have little or no effect. I still maintain it'd need something akin to a revolution there to change this sorta thing for the better. The ''rot'' is way too well set in. __________________ Chris - P95 NRA Certified Instructor & NRA Life Member. "To own a gun and assume that you are armed is like owning a piano and assuming that you are a musician!." If a BG dies as the result of pointing a gun at me, then he has merely succumbed to an occupational hazard of being a thug

November 23rd, 2007, 09:55 PM	#8
QKShooter Assistant Administrator Join Date: Dec 2004 Location: Off Of The X Posts: 19,968	Google search stabbings and Great Britain and you'll discover that the Bad Guy Brits have quickly discovered alternative methods for doing the same Dirty Deed. Murder is in the mind and not in the hand. __________________

November 23rd, 2007, 10:01 PM	#9
B52 Senior Member Join Date: Nov 2007 Location: Arizona Posts: 563	I went TDY to GB in 2003. I got mugged in London and all I was thinking was you are lucky this didn't happen in the U.S. because the slime ball would have been eating .45acp lead. I was so pissed, I told the bobbies what happend and they didn't do squat. I couldn't even carry my spyderco there, the scum bag got 20 pounds, I guess I should be happy I didn't get stabbed. The U.S is the best country in the world, even though some folks here are a little loco... Last edited by B52; November 24th, 2007 at 11:17 AM.

November 23rd, 2007, 10:43 PM	#10
retsupt99 VIP Member Join Date: Jul 2006 Location: Central Florida Posts: 14,906	The English deserve EVERYTHING that they have voted for...if we in the U.S. do not wake up, we'll be in the same boat. Stay armed...stay safe! __________________ "That I cannot do." "Give this to, uh, Clemenza. I want reliable people, people who aren't going to be carried away. After all we're not murderers in spite of what this undertaker thinks." *********************************** NRA Life Member

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