London Times comes to their senses on gun control?

[ScubaSigGuy]

Interesting article:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/commen ... 409817.ece

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


Wouldn't you feel safer with a gun?

British attitudes are supercilious and misguidedRichard 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 Brontë 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.

[longtooth]

This should be the front page story in the Chicago Tribune, NY Times, & DC Press.

[ScubaSigGuy]

This should be the front page story in the Chicago Tribune, NY Times, & DC Press.

What a great use of NRA advertising funds by running a full page add in each of those papers on a Sunday. It might turn a light bulb on somewhere.

[Skiprr]

Wow. I'm surprised the Times published this.

Good on them and Richard Munday.

(FYI, the URL is http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/commen ... 409817.ece; it was truncated in the original post.)

[phddan]

Wow,
Excellent article.

Dan

[seamusTX]

Wow. I'm surprised the Times published this.

There are sensible people in the U.K. They just don't have much political influence.

I don't know what the editorial positions of the Times are generally. This article is by a columnist. Newspapers sometimes publish opinion columns to "show what the nuts are thinking."

FWIW, the Times is owned by Rupert Murdoch (or rather a company that he runs, NewsCorp), and Mr. Murdoch was a supporter of Prime Minister Tony Blair, though that may have been political necessity or opportunism.

BTW, the U.K. is within an inch of being a one-party state. When a party can get a solid majority in Parliament, as the Labour party has had since 1994, it can do almost anything. There is no equivalent of the U.S. Senate or a presidential veto.

- Jim

[Sarah81]

One of my good friends lives in England. (She and I are e-mail pen pals, but we've met before.) She would LOVE to get her hands on a gun, any gun, just to see what it's like to hold and shoot. She's about my age (I'm 25), but she never had the chance to go shooting...much less own a firearm.

She's not the only one on that side o' the pond who would like to get guns back. She's not even the only law-abiding citizen who'd like to bear arms. I can't say that she's necessarily part of the majority...but if she and like-minded people ever got any power, they could swing things back to where they belong.

It's just too bad that she doesn't have any plans to come hang out with me here in Texas anytime soon. I would LOVE to see the look on her face after the 1911 .45 goes BOOM! in her hands *grins*

[jimlongley]

This should be the front page story in the Chicago Tribune, NY Times, & DC Press.

What a great use of NRA advertising funds by running a full page add in each of those papers on a Sunday. It might turn a light bulb on somewhere.

Some years ago the NRA tried to run such ads, and the various media turned them down.

[anygunanywhere]

I've never felt as safe as in the US, and never wanted a gun more than when in the UK - and I'm a Brit.

Canada is going to rank right up there soon. There were three shootings last week in the area I was working. I don't know what they were shot with since handguns are so well controlled and the long gun registry is so effective.

Try Mexico on for size.

Anygun

[seamusTX]

The United States is has a lower murder rate than Mexico, but 5 to 10 times the rate in the United Kingdom and Canada.

The U.K. has a high rate of violent crime, but much of that is fighting and strongarm robbery.

- Jim

[dws1117]

It might turn a light bulb on somewhere.

Unfortunately it probably wouldn't.

Good article.

As tough a fight as we have trying to keep our rights. I'd imagine that the fight to regain that right is much tougher.

[BShook]

It might turn a light bulb on somewhere.

Unfortunately it probably wouldn't.

Good article.

As tough a fight as we have trying to keep our rights. I'd imagine that the fight to regain that right is much tougher.

True, but every little bit helps!

[dws1117]

It might turn a light bulb on somewhere.

Unfortunately it probably wouldn't.

Good article.

As tough a fight as we have trying to keep our rights. I'd imagine that the fight to regain that right is much tougher.

True, but every little bit helps!