From the London Times:
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.
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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.
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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.
Emphasis added by me.
Following the 1996 Dunblane school massacre, in which seventeen people were killed by a man armed with two 9mm pistols, Britain passed a law outlawing the ownership of most handguns, despite researchers finding “no link between high levels of gun crime and areas where there were still high levels of lawful gun possession.” It’s a law so severe that the Britain’s Olympic shooting team is forced to train abroad, lest one of its members try to shoot up a grammar school. So how effective has the law been? A doubling in gun-related crimes since the ban, naturally.
The results were quite predictable by anybody with a clue.
HT to Mr. Reynolds.
Oleg Volk has a great poster that shows the problems with the extremes on both sides.
Although, I think it is fair to say that there are a lot more liberals that want violate your civil rights by denying your Second Amendment Rights than there are Conservatives to want to ban sex toys.
Yes, I know that is redundant, all gun grabbers are criminals and are against basic human rights by definition.
In this case, one who bilked the LA government into giving him a big pile of taxpayer cash never gave up his ganger ways.
50 heavily armed men abduct 7 police: four them of them found dead, three missing, gun battles leave 20 dead. About a thousand people so far this year shot or decapitated.Iraq? No, northern Mexico, about a hundred miles south of here. Betting is that the gang was a drug lord’s entourage.
To start with, this level of violence is occurring in close proximity to the US border, not half a world away. Of course, the MSM coverage of this is zip.
Both Mr. Hardy and Mr. Reynolds point out that Mexico has very draconian victim disarmament laws.
Here are several examples of the MSM pointing out their ignorance of the subject (or just spouting the party line in willful disinformation).
Greg Pierce in the Washington Times Inside Politics column also caught the ignorance (or intentional lies) of ABC.
Scarcely three hours after Monday’s massacre at Virginia Tech, Brian Ross and Dana Hughes of ABC News posted a story on their “Blotter” blog (blogs.abcnews.com/ theblotter) implying that the expiration of a 1994 gun law was to blame.
“High-capacity ammo clips became widely available for sale when Congress failed to renew a law that banned assault weapons,” began the ABC story, which cited the “expert” opinion of Paul Helmke of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence: “When you have a weapon that can shoot off 20, 30 rounds very quickly, you’re going to have a lot more injuries.”
At the time of that report, there was no information about the weapons Cho Seung-hui used to kill his victims before committing suicide. Since then, law enforcement officials have said the mass murderer used two pistols (reportedly a 9 mm Glock and a .22-caliber Walther), but there was nothing to suggest that large-capacity magazines were involved in the crime.
“Does ABC News have an obligation to report facts, or is peddling a political agenda buttressed by lies their preferred stock in trade?” Bob Owens wrote yesterday at the Media Research Center’s blog, NewsBusters.org.
“The Ross entry states that high-capacity magazines ‘became widely available for sale when Congress failed to renew a law that banned assault weapons.’ This is a patently false statement, containing no truth at all.
“High-capacity magazines have been around for more than half a century, and the sale of high-capacity magazines has not impacted whatsoever by the 1994 Crime Bill. These magazines were freely and commercially available, both in retail stores and online, without interruption, for the 10-year life of the ban, the decades preceding it, and afterward.”
“Armed America” author Clayton E. Cramer sent an e-mail Monday night to Robert Stacy McCain of The Washington Times, pointing out another problem with the ABC News item.
“The only time that an extended magazine is going to make a difference is if someone is shooting back at you,” said Mr. Cramer, a firearms historian.
Also remember what “Gun Free Zone” really means.
James Q. Wilson points out the real defination hold true:
AS FOR THE European disdain for our criminal culture, many of those countries should not spend too much time congratulating themselves. In 2000, the rate at which people were robbed or assaulted was higher in England, Scotland, Finland, Poland, Denmark and Sweden than it was in the United States. The assault rate in England was twice that in the United States. In the decade since England banned all private possession of handguns, the BBC reported that the number of gun crimes has gone up sharply.Some of the worst examples of mass gun violence have also occurred in Europe. In recent years, 17 students and teachers were killed by a shooter in one incident at a German public school; 14 legislators were shot to death in Switzerland, and eight city council members were shot to death near Paris.
The main lesson that should emerge from the Virginia Tech killings is that we need to work harder to identify and cope with dangerously unstable personalities.
It is a problem for Europeans as well as Americans, one for which there are no easy solutions — such as passing more gun control laws.
Mr. Reynold has a roundup of the facts.
Remember that “Gun Control” is a liberal democrat code word for Victim Disarmament.
