Discussion
www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;sessionid=TZWZI5IO02X43QFIQMGSM5OAVCBQWJVC?xml=/opinion/2005/01/23/do2302.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2005/01/23/ixop.html&secureRefresh=true&_requestid=67995
There's only one way to protect ourselves – and here's the proof
By Richard Munday
(Filed: 23/01/2005)
Today, 96 years ago, London was rocked by a terrorist outrage. Two Latvian anarchists, who had crossed the Channel after trying to blow up the president of France, attempted an armed wages robbery in Tottenham. Foiled at the outset when the intended victims fought back, the anarchists attempted to shoot their way out.
A dramatic pursuit ensued involving horses and carts, bicycles, cars and a hijacked tram. The fleeing anarchists fired some 400 shots, leaving a policeman and a child dead, and some two dozen other casualties, before they were ultimately brought to bay. They had been chased by an extraordinary posse of policemen and local people, armed and unarmed. Along the way, the police (whose gun cupboard had been locked, and the key mislaid) had borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by in the street, while other armed citizens joined the chase in person.
Today, when we are inured to the idea of armed robbery and drive-by shootings, the aspect of the "Tottenham Outrage" that is most likely to shock is the fact that so many ordinary members of the public at that time should have been carrying guns in the street. Bombarded with headlines about an emergent "gun culture" in Britain now, we are apt to forget that the real novelty is the notion that the general populace in this country should be disarmed.
In a material sense, Britain today has much less of a "gun culture" than at any time in its recent history. A century ago, the possession and carrying of firearms was perfectly normal here. Firearms were sold without licence in gunshops and ironmongers in virtually every town in the country, and grand department stores such as Selfridge's even offered customers an in-house range. The market was not just for sporting guns: there was a thriving domestic industry producing pocket pistols and revolvers, and an extensive import trade in the cheap handguns that today would be called "Saturday Night Specials". Conan Doyle's Dr Watson, dropping a revolver in his pocket before going out about town, illustrates a real commonplace of that time. Beatrix Potter's journal records a discussion at a small country hotel in Yorkshire, where it turned out that only one of the eight or nine guests was not carrying a revolver.
We should not fool ourselves, however, that such things were possible then because society was more peaceful. Those years were ones of much more social and political turbulence than our own: with violent and incendiary suffrage protests, massive industrial strikes where the Army was called in and people were killed, where there was the menace of a revolutionary General Strike, and where the country was riven by the imminent prospect of a civil war in Ireland. It was in such a society that, as late as 1914, the right even of an Irishman to carry a loaded revolver in the streets was upheld in the courts (Rex v. Smith, KB 1914) as a manifestation simply of the guarantees provided by our Bill of Rights.
In such troubled times, why did the commonplace carrying of firearms not result in mayhem? How could it be that in the years before the First World War, armed crime in London amounted to less than 2 per cent of what we see today? One answer that might have been taken as self-evident then, but which has become political anathema now, is that the prevalence of firearms had a stabilising influence and a deterrent effect upon crime. Such deterrent potential was indeed acknowledged in part in Britain's first Firearms Act, which was introduced as an emergency measure in response to fears of a Bolshevik upheaval in 1920. Home Office guidance on the implementation of the Act recognised "good reason for having a revolver if a person lives in a solitary house, where protection from thieves and burglars is essential". The Home Office issued more restrictive guidance in 1937, but it was only in 1946 that the new Labour Home Secretary announced that self-defence would no longer generally be accepted as a good reason for acquiring a pistol (and as late as 1951 this reason was still being proffered in three-quarters of all applications for pistol licences, and upheld in the courts). Between 1946 and 1951, we might note, armed robbery, the most significant index of serious armed crime, averaged under two dozen incidents a year in London; today, that number is exceeded every week.
The Sunday Telegraph's Right to Fight Back campaign is both welcome and a necessity. However, an abstract right that leaves the weaker members of society – particularly the elderly – without the means to defend themselves, has only a token value. As the 19th-century jurist James Paterson remarked in his Commentaries on the Liberty of the Subject and the Laws of England Relating to the Security of the Person: "In all countries where personal freedom is valued, however much each individual may rely on legal redress, the right of each to carry arms – and these the best and the sharpest – for his own protection in case of extremity, is a right of nature indelible and irrepressible, and the more it is sought to be repressed the more it will recur."
Restrictive "gun control" in Britain is a recent experiment, in which the progressive "toughening" of the regulation of legal gun ownership has been followed by an increasingly dramatic rise in violent armed crime. Eighty-four years after the legal availability of pistols was restricted to Firearm Certificate holders, and seven years after their private possession was generally prohibited, they still figure in 58 per cent of armed crimes. Home Office evidence to the Dunblane Inquiry prior to the handgun ban indicated that there was an annual average of just two incidents in which licensed pistols appeared in crime. If, as the Home Office still asserts, "there are links between firearms licensing and armed crime", the past century of Britain's experience has shown the link to be a sharply negative one.
If Britain was a safer country without our present system of denying firearms to the law-abiding, is deregulation an option? That is precisely the course that has been pursued, with conspicuous success in combating violent crime, in the United States.
For a long time it has been possible to draw a map of the United States showing the inverse relationship between liberal gun laws and violent crime. At one end of the scale are the "murder capitals" of Washington, Chicago and New York, with their gun bans (New York City has had a theoretical general prohibition of handguns since 1911); at the other extreme, the state of Vermont, without gun laws, and with the lowest rate of violent crime in the Union (a 13th that of Britain). From the late Eighties, however, the relative proportions on the map have changed radically. Prior to that time it was illegal in much of the United States to bear arms away from the home or workplace, but Florida set a new legislative trend in 1987, with the introduction of "right-to-carry" permits for concealed firearms.
Issue of the new permits to law-abiding citizens was non-discretionary, and of course aroused a furore among gun control advocates, who predicted that blood would flow in the streets. The prediction proved false; Florida's homicide rate dropped, and firearms abuse by permit holders was virtually non-existent. State after state followed Florida's suit, and mandatory right-to-carry policies are now in place in 35 of the United States.
In a nationwide survey of the impact of the legislation, John Lott and David Mustard of the University of Chicago found that by 1992, right-to-carry states had already seen an 8 per cent reduction in murders, 7 per cent reduction in aggravated assaults, and 5 per cent reduction in rapes. Extrapolating from the 10 states that had then implemented the policy, Lott and Mustard calculated that had right-to-carry legislation been nationwide, an annual average of some 1,400 murders, 4,200 rapes and more than 60,000 aggravated assaults might have been averted. The survey has lent further support to the research of Professor Kleck, of Florida State University, who found that firearms in America serve to deter crime at least three times as often as they appear in its commission.
Over the last 25 years the number of firearms in private hands in the United States has more than doubled. At the same time the violent crime rate has dropped dramatically, with the significant downswing following the spread of right-to-carry legislation. The US Bureau of Justice observes that "firearms-related crime has plummeted since 1993", and it has declined also as a proportion of overall violent offences. Violent crime in total has declined so much since 1994 that it has now reached, the bureau states, "the lowest level ever recorded". While American "gun culture" is still regularly the sensational subject of media demonisation in Britain, the grim fact is that in this country we now suffer three times the level of violent crime committed in the United States.
Today, on this anniversary of the "Tottenham Outrage", it is appropriate that we reflect upon how the objects of outrage in Britain have changed within a lifetime. If we now find the notion of an armed citizenry anathema, what might the Londoners of 1909 have made of our own violent, disarmed society?
•Richard Munday is the author of Most Armed & Most Free? and co-author of Guns & Violence: The Debate Before Lord Cullen
There's only one way to protect ourselves – and here's the proof
By Richard Munday
(Filed: 23/01/2005)
Today, 96 years ago, London was rocked by a terrorist outrage. Two Latvian anarchists, who had crossed the Channel after trying to blow up the president of France, attempted an armed wages robbery in Tottenham. Foiled at the outset when the intended victims fought back, the anarchists attempted to shoot their way out.
A dramatic pursuit ensued involving horses and carts, bicycles, cars and a hijacked tram. The fleeing anarchists fired some 400 shots, leaving a policeman and a child dead, and some two dozen other casualties, before they were ultimately brought to bay. They had been chased by an extraordinary posse of policemen and local people, armed and unarmed. Along the way, the police (whose gun cupboard had been locked, and the key mislaid) had borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by in the street, while other armed citizens joined the chase in person.
Today, when we are inured to the idea of armed robbery and drive-by shootings, the aspect of the "Tottenham Outrage" that is most likely to shock is the fact that so many ordinary members of the public at that time should have been carrying guns in the street. Bombarded with headlines about an emergent "gun culture" in Britain now, we are apt to forget that the real novelty is the notion that the general populace in this country should be disarmed.
In a material sense, Britain today has much less of a "gun culture" than at any time in its recent history. A century ago, the possession and carrying of firearms was perfectly normal here. Firearms were sold without licence in gunshops and ironmongers in virtually every town in the country, and grand department stores such as Selfridge's even offered customers an in-house range. The market was not just for sporting guns: there was a thriving domestic industry producing pocket pistols and revolvers, and an extensive import trade in the cheap handguns that today would be called "Saturday Night Specials". Conan Doyle's Dr Watson, dropping a revolver in his pocket before going out about town, illustrates a real commonplace of that time. Beatrix Potter's journal records a discussion at a small country hotel in Yorkshire, where it turned out that only one of the eight or nine guests was not carrying a revolver.
We should not fool ourselves, however, that such things were possible then because society was more peaceful. Those years were ones of much more social and political turbulence than our own: with violent and incendiary suffrage protests, massive industrial strikes where the Army was called in and people were killed, where there was the menace of a revolutionary General Strike, and where the country was riven by the imminent prospect of a civil war in Ireland. It was in such a society that, as late as 1914, the right even of an Irishman to carry a loaded revolver in the streets was upheld in the courts (Rex v. Smith, KB 1914) as a manifestation simply of the guarantees provided by our Bill of Rights.
In such troubled times, why did the commonplace carrying of firearms not result in mayhem? How could it be that in the years before the First World War, armed crime in London amounted to less than 2 per cent of what we see today? One answer that might have been taken as self-evident then, but which has become political anathema now, is that the prevalence of firearms had a stabilising influence and a deterrent effect upon crime. Such deterrent potential was indeed acknowledged in part in Britain's first Firearms Act, which was introduced as an emergency measure in response to fears of a Bolshevik upheaval in 1920. Home Office guidance on the implementation of the Act recognised "good reason for having a revolver if a person lives in a solitary house, where protection from thieves and burglars is essential". The Home Office issued more restrictive guidance in 1937, but it was only in 1946 that the new Labour Home Secretary announced that self-defence would no longer generally be accepted as a good reason for acquiring a pistol (and as late as 1951 this reason was still being proffered in three-quarters of all applications for pistol licences, and upheld in the courts). Between 1946 and 1951, we might note, armed robbery, the most significant index of serious armed crime, averaged under two dozen incidents a year in London; today, that number is exceeded every week.
The Sunday Telegraph's Right to Fight Back campaign is both welcome and a necessity. However, an abstract right that leaves the weaker members of society – particularly the elderly – without the means to defend themselves, has only a token value. As the 19th-century jurist James Paterson remarked in his Commentaries on the Liberty of the Subject and the Laws of England Relating to the Security of the Person: "In all countries where personal freedom is valued, however much each individual may rely on legal redress, the right of each to carry arms – and these the best and the sharpest – for his own protection in case of extremity, is a right of nature indelible and irrepressible, and the more it is sought to be repressed the more it will recur."
Restrictive "gun control" in Britain is a recent experiment, in which the progressive "toughening" of the regulation of legal gun ownership has been followed by an increasingly dramatic rise in violent armed crime. Eighty-four years after the legal availability of pistols was restricted to Firearm Certificate holders, and seven years after their private possession was generally prohibited, they still figure in 58 per cent of armed crimes. Home Office evidence to the Dunblane Inquiry prior to the handgun ban indicated that there was an annual average of just two incidents in which licensed pistols appeared in crime. If, as the Home Office still asserts, "there are links between firearms licensing and armed crime", the past century of Britain's experience has shown the link to be a sharply negative one.
If Britain was a safer country without our present system of denying firearms to the law-abiding, is deregulation an option? That is precisely the course that has been pursued, with conspicuous success in combating violent crime, in the United States.
For a long time it has been possible to draw a map of the United States showing the inverse relationship between liberal gun laws and violent crime. At one end of the scale are the "murder capitals" of Washington, Chicago and New York, with their gun bans (New York City has had a theoretical general prohibition of handguns since 1911); at the other extreme, the state of Vermont, without gun laws, and with the lowest rate of violent crime in the Union (a 13th that of Britain). From the late Eighties, however, the relative proportions on the map have changed radically. Prior to that time it was illegal in much of the United States to bear arms away from the home or workplace, but Florida set a new legislative trend in 1987, with the introduction of "right-to-carry" permits for concealed firearms.
Issue of the new permits to law-abiding citizens was non-discretionary, and of course aroused a furore among gun control advocates, who predicted that blood would flow in the streets. The prediction proved false; Florida's homicide rate dropped, and firearms abuse by permit holders was virtually non-existent. State after state followed Florida's suit, and mandatory right-to-carry policies are now in place in 35 of the United States.
In a nationwide survey of the impact of the legislation, John Lott and David Mustard of the University of Chicago found that by 1992, right-to-carry states had already seen an 8 per cent reduction in murders, 7 per cent reduction in aggravated assaults, and 5 per cent reduction in rapes. Extrapolating from the 10 states that had then implemented the policy, Lott and Mustard calculated that had right-to-carry legislation been nationwide, an annual average of some 1,400 murders, 4,200 rapes and more than 60,000 aggravated assaults might have been averted. The survey has lent further support to the research of Professor Kleck, of Florida State University, who found that firearms in America serve to deter crime at least three times as often as they appear in its commission.
Over the last 25 years the number of firearms in private hands in the United States has more than doubled. At the same time the violent crime rate has dropped dramatically, with the significant downswing following the spread of right-to-carry legislation. The US Bureau of Justice observes that "firearms-related crime has plummeted since 1993", and it has declined also as a proportion of overall violent offences. Violent crime in total has declined so much since 1994 that it has now reached, the bureau states, "the lowest level ever recorded". While American "gun culture" is still regularly the sensational subject of media demonisation in Britain, the grim fact is that in this country we now suffer three times the level of violent crime committed in the United States.
Today, on this anniversary of the "Tottenham Outrage", it is appropriate that we reflect upon how the objects of outrage in Britain have changed within a lifetime. If we now find the notion of an armed citizenry anathema, what might the Londoners of 1909 have made of our own violent, disarmed society?
•Richard Munday is the author of Most Armed & Most Free? and co-author of Guns & Violence: The Debate Before Lord Cullen
The "armed" versus "crime" map of the US is bollocks. Population density versus gun restriction is equally correlated ... i.e. it produces the same map. Extending the guns vs crime proponents feeble minded logic, I conclude that the lack of population density is a consequence of gun ownership buggering up your fertility.
I see nothing wrong with licensed gun ownership for responsible individuals for sport, or for pest control. However I don't want every chav prat taking a bling automatic on the way to the pub.
Adequate control to stop the chav/pub problem inevitably means access to guns has to be restricted beyond the point where they could conceivably be useful for protecting the home or person.
If violent crime is growing, a society would do better to look at the root cause of the problem, rather than arming themselves to the teeth. Sort out the cause, not the symptom. Rising crime is not inevitable. There are plenty of countries that don't have rising crime.
I see nothing wrong with licensed gun ownership for responsible individuals for sport, or for pest control. However I don't want every chav prat taking a bling automatic on the way to the pub.
Adequate control to stop the chav/pub problem inevitably means access to guns has to be restricted beyond the point where they could conceivably be useful for protecting the home or person.
If violent crime is growing, a society would do better to look at the root cause of the problem, rather than arming themselves to the teeth. Sort out the cause, not the symptom. Rising crime is not inevitable. There are plenty of countries that don't have rising crime.
If it's bollocks, then how do you explain how state crime rates dropped in states that enacted right-to-carry laws, such as Florida?
Sorry, but efforts to fix the "problem" have large;y failed, such as improving self esteem, etc.
The problem really isn't some as yet identified social factor. The problem is human nature outweighs societal rules in some people, and the only way to keep those folks in check is the implied threat of violent repercussions.
No matter how touch-feely you make society, a contingent of people will always want to walk on the other side of the tracks. If the only thing that makes them think twice about committing a violent crime is the possibility they might themselves get hurt, then I'm all for a system that supports it.
Whether you are a "chav", or a "gentleman", I believe you have an inherent right to defend your own self.
Sorry, but efforts to fix the "problem" have large;y failed, such as improving self esteem, etc.
The problem really isn't some as yet identified social factor. The problem is human nature outweighs societal rules in some people, and the only way to keep those folks in check is the implied threat of violent repercussions.
No matter how touch-feely you make society, a contingent of people will always want to walk on the other side of the tracks. If the only thing that makes them think twice about committing a violent crime is the possibility they might themselves get hurt, then I'm all for a system that supports it.
Whether you are a "chav", or a "gentleman", I believe you have an inherent right to defend your own self.
mybrainhurts said:Need to tackle urban poverty. Things that might help:
Rising crime is not inevitable. There are plenty of countries that don't have rising crime.
Suggestions for a fix?
Improve primary and secondary education ... allow teachers to enforce some discipline for a start. Reduce administrative burden and tax on small business. Gear welfare state to putting people back into the workforce rather than financing subsistence. Sit back and wait for twenty years to see if it works.
Agree with both the original post and the comeback, if that makes sense:-
Guns SHOULD be re-legalised. The original banning was an ill-advised knee-jerk reaction, and one of the most reactionary pieces of legislation ever to come from a UK government. However, the rise in violent crime, IMHO, doesn't have a lot to do with the ban.
I also disagree with concealed-carry permits for anyone except members of the police, armed forces, and other security services, who are highly trained to act in a responsible way.
Violent crime in this country is as a result of a number of factors, high among them being the exclusion felt by the poorer parts of society and the notable lack of policing and of police strength, combined with the blatently inadequate punishments for such crimes.
Gun laws have little bearing here, except for maybe on the burglary rates - I suspect if guns became legal again burglary rates may suddenly fall...or burglars may take to carrying guns (probably isolated cases only, rather than the norm).
You may also want to q.f. the "is prison the answer" thread, which touches heavily on the effects of Class A drug abuse.
Guns SHOULD be re-legalised. The original banning was an ill-advised knee-jerk reaction, and one of the most reactionary pieces of legislation ever to come from a UK government. However, the rise in violent crime, IMHO, doesn't have a lot to do with the ban.
I also disagree with concealed-carry permits for anyone except members of the police, armed forces, and other security services, who are highly trained to act in a responsible way.
Violent crime in this country is as a result of a number of factors, high among them being the exclusion felt by the poorer parts of society and the notable lack of policing and of police strength, combined with the blatently inadequate punishments for such crimes.
Gun laws have little bearing here, except for maybe on the burglary rates - I suspect if guns became legal again burglary rates may suddenly fall...or burglars may take to carrying guns (probably isolated cases only, rather than the norm).
You may also want to q.f. the "is prison the answer" thread, which touches heavily on the effects of Class A drug abuse.
might i suggest http://tinyurl.co.uk/ to avoid the difficulties caused by the link in the first thread?
i just cannot believe that extensive gun ownership can possibly lead to LESS violent crimes (I'd include threatening someone with a gun as a violent crime)
how many neighbour disputes or road rage incidents would lead to gunfire? noisy kids in the street? "git ma gun, honey"
i just cannot believe that extensive gun ownership can possibly lead to LESS violent crimes (I'd include threatening someone with a gun as a violent crime)
how many neighbour disputes or road rage incidents would lead to gunfire? noisy kids in the street? "git ma gun, honey"
madmike said:
If it's bollocks, then how do you explain how state crime rates dropped in states that enacted right-to-carry laws, such as Florida?
Sorry, but efforts to fix the "problem" have large;y failed, such as improving self esteem, etc.
The problem really isn't some as yet identified social factor. The problem is human nature outweighs societal rules in some people, and the only way to keep those folks in check is the implied threat of violent repercussions.
No matter how touch-feely you make society, a contingent of people will always want to walk on the other side of the tracks. If the only thing that makes them think twice about committing a violent crime is the possibility they might themselves get hurt, then I'm all for a system that supports it.
Whether you are a "chav", or a "gentleman", I believe you have an inherent right to defend your own self.
I don't discount that relaxation of gun controls in a state like Florida could have some impact. Criminals in Florida never had any problem arming themselves to the teeth. One can argue with some credibility that relaxation of gun controls has just redressed the balance of threat. That is not the case in the UK. Guns and ammuntion are still hard to get hold of here. The vast majority of UK criminals are not armed with guns. At the same time, it would be naieve to say that the entire reduction in violent crime in Florida was down to the relaxation in gun control. Some of the credit ought to go to the law enforcement agencies and the sucess of the economy.
The problem is in reality that society's real rules do condone criminality; not across the nation as a whole, but in large enough areas of society that it spills out and effects us all. If it was just a matter of human nature, how is it that plenty of countries can sustain economic growth, personal liberty, free markets and yet they do not suffer high or increasing levels of violent crime? It has to be a cultural difference and that is something we can change, but it takes a long time.
I agree that we all have the right to defend ourselves. But that doesn't automatically extend to meaning we have a right to quick access to guns. We all have to accept some curtailments on our individual freedom for the sake of the greater good (speed limits, driving licenses). Many people are too incompetent to safely carry a gun. I would love my mother to be protected from the dangers of violent crime, but the last time she was allowed to carry a gun she burst her eardrum with it and then took it on an international flight. Not everyone is as mechanically incompetent as my mother, but there are enough of them out there that I want to be protected from them. The likelihood of being faced with a siutation where I need a gun is so remote that it doesn't begin to outweight the risk that my mother might shoot me while trying to show me her nice new gun.
Hugo...
It doesn't work that way. The "societal issues" folk want to group everyone into nice, tidy categories. The problem with that is it doesn't take into account that we are all individuals. Criminal types especially.
If/when the word gets out that guns are legal, then individuals think twice before letting altercations degenerate (survival instinct - is it really worth it?). The fact that people may or may not be armed actually causes the law abiding people to think twice and criminals don't see the risk/reward equation going in their favour any more.
By all means, fix society's problems. But don't do it because you are trying to eliminate the gun violence. There is only a thin connection there (if any).
If the UK where to allow private possesion and carry of firearms (handguns) again, there are some safeguards:
1. Registration of weapons
2. Requiring owners/carriers to complete a law enforcement sponsored training class
3. Insist that owners take responsibility by using child safety locks/devices
4. Increased (doubled) prison sentences for violent offenders when using a firearm
all of these safeguards are used in Florida
Governments, historically, only disallow citizens to arm themselves for one reason - to dissuade forcefull rebellion. Obviously, the law has absolutely no effect on the criminal element.
Your government just believes that you law abiding folk can't be trusted and/or are too stupid to own guns.
Just my 0.02
ErnestM
It doesn't work that way. The "societal issues" folk want to group everyone into nice, tidy categories. The problem with that is it doesn't take into account that we are all individuals. Criminal types especially.
If/when the word gets out that guns are legal, then individuals think twice before letting altercations degenerate (survival instinct - is it really worth it?). The fact that people may or may not be armed actually causes the law abiding people to think twice and criminals don't see the risk/reward equation going in their favour any more.
By all means, fix society's problems. But don't do it because you are trying to eliminate the gun violence. There is only a thin connection there (if any).
If the UK where to allow private possesion and carry of firearms (handguns) again, there are some safeguards:
1. Registration of weapons
2. Requiring owners/carriers to complete a law enforcement sponsored training class
3. Insist that owners take responsibility by using child safety locks/devices
4. Increased (doubled) prison sentences for violent offenders when using a firearm
all of these safeguards are used in Florida
Governments, historically, only disallow citizens to arm themselves for one reason - to dissuade forcefull rebellion. Obviously, the law has absolutely no effect on the criminal element.
Your government just believes that you law abiding folk can't be trusted and/or are too stupid to own guns.
Just my 0.02
ErnestM
ATG said:
Guns and ammuntion are still hard to get hold of here. The vast majority of UK criminals are not armed with guns.
You serious?
Couple of hours in a pub can get you anything you want, as discovered by several journos, one of whom was arrested as he turned in the gun at a police station.
Nothing new, either.....TalkSport bod did it in '97.
ErnestM said:Ernest, how many police officers in the UK would you estimate have been shot in the last 10 years?
Guns and ammuntion are still hard to get hold of here. The vast majority of UK criminals are not armed with guns.
Wow, that should come as a relief to some of the BiB's on here. What say you, gents?
ErnestM
ATG said:
ATG said:
Guns and ammuntion are still hard to get hold of here. The vast majority of UK criminals are not armed with guns.
Wow, that should come as a relief to some of the BiB's on here. What say you, gents?
ErnestM
Ernest, how many police officers in the UK would you estimate have been shot in the last 10 years?
Don't know. But that was not what you said. You said guns and ammunation are hard to get and a vast majority of criminals are not armed with guns. Maybe UK criminals are more respectful of the BiBs and just choose not to shoot them when they are about to be arrested...
ErnestM
hugoagogo said:
i just cannot believe that extensive gun ownership can possibly lead to LESS violent crimes (I'd include threatening someone with a gun as a violent crime)
Living it at first hand if you go into a pub in Britain you never know if there will be a bar fight, fists, glasses and knives everywhere. The problem does not happen where I live in the USA, we have people with concealed weapons, pull that sort of stunt and you stand a good chance of being shot. It's a fair deterrent.
It's the same deal with bank robberies. Go into the bank waving a shotgun and you stand a chance of the customers shooting you for threatening them, and for the Police to shoot you if you get out.
Interestingly there are quite a number of bank robberies where no guns are used, the robber hands over a note and asks for the cash. However they usually get caught and the bank gets the cash back.
Now there will always be people who want to do a serious job and bring in more firepower than Rambo, but this is very rare. I should imagine many are ex-Servicemen who know the risks of being shot at or simply don't care anymore if they live or die.
It does work for road rage. A guy (call hiom #1) cut somebody up inadvertantly here in December and was chased. This led to the person who was cut up (#2) getting out to point out how much of an idiot he thought the driver (#1) was, #1 perceived this as a threat and shot #2 in the head. #1 was not prosecuted, he was acting to defend himself. This acts as a major deterrent, so we don't get a lot of it around here.
Our major problem in Detroit is druggies and pushers shooting each other. However, they live a long way from me or where I work, it's a known area to avoid, they will get the guns legally anyway, so I don't think changing the laws would make one bit of difference.
Thinking back to my recent insicent, 4 armed (knives etc) men in my house.
The law says I can use reasonable force to defend myself and/or arrest the invaders.
But it also says I cant use weapons, well not specificaly weapons as its primary use, I can use a handy torch prehaps, but prehaps a sledge hammer under the bed doesnt have such a legitamate use.
Luckily (?) they were only after the car keys, if they'd meant much other trouble what the hell would I have been able to do, legitamatly, that would give me a hope against 4 assailants?
A gun, or prehaps other non lethal self defence options (tasers?), 20 years of martial arts training and some luck..?
I know the police in my case where quick in responding but wouldnt have been quick enough. 2 stories recenly,1 leading to a death of a homeowner through agrivated buglary, and another of a serios stabbing by the same crowd who done my house makes me think that any invasion of home teritiry should bring with it an acceptance of risk of the ultimat in defence.
The law says I can use reasonable force to defend myself and/or arrest the invaders.
But it also says I cant use weapons, well not specificaly weapons as its primary use, I can use a handy torch prehaps, but prehaps a sledge hammer under the bed doesnt have such a legitamate use.
Luckily (?) they were only after the car keys, if they'd meant much other trouble what the hell would I have been able to do, legitamatly, that would give me a hope against 4 assailants?
A gun, or prehaps other non lethal self defence options (tasers?), 20 years of martial arts training and some luck..?
I know the police in my case where quick in responding but wouldnt have been quick enough. 2 stories recenly,1 leading to a death of a homeowner through agrivated buglary, and another of a serios stabbing by the same crowd who done my house makes me think that any invasion of home teritiry should bring with it an acceptance of risk of the ultimat in defence.
Absolutely - IMHO, if you are breaking into someone's home to take from them:-
- Posessions;
- Car keys;
- Unconsented sexual pleasure (couldn't think of another way of fitting it into the corner I'd written myself into!);
- Kids/family; or
- Life.
then you should have NO rights remaining under the law - the owner of the house doesn't know why you're there, so should be able to use ANY NECESSARY force, not any REASONABLE force, to defend themselves.
- Posessions;
- Car keys;
- Unconsented sexual pleasure (couldn't think of another way of fitting it into the corner I'd written myself into!);
- Kids/family; or
- Life.
then you should have NO rights remaining under the law - the owner of the house doesn't know why you're there, so should be able to use ANY NECESSARY force, not any REASONABLE force, to defend themselves.
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