Defending concealed carry in England
London Times piece on the benefit of owning guns. The whole piece is well worth reading.
Thanks very much to Ed Figarsky for this link.
The firearms massacres that have periodically caused shock and horror around the world have been dwarfed by the Mumbai shootings, in which a handful of gunmen left some 500 people killed or wounded.
For anybody who still believed in it, the Mumbai shootings exposed the myth of “gun control”. India had some of the strictest firearms laws in the world, going back to the Indian Arms Act of 1878, by which Britain had sought to prevent a recurrence of the Indian Mutiny.
The guns used in last week’s Bombay massacre were all “prohibited weapons” under Indian law, just as they are in Britain. In this country we have seen the irrelevance of such bans (handgun crime, for instance, doubled here within five years of the prohibition of legal pistol ownership), but the largely drug-related nature of most extreme violence here has left most of us with a sheltered awareness of the threat. We have not yet faced a determined and broad-based attack.
The Mumbai massacre also exposed the myth that arming the police force guarantees security. Sebastian D’Souza, a picture editor on the Mumbai Mirror who took some of the dramatic pictures of the assault on the Chhatrapati Shivaji railway station, was angered to find India’s armed police taking cover and apparently failing to engage the gunmen. . . .
Today we are probably more shocked at the idea of so many ordinary Londoners carrying guns in the street than we are at the idea of an armed robbery. But the world of Conan Doyle’s Dr Watson, pocketing his revolver before he walked the London streets, was real. The arming of the populace guaranteed rather than disturbed the peace. . . .
“Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India,” Mahatma Gandhi said, “history will look upon the act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.” The Mumbai massacre is a bitter postscript to Gandhi’s comment. D’Souza now laments his own helplessness in the face of the killers: “I only wish I had had a gun rather than a camera.”
Thanks very much to Ed Figarsky for this link.
Labels: DefensiveGunUse, England, multiplevictimpublicshooters
posted by John Lott at 3:15 PM
2 Comments:
Indeed, the sole purpose of gun control is to calm the qualms of the politicians who do not trust the population they try to control.
In the Quebec province of Canada, the Canadian firearm act is administered by the provincial police (Sureté du Québec, loosely translating as “Quebec’s surety”
You can find the definition of ‘surety’ at
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/surety
The law is overseen by the Service du Controle des Armes à Feu (firearms control service) itself under the direct and sole responsibility of the Direction de la Protection de l’État (state protection directorate) which itself is under and sole responsibility of Institutional Affairs.
The administration of the Canadian firearm act has nothing to do with criminal affairs or territory protection, e.g. protecting the citizens, it is solely a measure put in place to protect the State itself.
See the official organigram at:
http://www.suretequebec.gouv.qc.ca/mission-et-services/organisation/organigramme.pdf
Note also that while the firearm act was passed in Canada as a pretext after the École Polytechnique’s massacre, where 12 engineering student women were shot by a sexist psychotic, according to an elected official chatting in an unguarded context, what really motivated the law was when Corp. Lortie, a psychotic ex-military went into Quebec’s parliament and attempted (and succeeded) to shoot elected officials.
I salute The Times for publishing this article.
However, it will barely register on the radar in the UK. One article like this every couple of years will do nothing to wake my fellow countrymen from their ignorant slumber.
Less than 0.1% of the country will read this and the majority that do will dismiss it as nonsense.
God, it's depressing.
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