Let’s Have Lots of Gun Control, But...

I’m a Brit. Brits can own guns: shotguns and light caliber rifles. No .38 snub-noses, .357 magnums, Tec-9’s, Uzi’s, AK-47’s nor any other military weapon. This has been so for a long, long time. A criminal who takes a gun to a crime will do a LOT more time than if he had slipped a knuckle-duster in his pocket. This change in the law reduced offences in which a firearm was involved from 24,094 in 2003/4 to 8,399 in 2015/6.

There has been exactly one school shooting in the UK (Dunblane, 1996), and two mass shootings (Hungerford 1987, and Cumbria 2010).

Britain has all the personal freedom you could want. People come from all over the world to our little island because they will be left alone to live their lives, as long as they leave others alone to live theirs. People may go to the USA to follow a dream of riches and fame, but they come to the UK to live their lives without onerous state interference. Surely there are bureaucrats with far too many powers, but that’s bureaucracy everywhere. But if you pay your bills and stay away from the Family Courts and Social Services, you are as free as a bird. The bureaucrats are busy enough dealing with their regulars and covering up their cock-ups, they don’t need to find trouble.

And yet we have some of the strictest gun control. On. The. Planet.

There are countries in the world where a decent man needs a practical firearm to defend himself. New Zealand is not one of them, but it has an organisation called the New Zealand Shooters’ Association, and until recently ordinary civilians who weren’t criminals or taking psychiatric medication were allowed to have semi-automatic weapons and even assault rifles.

I know guns don’t kill people, people kill people. But if the people who have a yen to kill people can’t get the guns, they will let the urge go un-acted upon. Because killing people without guns is messy, bloody, up close, and more likely to go wrong for the killer.

The gun control nuts use their right to have a loaded semi-automatic AK-47 in the house as the touchstone of individual liberty. Listen to them and it feels like it is the only thing they care about, and the only things that matters. Meanwhile, in the USA, the Police can seize anything they want without a Court Order on suspicion of criminal activity. Focussing on gun control means you miss all the other stuff the bureaucrats are taking away. In the name of not letting a crisis go to waste, the New Zealand censor banned Jordan Peterson’s unreadable best-seller 12 Rules For Life because it might encourage more right-wing nuts. No legal possession of semi-automatics, no crisis to hide heavy-handed ideological censorship.

I say let’s have lots and lots of gun control.

But Governments have to take the guns from the Bad Guys - the criminals, drug cartels, organised terrorist groups and guerrilla forces - first. Then they can disarm the civilians. And then they have to disarm (most of) the Police.

The only people who should ever be able to get their hands on anything more than a shotgun or a light-gauge rifle are trained, uniformed soldiers. They have to had it back in at the end of the day. I don’t even want to see British policeman with those Heckler and Koch semi-automatic rifles.