article from the London Times

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

Richard Munday is editor and co-author of Guns & Violence: the Debate
Before Lord Cullen

i.e. from Rupert Murdoch, the Aussie fascist who decided to wrap
himself in the American flag to make a few billion more.

**** off, ****.

============== j-c ====== @ ====== purr . demon . co . uk ==============
Jack Campin: 11 Third St, Newtongrange EH22 4PU, Scotland | tel 0131 660 4760
http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/ for CD-ROMs and free | fax 0870 0554 975
stuff: Scottish music, food intolerance, & Mac logic fonts | mob 07800 739 557

Following up to Anonymouse wrote:

disarm only those who are
neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes

heehee the devil is always in the detail
--
Mike
Remove clothing to email

Following up to Jack Campin - bogus address
wrote:

i.e. from Rupert Murdoch, the Aussie fascist who decided to wrap
himself in the American flag to make a few billion more.

funny how some people still think "the London Times" is some
upstanding journal, not the purchased mouthpiece of an ozzie
megalomaniac
--
Mike
Remove clothing to email

On Wed, 28 Nov 2007 12:15:49 +0000, Mike...
wrote:

Following up to Jack Campin - bogus address
wrote:

i.e. from Rupert Murdoch, the Aussie fascist who decided to wrap
himself in the American flag to make a few billion more.

funny how some people still think "the London Times" is some
upstanding journal, not the purchased mouthpiece of an ozzie
megalomaniac

He chose to be a yank, not an Aussie. Thankfully. Not one of
our finer exports, but glad he went.



Cheers, Alan, Australia
--
http://loraltravel.blogspot.com/
latest: Slovenia
http://loraltraveloz.blogspot.com/
latest: Mossman Gorge in the Daintree Rainforest

Anonymouse wrote:

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

because we're noting they tend to happen in "gun free" places.

criminals don't like to plan their killing sprees where THEY are likely
to get stopped by a random citizen with his/her legal concealed firearm.


--

Hackamore
http://hackamoretravel.blogspot.com

"hackamore" kirjoitti
...
Anonymouse wrote:

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

because we're noting they tend to happen in "gun free" places.

criminals don't like to plan their killing sprees where THEY are likely to
get stopped by a random citizen with his/her legal concealed firearm.

Heh heh! Show me such an American citizen and I personally introduce you to
Jesus the Nasareth.

"hackamore" wrote in message
...
Anonymouse wrote:

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

because we're noting they tend to happen in "gun free" places.

criminals don't like to plan their killing sprees where THEY are likely to
get stopped by a random citizen with his/her legal concealed firearm.


--

Hackamore
http://hackamoretravel.blogspot.com


Despite the recent spate of shootings on our streets, we pride
ourselves on our strict gun laws

we may have strict gun laws BUT handguns and ammunition are SOOOOoooo easy
to obtain that we may as well NOT have them, all they have done is screwed
up a legitimate and enjoyable sport (target shooting) for thousands of
perfectly legitimate sportsmen and women

On the particular moment of Mon, 07 Jan 2008 12:24:15 -0600 in
relation to Mary's disappointingly immaculate rumpy pumpy, hackamore
put forth:

Anonymouse wrote:

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

because we're noting they tend to happen in "gun free" places.

criminals don't like to plan their killing sprees where THEY are likely
to get stopped by a random citizen with his/her legal concealed firearm.

In fact criminals are even known to relocate to different parts of the
globle before indulging in wanton violence in gun free havens.

Just make sure not to include drunken murder suicides in the stat(e)s.
--
---
DFM - http://www.deepfriedmars.com
---
--