Some random thoughts from a Brit on gun laws.

This will be a bit of an exercise in preaching to the choir, but maybe a sermon on a familiar subject from an unfamiliar direction might be useful. It will certainly help me get it off my chest.

Watching the absurdly ill-informed and utterly emotional response to the Uvalde school shooting here in the UK has been frustrating, even embarrassing. Even generally sound people are swept up in the tsunami of “if it saves one life-ism”.

It never ceases to amaze me how sound right-wing British people with a healthy scepticism about anything the BBC and other MSM “news” sources tell them about the UK, suddenly become credulous drones when the same sources give them highly spun and selective info about the USA.

I can understand how people react emotionally, and I can understand how it might look at first glance as if passing laws against gun ownership would help. It seems obvious, fewer guns equals fewer gun related deaths. But then it seemed obvious to our ancestors that the Sun went around the Earth and that the Earth was flat. Obvious is not the same as correct.

The already pretty tight gun laws in the UK were further tightened after both the Hungerford and Dunblane massacres of 1987 and 1996. The plain fact is even before those massacres the UK had tougher gun laws than even many Democrats would accept, and gun ownership was low, those massacres still happened. In 21^st century Britain our Olympic pistol shooters have to go abroad to train; special exemptions had to be made for the 2012 Olympics and the Commonwealth Games in 2014. None of this prevented the Cumbria massacre in 2010 when a lone gunman killed twelve people and then himself, or the Plymouth shootings in 2021 where five people were killed by another lone gunman who also killed himself.

It does have to be said, the UK does have very, very low levels of gun crime, but then it had lower levels of gun crime than the US, even when legal gun ownership was much higher, which it was in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

Historically English (and later British) subjects did have the right to bear arms for self-defence, as well as hunting etc. These rights were not quite of the unrestricted nature as the US 2^nd Amendment, but they did exist and grew out of Common Law, and are in the Bill of Rights of 1689 under William & Mary (I W. & M. st.2. c.2). As Sir William Blackstone wrote in his highly influential Commentaries on the Laws of England.

“The fifth and last auxiliary right of the subject, that I shall at present mention, is that of having arms for their defence, suitable to their condition and degree, and such as are allowed by law. Which is also declared by the same statute I W. & M. st.2. c.2. and is indeed a public allowance, under due restrictions, of the natural right of resistance and self-preservation, when the sanctions of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression.”

The Disarming Acts of 1716 and 1725 applied only to the Scottish Highlands and were a response to the Jacobite rebellions, and theoretically disarmed the Highland Clans. However, (and entirely predictably) only the Clans loyal to the Government (such as the Clan Ross and Clan Campbell) obeyed the law and handed in their weapons. The Jacobite Clans ignored the law or handed in obsolete weapons. Thus, the loyal Clans were left defenceless against attacks from the Jacobites. The famous Highland regiment, The Black Watch, were formed to help redress the situation.

There were laws passed in the early 19^th century, but these all outlawed committing a crime with a gun, or carrying a gun with the intention to commit a crime. None of them made it illegal to own a gun.

The first actual restriction on the sale and possession of firearms in the UK came with the Pistol Act in 1903. There were further restrictions in 1920, 1937, 1968, 1988, 1997, 2006, and 2019. As you’ve seen, all these restrictions have not prevented spree shootings, but they have ensured that we are utterly defenceless in the face of them.

Whether in the UK or USA it seems to me that mental health, especially the mental health of mainly younger men, confused and emasculated by the waves of misandry washing over them, is a major factor in many of these shootings. Yet no one seems to want to address this. 

Returning to the USA, far, far more people are shot and killed in the big cities than by the attention-grabbing spree shooters. I find the fact that the MSM studiedly ignores the mundane massacres in Detroit and Chicago, while bleating about Black Lives Mattering highly suggestive of an agenda. Sure, spree shootings are dramatic and traumatic news, but the death tolls from the big cities should attract at least as much attention.

The response to Uvalde from the Botoxed Bolshevik north of the US border is even more dripping with agenda. The fact that a shooting in Texas is prompting further anti-gun laws in Canada, a country that prides itself on not being the USA, is really only explicable in terms of wanting to disarm the population.

In a society where firearms are as widespread as they are in the USA it is naïve beyond belief to think the government can disarm everyone, law-abiding and criminal. It would be the 18^th century Highlands all over again, leaving the disarmed law-abiding population at the mercy of the men with guns.

I’ve long wondered about a simple point on disarming people. If the official forces of law and order can take guns away from criminals (who, by definition, are happy to obtain, posses and use guns illegally), then why don’t they just do so now?