Gun control advocates should take a long hard look at Great Britian, which by all accounts is not so great anymore. Unless you place high value on living in a crime ridden surveillance society. I realize that saying so will like offend many readers from Great Britain and would remind you that you are free to criticize the United States – I live here and I think we have a lot of our own issues to solve. Nevertheless, Great Britain is becoming a cesspool of bad social policies and resultant social tensions and afflictions.
On a June evening two years ago, Dan Rather made many stiff British upper lips quiver by reporting that England had a crime problem and that, apart from murder, “theirs is worse than ours.” The response was swift and sharp. “Have a Nice Daydream,” The Mirror, a London daily, shot back, reporting: “Britain reacted with fury and disbelief last night to claims by American newsmen that crime and violence are worse here than in the US.” But sandwiched between the article’s battery of official denials — “totally misleading,” “a huge over-simplification,” “astounding and outrageous” — and a compilation of lurid crimes from “the wild west culture on the other side of the Atlantic where every other car is carrying a gun,” The Mirror conceded that the CBS anchorman was correct. Except for murder and rape, it admitted, “Britain has overtaken the US for all major crimes.”
In the two years since Dan Rather was so roundly rebuked, violence in England has gotten markedly worse. Over the course of a few days in the summer of 2001, gun-toting men burst into an English court and freed two defendants; a shooting outside a London nightclub left five women and three men wounded; and two men were machine-gunned to death in a residential neighborhood of north London. And on New Year’s Day this year a 19-year-old girl walking on a main street in east London was shot in the head by a thief who wanted her mobile phone. London police are now looking to New York City police for advice.
Guns are tools designed for a specific purpose – to expel a projectile with explosive force. Anything in the path of the projectile is in jeopardy of being damaged or destroyed. When a society becomes obsessively focused on the wrong things it loses. Instead of worrying about the projectile we should be worrying about the mind that pulls the trigger that activates the mechanism that launches the projectile.
A human mind, when aimed in the wrong direction, is much more dangerous than any gun. It’s the culture stupid. This is a reminder to our new director of fixing everything, Lord Barack Obama. Fix the cultural problems and you’ll be able to stop worrying about how many guns are out there.
Please remember this as well. There are at least a few million Americans who believe that the right to bear arms is more important than anything. Be very careful how you use your unconstitutional agencies – the ATF and the DEA – because a few million new political prisoners would not help you implement positive cultural changes. Don’t make rules that men of conscience will not follow. Don’t create new classes of criminals out of people who would otherwise contribute more to your society than they would take out over a lifetime.
On my way to work this morning, I listened to Dan Carlin’s hardcore history episode Punic Nightmares III, in which the Carthaginians are tricked into giving up their means of self-defense by the Romans. Their city is sacked and they are wiped out. Mr. Obama soon to be President Obama, I would remind you that it is immoral to take away a human being’s means of self-defense. Do not focus on furthering the immorality of the government you lead or you will merely be creating a further divided nation. Instead, I would ask you to focus on fixing what is broken in the culture. Teach self-reliance, individual responsibility, civics, sound economics and minimal government interfence in a private citizen’s daily life. Emphasize community and local autonomy. Don’t get stuck on stupid. Don’t focus on trying to control us by taking away our guns.