Tag: UK

Too Little, Too Late?

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Well, THIS is interesting, from Amazon.com.uk:

I guess a bunch of people over in Ol’ Blighty have figured out that they are responsible for their own protection first, regardless of what their government tells them.

Either that, or American baseball has developed a tremendous following.

Odd about the lack of glove and ball purchases though…

A Third Day of Rioting in London

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Trevor Reeves said his business which has been in his family for five generations has been “completely trashed”

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Shops were looted and buildings set alight as police clashed with youths. The trouble also spread to Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and Bristol.

  • Several fires broke out in Croydon, including one at a large sofa factory which spread to neighbouring buildings and tram lines
  • In Hackney 200 riot officers with dogs and mounted police were located around Mare Street where police cars were damaged
  • Looters raided a Debenhams store and a row of shops in Lavender Hill in Clapham, as well as shops in Stratford High Street
  • A Sony warehouse in Solar Way, Enfield, a shopping centre in Woolwich New Road, a timber yard in Plashet Grove, East Ham and a building on Lavender Hill were all on fire
  • More than 100 people looted a Tesco store in Bethnal Green, the Met said, and two officers were injured
  • Cars were set on fire in Lewisham
  • A bus and shop were set alight in Peckham
  • Buses were diverted as the violence spread to Bromley High Street
  • There were reports of looting of phone shops in Woolwich High Street, in south London, and a torched police car
  • Shops and restaurants were damaged in Ealing, west London, and there was a fire in Haven Green park opposite Ealing Broadway Tube
  • Football matches at Charlton and West Ham which were due to be played on Tuesday have been postponed at the request of the police
  • At Clapham Junction looters stole masks from a fancy dress store to hide their identity

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One resident in Croydon, who gave his name as Adam, said he saw two cars which had been set on fire.

He said: “One older woman was dragged out and they set the car on fire. Then another car around the corner was on fire, then we counted about 12 to 15 shops that had been looted.

“The looting started about three hours ago. I just came back into my apartment and the looting was still going on – not a single policeman.”

“Not a single policeman.”

That’s not all that unusual in incidents like this. There just aren’t enough police. So what you get is:

What you won’t see is this:

Those are Koreans protecting a shop during the Los Angeles riots in 1992, when the police were nowhere to be found. You won’t see pictures of people defending their property against looters in London – that would get them arrested.

I expect the number of Brits fleeing Airstrip One for greener pastures will now increase above the 200,000 or so that have been leaving annually.

UPDATE:

Police lose control of streets shop owners form local “protection units”

News Desk 9am Sunday

Shop owners along Wood Green, Turnpike Lane and Green Lanes, the majority of which are of Kurdish or Turkish owned have formed local protection units following riots in Tottenham which have spilled over to Wood Green.

“We do not have any trust in the local police, our shops are next on the target list by the thugs who have ransacked Tottenham, we will protect our property”, said a leading member of the Green Lanes “unit”.

Shop owners have been seen by London Daily News reporters carrying crow bars, and other objects in case of attacks.

But, thankfully, no pictures which would be used as evidence against them.

Tottenham Rampage

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In 1909 the Tottenham Outrage occurred. A pair of anarchists armed with then-new semi-automatic pistols attempted to rob a local business payroll, and went on a shooting spree in their attempt to escape. Normal citizens joined in the pursuit, going so far as to provide privately-owned weapons to the normally unarmed police in pursuit.  Their escape was foiled.

One hundred and two years later, same place, a different kind of outrage:

The riot that tore through parts of north London’s deprived Tottenham neighborhood has cast a pall over Britain’s capital, echoing an earlier era of racial unrest, while spreading malaise through a city preparing to host the Olympic Games.

Eight officers were hospitalized after a peaceful protest against the shooting death of a young man degenerated into a Saturday night rampage, with rioters torching a double-decker bus, destroying patrol cars and trashing a shopping mall.

Looters descended on the area around midnight, setting buildings alight, and piling stolen goods into cars and shopping carts. Sirens could be heard across the capital as authorities rushed reinforcements to the scene.

More information and pictures here.

Gun Ownership Up in England & Wales

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At least that’s what they’re reporting.

Gun ownership is always thought of as a rarity in the UK. We may like to think that this country has lower levels of gun crime than the US, and that we don’t have the same problems of US gun control – especially after the Tucson shooting last year.

Forgotten Derrick Bird so soon?

But there are still plenty of firearms around here, all held legally. These latest figures from the Home Office have just been released and they show that more guns have been licensed than ever before.

How many?

• There were 141,775 firearm certificates on issue on 31 March 2010, an increase of 2% compared with the end of March 2009
• 580,653 shotgun certificates were on issue on 31 March 2010, 1% up
• Those certificates cover a total of 1.8m guns

This is exclusively England and Wales.  It does not include Scotland nor Northern Ireland.

So we have a grand total of 722,428 licenses covering 1.8 million rifles and shotguns.  Surely there is a large overlap between the group of people who possess firearm certificates (rifles and certain shotguns) and shotgun certificates (single- and double-barreled shotguns only), so the total number of individuals possessing licenses is going to be well under 722,000. 

The article states that the ratio is about 3,323 shotguns and rifles combined per 100,000 population, and that much is true, but what’s the license ratio?  The population of England and Wales is a bit over 62 55 million (correction pointed out by James Kelly, mea culpa), meaning that perhaps one in eighty-five seventy-six people is licensed to have a firearm of any kind.

I can’t help but recall the words of St. George Tucker from his 1803 Blackstone’s Commentaries on American law:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep,(sic) and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty …. The right of self defence is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any colour or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction. In England, the people have been disarmed, generally, under the specious pretext of preserving the game: a never failing lure to bring over the landed aristocracy to support any measure, under that mask, though calculated for very different purposes. True it is, their bill of rights seems at first view to counteract this policy: but the right of bearing arms is confined to protestants, and the words suitable to their condition and degree, have been interpreted to authorise the prohibition of keeping a gun or other engine for the destruction of game, to any farmer, or inferior tradesman, or other person not qualified to kill game. So that not one man in five hundred can keep a gun in his house without being subject to a penalty.

Well, I guess they can count themselves lucky that they’re doing better than one in five hundred.

Legally.

The estimate on illegally possessed firearms?  Well, in 2000 the Sunday Times reported:

UP TO 3m illegal guns are in circulation in Britain, leading to a rise in drive-by shootings and gangland-style executions, new figures have revealed.

That dwarfs the 1.8 million currently legally owned, doesn’t it?  And in 2008 The Guardian reported:

The gun shown here, a Webley, is up for sale in London for £150, one of hundreds of such weapons that are easily and cheaply available on the streets of the UK’s big cities, a Guardian investigation can reveal.

The variety of weapons on offer in Britain is extensive and includes machine guns and shotguns, as well as pistols and converted replicas. A source close to the trade in illegal weapons contacted by the Guardian listed a menu of firearms that are available on the streets of the capital.

“You can get a clean [unused] 9mm automatic for £1,500, a Glock for a couple of grand and you can even make an order for a couple of MAC-10s,” he said. “Or you can get a little sawn-off for £150. They’re easy enough to get hold of. You’ll find one in any poverty area, every estate in London, and it’s even easier in Manchester, where there are areas where the police don’t go.

“People who use shotguns tend to be lower down the pecking order. There is less use of sawn-off or full length shotguns, and if a criminal wants street cred, he wants a self-loading pistol, a MAC-10 or an Uzi submachine gun.”

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But it is the arrival of eastern European weapons that, alongside a homegrown industry in converting them, has contributed to the firearms glut. “There has been an influx from eastern Europe and particularly from Poland, and there are also a lot coming in from people who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq,” said the source. “In Liverpool docks, you can put in an order for 10 guns and some grenades and they’ll say OK and two weeks later, they will be there – and they are straight goers.”

Grenades!

There have been grenade attacks in the UK.  In 2003 a 63 year-old woman lost a leg when a grenade was tossed into her Liverpool home, for example.

But if this information is even close to accurate, it means that you have a greater chance of meeting someone who possesses a firearm illegally  in Britain than someone who possesses a firearm legally.

And the person who possesses one illegally is far more likely to stick it in your face by way of letting you know.  So you can hopefully forgive me when I dismiss the idea that the UK’s “strictest gun laws in the world” has done much of anything to disarm its criminal element or prevent spree-shootings.

From Where Great Britain Used to Be

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How’s that gun control working out again?

Terrifying arsenal of weapons found in teaching assistant’s Newall Green home

Terrifying. Their word. Another Glock 18?  No. 

The weapons – described by police as some of the most destructive they have ever seized – were linked to a series of shootings in Manchester and the north west, including one incident where a bullet narrowly missed a baby.

In a raid at the house in Burbage Road, Newall Green, police found a frightening array of firearms and ammunition, including two 9mm pistols, a 12-bore shotgun for use in combat, a Skorpion sub-machine gun, and lethal hollow-point and soft-tip bullets.

Terrifying or frightening?  Make your mind up.  There’s about an order of magnitude difference.  And you know, not one of those is legal to possess in the UK. Let’s see:

A compact Glock. Must’ve purchased that at an American gun show.

That’s a “Tariq 9mm believed to have been smuggled from Iraq” that “has been linked to three shootings in Greater Manchester, including a 2009 incident where a bullet narrowly missed a sleeping baby.” Wow. Don’t they know that handguns are illegal in the UK?

That’s your generic 12 gauge semi-auto short-barreled shotgun. I can’t tell from the photo make or model, but quite effective.  Benelli, maybe? And with the extended magazine tube, quite illegal. Not that it matters, obviously.

The pièce de résistance:

A Czech Skorpion submachinegun, probably chambered in .32ACP, but it might be .380. With one magazine.  That’s unpossible! Full-auto weapons have been banned in the UK since 1937!

Four guns. Four guns described as a “terrifying arsenal.” Kinda reminds me of Tams snark:

It’s good to have goals. Mine is that, when they finally come after me for felony jaywalking or confuse my address with the crack house two blocks down, and in the aftermath spread all my stuff on bedsheets in the front yard, I want the kids on the intarw3bz gun boards to look at that junk-on-the-bunk display and say “Wow, that is an arsenal.”

If they saw what I have in my safe, they’d wet themselves. And I don’t own anything full-auto.  I haven’t seen it, but I doubt my collection is but a shadow of hers.  She probably owns more Smith & Wesson revolvers than I own guns.

Here We Go Again

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So earlier this week I write my post Defending the Weak, and it drew a link from my old friend James Kelly at Scot Goes Pop. Apparently I offended his sense of propriety. So, in my usual style, I left a comment which has inspired yet another post by Mr. Kelly.

As I’ve noted before, we don’t have discussions. Our worldviews are so divergent we simply talk past each other.

Now, James has commented on my emphasis on statistics and their meaning before, yet I note that this time James goes straight to statistics which, I am forced to assume, he believes proves his point. You see, in Scotland, they don’t kill each other as often as we here in Arizona do. And when they do, they hardly ever do it with firearms, whereas here firearms are the preferred method.

I think what you’re supposed to gather from this (remember, I’ve been doing this sort of thing for years now, so I have experience at it) is that, since they don’t have guns, they can’t kill each other as much.

And this is based on one year’s data – 2009.

The logic is staggering.

His source states that in 2009 there were 79 homicides in Scotland, versus 324 in Arizona. Scotland and Arizona have roughly equivalent populations. I believe we’ve danced this dance before, however.

Once again, here’s a graph of Scotland’s homicide statistics from 1945 through 1997:

And here’s a homicide rate comparison table (in deaths per 100,000 population) I worked up using that data, along with data for the entire U.S. and also England & Wales (a separate single political entity):

Year US England & Wales Scotland
1946 6.4 0.81 0.72
1947 6.1 0.86 0.59
1948 6.1 0.78 0.66
1949 5.4 0.68 0.47
1950 5.3 0.79 0.68
1951 4.9 0.75 0.41
1952 5.2 0.91 0.53
1953 4.8 0.74 0.80
1954 4.8 0.70 0.63
1955 4.5 0.63 0.68
1956 4.6 0.71 0.57
1957 4.5 0.71 0.51
1958 4.5 0.58 0.82
1959 4.6 0.59 0.66
1960 4.7 0.62 0.68
1961 4.7 0.57 0.71
1962 4.8 0.64 1.12
1963 4.9 0.65 0.88
1964 5.1 0.63 0.98
1965 5.5 0.68 1.21
1966 5.9 0.76 1.65
1967 6.8 0.86 1.35
1968 7.3 0.87 1.40
1969 7.7 0.81 1.57
1970 8.3 0.81 1.59
1971 9.1 0.93 1.38
1972 9.4 0.97 1.62
1973 9.7 0.94 1.47
1974 10.1 1.21 1.49
1975 9.9 1.03 1.49
1976 9.0 1.14 2.03
1977 9.1 0.98 2.03
1978 9.2 1.08 1.59
1979 10.0 1.27 1.56
1980 10.7 1.25 1.73
1981 10.3 1.12 1.70
1982 9.6 1.25 1.70
1983 8.6 1.32 1.86
1984 8.4 1.37 1.77
1985 8.4 1.28 1.64
1986 9.0 1.24 1.62
1987 8.7 1.31 2.08
1988 9.0 1.42 1.73
1989 9.3 1.33 1.98
1990 10.0 1.31 1.68
1991 10.5 1.42 1.72
1992 10.0 1.33 2.68
1993 10.1 1.31 2.22
1994 9.6 1.41 2.18
1995 8.7 1.45 2.67
1996 7.9 1.31 2.30
1997 7.4 1.41 1.72

You can go to the old post and get the later data, I’m not really interested in reproducing all that here, nor in updating it, really, but the point I want to make – again, since James seems incapable of understanding it – is that as far back as 1945, when neither country had much in the way of firearms laws, the homicide rate in the U.S. was 8.8 times the rate in Scotland.  As time has progressed, and the UK has instituted stricter and stricter laws against firearm possession (promoted in every case to make the UK “safer”), the homicide rate trend has been converging. 

James likes to point out that the U.S. – with all of its privately possessed firearms, spreading “right to carry” laws and all – has a homicide rate that is – let me find his number, oh yes – “more than two-and-a-half times greater” than Scotland’s. But sixty-five years ago, it was eight point eight times greater. Scotland’s homicide rate in 2009 was 1.52/100,000, (down from 1.9 in 2008). The U.S. homicide rate that year was 5.0/100,000. The ratio was therefore 3.2 to 1.

Now, I ask you – what does a trend from 8.8:1 to 3.2:1 indicate to you? Especially bearing in mind that gun laws here are “lax” and in the UK are “the strictest in the world” by their own admission?

But hey!  At least they’re not killing each other with GUNS!  Because somehow that makes a difference.

And lastly, there’s this:  Scotland has been called “the most violent country in the developed world.” The UN said it in 2005, and yes, that includes the U.S. They might not kill each other at anywhere near our rates, but they violently victimize each other far more often. In 2010 the Scottish Labour party bemoaned the fact that the violent crime rate in Scotland is “four times the rate of England and Wales.” That polity ranks #2 in the world.

And remember, the crime statistics in the UK aren’t exactly reliable.

Back when I wrote What We Got Here is … Failure to Communicate, I noted that Thomas Sowell pointed out one major difference between those who believe humans are perfectible and those like me who believe human nature doesn’t change.  Those who believe in human perfectibility believe in solutions.  Those like me see trade-offs.  James believes the solution is to disarm everyone.  I believe otherwise.

Hey, maybe he’s right.  Maybe if the Scots had guns they would kill each other at astronomical rates.  Given their obviously hyper-violent culture ….

Then again, there might be a few more deaths but a lot fewer Glasgow smiles.  And if the potential victims are armed ….

It’s a Twofer!

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So (formerly) Great Britain has “some of the toughest gun laws in the world,” according to former Home Secretary Alun Michael, gun laws that were necessary because (he said) “We recognize that only the strictest control of firearms will protect the public.”

They tell us that getting groped and probed and scanned by the TSA is necessary too, and for the same reason – “protecting the public.”

Oh really?

So much for airport security: Man ‘smuggled 80 guns into Britain’ by hiding them in suitcases


An American man is suspected of smuggling 80 weapons into the UK by hiding them in his suitcases.

Former U.S. marine Steven Greenoe, who holds British citizenship, apparently strolled through airport security in both Britain and America with dozens of handguns stashed in his suitcases on ten flights last year.

He is believed to have delivered them to criminal contacts in the North West of England.

On one occasion, Greenoe was stopped after officials at Atlanta airport spotted the firearms.

But incredibly he was allowed to board the flight after telling officials he worked as an international security consultant.

The revelations are an embarrassment for transatlantic security and for the UK Border Agency.  (Ya THINK?)

It makes a mockery of security regulations which mean innocent passengers have to carry cosmetics in clear plastic bags when in fact Greenoe apparently had no problems carrying weapons in a suitcase.  (Those regulations were already a mockery.  Now they’re a belly-laugh.)

So… did Project Fast and Furious expand to include Jolly Olde England?  Is Greenoe a BATF employee, on or off the books? 

Oh, and get this:

A number of 9mm semi-automatic pistols believed to have been bought by Mr Greenoe for $500 each in a North Carolina gunshop were offered for sale at up to £5,000 a piece in Britain a week later, according to the Times.


More than 60 weapons, including more than 20 Glock pistols and more than a dozen Ruger handguns, are understood to be still unaccounted for.

Wow! At current exchange rates, that’s an $8200 return on a $500 investment (minus, of course, the plane fare.) Still, you’re looking at close to a 16:1 ROI if you can move five at a time, and he’s moved at least 60 guns that they know about. At a guess, we’re talking $400k worth of profit.

I am once again reminded of Father Guido Sarducci’s Five-Minute University Economics class: “Supply and-a Demand. That’s it.”

Apparently no one in Britain’s gun-control culture has taken that one.

Quote of the Day – UK Edition

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Reader Bob Beagle pointed to an article in the UK Telegraph about how the Giffords shooting is just more evidence that the US needs to adopt strict gun laws.  I found this comment to that piece worthy of being QotD in its entirety:

If I may suggest, the repeated acts of treason by sitting prime ministers of the UK, the forced participation in the anti-democratic EU, the end of habeas corpus, the loss of protest rights, the loss of free expression rights ….. all serve to make many in the UK acutely aware that a weak populace will be treated with contempt.


In the UK we were disarmed by the state, and now that state thinks nothing of signing our national sovereignty away against a manifesto pledge.


Gordon Brown shoulld(sic) be executed for his treason against the british people. The treason is continuing under cameron(sic).


If these traitors, protected by a corrupt judicial system at least feared getting a righteous bullet between the eyes, perhaps they would think twice before betraying the people.


We have already witnessed the end of democracy in the UK. That would not have happened if the people had the right to carry firearms.


So, if we sound like NRA stooges, it is simply because we now understand what we have lost and why.