“The results (of the Firearms Act of 1998) have not been what proponents of the act wanted. Within a decade of the handgun ban and the confiscation of handguns from registered owners, crime with handguns had doubled according to British government crime reports. Gun crime, not a serious problem in the past, now is. Armed street gangs have some British police carrying guns for the first time. Moreover, another massacre occurred in June 2010. Derrick Bird, a taxi driver in Cumbria, shot his brother and a colleague then drove off through rural villages killing 12 people and injuring 11 more before killing himself.” – Joyce Lee Malcolm in Two Cautionary Tales of Gun Control [via wsj.com]

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27 COMMENTS

  1. This is the result of demands that someone “do something.” Often, because careful consideration is put aside in favor of haste, doing “something” ends up worse than doing nothing.

  2. Remember, to governments it isn’t important to actually DO something effective, what is important is to be SEEN to be doing something.

  3. Hey, gun control works!..

    Just ask any of the 500 homicide victims so far in Chicago..

    Oh wait..

    You can’t..

    They’re DEAD!

    • I live 90 miles from this “paradise”, in Wis. though. Chicago is one big criminal safe zone The beauty part is that the killers can be saved, the dead? who cares, whats for dinner, Randy

      • Wife and I were born and raised in Chicago, lived right next to O’hare.

        Made the move here to southeast Arizona and haven’t looked back!

        No permit needed to conceal carry..

        Open carry, noooooo problem..

        We love our 2nd Amendment here!

  5. The government knows that gun control does not work. They want to take away a little at a time, and when that doesn’t work ‘We have to do more’ will follow. Until they are all gone and the government has total control. That is the real “have to do something” they are after.

  6. The entire WSJ article referenced above is instructive. Just do a search on the title noted above on the WSJ site. It was published 12/26.

  8. Gun control isn’t about crime or keeping people safe. Its a manifestation of a cultural bias against firearms. If people feel guns are unsafe, they’ll ask for laws to ban them-crime stats be damned. That’s why the population reacted against a vote to arm police officers after two of the UKs unarmed cops were shot dead by a gunman who possessed, natch, unregistered weapons and a grenade.

  9. I recall some asshat on here (many of you know who it is) that scoffed at my mention of Britain becoming a police state.

    well there you have it. because police officers in uniform patrolling with MP5s is a far more sensible solution than plainclothes, armed proles to keep the bad guys in check…LOL

  11. Well the Brits banned all guns they have to ban cops now since there the last to have guns, LOL.

    Shows no matter what firearms ban mass murders will happen.

  12. The UK has a class problem. The upper class, the peerage, the very rich, own large bits of land and have many guns. Indeed, I long ago attended a ‘house party’ during which shooting was a key activity. At the beginning of the last century Britain had essentially no gun laws, other than definitions of armed crime. Then they fed the ‘lower orders’ through the meat grinder of WWI. The Tommies came home in 1918 poorer and often crippled. This was followed by a deflationary return to the gold standard in the 20’s, balanced only by US largess. (We agreed to loose money here to boost US imports.) Within thirteen years of WWI’s end the blue-collar crowd was thrown by the Great Depression into massive unemployment and renewed poverty. You can’t, I suppose, remain an upper class if you expose your working class to that twenty-five year history yet let them retain guns. Guns are for the stable upper classes, old bean. So the middle class is stuck between a brutalized lower class that has little fear and little education on one side, and a callous privilege-preserving upper class that enjoys shooting and money. The tradition of unarmed police relied upon expected armed citizen assistance to the police, just as in the US pre-1850. We simply changed the rules sooner in the US under the pressure of vast immigration from abroad, and internal migration from south to north.

  14. In in the UK.
    Here we have a judiciary that does not have the death penalty up its sleeve but it is not demanding on behalf of victims of crime today, or for that matter tomorrow the changes necessary to harden the volk from the deranged and committed felons.

    Plan of action is clear and simple for us, however the Government is much like yours in the US, all ears but only hears what it WANTS TO HEAR.

    1st – We need our guns back and the process deregulated and de-registered
    2nd – We need our justice system to punish severely with the possibility of the death penalty being used for specific offenses.

    But I stress, the firearms HAVE to be in the civilians hands first.

    F.W.I.W I AM ALL IN FAVOR OF TYR REIGN JUST SO LONG AS JUSTICE IS DONE.

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