imported post
If I lived in the USA rather than the UK, where youare 3 times more likely to be murdered and 25 times more likely to be murdered with a firearm, I'd probably want to be armed too!
Fortunately our 'crazy' British laws mean that firearms homicides are almost exclusively committed by drug gang members against other drug gang members and almost never against an innocent member of the public. The idea that the British public are cowering, defenceless, terrorised by armed criminals is ludicrous. I'm slightly dubious about the numbers of people allegedly attacked by burglars in their homes. I only encountered a handful of cases like that in my 30 years as an officer.But, even accepting thatit is true, how many of those buglars were armed and how many of the victims were killed? Not many I suspect, unless there is some huge conspiracy not to report it in the press! How many peole are killed mistakenly each year by American citizens 'defending' their homes against unexpected delivery men and drunks who've gone to the wrong door? 2002 US statistics show that 59 children under the age of 4 were killed by firearms, 377 aged 5-14 also perished the same way. I think I'd swap British risks of encountering burglars for the risks to children of firearms kept in the home.
Iwas a uniformed patrol police officer from 1970 to 2000 in some busy places, including central London. I never felt the need for a firearm and never carried one on duty. Of course there is the need for a specialist armed unit to deal with the gun crime that does occur, but it is so rare that the overwhelming majority of British officers can and do safely patrol unarmed.
Of course, no law will completely prevent the carrying of firearms by criminals, but putting millions more of them into circulation is hardly likely to help improve things. The fact that some do still carry guns doesn't mean that the law doesn't work, any more than the huge number of homicides in the USA means that you should scrap the homicide laws as ineffective.
The open carry movement seems predicated on the idea that you can tell who is a responsible citizen and trust them to carry a firearm. Unfortunately, mental illness, personality disorders, drug and alcohol problems, jealousy, anger-management 'issues' and all sorts of other destabilising influences can be present without being sufficiently apparent to get someone classified as unfit to carry a gun. The two horrendous massacres in Hungerford, Berkshire and that of primary schoolchildren in Dunblane, Scotland, were committed by 'law-abiding' and 'responsible' gun club members. That prompted the tightening of restrictions that now help protect us from similar events. Worse massacres in the USA don't seem to have had the same effect.
Guns have been a part of the USA from its foundation and, given the number of them in circulation, I can't see how you could prevent them being a problem. In the UK there was some tradition of middle and upper-class 'gentlemen' carrying pistols, dating from before the foundation of a police force, but there has never been general carrying of guns in the UK in the same way as in the USA. The Avengers was fiction! All jolly good British fun, don't ya know, but hardly a realistic representation of life in the UK!
One last thought, how many US citizens who possess firearms are actually part of a 'well-regulated militia'? You must have a damned big army!