Fasten your watch, pocket your pistol
Richard Munday in the UK Times, on the perverse logic of gun control:
America’s disenchantment with “gun control” is based on experience: whereas in the 1960s and 1970s armed crime rose in the face of more restrictive gun laws (in much of the US, it was illegal to possess a firearm away from the home or workplace), over the past 20 years all violent crime has dropped dramatically, in lockstep with the spread of laws allowing the carrying of concealed weapons by law-abiding citizens. Florida set this trend in 1987, and within five years the states that had followed its example showed an 8 per cent reduction in murders, 7 per cent reduction in aggravated assaults, and 5 per cent reduction in rapes. Today 40 states have such laws, and by 2004 the US Bureau of Justice reported that “firearms-related crime has plummeted”…
we have forgotten that within living memory British citizens could buy any gun – rifle, pistol, or machinegun – without any licence. When Dr Watson walked the streets of London with a revolver in his pocket, he was a perfectly ordinary Victorian or Edwardian. Charlotte Brontë recalled that her curate father fastened his watch and pocketed his pistol every morning when he got dressed; Beatrix Potter remarked on a Yorkshire country hotel where only one of the eight or nine guests was not carrying a revolver; in 1909, policemen in Tottenham borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by (and were joined by other armed citizens) when they set off in pursuit of two anarchists unwise enough to attempt an armed robbery. We now are shocked that so many ordinary people should have been carrying guns in the street; the Edwardians were shocked rather by the idea of an armed robbery. If armed crime in London in the years before the First World War amounted to less than 2 per cent of that we suffer today, it was not simply because society then was more stable…
As late as 1951, self-defence was the justification of three quarters of all applications for pistol licences. And in the years 1946-51 armed robbery, the most significant measure of gun crime, ran at less than two dozen incidents a year in London; today, in our disarmed society, we suffer as many every week.
Next up in the cavalcade of modern logic: why do we have so many people in prison if crime is down?
September 9th, 2007 at 7:24 pm
Next up in the cavalcade of modern logic: why do we have so many people in prison if crime is down?
On one conservative site this question was met with derision toward the supposedly fuzzy-headed liberals who ask it. The given answer: crime is down because the criminals are in prison doh!!
But:
Here’s one of them:
Home of the brave? Probably, for the time being.
Land of the free? Not anymore.
And hardly anyone seems to care.
**************
Follow-up question: how many people owe their jobs to our kinder, gentler American gulag? Politicans, administrative staff, attorneys, police, prison guards, parole officers, therapists,…
September 10th, 2007 at 6:27 am
“A record 7 million people — or one in every 32 American adults — were behind bars”
Excellent — though obviously not enough are in prison. That won’t happen until every criminal is behind bars.
As for the McDonald’s story, unless a state passes a law that actually makes oversalting a sandwich a crime, you’re doing nothing more than holding up an obvious example of a case that will be thrown out of court as if it were indicative of some trend.
Not unlike celebrities who claim on national TV that they are being silenced.
September 10th, 2007 at 7:46 am
Guns where very expensive back in the good old days, and therefore relatively rare amougst the “criminal classes”.
September 10th, 2007 at 2:37 pm
I’ve seen your question (re crime and prisoners) asked quite seriously, on Metafilter. It somehow never occurred to them that there was a cause-and-effect relationship there.