Gun Control

Jon Dougherty has a column in today's WorldNetDaily about Canada blaming the US for Canada's gun violence problem. The latest news I saw, about a week or two ago (I'm operating from memory on this), was that several youths with guns shot and killed someone in Canada. The Canadian officials' response was to blame the US for the crime, when the killers were all Canadians who, I believe, had not crossed into the US, and the guns were all obtained in Canada.

Makes sense, in a Canadian-government sort of way.

When Western governments are mislead (sic) by a handful of silly socialists into believing that fewer guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens leads to enhanced public safety, they have all paid the price – in blood.

For instance, as I wrote in an October 2003 column, British authorities saw a 35-percent increase in gun violence in 2002 alone – not so ironically, that's just six years' removed from a nationwide ban on personal ownership of most firearms. So bad is the violence now that police say it has "spread like a cancer" across the whole of the country.

And in March 2000, WND reported that, since Australia banned private ownership of most guns in 1996, crime has risen dramatically on that continent – armed robberies by as much as 45 percent.

Dougherty's reference to Great Britain is a concern.

The company I work for has corporate offices in England, and theoretically I could transfer to the UK office. If I did, I could write (and sell) all kinds of travel articles and photos of the cool places to see in the UK and the nations nearby. It sounds like a dream job.

But England has banned the ownership of guns, the crime rate has jumped, and the people who are prosecuted most heavily in home-invasion crimes are the gun-using homeowners who have the nerve--illegally--to defend themselves. So how would I defend myself (can't count on the police to be Bobby-on-the-spot) if someone broke into my flat? I'm not sure exactly how much deadly force is allowed.

My idea is to get a crossbow with a trigger pull and some nice metal bolts. I know a guy who built a crossbow out of a car's leaf spring when he was a teenager, but I think that would be too much power for a home-defense situation. Still, I don't know if I'd be thrown in the slammer for using one.

Would a sword be allowed? Knives? What do people in England do to defend themselves against criminals? I hope they're not expected to just roll over and play dead and let the bad guys have their way with the homeowners and their property.

I don't know. Maybe I just don't have the proper UK non-self-defense mindset. I think I need to do a little more research on the ramifications of gun control in the life of the UK regular people before I sign up for a transfer.