When guns are outlawed...

[unixronin]

"...Only outlaws will have guns," goes the saying.

Roughly ten years ago now, the UK de-facto banned all firearms except for the police and aristocrats.  UK government figures show that in the intervening ten years, firearm offences in the UK have risen by 89%, from 5,209 to 9,865 last year.  Not only are some UK beats now routinely patrolled by armed officers for the first time in over a hundred years, some of them are now — reportedly — routinely patrolled by officers carrying submachineguns.  (Note that the weapons shown in the thusly-captioned Daily Mail photo are not submachineguns, they are 40mm launchers for "rubber bullet" baton rounds.  The officer pictured in this related article, though, is indeed carrying a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachinegun.)

Clearly, the UK's gun control policy has failed, and failed badly.  The UK outlawed guns, and it appears indeed that now, in the UK, only outlaws (well, and police and aristocrats) have guns.

Then again, perhaps the UK police should now be filed among the outlaws, considering some of the shenanigans reported in and subsequent to last year's massive raid in which Metropolitan Police broke into over 6,700 safe-deposit boxes and removed a total of £53 million in cash plus vast amounts of personal property, most of which — despite strenuous resistance on the part of the Metropolitan Police — they have subsequently been forced by the courts to return to its lawful owners.

Comments

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

california went through a similar phase of stealing from living people's safe deposit boxes. they changed the law for the time out from something long, to something shorter, and again, shorter...

money was seized, items such as pictures, and person junk tossed. jewels, gold, other valuable were auctioned off.

in the end, people got compensated for their loss with money, but anything of personal, or family value, like the (literal) family jewels ... gone forever.

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[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yup, I remember that. Possibly the worst part of this is that the Met hasn't even really made any serious efforts to deny that it was mostly about seizing money to fund itself.

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

oh, and i forgot, despite current contact information on file with the bank, they made no attempt whatsoever to contact the owners of the boxes. the bank continued to accept payments for the boxes, and also tend to the clients bank accounts/etc. nice stuff.

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[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Legalized robbery. It's time.

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

oh, fantastic stuff...

a scifi author being beaten, his stuff taken, and sent into a Winter storm without his warms?

a disabled us vet with companion dog beaten by a McDonald's staff? great!

good times...

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[jordan179.livejournal.com]

a disabled us vet with companion dog beaten by a McDonald's staff? great!

Thanks for telling me about that. Yet another reason for me to avoid eating at McDonald's. (The main reason: their food sucks, even by fast-food standards!)

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

That's because you're operating under the mistaken assumption that the product MacDonalds serves is food... ;)

[writerspleasure.livejournal.com]

would you link me to the safe deposit story? i've been kinda documenting california's decline.

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

Oversized deficits that MUST be covered will do that to politicians. Even if it costs them down the road, the overwhelming need to solve the immediate problem makes future growth of the problem irrelevant.

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

if they could get away with armed door to door robbery, they would.

look at the mess with rolling blackouts. that must've made a few people very rich.

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[jordan179.livejournal.com]

I wrote an article on the decline of the British police

http://jordan179.livejournal.com/149586.html

with specific regard to their increased staffing by Muslim immigrants, who have not the foggiest idea of how real, Western-style police forces are supposed to operate, and in many cases come from countries where the police are little more than a uniformed street gang.