Crime, the citizen, and self-defense in Great Britain

An interesting essay in today's National Review Online on what happens when citizens' right to self-defense is systematically suppressed:

The British government is more abusive than ever to people who use force for lawful protection, and as accommodating as ever to violent criminals. The news that two Britons carried out a terror bombing in Israel has not resulted in calls from the government or from the "posh," non-tabloid press for cracking down on the clerics who incite terrorism. The tabloid Express takes a harder line. The bombers grew up in England in a secular, English-speaking, integrated environment, but then fell under the influence of hateful clerics in England, so the connection between terrorist incitement and terrorist action is clear enough. The civil-liberties merits of tolerating terrorist clerics is far outweighed by the massive loss of liberty for non-terrorist citizens that would follow the nearly inevitable advent of jihad bombings in Great Britain.

Non-terrorist criminals also continue to get an easy ride from the government. Some teenagers who perpetrated an unarmed gang homicide on a random stranger were last week sentenced to terms of 2-4 years. The same week, reports the Evening Standard (4/29), "An evil young killer who stabbed a complete stranger through the ear with a hunting knife" was sentenced to seven years in prison. Meanwhile, the government is introducing a five-year mandatory minimum for carrying a gun illegally. So, merely carrying a gun merits a sentence in the same range as murdering someone.

The piece also makes mention of the UK gun amnesty:

A gun "amnesty" has resulted in the surrender of about 25,000 arms, and was proclaimed a great triumph by the government. Civil-libertarian Stephen Robinson noted in the Telegraph: "The police were strangely reluctant to specify how many of the guns were handed over in inner city areas, fueling the suspicion that many of the weapons were family heirlooms. . . . Many appear to have been handed in by the elderly and law-abiding who fear becoming criminalized in a society in which private gun ownership is slowly being outlawed."

UPDATE: If you think this is just a rehash of the gun control debate, leavened with a dash of soft-on-terrorism, take a look at the letter linked to here, which nicely illustrates that the gulf between the US and UK on self-defense goes much, much deeper.

Posted by David on May 14, 2003 11:08 AM