Great Britain has some pretty strict gun control. As American gun control advocates routinely point out, they put them in place immediately after a mass shooting, all in hopes of preventing another such atrocity.

Of course, as we now know, those hopes evaporated last week.

With all that gun control, it seemed likely the killer had purchased his firearm illegally. After all, there’s no way the UK authorities would give a license to a man like that, now would they?

Oh, wait. They did.

Twice.

British cops who returned the gun mass shooter [name redacted] used to slaughter five people last week admitted they never scoped out his social media first — claiming it would have been an invasion of privacy to do so.

If they had bothered to look, authorities in the town of Plymouth would have likely seen [the killer’s] apparent obsession with gun videos on YouTube, and his infatuation with one of the UK’s most deadly shootings, the 1987 massacre in Hungerford.

[His] gun and license were taken in December 2020 after he was accused of assault three months earlier. They were returned to him last month.

On Thursday, he killed his own mother before opening fire on four others, including a 3-year-old girl, and then turning the pump-action shotgun on himself.

Of course, there are those in this country who somehow believe gun licensing would end mass shootings in this country. However, as we can see from this incident in Plymouth, that’s not necessarily going to be the case.

The issue here is that people are people. They’re not flawless. That includes the police.

More importantly, though, there are limits to what those people can see. They’re not omnipresent, all-seeing entities. That doesn’t mean some people will expect them to be, though.

Now, a panicking police force is looking to expand beyond criminal records and is looking to try and delve into gun owners’ social media histories.

British police want to trawl gun owners’ social media for wrongthink after the Plymouth ‘incel’ shooting.

Gosh, what could possibly go wrong?

Plenty, to judge by the orgy of breast-beating, cant, hypocrisy and hysteria which has characterised the political and media response since Thursday’s mass shooting.

A grim incident — the killing of several people by self-described ’23-year old virgin autist’ [name redacted], who subsequently committed suicide — has been seized on by the media and political class as a beneficial crisis. They will now exploit this as an opportunity to advance a long-running Establishment agenda: the war on private gun ownership, and the redefinition of anyone with vaguely right-wing ideas as a potential terrorist threat.

Here are some examples:

Former Metropolitan Police commissioner Lord Stevens has told the Sunday Telegraph that the police should now trawl the “online content” of potential gun owners for “an in-depth assessment of who these people are and what they think.”

Of course, it’s unsurprising that officials would try to cover up the failure of their system by claiming the problem is that the system isn’t invasive enough. It’s not enough to determine if those who want to purchase guns have a criminal history, but they also need to make sure they think all the correct things.

What they don’t get is that people like the killer will simply refuse to post their true feelings. They’ll keep them bottled up, fearful that if they say what’s really on their minds–and remember that much of the killer’s posts weren’t so much violent as depressive–they might be denied the ability to own a firearm.

And there are people who want to do this here in the United States, too.

None of that will stop a maniac from killing as many people as they can. Not all the gun laws in the UK did that and neither will the next batch.

But I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if someone else had been armed and in a position to stop the attacker. Of course, the UK being the way they are, the hero would probably have been charged.