About the UK not having gun crime...

Image by r.nial.bradshaw from Openverse

We’ve been told over and over again that we should adopt stricter gun control policies in part because the rest of the world has them. Moreover, we’ve been told that laws like that have made it so places like the UK don’t really have any gun violence.

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What’s more, our media has repeated this claim as if it’s an indisputable fact.

Hell, a lot of folks from the UK claim as much in their discussions with Americans. However, it makes me curious just how that can be the case when we’re also seeing stuff like this:

The Home Secretary said the continued use of guns in UK cities is a “major concern” as she pledged more cash to get weapons off the streets in the wake of the Liverpool shootings.

On Friday, Priti Patel met police officers and visited the scene where Olivia Pratt-Korbel, nine, was shot dead by a gunman who chased his intended target into her home.

Asked how concerned she is about the continued use of firearms in the UK’s big cities, Ms Patel replied: “This is a major concern.”

So just how is it that a nation with some of the most strict gun control laws anywhere in the entire world–an island, mind you, with limited points of entry through which guns can be smuggled–is having a “major concern” with guns?

If gun control works as advertised, the UK should be an absolute Utopia, with almost no violent crime at all, much less any concern involving so-called gun crime, yet here we are. This is the Home Office minister for the British government acknowledging that this is a problem in a nation that has all but banned private gun ownership. It sounds to me like she’s also acknowledging that gun control didn’t work.

Bad people are going to do bad things, but all they’ve done in the UK is make it virtually impossible for anyone to defend themselves. They don’t even seem to recognize the right to self-defense. That makes the entire nation a virtual playground for the criminal.

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This despite all the posts on social media about how they’re taking “dangerous” weapons off the streets, only to have pictures of kitchen knives taken from people’s homes.

The UK doesn’t appear to have really achieved the safety many claim.

Meanwhile, these same people ignore the profound differences between the United States and our friends in the UK. After all, even our non-gun homicide rates are higher than just about everyone else’s total homicide rates.

The truth is that guns aren’t the problem and never have been. The problem is people. Yet the UK is focusing on guns, yet again, and they’re still going to have “major concerns” going forward unless they wake up and recognize that guns aren’t the problem.

Unfortunately, I don’t think they’re capable of doing so. Why would they, when they get to empower their citizens to feel smug when talking with Americans?

But those folks need to remember their own nation is far from free of “gun crime.”

(Hat tip to our friends over at The Truth About Guns for this one)

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