British Gun Restrictions: Nevermind The Results, It’s Faith

Our good friend Derek Bernard has sent another epistle from across the pond.  In his prvious piece he forwarded an op-ed by Richard Munday, another English friend, that explored the Mumbai incident in a historical context.  

The latest essay tracks the history of British gun restrictions back to the time just after the Great War of 1914-1918.  Prior to that time, guns were common in England, and the streets a good deal safer than they are today.  What particularly interests me is that the British Home Office’s concern about guns arose from that fact that WWI had trained a generation of men with skill at arms.  The hidden agenda of the early British gun control was to prevent a revolution such had already happened in Russia.  But the public excuse was, as always, crime.  England’s crime rate has been steadily rising for the past half-century, and with an increasingly heterogeneous population, one can expect that rise to increase.  I’ve been amazed over the past couple of years to see the debate over gun control in England appearing in the staid grey pages of The Times.  Richard and Derek are voices crying in the wilderness, but lone voices have made significant changes in the past. 

Derek submitted his story as a PDF file.  Read it here.

14 May Update

At Derek’s request I have replaced Derek’s earlier essay with an updated version.  The original contained a sentence that threatened to cause considerable legal trouble and given the state of British libel laws, Derek considered it more prudent to alter the essay.  He’s added some more information, and certainly it is still a strong statement.  It’s been altered to get rid of the potentially troublesome language.

–Chris