Daniel J. Mitchell - 9/25/2013
The English are an interesting tribe. There is much to like about their country, including the fact that repeatedly elected Margaret Thatcher, one of the world's best leaders in my lifetime.
On the other hand, the United Kingdom has veered sharply to the left in recent decades, and Thatcher must have been very disappointed that her Conservative Party now is but a hollow shell, controlled by statists who actually think people should voluntarily pay extra tax to support wasteful and corrupt government.
And the politicians openly pursue Orwellian tax-collection tactics!
No wonder the country now faces a very grim future. But the thing that most irks me about the British political class is the fanatical embrace of anti-gun policies. Consider some of these examples.
- There was a proposal to prevent children from watching Olympic shooting events.
- A British veteran of the Iraq war was arrested after his local trainees included a gun when mailing his possessions back to England.
- In an example of private sector political correctness, a bookstore put shooting magazines in the porn section.
- A man got arrested for finding a gun in his yard and turning it over to the police.
- Starting pistols have been banned from some school races.
- A man was arrested for shooting a burglar who invaded his house.
Given these example of anti-gun zealotry, you won't be surprised to learn that some English pundits think America is primitive and backwards for retaining an individual right to bear arms.
You may be thinking, so what, they have their bad laws and we have our good laws. But it seems at least some Brits want to disarm not just their own citizens, but Americans as well.
Writing for the UK-based Guardian, Henry Porter asserts that it is time for the United Nations to somehow undermine private gun ownership in the United States.
- what if we no longer thought of this as just a problem for America and, instead, viewed it as an international humanitarian crisis a quasi civil war, if you like, that calls for outside intervention? If this perennial slaughter doesn't qualify for intercession by the UN and all relevant NGOs, it is hard to know what does.
Does he want Obama to ram through the U.N. treaty that leftists hope would trump the Second Amendment?
If so, all I can say is good luck trying to enforce gun bans. The American people would engage in widespread disobedience if our own politicians tried to take away our constitutional freedoms.
I'd like to see UN bureaucrats try to disarm these great Americans
And if a bunch of U.N. bureaucrats tried to do the same thing well, that's such a ridiculous notion
that I'm reminded of my fantasy about what might have happened if the United Nations had tried to stop Texas from executing a child murderer who originally was from Mexico.
But the call for UN intervention is not the most absurd part of the article.
What could be sillier, you ask? How about the fact that Mr. Porter implies that gun owners are akin to slave owners. It's not an explicit accusation, but you can see in this excerpt that he wants readers to draw that conclusion.
Half the country is sane and rational while the other half simply doesn't grasp the inconsistencies and historic lunacy of its position, which springs from the second amendment right to keep and bear arms, and is derived from English common law and our 1689 Bill of Rights. We dispensed with these rights long ago, but American gun owners cleave to them with the tenacity that previous generations fought to continue slavery.
So if you cleave to your guns, you're on the same level as the people who defended slavery. I guess this is the U.K. version of Obama accusing some Americans of clinging to guns.
Ironically, Mr. Porter self identifies as a journalist specialising in liberty and civil rights. But I guess he doesn't specify what side he's on, so I guess we can assume he specializes in undermining liberty and curtailing civil rights.
P.S. The Guardian is known as a left-wing newspaper, but I've always had a special place for them in my heart ever since one of their writers accused me of being a high priest of light tax, small state libertarianism. He meant it as an insult, of course, but I think of it as the nicest thing ever written about me. Even better than this.
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