Flying Pigs Alert!

Every Brit I've ever met has defended his country's strict gun controls. The British press seems to reflect this attitude perfectly, with a determined defense of the British policies and self-righteous condemnation of the American “Wild West” and its allegedly out-of-control gun culture.

So when I read the headline of a column this morning in the London Times, by Richard Munday, I was quite surprised – and even more surprising was the contents. The column is headlined Wouldn't you feel safer with a gun?, and it starts like this:

Despite the recent spate of shootings on our streets, we pride ourselves on our strict gun laws. Every time an American gunman goes on a killing spree, we shake our heads in righteous disbelief at our poor benighted colonial cousins. Why is it, even after the Virginia Tech massacre, that Americans still resist calls for more gun controls?

The short answer is that “gun controls” do not work: they are indeed generally perverse in their effects.

I fear that this heresy puts Mr. Munday's British citizenship in danger of revocation. By Monday morning, it's likely he'll be seeking asylum at the U.S. Embassy in London.

But it gets even better:

Virginia Tech reinforced the lesson that gun controls are obeyed only by the law-abiding. New York has “banned” pistols since 1911, and its fellow murder capitals, Washington DC and Chicago, have similar bans. One can draw a map of the US, showing the inverse relationship of the strictness of its gun laws, and levels of violence: all the way down to Vermont, with no gun laws at all, and the lowest level of armed violence (one thirteenth that of Britain).

Here's a liberal commentator, in a liberal newspaper, in a liberal country, citing the uncomfortable facts that liberals around the world struggle mightily to suppress and deny. What the heck is going on here? I have no doubt now that pigs are flying between the skyscrapers in London!

Here's the column's conclusion:

As late as 1951, self-defence was the justification of three quarters of all applications for pistol licences. And in the years 1946-51 armed robbery, the most significant measure of gun crime, ran at less than two dozen incidents a year in London; today, in our disarmed society, we suffer as many every week.

Gun controls disarm only the law-abiding, and leave predators with a freer hand. Nearly two and a half million people now fall victim to crimes of violence in Britain every year, more than four every minute: crimes that may devastate lives. It is perhaps a privilege of those who have never had to confront violence to disparage the power to resist.

Mr. Munday asks, “Wouldn't you feel safer with a gun?”

Well, Mr. Munday, speaking as a gun owner in the American Wild West, I can tell you this: even though I live in an area with statistically and historically very low rates of crime, my wife and I do indeed feel much safer with a gun. Several guns, actually. We own three firearms: a seven-shot Smith & Wesson revolver, a six-shot Beretta semiautomatic shotgun (a so-called “riot gun”), and a 22 gauge Remington rifle (a “varmint gun”). The guns are all legally purchased and licensed. Both my wife and I have attended formal training and have practiced on the range; the varmint rifle gets regular use on our property (mostly against ground squirrels and gophers).

The police emergency response time to the area where we live is around 30 to 60 minutes – not because the police are incompetent, but because we live quite far from any police station. If some bad guy showed up on our doorstep, dialing 911 and waiting for the police to show up is a recipe for becoming a victim. Our guns are much more likely to succeed in defending us, either as a shock-and-awe deterrent (that shotgun would punch some impressive holes in a vehicle!) or in violent self-defense.

Does that make us feel safer? Of course it does. As it should anyone whose brain hasn't been muddled with liberal claptrap…

EU Constitution

Estonia has become the 15th country to ratify the European Union Constitution. France and the Netherlands have already rejected it (by referendum), so the commonly held notion is that further votes are useless. However, in actual fact the EU constitution takes force when the last of the 25 EU member countries ratifies, so each countries ratification is important. Further, the rules governing when the EU constitution takes force require only that the member countries ratify the constitution; the rules do not specify how the ratification is to occur. In particular, it is not certain that the failure of referendums actually prohibits ratification by the government (although both France and the Netherlands have said they will abide by the referendum results).

I downloaded the English text of the EU constitution a few months ago, and made a good faith attempt to read it. It is over 400 pages long, very dense, rich with jargon — and looks less like what this American thinks of as a “constitution” and more like a liberal, politically correct, meandering manifesto. I got through perhaps 100 pages before I just could not take it anymore…

My predictions on the EU are these:

— Even without ratifying the “constitution", the EU is likely to collapse under its own weight. Take just one requirement: the translation of all EU documents into the native language of every member country. Already this is causing delays of years in the legislative and treaty efforts, as there aren’t enough translators to do the job. And at some point the people in the member states are going to wake up and realize that the EU’s top-heavy bureaucracy is serving its own interests above those of the member countries — and there will be a revolt (hopefully of the ballot-box kind).

— If the EU constitution is ever ratified, the process described above will accelerate tremendously — but a revolt will be vastly more difficult to accomplish.

— If the EU constitution is ever ratified, everything the EU tries to accomplish will be held up by endless court cases arguing about the interpretation of the constitution. If you think the squabbling in the U.S. is bad, just wait until you see what happens when the lawyers have over 400 pages of “guidance” to argue about!

The cartoon above right was sent to me by one of my friends in Estonia. He tells me that the caption reads (translated) like this: “We’ll get it ratified, turn up sleeves and start to bump off the ones who are not with us…” I think that cartoonist has the bureaucracy nailed perfectly — getting it ratified by any means necessary is precisely their agenda. And if they manage to do so, then watch out! So far as I can tell by my correspondence with several Estonians, the general population really doesn’t seem to care very much about the EU constitution, or about other aspects of the EU, such as adoption of the Euro. It’s clear from the polls (and my friends confirm this) that popular support for adopting the Euro has declined — but it’s also true that in general people there have only a vague understanding of the issues, pro and con. In other words, it’s just like here in the U.S. — only a few crazy people actually care enough about these things to become well informed. For example, none of my Estonian friends — whether ethnic Russians or Estonians — even claim to have read the EU constitution. One friend tells me that many members of parliment — the legislative body that votes on ratification in Estonia — have not read the EU constitution that they just voted to ratify. Apathy runs deep, apparently.