It’s often said here on the SDMB by foreigners that Americans are gun crazy, invariably leading to the usual debate about rights and no small amount of animosity. Yet here we have a report (admittedly source unknown) that the English want their guns back, going so far as to stage “the largest peaceful protest in British history”, with people demonstrating considerable support for America’s gun rights, going so far as to allude to sayings that are common among pro-gun activists.
So, first things first: I don’t recognize the source. Does anybody know where this came from?
Second, how should we reconcile the obvious conflict with what is asserted on the SDMB by foreigners and what foreigners are asserting here on camera?
Last, is the report factually inaccurate in any way? I do understand that it is making an emotional appeal, but that’s what reporters do. More important would be whether this is true or not.
The march itself seems to have been the September 2002 Countryside Alliance “Liberty and Livelihood” march to oppose the foxhunting ban and, more generally, to object to what they saw as indifference by Parliament to rural problems. There were about 400,000 marchers.
I don’t know the origin of the clip, and I have my sound off, so I don’t know what the clip is claiming, but the ban on fox hunting was controversial, and seen by some as imposition by the government and activists against traditional customs.
The report is massively disingenuous. The protest featured was not about gun control. It had much more vague aims, but was particularly about opposing the ban of hunting with hounds, not guns. But whatever the protest was, among that many people, it’s not difficult to find someone to give you a quote supporting or opposing just about anything.
There’s other inaccuracies which are either the result of ignorance, lack of research, or intent to mislead. Bobbies carrying firearms for ‘the first time ever’? Simply not the case - there’s always been armed response units in every police force. The actual situation being referred to was a handful of small locations with particular problems with gang-related shootings having these teams accompanying regular officers on foot patrol rather than remaining in the shadows in their vehicles, more for public visibility and reassurance than for any effect this has on crime.
The nonsense about the handgun ban has been talked about in detail on these boards in the past, IIRC. They were not owned privately in large numbers prior to the ban, certainly not as a routine self-defence tool.
For an alternative view of the Tony Martin case, try this for starters.
As other posters have pointed out the protest was NOT a “pro gun” march, it was at best peripherally related to guns. It was about “rural” issues, in particular “hunting with hounds”. To try and claim it was a “pro gun” march was extremely dishonest.
The UK has NEVER had a culture of owning handguns for self-defence (outside of Northern Ireland at least). Irregardless of the rights and wrongs,of the total handgun ban, it did not take away guns that would otherwise have been “protecting” British households.
As a criminal, if you broke into a house in 1995 you were secure in the knowledge that the house owner did not own a handgun, that is still the case now. The vast majority, of the small number of handguns, in public hands were .22s for target shooting (of course you could take the gun ban as an example of useless knee-jerk populist legislation, but of course that NEVER happens in the states ).
Many agree with you. Advocates of hunting claim that a fox-hound can kill a fox with one merciful bite across the back of the neck. Detractors beg leave to doubt that things are as quick and clean as this all the time, or even most of the time.
As for the link, I wish pro-gun Americans would not insist on making dubious political capital out of my country. Even if violent crime is up since the handgun ban, that’s a classic post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy; very few guns have historically been used for crime prevention, at least not in my lifetime.
I’ll echo GorillaMan (edit: and griffin1977): the Countryside Alliance march, shown, had very little indeed to do with gun rights, and the reader may draw his own conclusions concerning anyone who presents it as such.
I stand to be corrected (INAL), but I am pretty sure he would have faced prosecution for murder if he had done the same same thing most states in the US. He shot a unarmed burglar in the back as the burgular (who was 16) was in a window, trying to escape.
I wasn’t necessarily attempting to do that. I came across this and I think I demonstrated considerable scepticism given that my default position is the polar opposite of yours. I see that it has been pretty thoroughly debunked, but I think you’ll find that the pro-gun side is not so sceptical about it. They are passing this around as 100% true. I had my doubts, so I asked.
Well, we had a majority of 'em there, but we couldn’t keep them on camera long enough - kept on taking bathroom breaks, or popping down to the pub for a pint, and then taking a bathroom break.
After awhile we just gave up, and everyone went back to their home countries. But we tried.
I thought that the major argument on humaneness grounds is that a fox is either killed outright or escapes unharmed, unlike shooting where you can leave them injured and dying slowly.
In Australia, “Fox Hunting” refers to the hunting of foxes with firearms, not on horseback.
I can tell you from first-hand experience that a fox that has been shot with a 12ga or a mid-calibre centrefire rifle is dead before he hits the ground. No slow deaths or crawling away injured involved. Even if you don’t kill it outright, you’re generally shooting at such close range (less than 50m) that it should only take a second to get off a follow-up shot, and if you can’t hit a stationary target with a rifle at that range you’re probably not ready for hunting just yet.
I’ve not been involved with the “Hunting with Hounds” kind of fox hunting, but I don’t believe that allowing a fox to be chased and mauled by dogs- no matter how well trained- is humane or sporting, for that matter.
The whole point of a hunt is that the animal should be allowed to escape if you, as a hunter, are not able to bring them down with a clean, humane shot.
I’ve lost count of the number of times in which I’ve had to let a quarry go because they had run up onto the top of a hill (never fire at things on the top of hill, kids- you don’t know what’s on the other side), or down into a rocky gully (can you say ricochet?), or had disappeared into bush or onto an adjacent property that we did not have permission to shoot on.
I can’t help but feel that unleashing the hounds on a fox while you chase after them on horseback is cheating, at least from a hunting perspective. Now, if you were on horseback chasing after the fox with a rifle and had to stop and fire, that’s fine. But sending hounds into brush or areas you can’t get into or otherwise see? Not hunting in its truest form, IMHO.
The No True Scotsman informal fallacy does not apply to everything under the sun. It applies only when an attribute is assigned to an element of class X when that attribute does not determine X-ness. Thus, “no true vegetarian eats meat” is not a logical fallacy.
True. The “no true Scotsman” fallacy applies when you’re redefining class X to include your favored attribute.
In this case, true hunting is being redefined to exclude the use of animals when the human can’t make the kill. I’m not a hunter, but I can’t find this aspect of the definition anywhere else; this does look to me slightly like a NTS argument.
However, it’s likelier just that Martini was using a rhetorical structure to condemn a style of hunting that he was condemning, which is fine. I strangely find myself on the opposite (sort of) side of the issue from him. It’s not that I"m eager to see foxes torn limb from limb by ravening dogs. It’s that any sort of hunting done for pure pleasure (as opposed to being done to protect livestock/obtain meat/etc.) is IMO* not a good thing. Hunting ought to be a means to an end, not something with a code of honor meant to keep the game pure.
Daniel
yes, that stands for what you think it does. No, I don’t need anyone to point out to me that this is just my opinion. Yes, I’m aware of that.
).