Don’t assume they’re not there. London gangs have started to target provincial towns & cities as new places to control the drug dealing in, places where the police are unaware of what’s happening. Overshadowed by a certain serial killer, there were four people shot in an Ipswich nightclub last year, one died, and most of the people involved were from London. It’s only a short way up the A140 for the opportunistic ones to make the next move.
(Random anecdote: a couple of years ago, while working as a teacher in the town, my mother made a home visit to a particularly problematic family. After a few minutes sat in the front room talking with the parents, she realised there was a handgun sat on the coffee table. She hadn’t clocked it before because it was just there, casually, and presumably it was so normal to everybody else in the house that nobody had thought to move it.)
An application for a personal protection weapon may be made within Northern Ireland, but that just shows you how extreme a situation it takes for someone in the UK to need a weapon for self defence.
When I think of Dunblane and Hungerford and VT, my firstreaction is that if someone had been armed, then Hamilton or Ryan or Cho wouldn’t have killed so many because there would have been no need to wait for the police.
I’m aware that this is an unpopular opinion, and I really don’t give a damn.
Good, because what this thread needed was someone to come in and spout his opinion and be deaf to all counter-argument, and there have been too few opportunities to express this very opinion over the last few days.
Y’see, our first reaction is that if guns were a lot easier to get over here, we could have a Dunblane or a Hungerford every other month with a little effort. What with this thread being about gun crime in the UK and all.
Agreed. You can’t go by what you see on the news. As my dad says, they have “a proctologist’s-eye view of the world.” Fact is, most crime in the US is drug-related, just like in the UK.
If you want to slam me, do it in the Pit, but we live in a free society, which means that we are free to have our own opinions. We may disagree with others’ opinions, but we may not disagree with the right to hold those opinions.
And if you want to toss around opinions that have not much to do with the OP, do it in IMHO or MPSIMS or GD, but perhaps not in GQ. Y’know, there’s been plenty of opportunity to trot out your opinion in any of the many VT-related threads this week. You don’t really need to do it in a thread asking about gun crime in another country, and then complain when you get called on it.
Hah. I went past the Emneths not too long back on my way over to Peterborough, but no, they’re not on my doorstep, and I live in a plain family house in a village where the inhabitants have more than three surnames between them.
Damn I must know nothing about daily life in the US, I’ve never seen The Wire. I did watch Touching Evil so I know you’re all a bunch of sickos over there.
Luck? That people going postal with firearms wasn’t exactly a common occurrence before 1997 anyway? Wizards?
Look, here’s the thing- contrary to popular belief, most of the guns handed in and destroyed during the buyback were old .22s, bolt-action hunting rifles or SMLEs left over from the war, and shotguns. There weren’t a huge number of AK-47s, AR-15s, L1A1s, or M1s in the country anyway. And here’s the thing: The people who had their guns crushed got paid for them. What do you think many- if not most- of them did? They went and bought new, legal guns. Same thing happened with the handgun buyback- there are now MORE legally owned handguns in Queensland than there were before the buyback.
As far as I’m concerned, the Monash University Shootings were a massacre in design and intent, fortunately prevented from becoming one by the bravery of some of the intended victims. Had things turned out differently, however, there may very well have been 12 victims… Even 2 victims was 2 too many.
One more time: from 11 in a 10 year period to (by your count) one in the following 10 year period. A sudden precipitous drop at exactly the time of the buyback and ban. What more would it take to convince you? Are you even amenable to being convinced on this matter?
Do you have any backing for these assertions? There were 600,000 guns destroyed; how many could there have been left over from “the war” (which ever one you mean) anyway?
Exactly - handguns, legally owned with registered owners.
How about the figures for the 10 years before that? And before that? How about the figures for every decade since WWII ended? There were machine guns and what have you in Australia as soon as WWI ended, with more firearms coming back after WWII. I’m not aware of numbers of mass shootings in the 1950s and 1960s, or even the 1970s.
Sure, but I’ve yet to see anyone come up with compelling and convincing proof.
SAF Lithgow manufactured approximately 640,000 SMLE Mk II and Mk III* rifles between 1912 and 1956. Rifles which were lost due to war service were replaced with British manufactured rifles, and there were already large numbers of Martini-Enfield and Magazine Lee-Enfield .303 military rifles in the country when WWI broke out. That doesn’t include Bren Guns (also manufactured at SAF Lithgow), Enfield Revolvers (350 manufactured by HAC), Service Pistols, Captured Arms… you get the idea. There were A LOT of guns left over from WWI and WWII in Australia, and still are. I’ve got most of the production figures in reference texts here (which would take too long to look up simply to illustrate a point), but the figures are simple: There were as many SMLE Mk III rifles made here in Australia as there were total rifles and shotguns crushed in the buyback. Internal production of all types of firearms by SAF Lithgow outweighs the number of guns destroyed by a large margin, and when you factor in the number of guns imported, you can see why I assert that the main guns destroyed in the buyback were not semi-auto rifles, but .22s and shotguns.
