Commonsense & Wonder

Wolf Howling on the effects of disarming the populace.

There is an old saying, God created man, Samuel Colt made them equal.

We saw the exercise in equality play out in the news just the other night when an intruder broke in on a woman and her two young children. They tried to hide from him in an attic crawl space. He sought them out. The woman had a .38 caliber revolver that she emptied into him, then escaped unharmed with her children. In another story in the news, a young woman in India and her boyfriend were on a bus, unarmed, when they were attacked by several men. The men beat the boyfriend, then gang raped and disemboweled the woman.

Those are anecdotes. So what happens on a meta-scale when a nation is disarmed, and people are unequal to the criminal element? For that, we can compare the U.S. and the U.K.

In the U.K., gun ownership is virtually banned. Even the police force in the U.K. is, for the most part, unarmed. Raw figures show that the UK has a lower homicide rate than the U.S., 1.2 per 100,000 of population in the U.K. versus 4.8 in the U.S. But when it comes to violent crime overall, the UK is a much greater hotbed than the U.S., with 2,034 violent criminal incidents in the U.K. per 100,000 of population versus 486 in the U.S. An anecdote from a British police officer gives a chilling feel for the ramifications of a disarmed society - where the criminals are very often more powerful at the point of the crime than either the citizens or the police. This from thePolice Inspector Blog:

An ATM raid is where a gang steals a digger, a flatbed truck and some old 4X4 vehicles. They then drive in convoy, at night, to an isolated bank or other ATM site, use the digger to smash the ATM out of the wall, load it on to the flatbed and ‘make off’ to a dump site.

At the dump site, which will be a field or a clearing in a wood somewhere, the kind of place they also use to burn the metal out of stolen cable, the ‘engineer’ will be waiting in another 4X4, ready to cut the ATM open and release the cash. The cash is then divided and the gang abandon all but the getaway vehicles and run for home.

This is a high value business. Some ATM’s have up to £1/4 million inside if they are ‘hit’ at the right time. Every county police officer knows where I am coming from with this. Here is the bad bit for us.

If an insomniac wandering about in the early hours sees such a raid and calls it in, we have to respond. When we eventually arrive, single crewed or if we are lucky, double crewed, if the offenders are still there or if we come across the convoy ‘making off’ we can expect to be met with extreme violence by at least eight hardened criminals. They are better armed than us and will ram our family saloon cars off the road in an instant.

If police officers are caught in the open they will be met with baseball bats, iron bars and firearms. They will also be heavily outnumbered. Even if we manage to get one of the counties very few police dogs to respond, the dogs can be stabbed or shot and the handlers beaten half to death. This has happened in Ruralshire. With our tiny numbers of police available for such a huge county, our pathetically underpowered vehicles and our uniquely unarmed status, the thieves rule this county at night now, not us.

It would seem that disarming the populace has the effect of making them game animals for the predators. And the same holds true for the police. It has the point of making the law abiding citizens unequal when it counts most, when their lives and liberty are on the line.

Equality is perhaps the greatest good - so the progs assure us. They demand equality for women, for minorities, some even for flora and fauna. You have to wonder why these call for equality end completely when it comes to the ability of the average law abiding person to protect their lives and liberty?

The rest here.