Sorry if it seems like I have hijacked the thread I actually do have some ideas I want to get across that will tie some of my previous posts. I do agree with you on the fact that there is a cultural difference in that people in Britain have much less experience in gun handling than in the US.
Especially as both countries have down sized their militaries and hunting has become less popular. Even here in the US the percentage of people who have ever handled a gun has gone down. As they have become foreign to people it has become easy to demonise guns and make them an object of fear.
If you think about it though people handle deadly weapons and expose themselves to danger everyday without even thinking about it. I’ll give you some examples.
Lots of kids eleven, twelve, thirteen, own baseball bats. Very few ever use them as a weapon on someone. Why? Because even an eleven, twelve or thirteen year old kid knows right from wrong.
If you go into some of the rural areas of the US you can find communities where it has been a tradition for generations that kids that age go out hunting sometimes without much supervision form adults. Kids that age can be taught the proper safe firearm handling practices.
Another potential deadly weapon is the automobile. Millions of cars are on the road everyday. But very few people deliberately ram someone off of the road or run over pedestrians. When those types of incidents do occur it is usually a more or less avoidable accident. In order to get behind the wheel people have had to learn safe driving practices.
Think about how much trust in their fellow man many Londoners demonstrate everyday when they stand right at the edge of the platform in the underground when the trains come rushing in. It would be so easy to just give someone a nudge but most Londoners don’t even give it a thought.
Then there are the Zebra crossings. Where most Londoners just step out into the road without even a thought. Which nowadays is taking a chance given the fact that there are a lot more international drivers who might not have any experience with such a thing.
I would like you to consider the possibility that most Englishmen are much more civil than the ideologues in the government have led you to believe. I think that the vast majority of people in England would do the right thing with firearms. Just like how in America the vast majority of gun owners handle their guns in a responsible manner.
Unfortuneately there has been a huge amount of hype (which the British government is good at) and they have really been able to turn guns into an object of fear.
When one sees young UK gang members being interviewed a lot of them talk about how they want respect. What they really mean though is that they want to instill fear and intimidate people.
The British gun control culture that has turned guns into such a horrific instrument of fear and loathing, that the average adult Englishman will just about lose control of his bowels and piss in his knickers at the very mention of the word gun, plays right into that.
Gun control is much like the war on drugs. It is one of those things where people want to do good, so they try to do something. What happens then is that since these people are trying to do good they assume that it is only natural that their good intentions will only have good results. What happens then is when something bad results from their doing good they go into a state of denial.
One of the bad things about the war on drugs is this. The law makes it profitable to sell drugs for a living. It allows gangbangers with little to no job skills maybe even an drug problem to make a decent living, especially if they are a senior member of a gang.
If you genuinely want to do something about destroying gang culture you must first destroy the underground economy that has been created by the war on drugs. It would do serious damage to the gangs if we took away their business.
On the BBC a year or so ago they had a report that the UN estimates the worldwide trade in illegal drugs to be around three hundred billion dollars a year, which makes it equal to the worldwide trade in automobiles.
Something I have been thinking about since I heard that report is, what kind of a world are we going to leave our kids when we have been pumping three hundred billion dollars a year into the hands of organised crime for decades.
All this gang culture and lawlessness is being driven by the war on drugs.
