Arm the people!

“Do not patronize the passionate supporters of your opponents by looking down your nose at them”

Bill Clinton to fellow Democrats who want gun controls

THERE HAVE BEEN PROTESTS against gun control all over America; but they have been ill-attended events. Whether this is because Obama is wining the argument or, as with other issues, the Right cannot rally in any great number the silent majority, whose intellectual instincts and sympathies are, as in the UK, small c conservative.

           

The liberals enjoy, as a social activity, demonstrating. They have done so since the Vietnam war, and the habit has been, almost genetically, handed down since. The Left in America will always bring out the numbers which are visually impressive to the liberal media. Hundreds of thousands of liberals can be called upon at any one time to protest against any cause considered (or even ill-considered) by them as illiberal and ‘anti-progressive’. But they represent a mere segment of the 315 million population.

Under the Second Amendment to the American Constitution, every American citizen has the right to bear arms. As a result there is (as there once was in the UK) a culture of  gun ownership. It was understood that the law-abiding gun owner could not be associated with the criminal or some demented soul who massacres the innocent.

           

Gun ownership in the UK was criminalised after the First World War when soldiers returning home were at first allowed to keep their guns; but after the revolutionary events in Russia and other parts Europe; the British establishment quickly backtracked. Up until this moment any British citizen without a criminal record was given the right to own a gun.

GUN OWNERSHIP is as much, if not more, of a human right than the many examples of such a phenomenon of our liberal culture who, on a daily basis, take to the European Court of Human Rights for favourable judgement.

           

            In America the constitution guarantees such a right and this has managed to  keep modern liberalism at bay. But under Obama this is about to change after the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut. He will see this issue, along with his reform of America’s health care system, as the pinnacle of his  presidency, if, that is, he can outlaw certain calibres of weaponry.

           

            Who knows, it may lead to a third term. An event unknown since another Democrat president was so honoured. But Obama is no Roosevelt: yet while he still lacks the opportunity that a world war gave Roosevelt for extending his presidency; Obama has the colour and liberal charisma to convince his party and the American people on the back of his tint, and his health reforms, to give him a third term.

            The average European liberal sees the average American gun owner as a Red Neck or survivalist waiting for the end of the world. This is not the case. The vast  majority of American gun owners believe they have the right to protect their families from criminal intrusion. Gun ownership gives them an equal match with the burglar or any other criminal; or even with the maniac who walks onto a school campus and seeks to annihilate the students.

           

            In Newtown, if a teacher or a security guard had had a gun, then 26 people may be alive today; but such liberal lateral thinking does not acknowledge such a prospect because they think gun ownership bad under all and every circumstance – even, no doubt, if their country were invaded.

IT SHOULD BE THE right of every law abiding citizen to own a gun. In this country the only restriction should be on the calibre of the weapon. Every  British citizen (without a criminal record) should be allowed ownership of a hand gun. I am not talking about assault weapons, but the minimal calibre needed to secure his or her family and their property.

           

            In America, if Obama disarms the law abiding American citizen; he will still have no power over the criminal’s ability to own a gun. He will put the law abiding and voting US citizen at the mercy of criminals who sneer at Washington’s laws in their daily activity.

            Newtown was bad and there will be worse to come. But to blame gun ownership for such tragedies, is like blaming the government for floods, as well as any other natural catastrophe that manages to kill.

Guns are dangerous. They can intimidate to gain reward with the threat of death. In a household that carries at least one gun; that one gun presents the victims with an opportunity to rid themselves of their persecutor.

            Gun ownership in America should remain as it is. In the UK gun ownership should be restored to the period before the First World War. In Britain today, burglary is treated as a mere consequence of modern living unless a murder is involved. The theft of property seems to matter little to the modern police service. If the police cannot respond to such crimes with the same level of urgency they do to a murder; then the law must allow the victim in such cases to protect themselves with a hand gun.

           

            If the police have no wish to become armed; this does not mean that the law-abiding citizen should be denied such protection. After all, the police in the UK have never been armed, even while the rest of the law abiding citizenry were allowed to be. There have been many reordered examples in the past, of unarmed British police, in pursuance of an armed criminal, seeking the loan of a weapon from a passerby while in pursuit of a criminal.

            If Obama proves successful in either disposing of or reforming the Second Amendment; I hope the constituency such a law would effect would challenge it in the courts. The National Rifle Association (NRA) should dip very deeply into its no doubt lucrative pockets to finance such an action. This is a constitutional matter and deserves to be challenged. As Edmund Burke said “ Bad law is the worst sort of tyranny”.