Or Lack of Guns, that is.
Pardon our tardiness with the London riot story, but we didn't want to chime in on the topic when the only input we had to offer was the same input we always offer: Where there are protests, there are Communists.
Remember:
Besides, SaysUncles summed it up best a week ago:
What’s the cause of the riot? I’m guessing lack of incoming fire.
But today Law Professor and author Joyce Lee Malcolm published an opinion piece in the WSJ that motivated this post. This article is great for it summarizes England's gun debate for the interested yet poorly informed American (us). We could pick any paragraph out to quote as the entire article drips with facts. Here are our favorites from The Soft-on-Crime Roots of British Disorder:
If a homeowner protecting himself and his family injures an intruder beyond what the law considers "reasonable," he will be prosecuted for assault. Tony Martin, an English farmer, was sentenced to life in prison for killing one burglar and wounding another with a shotgun during the seventh break-in at his rural home in 1999. While his sentence was later reduced to five years, he was refused parole in 2003 because he was judged a danger to burglars.
In 2008, a robber armed with a knife attacked shopkeeper Tony Singh in West Lancashire. During the struggle the intruder was fatally stabbed with his own knife. Although the robber had a long record of violent assault, prosecutors were preparing to charge Mr. Singh with murder until public outrage stopped them.
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Handguns? Parliament banned their possession in 1997. As an example of the preposterous lengths to which zealous British authorities would enforce this law, consider the fate of Paul Clark, a former soldier. He was arrested in 2009 by Surrey police when he brought them a shotgun he found in his garden. For doing this personally—instead of asking the police to retrieve it—he received a five-year prison sentence. It took a public outcry to reduce the normal five-year sentence to 12 months, and then suspend it.
The ban on handguns did not stop actual crimes committed with handguns. Those crimes rose nearly 40%, according to a 2001 study by King's College London's Center for Defence Studies, and doubled by a decade later, according to government statistics reported in the London Telegraph in October 2009.
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The lesson from many years of failed criminal justice policies is that deterrence matters, police cannot always protect the public from violence and criminality, and ordinary people must be allowed to protect themselves. Reducing them to baseball bats is unconscionable.
In 2008, a robber armed with a knife attacked shopkeeper Tony Singh in West Lancashire. During the struggle the intruder was fatally stabbed with his own knife. Although the robber had a long record of violent assault, prosecutors were preparing to charge Mr. Singh with murder until public outrage stopped them.
---
Handguns? Parliament banned their possession in 1997. As an example of the preposterous lengths to which zealous British authorities would enforce this law, consider the fate of Paul Clark, a former soldier. He was arrested in 2009 by Surrey police when he brought them a shotgun he found in his garden. For doing this personally—instead of asking the police to retrieve it—he received a five-year prison sentence. It took a public outcry to reduce the normal five-year sentence to 12 months, and then suspend it.
The ban on handguns did not stop actual crimes committed with handguns. Those crimes rose nearly 40%, according to a 2001 study by King's College London's Center for Defence Studies, and doubled by a decade later, according to government statistics reported in the London Telegraph in October 2009.
---
The lesson from many years of failed criminal justice policies is that deterrence matters, police cannot always protect the public from violence and criminality, and ordinary people must be allowed to protect themselves. Reducing them to baseball bats is unconscionable.
It is as sad to watch England decline as is the knowledge that things will get far worse if she makes the tough choices to save herself. An entire generation there (and here) have been programmed to think they are entitled to free stuff, and that those with more stuff will pay the bills.
There is no telling how far they will go in England, but we find some comfort in the fact that a few muzzle-flashes here in the states will limit the destruction.
U/T: Professor Malcolm.
UPDATED 11am
Found this at Moonbattery:
And White House Insider at newsflavor, through Andrea's Radio Patriot site, suggests the foundation of the Obama campaign strategy in 2012 is white guilt, with the secondary strategy of race riots:
They are willing to go that far – go down that road if need be. If the Obama team can’t guilt enough of White America into voting for them in 2012 – they are just fine with trying to scare the shit out of them to do it. And you need to know that there are a lot of Democrats who are hearing about this and are not on board. We’ve always used the race issue to our advantage – but what the Obama team has planned is something…it’s something else altogether. Off the charts stuff. Remember when I said that Obama ain’t no Democrat? That’s as true now as it’s ever been. And he’s on some kind of collission course now with everybody scrambling to get out of the way, and then some of us trying to do what we can to stop it before it’s too late. He’s already destroyed the party…much of it. Gonna take a long time to recover. Daley can’t stop this from within. He’s moderated the damage, but he’s wearing down. Now it’s the country we are worried about. My kids and grandkids will do all right without a Democratic Party around. They need to have an America though. The whole world does.
We think any Obama 2012-inspired race riots will have the same effect as the stated goals of Stimulus (creating jobs), QEx (stabilizing economy), ObamaCare (reducing health care costs), GM Bailout (restoring GM to profitability), etc. It will backfire and cause a lot of damage.
We were in Los Angeles in 1992. The guilt caused by those riots cannot be duplicated today. The residents of South Central burned the local businesses to the ground, claimed victim status, and were rewarded with new businesses building their stores in the same neighborhoods. They further guilted banks to issue sub-prime loans. We saw how that worked.
The differences today: businesses (except GE, GM and Chrysler) are the true victims. 17% of working-capable Americans who are un-employed are the true victims.
Victims generally don't give charity to people who fake victim status.
Nor does the US government have the money (or enough democrats) to throw money at those who will choose to riot in the next year. If something burns in 2012, it will stay burnt.
UPDATED 8.18 8:30am
And more from Prof. Malcolm at Powerline (through Instapundit):
The most amazing thing about the reaction of English MPs to last week’s terrible violence was how surprised they were. For a country whose criminal law is invariably sympathetic to offenders, nearly always harsh on their victims, and unwilling to pay for adequate policing the surprise is that they were surprised.
She follows with more examples of citizens punished for defending themselves and their property.
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