Why I Carry a Handgun for Protection, Vol. 60

So that if a disturbed individual happens to purchase a knife at a grocery store and then begins randomly stabbing multiple people with it we will be able to intervene and protect those victims, just like a legally armed Good Samaritan did last Thursday evening in Salt Lake City, Utah:

"Then, before the suspect could find another victim - a citizen with a gun stopped the madness. 'A guy pulled gun on him and told him to drop his weapon or he would shoot him. So, he dropped his weapon and the people from Smith's grabbed him.'"

Armed citizens can and really do regularly make a vital difference in these sorts of situations, despite the evermore-ludicrous claims to the contrary from groups such as the Brady Campaign and the Violence Policy Center.  Even the local police agree that the citizen did exactly the right thing:

"By the time officers arrived the suspect had been subdued by employees and shoppers. Police had high praise for gun carrying man who ended the hysteria. Lt. Brian Purvis said, 'This was a volatile situation that could have gotten worse. We can only assume from what we saw it could have gotten worse. He [the permit holder] was definitely in the right place at the right time.'"

Congratulations and thanks are due to that brave individual for putting his personal safety on the line to protect innocent people from mortal danger, and to the police for recognizing and appreciating that effort.

How's that "knife control" working out for you, England?

Not very well at all, it seems.

BBC News reports that no less than 19 men were arrested the other day for engaging in a series of melees using "knives, hockey sticks and other weapons" in broad daylight right smack in the middle of Trafalgar Square, one of the must-see places in London for tourists.

Until now, that is.

"Officers are studying recordings from several CCTV and traffic cameras located around the square."

All of that ubiquitous Big Brother-style public surveillance going on in today's Britain didn't do diddly-squat to prevent these violent acts, but weakly only serves to give the cops a small chance to identify the thugs responsible for the mayhem.  We're positive that's of pretty small comfort right about now to the victims.

This is the Nanny-state, we remind everyone, whose benevolent "leaders" concluded that a near-complete ban on the legal ownership of firearms didn't go nearly far enough in accomplishing their ultimate goal of completely disarming the law-abiding populace, so a few years ago they enacted a ban on carrying even small knives in public for self-defense and other lawful purposes, complete with an "amnesty period" for people to turn in contraband blades (these particular brutes must have unfortunately forgotten to hand over theirs).

That insane policy, of course, only ensures that the regular peasants there are utterly defenseless from the criminals such as these who pay no attention at all to such legal prohibitions, as the events of the other day prove without a shadow of a doubt.

Naturally, this being Great Britain and all, every one of the alleged miscreants has now been released on bail, despite at least some of them committing multiple stabbings during the fracas.

The bobbies undoubtedly need that jail space to lock up the poor blokes who unluckily get nailed for possessing a pocket knife in public.

More madness out of what used to be Great Britain

Extremely cool:  English writer Terry Pratchett was recently knighted by his Queen.  To celebrate, he forged his own sword, to the point where he dug up and smelted the iron ore himself.

Extremely uncool: Sir Terry now finds that he has to hide the sword in an undisclosed location to avoid prosecution under that particular Nanny-state's idiotic laws, ones that disarm the common peasant of common kitchen implements in a vain attempt to prevent the rampant yobs there from committing "knife crime" on each other:

"Pratchett has stored the sword, which he completed last year, in a secret location, apparently concerned about the authorities taking an interest in it.

He said: 'It annoys me that knights aren’t allowed to carry their swords.'"

We're sure that this esteemed author can certainly think of much more appropriate (and stronger) words than "annoyed".  He must simply be politely restraining himself out of deference to his "ruler".

A Nanny-state roundup

A gaggle of random tidbits from the formerly mighty British Empire, now sadly transformed into a faded laughingstock of a Nanny state:

1.  Two Australian feral youths attacked a police officer and continued to punch and kick him while the cop was unconscious even after his partner, apparently conditioned by that PC society to be afraid of his own service firearm, drew down on the thugs and unsuccessfully ordered begged the teens to stop bashing his coworker:

"Police prosecutor Kieren Self said Constable Chris Shanco drew his firearm while his colleague Constable Karl Ah Shay was being bashed at Innisfail on Saturday, only to be goaded by one of the attackers who asked him: 'Are you going to shoot us?'."

Seems like a completely justified use of deadly force to us.  Feel free to come to your partner's defense at any time, Constable Shanco.  Any time indeed.

One wonders what would happen if the victim hadn't been a "special person" - would Shanco have simply run away in tears?

Sadly, the story gets even more pathetic.  The article reports that the attack continued until innocent bystanders stopped it.

Don't count on being protected by the police Down Under.  It says a lot for the law-abiding population there that even after their government has completely disarmed them, effectively preventing them from defending themselves, they're still willing to bail out the cops who apparently won't even help themselves. 


2.  Several hundred cops in Nottingham, England hit the city streets on a recent Saturday night to unlawfully detain, search, metal detect, drug test (!) and otherwise completely violate the civil rights of a large number of law-abiding teens who were engaged in nothing more sinister than riding the local buses, all in the name of knife control:

"The major operation involved 200 officers as part of a Home Office project targeting 13 to 24-year-olds.
Officers and a specially-trained dog met young people coming off a number of bus routes. 

Metal detectors were used in an effort to find concealed weapons while drug testing was also carried out."

Perhaps most tellingly, the article fails to inform the reader just how many evil, banned knives were recovered during this overkill of an operation, which leads us to believe that none were found - which renders this "Checkpoint Charlie" approach to crime-fighting a complete waste of public resources, not to mention an appalling abuse of authority. 


3.  Teachers at a school in Wiltshire, England left a five-year-old boy stranded alone in a 20-foot-tall tree after he climbed it during a recess period because those pesky "health and safety" regulations that seemingly rule every facet of life over there apparently expressly forbid them from helping kids out of such a predicament.

Incredibly, the supposed "adults" left the kid alone and returned to class:

"But instead of helping him, staff followed guidelines and retreated inside the school building to ‘observe from a distance’ so the child would not get ‘distracted and fall’."

This "observation" went on for forty-five minutes.

Finally, a 38-year-old woman (and mother of a six-year-old herself) with an ounce of common sense named Kim Barrett happened along the street beside the deserted schoolyard and helped the poor tot down, returning him to the building.  Was the staff thankful? Yeah, right.  They had Ms. Barrett arrested for trespassing:

"Miss Barrett, a part-time cleaner, said: ‘I felt really angry because I felt I had saved the school and this boy from something that could have been far worse, and that instead of thanking me I was under investigation.

‘It was ridiculous. He was all on his own, there was no one near him and you couldn't see the school buildings from where he was.

‘Not only was he at least 6ft off the ground, but someone taller than me could easily have reached in from the pavement and plucked him off the branch.

"The school say he was being watched but that's impossible because there is no line of sight from the school building to the tree. 

'I am a mother myself and I find it a bit ridiculous that the school's policy is to leave a child up a tree. I would be very angry if this happened to my child.

'I think this is a big cover up and that the school obviously had no idea he was there. When I took him in they had no idea he was missing.'"

Undoubtedly.  We think that Ms. Barrett could run that school a whole lot better than the buffoons who are currently in charge. 


4.  Sal Miah, who owns a curry restaurant in East Sussex, England, caught two teen hoodlums red-handed smashing into his beer cooler.  He stopped them, sat them down by the bar in his place and called the cops, who promptly showed up and arrested... Mr. Miah, for assault and battery:

"The married father-of-five spent five hours in a police cell and had his DNA, fingerprints and police mugshot taken.

Mr Miah, who has run the Raj Poot restaurant in Crowborough, East Sussex, for 14 years, was finally released at 4am after receiving a caution for assault and battery, which will stay on his record for five years."

Insanity.

"As officers put him in the back of a patrol car, he said the laughing yobs (a large gang of the youths' friends, who showed up and tried to kick in the door of the restaurant in order to free their buddies) hurled abuse and mocked him with shouts of 'You're nicked'."

Mr. Miah sounds like a sensible, upstanding citizen.  It's a real shame we're seemingly never again going to travel to England due to just this type of out-of-control youth violence.  We would otherwise gladly patronize his establishment. 


5.  A South Shropshire, England woman has been prosecuted by the Crown for failing to turn in to the government an old coin she found in her own garden when she was a little girl:

"A court heard the silver piedfort marking Charles IV's ascension to the French throne in 1322 was discovered by Miss Harding 14 years ago as she worked in the garden with her mother.
Following her mother's death a short time later, Miss Harding kept the 1.4g item as a memento until she eventually approached museum experts with it last year who identified it as a piedfort, but she did not inform the coroner...

...Under the Treasure Act 1996, treasure is defined as any single object at least 300 years old which is not a coin but has a precious metal content of at least 10 per cent. 

The Act gives a finder 14 days to inform the local coroner of potential treasure and creates an offence of failing to carry out that duty where this is not followed."

It seems that there no longer is such a thing as private property rights in England, and the government can just come in willy-nilly and take anything they wish simply because they can.

"Treasure Act", indeed.  Let's not give our Congress any ideas.  The Antiques Roadshow folks must be sweating bullets right about now.


This is the model society that our dear President would have us emulate.  Please help stop him.

English jurors are finally starting to get it

A jury in Hull, England has taken less than 50 minutes to acquit local builder and law-abiding subject David Fullard of a charge of "unlawful wounding" after he was forced to use an antique samurai sword (which sadly seems to have been the only defensive weapon available, seeing as how most other guns and knives in that country have been outlawed for the commoners by the ruling martinets) to cut the ear off one of a pair of armed young thugs who had burst into his house one night last year with the intention of robbing the occupants, threatening them with death and great bodily harm in the process:

"Their ordeal came last March when [Michael] Severs and pal Michael Smith - both high on vodka and cannabis - stormed into the Fullards' home in Brough, East Yorks, demanding money.

They were armed with a spade and knuckle-duster. Smith picked up the sword as they threatened to rape Mr Fullard's partner Sue, 53. 

They also said they would kill his sons Tom, 17, and Danny, 14, and torch the house."

The homeowner then struck Severs with the sword, "sever"ing his ear in what appears to be a triumph of poetic justice.

Mr. Fullard faced up to eight years in prison if he had been convicted of the crime with which he was wrongly charged, which is quite a heavy penalty especially when one compares it to the pitiful sanctions that the two "yobs" received for so brazenly invading his home that evening:

"Yesterday the two jobless thugs got six-month suspended sentences and 100 hours of community service after admitting affray."

In other words, they skated.  Severs even got his ear reattached for him courtesy of the NHS, for Pete's sake.  

That's maddeningly what passes for justice in England these days, although at least juries there seem to be finally waking up and are refusing to obediently go along with the official railroading of innocent peasants who are merely defending their homes and families from these types of remorseless thugs, using whatever crude implements at hand that haven't yet been confiscated or outlawed by their overlords.  

The jurors no doubt realize that next time it might be themselves who are in the dock facing years behind bars for daring to protect themselves and their loved ones. 

Famous or not, one is truly defenseless when in England, even in one's own house

British TV star Myleene Klass was at home alone with her young daughter when she was startled by a group of teenagers who had entered her garden and were peering in her kitchen window. Ms. Klass instinctively grabbed a kitchen knife and tapped on the window glass with it, which had the intended effect of scaring the intruders away.

Naturally, this being England and all, it's Ms. Klass who is in trouble, as opposed to the trespassers:

"Hertfordshire Police officers warned Klass she should not have used a knife to scare off the teens because carrying an "offensive weapon" - even in her own home - was illegal."

One could argue that the knife was in fact used as a defensive weapon against the intruders on her property, who for all Klass knew were armed assailants bent on causing harm to her and her child, but the point is moot since that quite reasonable interpretation of the situation currently happens to also be illegal in that insane asylum.

"[Klass's spokesman] told the Sunday Telegraph: 'Myleene was aghast when she was told that the law did not allow her to defend herself at home.'"

Aghast indeed.

Yet another coddled famous person who finds out the hard way what the common British peasant already painfully knows - that the criminals in their country enjoy far more in the way of rights and protections than does the law-abiding citizenry, whom the government has left utterly defenseless.

Only the criminals have firearms. Scouts can't have knives. Welcome to England, the epicenter of ridiculous policies

Several brain-dead members of a violent street gang in Sheffield, England have been sent to prison after they stupidly posted pictures online of themselves posing with firearms.

(Picture is from the article)

Sounds like wonderful news. Some pissant thugs who were terrorizing their city get put away and - hey, wait just one minute - we thought firearms were pretty much completely banned in that country?

You mean to tell us that British criminals don't obey the law, while at the same time the only people who apparently bother to do so are the very law-abiding citizens of that Nanny state who are strictly prevented from owning and carrying self-defense weapons in order to protect themselves and their families from exactly this sort of lethal "yob"?

Boy, that sure sounds like a recipe for success. Not, as the above picture clearly shows.

For the umpteenth time: Gun bans only end up confiscating firearms from responsible, law-abiding individuals, which then has the effect of robbing those innocent people of their natural right of self-defense against the thugs and criminals of society who by definition don't pay one whit of attention to any laws, let alone the ones involving firearms.

One day, the English government will hopefully figure that simple fact out.

One day.


In a similar vein, the British Boy Scouts have announced that the boys will no longer be allowed to bring their Swiss Army-style pocketknives to camp:

"'I think it is safest to assume that knives of any sort should not be carried by anybody to a Scout meeting or camp, unless there is likely to be a specific need for one. In that case, they should be kept by the Scout leaders and handed out as required.'"

Unbelievably, that quote is from a knife-maker who teaches safe knife practices to the Scouts. We suppose he's now just talked himself out of a job.

Well, maybe not, as we presume that the leaders (including the now-useless idiot knife-maker) are now going to have to perform all of the cutting of firewood, slicing of victuals and pretty much every other chore save emptying the privies, relegating the boys to standing around and watching (but not doing) everything remotely interesting or enjoyable.

That sure sounds like great fun and a wonderful way to teach camping skills as well as confidence and self-reliance, doesn't it?

We're just waiting for the inevitable announcement that the British Army is going to begin having colonels and above keep all of the rifles and pistols locked up securely, and only hand them out just prior to a battle.

That sort of outlandish scenario seems more and more likely to really take place at some point, given the speed that England is descending into madness.

He's missing the "point", literally and figuratively

An English industrial designer named John Cornock, inspired by the impassioned pleas of some of the doctors in that model nanny-state who are agitating for a total ban on the sale of "long, pointy" kitchen knives in Britain, due to their high rate of usage by criminals for muggings and robberies in that country (despite, of course, England's complete ban on carrying knives in public, along with their recent widely-publicized "knife amnesty" campaign, which have both worked out so well to date), has come up with what he thinks is an innovative solution - the "anti-stab" knife:

(www.newpointknives.co.uk)

This novel invention would indeed seem to curtail the stabbing of victims, but unfortunately not the slicing of them, which is just as deadly. Maybe Mr. Cornock forgot about that little fact whilst he was brainstorming his groundbreaking design.

"He said: 'It can never be a totally safe knife, but the idea is you can’t inflict a fatal wound. Nobody could just grab one out of the kitchen drawer and kill someone.'"

Wanna bet? You stand over there, Mr. Cornock, while we test your theory. Oh, you're declining? We kind of figured you would.

The new cutlery is bargain-priced at a low, low $63-83 each, practically guaranteeing that the thugs and criminals over there who didn't obey the law (imagine that?) and surrender their contraband cutlery three years ago will immediately toss out or turn in their perfectly good stabbin' instruments and run out to be among the first to purchase this updated design. Similarly, the good inventor must also be assuming that the government will concomitantly be banning grinding wheels and files, since ne'er do wells could use those commonly available tools to put sharp points on his knives in minutes.

Next up for Mr. Cornock- the designing of anti-crush rocks and anti-poke sticks, ensuring that the law-abiding English peasant continues to remain completely defenseless against the criminal element running wild over there.