Gun control — clutching at straws

As I labour away at my keyboard I can hear excited Englishmen on Sky News babbling on in the background about a much-needed revamp of British gun laws. Good! If the law is changed so as to make guns more accessible to the ordinary Englishman the authorities could in future warn him about the eruptions of people like that loony Derrick Bird, generic so he could arm himself in preparation of his arrival. The way things were this week, order though, sales all they could do was tell everybody to lock themselves indoors until the coast was clear. That’s fine if you’re lucky enough to hear the warnings, but not so good if you unexpectedly find yourself face to face with a shotgun-wielding nutter who finds himself with fewer targets to choose from than he expected. I suspect, though, that the much-debated changes will be aimed at removing the very few options that Englishmen still have in terms of personal choice.

After the 1987 Hungerford massacre and the Dunblane killings nine years later, the British government reacted in typically nanny-state fashion by introducing increasingly stricter restrictions on private ownership of handguns and rifles.-[source]