England and Gun Control --- Moral Decline of an Empire
Miguel A. Faria, Jr., M.D.
Et domus sua cuique est tutissimum refugium.
Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634)
The Legacy of Revolutions
It seems that when it comes to the issue of gun control, England has never gotten over the shock of the American Revolution, when a band of patriots, ordinary armed citizens, citizens who were very protective of their rights and liberties, challenged the mighty British empire, and ultimately prevailed.
Here is the historical background. After the Puritanical rule of the Lord Protector of England, Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658), the British populace welcomed the restoration of King Charles II, condoning the pageantry and permissiveness within his court as well as tolerating the restrictive gun control laws he implemented in the realm. (i.e., the Game Act of 1671). The policies (and religion) of his brother successor, King James II, on the other hand, were not tolerated, and within a few years Parliament orchestrated the Glorious Revolution (1689) that ousted James II and established Parliament's supremacy over the Crown. Included among the Declaration of Rights (Feb. 13, 1689) which Prince William of Orange and his wife Mary, James II's Parliamentary chosen successors, had to agree to accept before they could ascend the throne of England was: "That the subjects which are protestants may have Arms for their Defence suitable to their Conditions, and as allowed by Law." Notice in the statement the lack of equality of citizens before the law (i.e., Protestant vs. Catholic), the arbitrary government prerogative to restrict the natural rights of citizens, and the violation of Sir Edward Coke's wise dictum, et domus sua cuique est tutissimum refugium, "a man's home is his castle," and that a man has a right to possess arms to protect his property, himself, his home, and family. Ditto for Sir William Blackstone's (1723-1780) fifth and last auxiliary right of a citizen, the God-given right of a person to keep and bear arms for his basic and natural right of resistance to oppression and for self-preservation --- "So long as those [liberties of Englishmen] remain inviolate, the subject is perfectly free; for every species of compulsive tyranny and oppression must act in opposition to one or other of those rights."(1) Be that as it may, with the Declaration of Rights, the natural right to self-protection in England became subjected to arbitrary government infringement.
It goes without saying that while we as Americans believe man is endowed by his Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, Property, and those natural rights encapsulated in the Bill of Rights that allow us to pursue Happiness unimpeded by government (i.e., as long as we don't violate the equal rights of others) --- the British allowed their government to assign them "rights" which could then be restricted or qualified out of existence at will by government ---- be it the despotic, capricious rule of the Crown or the tyrannical, arbitrary, Parliament majority, or for that matter, the UN.*
And so, near Concord and Lexington on April 19, 1775, when the British attempted to apprehend the leaders of the brewing rebellion, Samuel Adams and John Hancock, and intended to seize and confiscate the arms and ammunition the patriots had stored at Concord --- the shot was fired that was heard around the world. A band of armed patriots --- an organized militia with small private arms, the Minutemen of the revolution --- routed the mighty Red Coats, the disciplined and highly professional force of the British Empire.
The rest, as they say, is history...despite a protracted assault on our liberties by the advances of creeping (democratic) socialism, globalism, public mis-education, and liberal mass media indoctrination --- our Constitutional Republic survives and America remains the freest country in the world.
Pinochet's Nightmare
Great Britain, once considered by some to be perhaps the most civilized country in the world, has allowed itself to be carried by the continental wave of European democratic socialism. And now led by the heirs of the Fabian socialists of the Labor Party, Britain has betrayed the code of conduct of civilized nations and international jurisprudence by kidnapping and holding General Pinochet, a former head of state, under arrest at the extradition request of a socialist Spanish judge on dubious criminal charges to satisfy left-wing, global political correctness. Gen. Pinochet was apprehended Oct. 17 while recuperating from back surgery and is being held under house arrest at the Wentworth Estate outside London. Initially, a British high court prevailed and the charges were temporarily suspended. But then on November 25, 1998, the Law Lords, a House of Lords British tribunal voted 3 to 2 to have Gen. Pinochet stay in England to face extradition charges to Spain, "for crimes against humanity, murder and genocide." It now appears Prime Minister Tony Blair blackmailed the House of Lords with the intimation, only two days prior to the ruling, that the peerage could lose its hereditary membership in the name of "democratic reform." To make matters even worse for the ruling, it has now been found the judge, Lord Justice Hoffman, who cast the deciding vote had a serious conflict of interest with ties to Amnesty International, a group which has long campaigned against Pinochet.
How low can you stoop to trample the rule of law? If Pinochet, who saved his country from Marxist tyranny and then after re-establishing the rule of law handed over the reins of power to democratic rule in Chile, faced extradition "for crimes against humanity, murder and genocide," then why not other dictators e.g., Fidel Castro, the longest ruling tyrant in the world, who still reigns over the communist, island-prison of Cuba. In fact, Castro, who was visiting Spain at the time of Pinochet's travails, declared he would be happy to see Pinochet extradited to face criminal charges. But as a recent report by Accuracy In Media (AIM) succinctly put it: The revolution he launched on September 11, 1973, was relatively bloodless. According to official reports, 3,200 people were killed or disappeared. Allende himself committed suicide with a gun that was a gift from Fidel Castro.
By contrast, Fidel Castro had executed 22,000 people by the end of 1969, according to the estimate of an intelligence officer at the Spanish embassy in Havana. The bloodletting did not stop then. A Cuban scholar, Dr. Armando Lago, estimates that the total is now 30,000. Tens of millions were killed by Lenin and Stalin in Russia and by Mao Tse-tung and his successors in China. The butchers of Tiananmen Square may have killed as many in one day as the Chilean military killed in the 17 years of Pinochet's rule, but their ringleader, Jiang Zemin, was recently an honored guest at the Clinton White House.(3)
Allow me again to digress briefly and mention, at least for now, another ongoing story and related embarrassing situation for Britain, the Irish problem, the protracted insurrection aimed at the heart of the British nation and which has nearly brought the once great empire to its knees. And let us say it, despite the trading of personal liberty for public security and the step-by-step imposition of draconian gun control and the restrictions of other civil liberties in the name of fighting IRA terrorism, the Irish problem remains unresolved. The measures have provided neither peace, tranquility, nor safety --- long-lasting peace remains to be seen.
The British authorities had been impotent to stop terrorist attacks, yet British subjects have been left disarmed, denied personal safety in the streets and the right of self-protection and of self-defense in their own homes. Under England's present gun control laws only certified members of approved target shooting gun clubs are allowed to keep firearms, which must be .22 caliber or smaller, and which must be kept locked up at the gun club at all times. There are also no veritable self-defense laws in England.(4)
The Rise in British Crime and Violence
Despite the talking heads on the evening news implying otherwise, violent crime is steadily coming down in American cities, despite the fact there are more guns in America than ever before (i.e., refuting the simplistic public health view of "more guns, more crime"[5]) and record numbers of citizens carrying permits for concealed firearms. Only Switzerland, where virtually every home houses a fully automatic firearm and every adult male citizen is armed and expected to participate in the national polity as well as local self-government, can boost a longer-lived but just as stable a republic as ours. To make matters worse for British citizen disarmament, despite their draconian gun control laws and their loss of civil liberties, crime has steadily increased in Britain in the last several years: "Britons are chagrined by the findings of a U.S. Department of Justice study that says a person is nearly twice as likely to be robbed, assaulted or have a vehicle stolen in Britain as in the United States. The Trans-Atlantic cousins can take comfort in the fact that the United States remains far ahead of Britain in violent crimes, including murder and rape, although the gap is narrowing there as well."(6)
Additionally, the study revealed, "In 1995, the last year for which complete statistics were available for both countries, there were 20 assaults per 1,000 people or households in England and Wales but only 8.8 in the United States."(4) While the U.S. still leads in the most violent crimes, rates for serious crimes such as murder are coming down relative to Great Britain. In fact, the Associated Press recently reported that U.S. murder rates have reached a 30-year low and "serious crimes reported by police declined for the sixth straight year in 1997."(7)
During this period of the study which was conducted by a Cambridge University professor and a statistician from the U.S. Department of Justice and reported in The Washington Times, several types of crimes rose steadily in Britain while declining in America. For example, "Robberies rose 81 percent in England and Wales but fell to 28 percent in the United States. Assault increased 53 percent in England and Wales but declined 27 percent in the United States. Burglaries doubled in England but fell by half in the United States and motor vehicle theft rose 51 percent in England but remained the same in the United States."(6)
To make matters worse for England (and this is also true for Canada), in those countries where citizens are disarmed in their own homes, day burglary is commonplace and dangerous because criminals know they will not be shot at if caught flagrante delicto; whereas in the U.S., burglars prefer night burglaries and they try to make sure homeowners are not at home to avoid being shot at by the intended victims. A recent report on this dangerous practice and the rising tide of thievery and burglaries in England has dubbed Britain "a nation of thieves." The London Sunday Times noted: "More than one in three British men has a criminal record by the age of 40. While America has cut its crime rate dramatically Britain remains the crime capitol of the West. Where," asks the British author, "have we gone wrong?"(8)
Ironically, the most drastic ascendancy of crimes in Britain was found in those types of felonies where recent studies in the U.S. have shown that guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens, not only save lives, but protect private property, reduce injuries to good people, and crime is generally deterred.(9) For example, the use of firearms to protect oneself against violent predators has proved to be an effective self-defense measure in the United States according to several studies described in the monumental books, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America (1991) and Targeting Guns (1997) by Prof. Gary Kleck of Florida State University; Don B. Kates, et. al., in the Tennessee Law Review journal; David Kopel in at least two books, Guns --- Who Should Have Them (1995) and The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy: Should America Adopt the Gun Controls of Other Democracies? (1993); and Dr. Edgar Suter and other members of Doctors for Integrity in Policy Research in various articles in the Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia (1994-1995).(10,11)
Even U.S. government studies have had to admit the beneficial aspects of gun ownership in the hands of ordinary, law-abiding citizens, particularly in the area of self-protection. For example, a 1993 Department of Justice study found that "67.2 percent of people who had used a weapon to defend themselves against violent crime believed it had helped their situation." The results of this study are, of course, also in line with the 1996 epochal paper and subsequent book, More Guns Less Crime --- Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws (1998) by University of Chicago professor John Lott and researcher David Mustard, which found that allowing people to carry concealed weapons deters violent crime --- without any apparent increase in accidental deaths. The work of these researchers, based on 16 years of studying FBI crime data for all 3,054 U.S. counties, concluded that "if states without right-to-carry laws had adopted them in 1992, about 1,570
murders, 4,177 rapes, and 60,000 aggravated assaults would have been avoided annually."(12)