Tag Archives: Gun Ownership

News

Couple arrested for using legally-owned gun to defend home from burglars

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Dina sent me this article from the UK Daily Mail, which I found very disturbing.

Excerpt:

  • Police received 999 call from a man who said he had opened fire on four intruders
  • Man, 35, fired shotgun at gang who broke into his isolated cottage in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire
  • He and his wife, 43, called police immediately after shooting
  • Couple arrested on suspicion of GBH and four men detained on suspicion of aggravated burglary

The couple arrested after two suspected burglars were shot during a midnight break-in at their remote rural home had been robbed three or four times already, it has been reported.

Police descended on the farm cottage in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire after receiving a 999 call from a man who said he had opened fire on four intruders.

The homeowners, who have been named as 35-year-old Andy Ferrie and his wife Tracey, 43, were understood to have called police immediately after the shooting, at 12.26am yesterday morning.

Mr Ferrie’s mother Susan Spilner told the Sun newspaper: ‘This is not the first time they have been broken into. They have been robbed three or four times. One of them was quite nasty.”

[…]The man who dialed 999 told officers he had fired his shotgun, which is licensed and legally held, and the intruders fled.

Minutes later, ambulance paramedics were called to treat a man with shotgun injuries. The 999 call was understood to have been made by one of the suspected burglars.

A second man was treated for shotgun injuries after he walked into Leicester Royal Infirmary, around ten miles from the cottage.

Neither of the men’s injuries were said to be serious.

The householder and his wife were arrested on suspicion of causing grievous bodily harm.

He is thought to be a farm worker who kept the shotgun legally as part of his job. Four men in their 20s and 30s were also arrested on suspicion of aggravated burglary.

I checked the population of their city and it’s 25,000 people. That is just scary to me.

The UK took a hard turn to the left over the last couple of decades under the Labor Party. They believed that disarming law-abiding citizens in order to protect criminals would reduce crime. In addition to arresting law-abiding citizens, the UK also has strict gun control that prevents law-abiding citizens from defending themselves from criminals. For example, in 1997, the UK banned handguns. The result of that policy was that violent crime more than doubled in the four years following the ban. So not only is there this initiative on the secular left to coddle criminals with lighter sentences, but there is also the effort by the secular left to disarm law-abiding citizens.

Men in particular are meant to use force against criminals. But that distinctive male role is not OK with the UK Labor Party, who do not like distinctions of good and evil in any case. This inability to protect their families is stressful for men. Many men are not interested in getting married because of this stress. The whole point of marriage for a man is that there will be respect for his male roles from his family as well as from the state. The refusal of the government to punish criminals is not reassuring to men. And the government’s tendency to not let men do what needs to be done and use their judgment in cases like this just makes marriage seem less attractive to us.

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News

UN finalizes plan to allow future confiscation of legally-owned guns

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From CNS News:

 Amid energetic lobbying from both sides, the Obama administration is taking part in month-long negotiations at United Nations headquarters aimed at finalizing a conventional arms trade treaty, which supporters say will save millions of lives but opponents fear threatens to restrict Second Amendment rights at home and U.S. arms sales policies abroad.

[…]In a letter to Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the eve of the conference, 130 Republican lawmakers outlined their concerns that the treaty being negotiated could negatively affect U.S. security, foreign policy and economic interests – as well as Americans’ constitutional rights.

“The ATT must not accept that free democracies and totalitarian regimes have the same right to conduct arms transfers: this is a dangerous piece of moral equivalence,” the letter stated.

“Moreover, the ATT must not impose criteria for determining the permissibility of arms transfers that are vague, easily politicized, and readily manipulated,” it continued, referring in particular to U.S. arms sales to Taiwan and Israel.

The lawmakers warned that they would oppose the appropriation or authorization of any taxpayer money to implement a “flawed” treaty.

The Bush administration in 2006 cast the lone negative vote when 153 nations passed a U.N. General Assembly resolution that began the treaty-drafting process, which is now in its final phase in New York. President Obama reversed that position in 2009, backing the initiative but making its support conditional on consensus decision-making.

[…]ATT proponents and the U.N. say the initiative will not affect domestic gun ownership, but Second Amendment advocacy groups are adamantly opposed to the treaty, which Gun Owners of America calls “a backdoor attempt by the Obama administration to impose radical gun control on America citizens.”

Addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference last February, National Rifle Association vice-president Wayne LaPierre accused Obama of working behind the scenes with the U.N. on a “treaty that could effectively ban or severely restrict civilian ownership of firearms worldwide.”

“I’ve been around long enough to know that the U.N. has little regard for our Constitution and none at all for the Second Amendment,” LaPierre said. “But I never thought I’d see the day when an American White House would tolerate a proposal that would literally gut one of our most fundamental freedoms in this country.”

Last March Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) introduced legislation prohibiting any funds for negotiating an ATT that would restrict U.S. citizens’ Second Amendment rights. The bill has 19 co-sponsors, all Republicans.

I think when deciding whether to believe the nice-sounding words of the Obama administration, we should look at their record on gun control and their record of keeping their word. They are gun control radicals, and what they claim will happen to us before a bill is passed often isn’t any great predictor about what follows next. Remember “you can keep your current health insurance”? Not so much.

Commentary

Editorials by Stephen Baskerville, John Lott, Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams

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I thought I would throw out a variety of recent editorials from some of my favorite economists and public policy experts. Economist Robert P. Murphy isn’t featured today, because I wrote an entire post about his excellent article on energy policy recently.

Does the government discourage marriage and family?

Patrick Henry College economist Stephen Baskerville wrote an article about the government’s role decline of marriage and the family.

He writes:

…80 percent of divorces are unilateral. Under “no-fault,” divorce becomes a power grab by one spouse, assisted by judicial officials who profit from the ensuing litigation: judges, lawyers, psychotherapists, and social workers. Involuntary divorce involves government agents forcibly removing innocent people from their homes, seizing their property, and separating them from their children. It requires long-term supervision over private life by state functionaries, including police and jails.

…Invariably the first action in a divorce is to separate the children from one parent, usually the father. Even if he is innocent of any legal wrongdoing and does not agree to the divorce, the state seizes his children with no burden of proof to justify why. The burden of proof–and financial burden–falls on him to demonstrate why they should be returned.

A legally unimpeachable parent can thus be arrested for seeing his own children without government authorization. He can be arrested through additional judicial directives that apply to no one but him. He can be arrested for domestic violence or child abuse, even without evidence that he has committed any. He can be arrested for not paying child support, regardless of the amount demanded. He can even be arrested for not paying an attorney or psychotherapist. There is no formal charge, no jury, no trial, and no record.

If these statements surprise you, I recommend you read the whole article to find out how this is done. You will never see anything like this reported in the mainstream media. They have an agenda that forbids telling the truth about this issue.

Do gun-free zones discourage multiple victim public shootings?

University of Maryland economist John R. Lott writes about gun-free zones and their effect on MVPS incidents in this Fox News article.

He writes:

Time after time multiple- victim public shootings occur in “gun free zones” — public places where citizens are not legally able to carry guns. The horrible attack today in Binghamton, New York is no different. Every multiple-victim public shooting that I have studied, where more than three people have been killed, has taken place where guns are banned.

You would think that it would be an important part of the news stories for a simple reason: Gun-free zones are a magnet for these attacks. Extensive discussions of these attacks can be found here and here. We want to keep people safe, but the problem is that it is the law-abiding good citizens, not the criminals, who obey these laws. We end up disarming the potential victims and not the criminals. Rather than making places safe for victims, we unintentionally make them safe for the criminal.

Lott is the author of “More Guns, Less Crime”, a study, published by University of Chicago Press, that shows how concealed-carry laws drastically reduce crime in every state in which these laws were enacted. Surprising? Take a second look.

Is moral equivalence good foreign policy?

Hoover Institute (Stanford University) economist Thomas Sowell writes about the danger of electing a president with no executive experience at any level. Especially one who believes, as Evan Sayet says, that evil is good, and good is evil.

Sowell writes about Obama’s affection for Iran and Russia:

What did his televised overture to the Iranians accomplish, except to reassure them that he was not going to do a damn thing to stop them from getting a nuclear bomb? It is a mistake that can go ringing down the corridors of history.

…This year, President Obama’s attempt to make a backdoor deal with the Russians, behind the backs of the NATO countries, was not only rejected but made public by the Russians– a sign of contempt and a warning to our allies not to put too much trust in the United States.

And his hostility for Israel and Britain:

However much Barack Obama has proclaimed his support for Israel, his first phone call as President of the United States was to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, to whom he has given hundreds of millions of dollars, which can buy a lot of rockets to fire into Israel.

Our oldest and staunchest ally, Britain, has been downgraded by President Obama’s visibly less impressive reception of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, compared to the way that previous Presidents over the past two generations have received British Prime Ministers.

You can find a lot more about the kind of foreign policy threats we face at The Western Experience. The world is not a safe place, Bush just made it look that way by keeping our enemies in check, in exactly the way Obama won’t.

Is wealth redistribution morally justified?

Finally, let’s see what George Mason University economist Walter Williams has to say about the morality of wealth redistribution.

Excerpt:

The reason is that now that the U.S. Congress has established the principle that one American has a right to live at the expense of another American, it no longer pays to be moral. People who choose to be moral and refuse congressional handouts will find themselves losers. They’ll be paying higher and higher taxes to support increasing numbers of those paying lower and lower taxes. As it stands now, close to 50 percent of income earners have no federal income tax liability and as such, what do they care about rising income taxes? In other words, once legalized theft begins, it becomes too costly to remain moral and self-sufficient.

I recommend clicking on whichever of these stories strikes you as the most wrong or unfamiliar, and see if reading the whole thing changes your mind at all. I think it’s a fun experience to become more aware and tolerant of different views by learning about them. You can still disagree, but you’ll have more understanding.