Tag Archives: Nanny State

News

Grandmother jailed for five years for owning family heirloom handgun

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Story from BBC News. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

A grandmother has been jailed for five years for possessing a “family heirloom” World War II pistol.

Gail Cochrane, 53, had kept the gun for 29 years following the death of her father, who had been in the Royal Navy.

Police found the weapon, a Browning self-loading pistol, during a search of her home in Dundee while looking for her son.

She admitted illegal possession of the firearm, an offence with a minimum five-year jail term under Scots law.

Cochrane told the High Court in Edinburgh that she had never contemplated she might be committing a crime by keeping the gun or that she might need to get a licence for the weapon.

She said: “I thought it was just a war trophy.”

The judge is a woman, and women often don’t like guns in the home:

However, Judge Lady Smith said: “I am not satisfied that a reasonable explanation has been put forward for not handing this gun into the authorities throughout the 29-year period she says she has had it in her possession.”

The judge said she was unable to find herself satisfied that this was one of the rare cases in which exceptional circumstances existed.

She said: “The result is I have no alternative but to sentence Mrs Cochrane to a period of five years.”

[…]When interviewed, Cochrane told police that the gun had previously belonged to her father and that she had kept it when he died.

She said she believed it was a real gun, but had no ammunition for it.

Scotland is the part of the UK that is most solidly owned by the Liberal Democrat party, which is further to the left than the Labor party.

She’s an innocent law-abiding citizen, but she has to be made an example, I guess.

Commentary

Do gun-free zones prevent multiple-victim public shootings?

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Article by John Lott in National Review.

Excerpt:

It wasn’t supposed to happen in England, with its very strict gun-control laws. And yet last week, Derrick Bird shot twelve people to death and wounded eleven others in the northwestern county of Cumbria. A headline in the London Times read: “Toughest laws in the world could not stop Cumbria tragedy.”

But surely this was an aberration. Because America has the most guns, multiple-victim public shootings are an American thing, right? No, not at all. Contrary to public perception, Western Europe, most of whose countries have much tougher gun laws than the United States, has experienced many of the worst multiple-victim public shootings. Particularly telling, all the multiple-victim public shootings in Western Europe have occurred in places where civilians are not permitted to carry guns. The same is true in the United States: All the public shootings in which more than three people have been killed have occurred in places where civilians may not legally bring guns.

The article has a list of MVPSs in Europe. They all occur in gun-free zones, where guns are prohibited by law.

When a government bans guns, the only people who have guns are criminals. And they know that there is no one to stop them when they open fire. That is why violent crime more than doubled in the 4 year period after the UK banned handguns.

News

61-year-old British man convicted for cutting up fruit with a Swiss Army knife

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Story from the UK Daily Mail. (H/T Overlawyered via ECM)

Excerpt:

A disabled caravanner who kept a penknife in his glove compartment to use on picnics has blasted the authorities after being dragged through court for possessing an offensive weapon.

Rodney Knowles, 61, walks with the aid of a stick and had used the Swiss Army knife to cut up fruit on picnics with his wife.

[…]He said: ‘There is no previous conviction history whatsoever and it was not in his possession and was in the car glove compartment in a pouch.’

The retired maintenance engineer, from Buckland, Devon, had no criminal record before the case.

He said: ‘The tool was in my glove box in a pouch, along with a torch, first aid kit and waterproofs.

‘It is everything I need for the maintenance of my car or if I break down.

‘Now I have a criminal record for the first time in my life. I am upset by that.’

This is good, because once the public is disarmed, then the poor helpless criminals who are only criminals because of the social injustice of the capitalist system will have no one to fear as they execute crimes. Stealing isn’t wrong – nothing is right or wrong. And criminals shouldn’t be deterred from crime by having their victims defend themselves – even if law-abiding people have to be injured or killed.

Besides, it’s illegal for men to be protectors of their families in the UK – that’s the government’s job. Men just get to pay the taxes for the government. After all, men don’t really care about their families. It’s not like men have some sort of innate desire to protect and provide for and lead their families that would be thwarted by gun control, high taxes and mandatory public schooling. They’ll still want to get married, right? Besides, not having to defend the family leaves a man more time for looking at homes for sale and shopping for women’s shoes.

What went wrong in the United Kingdom?

I wonder if you all remember a while back when I linked to all the chapters of Theodore Dalrymple’s famous book “Life at the Bottom”, which is about the worldview of the British lower class. It’s also about how rich, well-meaning secular leftists hurt the poor by enacting public policies that reward bad behavior and punish good behavior. Dalrymple is a psychiatrist in a hospital, so he sees it all firsthand.