Tag Archives: Police

News

Former soldiers arrested by UK police for defending their business from burglar

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So this news story from the UK Daily Mail should come as no surprise to anyone who reads British writers like Theodore Dalrymple or James Hannan or Peter Hitchens.

Excerpt:

Two men were dragged to court for apprehending a Romanian they caught burgling their business.

A nine-month ordeal ended for Steven Iliffe, 54, and son Daniel, 26, yesterday when a judge threw out the case against them.

They had begged police to go on a roof to arrest career criminal Petre Ilie.

But officers were barred by their superiors, via their radio, due to health and safety rules.

Eventually, the father and son, both former soldiers, went on the roof themselves to tackle the armed man.

They were stunned when the police later arrested them on suspicion of attempted murder – and later charged them with the lesser offence of causing grievous bodily harm with intent.

Yesterday, the pair said they were considering legal action against Leicestershire Police.

Mr Iliffe senior said he had suffered a heart attack in a cell triggered by the stress of his arrest at their scrap metal business in Hinckley, Leicestershire, last December.

He added: ‘We had suffered a string of burglaries and went up onto that roof only because the police had refused to do so.’

The criminal is in the country illegally, too:

Leicester Crown Court was told yesterday that Ilie, 39, already had ‘a number of convictions for burglary, failing to surrender and breaching court orders’ in the UK under the name Christopher Tudor.

In 2010 he was deported but sneaked back into the UK.

He was then arrested again alongside the Iliffes.

I hope that the United States doesn’t ever get to the point where the government prevents law-abiding citizens from defending themselves from criminals. The UK is a very liberal country, so they are very much into the idea that evil is good, and good is evil, so that everyone is “equal” and liberals can feel compassionate.

I know that formerly liberal countries like Canada have been pushing back hard against crime, with measures like abolishing the long gun registry, a tough “omnibus” crime bill, and renewed protections for self-defense. I guess that’s why their crime rates are at a 40-year low. Canada is serious about stopping crime. They do what works, and then they get the results that they expect to get.

News

Which culture condones killing young girls or throwing acid in their faces?

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Here’s a story from the UK Daily Mail. (H/T Blazing Cat Fur)

Excerpt:

A 10-year-old schoolgirl died after being shot as she was walking home from a bible study class in Egypt.

Jessi Boulus died from the single shot to the chest as she made her way through the streets of Cairo on Tuesday.

Her death is yet another example of rising tensions against Christians in the country after supporters of ousted President Mohammed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood started to target Egypt’s Christian minority, holding them partly responsible for his removal.

Jessi’s mother told the BBC News she believes her daughter was targeted due to her religion.

‘She was my best friend, my everything. Jessi was just becoming a young woman,’ she said.

‘Every woman dreams of becoming a mother, and for 10 years I was lucky enough to be a mum. I’ll miss Jessi calling me mum – I know I won’t ever hear it again.’

Jessi’s father told the website: ‘Jessi was everything to us. Her killers didn’t know that Jessi was my life – my future. They killed our future. I lived for her. We both did.’

Her parents said that they had noticed rising tensions in recent months and had discussed emigrating but had decided to stay in Egypt as it was their home.

In April, a Muslim mob attacked the main cathedral of the Coptic Orthodox Church as Christians held a funeral and protested there over four Christians killed in sectarian violence the day before.

Pope Tawadros II publicly blamed Morsi for failing to protect the building.

Egyptian security forces stood by during a brutal attack on Coptic Christians in Luxor days after Mohamed Morsi’s removal, according to Amnesty International.

During the 18-hour-long attack on 5 July, the security forces left six besieged Coptic Christian men – four of whom were then killed and one hospitalised – to the mercy of an angry crowd.

An angry mob armed with metal bars, knives, tree branches and hammers attacked Christian homes and businesses in Nagah Hassan, 11 miles west of Luxor, after the dead body of a Muslim man was discovered near the homes of Christian families.

Despite local residents’ and religious leaders’ repeated calls for help, security forces on the scene made only half-hearted attempts to end the violence and sufficient reinforcements failed to arrive.

And another story from the leftist BBC.

Excerpt:

The Zanzibar government has offered a reward of 10m Tanzanian shillings (£3,970; $6,170) for information leading to the capture of attackers who threw acid at two UK women, police say.

Kirstie Trup and Katie Gee, both 18 and from London, had acid thrown on their faces, chests and hands.

The island’s Police Commissioner Musa Ali Musa told the BBC that there was “no prime suspect” for the attack.

He said that a lot of people had been questioned and information gathered.

However no-one has been arrested or charged and investigations are continuing, Mr Musa said.

[…]The two young Britons, who were volunteering for the charity Art in Tanzania, have been flown back to the UK.

Previously I wrote about Islamic child sex-trafficking and Islamic gang rape.

I post these stories because it’s become fashionable in certain circles to condemn “judging”. Everybody wants to be liked these days, and that means being “tolerant” and seeing all views and cultures as equally valid. Even Christains are taken in by it, extolling the virtues of not judging anyone, and judging people who do think that evil really is evil.

When you meet someone who says that it is wrong to judge, show them these news stories.

News

New CDC study on gun violence that Obama requested undermines gun control

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Here’s an article about the CDC study from the leftist Slate magazine. (H/T ECM)

First – Obama ordered this study, and it was performed by an agency under his control – the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The article says:

Earlier this year, President Obama ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to assess the existing research on gun violence and recommend future studies. That report, prepared by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council, is now complete. Its findings won’t entirely please the Obama administration or the NRA, but all of us should consider them.

The article explains 10 findings of the report.

Here are a few of them:

2. Most indices of crime and gun violence are getting better, not worse. “Overall crime rates have declined in the past decade, and violent crimes, including homicides specifically, have declined in the past 5 years,” the report notes. “Between 2005 and 2010, the percentage of firearm-related violent victimizations remained generally stable.” Meanwhile, “firearm-related death rates for youth ages 15 to 19 declined from 1994 to 2009.” Accidents are down, too: “Unintentional firearm-related deaths have steadily declined during the past century. The number of unintentional deaths due to firearm-related incidents accounted for less than 1 percent of all unintentional fatalities in 2010.”

5. Mass shootings aren’t the problem. “The number of public mass shootings of the type that occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School accounted for a very small fraction of all firearm-related deaths,” says the report. “Since 1983 there have been 78 events in which 4 or more individuals were killed by a single perpetrator in 1 day in the United States, resulting in 547 victims and 476 injured persons.” Compare that with the 335,000 gun deaths between 2000 and 2010 alone.

7. Guns are used for self-defense often and effectively. “Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year … in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008,” says the report. The three million figure is probably high, “based on an extrapolation from a small number of responses taken from more than 19 national surveys.” But a much lower estimate of 108,000 also seems fishy, “because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use.” Furthermore, “Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was ‘used’ by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.”

10. It isn’t true that most gun acquisitions by criminals can be blamed on a few bad dealers. The report concedes that in 1998, “1,020 of 83,272 federally licensed retailers (1.2 percent) accounted for 57.4 percent of all guns traced by the ATF.” However, “Gun sales are also relatively concentrated; approximately 15 percent of retailers request 80 percent of background checks on gun buyers conducted by the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.” Researchers have found that “the share of crime gun traces attributed to these few dealers only slightly exceeded their share of handgun sales, which are almost equally concentrated among a few dealers.” Volume, not laxity, drives the number of ill-fated sales.

The findings of the CDC study are not aligned with either side of the gun control debate, but considering the source (an agency of the Obama administration), I expect them to be even more liberal than the real state of affairs.

A better place to look for the truth about guns is in the academic literature. Here are two books I really like for that.

Both of those books make the case that permitting law-abiding citizens to own firearms for self-defense reduces rates of gun violence.