Why Stop with Guns: England’s Mass Killing Problem

I’ve been to London a couple of times, and one of the most intriguing things I see every time I go, are the ISIS protests.  London seems to have one of these protests almost every day – thousands of Islamic people marching through the capital of England, proudly carrying ISIS flags, and chanting such catchy phrases as, ‘Death to the U.K.! Death to the U.S.A!’  And yet, many in America think England, with its strict anti-gun laws, is safer than is the United States.

I thought it might be interesting to take a good hard look at just how different post-gun England is from the gun-infested U.S.A..  I’ve always thought it was silly to separate out gun deaths from other sorts of deaths, so rather than looking only at gun death rates, I wanted to look at homicides, terrorist attacks, mass killings – all things related to crime and death – together, to see just how much more peaceful England is than is the United States.

One of the first things I found is that England is not gun-free.  Not only do the British stockpile guns, but also howitzers, machine guns, and hand grenades.  It turns out that banning guns does not take them away from those who do not care about the law.  In the case of England (and the rest of Europe), these stockpiles are coming through Belgium, and being hidden largely in mosques, in preparation for jihad.  As you can see from the Tariq Ramadan quote attached to the picture on this post, Islam is very open about its goals: “We are not here to adopt Western values.  We are here to colonize the US and Canada, and spread Islamic Sharia Law.  Canada has one of the easiest legal systems to penetrate and advance Sharia from within – but if that doesn’t work, we won’t hesitate to use violent Jihad.”

I fact-checked this quote before posting it.  It’s legitimate, and Tariq Ramadan is a professor at England’s Oxford University, where he is free to teach England’s children to either kill in the name of jihad, or to die by jihad.

Ironically, England does not have the same free speech protections the United States has, so while Professor Ramadan is free to preach violent jihad, non-Muslim British people are not allowed to denounce Professor Ramadan, less they be guilty of spreading hate.  Everywhere the freedom of speech falls to calls for banning ‘hate speech,’ words like ‘hate’ end up being defined based on who is speaking rather than what is said.  Muslims are free to preach hate, but non-Muslims are not even free to denounce the hate Muslims preach.

I want to be clear too that I am not talking about all Muslims.  Many Muslims want the same things everyone else wants, and many Muslims practice Islam in ways that are just as compatible with Western values as is Christianity.  The crown prince of Saudi Arabia wants to spread a moderate version of Islam, and if he is successful, then in future generations Islam may emerge from its dark age.  I recognize that many Muslims are not in that dark age, but I also recognize the need to be wary of those, like Professor Ramadan, who are.

Do Muslims in England ever act on the words of people like Tariq Ramadan?  It turns out they do.  England has far more terrorist attacks than does the United States, in spite of being a much smaller country, and that is true even if you count every mass shooting in the United States as an act of terror.  The fact is that England does not have the kinds of mass shootings that we see in the United States, but what England has is worse.

Here are some examples of mass killings in England…  David Copeland killed three people with a series of nail bombs in 1999, and injured 139.  More recently, in 2005, four suicide bombers in the UK’s subway system killed more than fifty people, and injured many hundreds more.  Still more recently, on March 22, 2017, three people were killed and 29 were hospitalized, after a jihadist drove a truck into a crowd on Westminster Bridge.  Two months later, on May 23, 2017, twenty two people were killed, and fifty nine injured, by a bombing at a Manchester concert.  Less than two weeks later, on June 3, 2017, jihadists drove down a bunch of people on London Bridge, and knifed a bunch of people at Borough Market, in London.  Another van was driven into a crowd, killing one person and wounding 10, on June 19, 2017, at Finsbury Park.  I could keep going, but I think you get the point.  Not only do the rates of mass murder (and attempted mass murder) in England more than rival the United States, but in England, the rates are climbing fast, prompting many English leaders to call this ‘the new normal’ for the English people.  Can you imagine living in a city where mass killings are so common that the Mayor of that city, rather than denounce the killings, tells the public to get used to it?  That’s London.  That’s what everyone here wants to emulate.

Unless someone is less dead when killed by a bomb or run over by a van than when shot by a gun, England has a far bigger problem than we do.

It’s not all about jihad either.  England has a very long history of mass killings that rivals the United States, even without counting jihad, when one considers the comparable sizes of England and the United States.  The British seem to prefer using bombs, and fire, as mass-murder weapons, but if anything it turns out that bombs and fire can kill more people than can guns.  The British also like using knives to kill each other, with a rate of knife homicides that is so bad that British doctors are calling for a ban on kitchen knives.  A look at a common London newspaper shows that London is just as dangerous, in terms of murder rates, as are any of our cities.

My guess is that should London go ahead and ban the kitchen knife, we’ll start selling lots of baseball bats overseas.  Even England can’t ban everything.

What makes guns unique?  Why do people focus on guns rather than on all of the other ways people can kill other people?  It seems maddening to think that someone stabbed sixty times is any less dead than someone who is shot, or that people killed in a bombing are any less dead than those killed in a mass-shooting, so why are people so focused on guns that they overlook all of the other ways people kill, when guns are not available?

I’ll tell you why.  Sam Colt made an 80 year-old Grandmother just as strong as any 22 year-old man.  A grandmother with a gun can protect herself against someone bigger and stronger than her.  We know from the extensive analysis in John Lott’s book that more guns lead to less crime – or more to the point, where concealed carry is more common, violent crime rates plummet and crimes where a criminal is not as apt to run into anyone (like stealing an empty car) go up.  This is true with all forms of violent crime.  There is only one logical reason for people to focus on guns, while ignoring all of the other ways people are killed: the war against guns is not a war against killing, but a war against self-defense.

Another difference between shootings and bombings is that, while it is hard to stop a suicide bomber with a gun, there are a surprisingly large number of cases where mass shootings were stopped by armed citizens.  Those who wish to commit such heinous acts as mass-murder unfortunately take the possibility of an armed citizenry into account, and prefer to kill people in gun-free zones.  In England, that’s everywhere, and in America, most mass killings used to be committed at fast food restaurants and post offices, generating the phrase ‘going postal’.  The creation of gun-free zones gave would-be mass killers places where they can kill, with impunity, until the police arrive.  When a would-be mass shooter hears the phrase, ‘gun-free zone,’ what they really hear is ‘target-rich environment.’

Going back to England..  Criminals in London have no problem getting guns, and there are a number of areas in London where street gangs have complete control over the citizenry – the police only entering those areas when they can go in force.  London police apparently think that not policing large swaths of London is the best way to avoid gun deaths – the police often needing to shoot people when they do go in.  If you really want to see what post-gun London looks like for the people who live there, watch Harry Brown, staring Michael Kane.  Harry Brown won a slew of awards for it’s accurate portrayal of post-gun London.

There are also a large number of Muslim no-go zones, where Islamic gangs enforce Sharia, and where British law does not apply.  The United States is in a bit of a unique position in that the vast majority of our Muslims came here to get away from Sharia Law, and as a result my wife and I can have lunch in Hamtramck, Michigan, whenever we like, with no fear of being attacked.  In those parts of Europe where mass Muslim migrations have brought in large numbers of people who want to live under Sharia, there are large Muslim-dominated areas that are essentially states within the state, and those areas are not safe.  Snopes calls the notion of ‘no-go zones’ false, but the devil is in the details.  As with gang-controlled boroughs, the police do sometimes go into Muslim-controlled areas, but when they do, they go in force, sparking riots.  Snopes says that this does not constitute a ‘no-go zone’ but I’ll leave that up to the reader.

There are parts of Chicago that are essentially controlled by gangs too, where the police only go when they have to.  As in London, however, it is almost impossible for a private citizen to legally carry a gun in Chicago, and as such, in those parts of Chicago that are controlled by gangs, the only guns are the ones the gang members carry.  Try creating a no-go zone in a city controlled by Republicans and see what happens – a well armed militia would throw the gangs out, unless the police threw the gangs out first.

Guns are not the only way to kill people, and if someone wants to kill large numbers of people, guns are not even the best way to do it.  When people say that guns are designed to kill, the irony is that, while many guns are designed to kill, the most commonly used gun in mass shootings (the AR-15) was actually designed not to kill. One of the reasons NATO went to the 5.56 mm round was that when one kills an enemy combatant, they take one combatant out of the fire fight, whereas a wounded combatant needs to be carried by two non-wounded comrades, taking three people out of the fight.  The 7.62 mm bullet was too effective at killing, so a smaller round became the norm.  The .45 is probably the best round for killing at short range, and particularly the hollow-point .45.  Bullets designed to do massive internal damage, by flattening out into as big a pancake as possible, kill.  Bullets that fly straight through people without flattening, like the 5.56 mm round the AR-15 uses, tend to wound.  Banning so-called assault rifles would, at best, lead to mass shooters using other weapons that may not look as scary, but that are apt to kill far more people.

If we want to be realistic, we’d have to ban all guns for a ban to be effective, or at least all semi-automatic guns and revolvers, but then if we wanted to be realistic, we would look at places like England to see what those places really look like, in terms of all of the ways people can kill people, and not just in terms of guns.  When we look at the facts – all of the facts – covering all of the different ways people can be killed, we have fewer mass killing incidents than do many other places, where there are no legal guns.  Unless one wishes to take the position that it is better to kill 100 people with a bomb than 10 people with a gun, we would be stupid to follow England’s lead.

Our way, imperfect as it may be, works better.  The Second Amendment stays.

 

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