@Druid799 some really great points there and I understand your reasoning. I believe a farmer was convicted a fair old while ago for killing a young burglar with an illegally held shotgun.
I personally don’t think saying that banning alcohol or Smoking is puerile and my reason being the following. I should say that smoking is self inflicted and would completely agree on that however I think with alcohol it’s a different argument. Let’s take guns out of argument briefly 39% of the 516,000 odd violent crimes last year in England and Wales where alcohol related so for me there is an argument to for banning alcohol as one third of people who commit Violent crimes under the influence of alcohol. Bearing in mind this is violent crime not drink driving or just being drunk in public. Would this statistic be worse if people had guns? Possibly I think you could argue it would be quite reasonably. However the of these 200,000 odd victims of terrible crimes how many could have prevented a crime happening to them if they were armed? I’m not saying they fired a weapon but even just the implied threat of it being used can be a deterrent. Again we can’t measure this as there isn’t any data and I’m only surmising.
I also agree that we don’t have a gun problem in the UK because they aren’t readily available but we do have a knife problem, a very serious one. I understand the reasoning for needing knives and wouldn’t call for them to be banned but a knife is still a lethal weapon as is a gun in the wrong hands.
Now if we consider that like someone mentioned on here that the average knife used in a stabbing in this country is a kitchen knife that you can buy at a supermarket these are scarily easily available yet people argue that a knife is just a tool. Well so is a gun isn’t it?
thankfully criminals tend to use guns against other criminals but knife crime in this country scares me genuinely so let’s regulate knife sales properly and make sure that people can’t just buy a samurai sword unless they have a good enough reason for it. Kitchen knives will have to kept in a safe and you will need to sign them out and in every time you use them. Sounds pretty stupid but then can be lethal can’t they?
So joe public shouldn’t have knives either because the statistics prove they can’t be trusted and alcohol as well because they can’t be trusted.
Would you ban knifes? Would you ban alcohol?
I think the UK does have very good gun laws however I just think that if someone wants AR15 they should at least be allowed to apply to have one. If they get one or not depends on the authorities then.
The farmer got prosecuted for it as he should for illegal possession. he also shot them in the back as they were running away i believe.
Im pretty sure if tobacco or alcohol were new discoveries they would be controlled or outright banned. But theres the problem with the heritage behind certain substances. In my experiance though, you know the violent drunks before they have any amount of alcohol, it reduces inhibitions.... Though i do feel 'i was under the influence' is used far too often as an excuse, like it lessens the crime.
A small percentage of crimes may have been prevented were the victim armed. but then again, in that situation, the criminal would also be armed (back to the gun owning arms race senario). The police in this world would 100% have to be armed as well. and in a country where everyone you come accross might be packing, then i bet unlawful death by being shot by law enforcement, scared for their own life would sky rocket.
knife crime stat for 2019 (47349) accounts for 0.81% of all crime reported that year in the UK (total reported crimes were 5.8 million). knife crime is scewed in the news, short of pandemic, its the big story of the time. It comes in waves, for example, if you followed the tabloids in the late 90's then the country was infested by paedofiles. There is a brass eye episode from the 80's (?) that i am certain will never be aired again because the current generation have no sence of humour.
forgive me again for jumping to conclusions and reading between the lines. but you say your scared of knife crime. well an AR15 is not going to disarm the criminal, its just going to increase his potental range of influence, because if you have an ar15 he will have similar, and being his intent, he would have it pointed at you first. its also not what you would need? im guessing your thinking a more concealed carry option?
It all boils down to 'if you can legally own a gun, anyone who picks a fight with you is also likely to own a gun' so the threat or issue is not solved, the ranges and potential collatoral go up.
as for banning knives because they can kill (like guns), have a think. other than killing something what use has a gun got? can it do anything other than shoot a projectile? is there a daily application for it? even weekly? when handguns etc were banned here and in australia 'self defence' is not a valid reason. as someone else said, if no one else has a gun, then you dont need one.
licencing and checks to own a gun are like STD tests. only accurate on the day of the test. It just poves you havent had a mental break down or comited a crime....YET. what if there is an unchecked mental condition? what if they are highly strung and things are not going well at work, or family life is getting tough (the wife leaving you and taking the kids etc), what if your paranoid and someone just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? everyone has a breaking point, and you just legally armed them? I will admit that peoples breaking point is most likely to result in suicide by gun, but a few of them may have a degree of murder before the gun gets turned on themselves...
As said earlier, knife crime scares you. thats fine. though i would argue, unless your in an inner city area associated with gang crime the chances of having one waved at you are far lower than the news would imply. but maybe there should be an new type of firearm with a catridge of an effective killing range of 5 meters? out of range of knives etc. would never happen though. but then i would guarantee that the knife crime rate would drop and gun crime rates with this new 'personal defence' weapon would go up.
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