**BANG�Bloody hell!�BANG**
January 13, 2002 ~ 1:24 p.m.
I must congratulate Mr. Levski on this recent entry of his. The perception that serious crime can�t occur in Britain because this nation banned handguns really gets on my nerves. Even more nerve-wracking is the notion that we here in Britain will be forever safe from gun violence as a result of this.
I�ve heard some incredibly daft claptrap in my time, but that one wins the Dumb-ass Idea of the Century Award.
The statistics for the past year indicate that overall crimes involving guns in London has escalated a remarkable 72 percent in one year�2,648 incidents in 1999 to 3,685 in 2000. Muggings involving a gun increased by 53 percentduring the past year, while gun murders increased 90 percent.
Does this sound like a safer society to live in? Ask the folks of Brixton, the West End, Hackney and countless other communities across the London area who have dealt with shootings practically on their doorsteps. It was particularly bad during the summer when there were reports of shootings on the news every other night. The gun violence in London has leaped so exponentially in the years following the firearms ban of 1997 that the BBC has even produced two television documentaries exposing the rise in criminal gun use. (I remember doing the promotional advertisements for them at work.)
The Met (the London police force) wishes to calm our nerves by saying that the rise in gunplay is largely confined to the drug dealers and specific gangs. Is that so? Sounds a lot like the situation in America too, yet the U.S. gets exposed all the time as such a dangerous place to live. Sometimes I get the feeling other Brits look at me as if to say, �You�ve lived 31 years in America and lived to tell about it? Bloody hell!� Apparently, they view life on an American street as a modern-day version of the Wild West, with residents dodging bullets as they go about their daily business.
Well, why don�t you grab a cup of tea, dear fellows, and sit in the middle of the Oval Cricket Grounds and stare at the clouds where your heads are, because in a few short years, that will probably be the only safe place left in London.
The problem is even worse in London, because communities are mixed. London gangs aren�t necessarily confined to the ghettos. They can live on otherwise safe looking streets with ethnically diverse neighbors. In American cities, you are always pretty clear about what the no-go areas are. In many London townships, you can never totally be sure.
Obviously, the great British social experiment of avoiding ghettos by encouraging mixed communities hasn�t helped us to all get along. And there are ghettos here. Only they call them �council estates.�
I take the Met�s assurances with a grain of salt. If it�s true that gun violence is reserved for only rival gang members, then why was an innocent girl shot in the head for her mobile phone as she was walking home, minding her own business, just after New Year�s in supposedly safe Walthamstow?
You gun opponents out there, are you taking notes?
Britain doesn�t have a gun problem, America doesn�t have a gun problem, even South Africa�which has always made American gun violence look like child�s play compared with their own�doesn�t have a gun problem. They all have a judicial problem. America locks up non-violent recreational marijuana users while releasing sociopaths to make room for them. Britian has a criminal justice system so weak with nancy boy liberal judges that the average British citizen hardly stands a fair chance against violent criminals. South Africa, former great land of state-sponsored racism, is still figuring out how to deal with the near civil war tearing the country apart in its post-apartheid era.
There�s also a people problem to take into account. Morals have been depleted and life degraded so thoroughly that it seems there is no end to the evil that has been wrought upon us. But, unfortunately, for many of us, it�s far easier to personify a gun and point to that as the ultimate evil while failing to notice the sick mind of the individual abusing its use.
I�d like to add that America was not the first country to make worldwide headlines with a school gun massacre. It was the United Kingdom. Everybody knows about Dunblane. And there have also been school bloodbaths in recent years in France, Sweden and the Netherlands, all countries that�wouldn�t you know it!�have banned firearms as well.
Unless we can rescue our society with civil responsibility and a tough, no-nonsense judicial system, banning handguns won�t save you. Only you, dear fellow law-abiding citizen, will be without a gun. The criminal creeping up behind you will, however, won�t give a damn if it�s his right to own one or not.
� M.E.M.
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Copyright � 2001-2007 by M.E. Manning. All material is written by me, unless explicitly stated otherwise by use of footnotes or bylines. Do not copy or redistribute without my permission.
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