Just How Insane Has
England Gotten With
It's Gun Ban?
So Insane It's Sentenced
People To PrisonFor Stumbling
Over Illegal Guns
That They Turned In
To The Police
Yes. Really.
England's Handgun Crime Doubles A Decade After Handgun Ban
Not only did England's handgun crime double, the exact OPPOSITE of the intended result of the ban, they are now to the point they are throwing honest people into prison for turning in guns they found:
Meanwhile, law-abiding citizens who have come into the possession of a firearm, even accidentally, have been harshly treated. In 2009 a former soldier, Paul Clarke, found a bag in his garden containing a shotgun. He brought it to the police station and was immediately handcuffed and charged with possession of the gun. At his trial the judge noted: "In law there is no dispute that Mr. Clarke has no defence to this charge. The intention of anybody possessing a firearm is irrelevant." Mr. Clarke was sentenced to five years in prison. A public outcry eventually won his release.
In November of this year, Danny Nightingale, member of a British special forces unit in Iraq and Afghanistan, was sentenced to 18 months in military prison for possession of a pistol and ammunition. Sgt. Nightingale was given the Glock pistol as a gift by Iraqi forces he had been training. It was packed up with his possessions and returned to him by colleagues in Iraq after he left the country to organize a funeral for two close friends killed in action. Mr. Nightingale pleaded guilty to avoid a five-year sentence and was in prison until an appeal and public outcry freed him on Nov. 29.
The system has gone so insane there that it took a huge public outcry to redress these two injustices visited upon these honest citizens. The insane quote from the judge in the Clarke case sends a shiver down my spine. Just possessing the gun, however you got it, makes you a criminal. So off to prison with you!
Does anybody in England need to seriously spend 3 seconds considering whether or not to turn in a gun they stumbled over after the Clarke case was made public?
Does anybody in England need to seriously spend 3 seconds considering whether or not to turn in a gun they stumbled over after the Clarke case was made public?
Only Liberal bureaucrats can construct & defend a system that can't tell between criminals and honest citizens any more.
Also note this little factoid from the article:
In 1987, Michael Ryan went on a shooting spree in his small town of Hungerford, England, killing 16 people (including his mother) and wounding another 14 before shooting himself. Since the public was unarmed—as were the police—Ryan wandered the streets for eight hours with two semiautomatic rifles and a handgun before anyone with a firearm was able to come to the rescue.
Wayne LaPierre at his press conference earlier this week was exactly correct: unless/until your bad guy going around shooting people decides to kill himself, the only thing that'll stop him is a good guy with a gun. And England's gun control was so strict when this massacre occured in 1987, that it took EIGHT LONG HOURS for that good guy with a gun to show up.
All you gun control zealots pay attention: America WILL NEVER have that problem. It will NEVER take 8 hours to get a good gun on the scene to deal with a situation like this.
And note the biggest takeaway from the article: they banned handguns and a decade after the ban handgun crime is double what it was before the ban by the Gov't's own admission.