Some sense from across the pond, on the policy foolishness of disarming the citizenry. As Mumbai showed, it only makes people helpless victims against the enemy. And in broad terms, the enemy is anyone who worships entropy and mayhem. As Alfred said in Dark Knight, “Some men just want to see the world burn.” And they will get their wish if we don’t defend ourselves against them.
Rhetoric about standing firm against terrorists aside, in Britain we have no more legal deterrent to prevent an armed assault than did the people of Mumbai, and individually we would be just as helpless as victims. The Mumbai massacre could happen in London tomorrow; but probably it could not have happened to Londoners 100 years ago.
In January 1909 two such anarchists, lately come from an attempt to blow up the president of France, tried to commit a robbery in north London, armed with automatic pistols. Edwardian Londoners, however, shot back – and the anarchists were pursued through the streets by a spontaneous hue-and-cry. The police, who could not find the key to their own gun cupboard, borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by, while other citizens armed with revolvers and shotguns preferred to use their weapons themselves to bring the assailants down.
Today we are probably more shocked at the idea of so many ordinary Londoners carrying guns in the street than we are at the idea of an armed robbery. But the world of Conan Doyle’s Dr Watson, pocketing his revolver before he walked the London streets, was real. The arming of the populace guaranteed rather than disturbed the peace.
Nineteenth-century London (and India) was much better suited for civil defense against monsters like this than the twenty-first century version.
Yea, but it is just so debonair to sit around with people in pretentious circles of righteous indignation while snidely smirking with one another at just how barbaric the gun toting hillbillies across the pond are.
There’s something particularly appealing about a society where the citizenry is generally armed and the police are normally not, and when they do need weapons, merely ask random passers-by to lend them — and get them.
There is a refutation to the idea that armed civilians would have helped in the Mumbai attack here:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2008/11/mumbai_2.html#comment-21775
The argument sounds reasonable to me, but I imagine it wouldn’t to you, Rand, and to most of the people who comment on this blog. I’d read with interest if anyone has a response. Thanks.
PS Blog entries seem to disappear into the “older posts” section much faster than on the old blog. I suppose the quick fix, if you want to change it, involves setting the “length” value of a field to a different number. But in my ideal world, blogs would make it easy to see when a new comment has been added, creating a more usenet-like experience. Another blog I read, Steinn Sigurðsson’s Dyanmaics of Cats blog does indeed have this feature — you can see who has last commented, and on which blog entry. Steinn’s blog is here: http://scienceblogs.com/catdynamics/
Of course, first the blog owner must decide whether he wants the comments to be mostly directed at him, or if he wants to create a two way interactive environment like usenet…
“I agree that arming the general population isn’t likely to help in these situations. In the unlikely case that an armed group attacks a location with armed civilians, a gunfight seems the most likely outcome. In this case, trained attackers have the advantage, as they know who’s friendly and who isn’t. The civilians, however, do not. This means that the civilians may wound or kill each other in the confusion of the attack. Furthermore, when the police or other armed response groups show up, how are they going to differentiate between armed terrorists and armed civilians?
In a worst case scenario, the attackers could initiate a firefight between groups of civilians and discretely pull out before there’s a police response. The police then show up to find only trigger-happy civilians mistakenly firing at each other, which is a recipe for disaster.
Certainly, an armed population may deter some attacks and in some cases prevent attacks, but untrained and independently acting civilians aren’t a suitable solution. Confusion and chaos combined with an armed and scared population is not ”
25 years of widespread CCW and this ligberal wet dream scneario has never came to pass. Some refutation.