A Righteous Cause

 Tom Knighton over at the blog Bearing Arms has a piece today that notes that If UK Gun Laws Are So Effective, What Are These Charges, Then. I have noted before the extremely restrictive nature of the gun laws in the UK. It is virtually impossible for a person to legally have a rifle or pistol in the UK. Oh, you can have them under tightly restricted settings like having to have them stored under lock and key at a gun club. But you can't keep them at home for self defense.  Certainly no one who might need one can afford to have a gun.

Of course, they don't have a Second Amendment. But, the truth is that Second Amendment or not, they also have a right to keep and bear arms for lawful purposes, which includes self defense.

This isn’t the first case of such a thing I’ve written about in the United Kingdom, either. While firearms may not be as common there as they are in the United States, both the UK and Australia are islands. That makes it a bit more difficult to smuggle guns into the country, though not impossible. Because of that difficulty, you’d think they’d have a pretty good lock on the illicit firearm market.

Yet I keep seeing stories about people being arrested for having illegal firearms there. I write about a fair number of them, but I don’t have time to write about all of them, even if I wanted to.

What all of that does, though, is make it clear that the UK’s gun laws aren’t nearly the answer gun control activists here in the States would have you believe. They don’t keep guns out of criminal hands, they don’t prevent violent crime, and they don’t really do much of anything except keep law-abiding citizens from being able to exercise their right to keep and bear arms.

No, the UK doesn’t recognize such a right, that doesn’t mean such a right doesn’t exist for subjects of the crown. A right to be armed is the natural right of all people, one that must be defended and preserved.

They didn’t do that in the UK and now criminals can get guns without issue while law-abiding citizens are effectively disarmed. There’s nothing right about this in the least.

Perhaps restoring the rights of others is a way to preserve our own. At one time, Wayne LaPierre was arguing for the right to arms of people in the UK. But the NRA has been put on its heals by internal struggles and a lawsuit by an anti-gun AG.  As gun owners, we need to take the offensive again.  It's a righteous cause.