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An interesting aspect of gun control countries that to my knowledge has never been studied is the concomitant use of lethal martial arts.

In the case of the old Soviet Union, both guns and unregulated martial arts were prohibited. And while accurate statistics about illegal guns aren’t available, it is known that illegal martial arts schools still existed.

Importantly, these illegal martial arts schools specialized in singularly lethal techniques. That was not just because you would typically get into lethal fights, but that you couldn’t let it be known that you were a martial artist.

That is, if you killed a person, you would go to prison, but if you were known to be a martial artist, you would be killed by the government.

That being said, what about England today? Guns are banned, so they are everywhere in the hands of criminals and scared citizens. Knives are being banned, so if you would have carried a knife to defend yourself, you will probably want a gun.

But what if you are a martial artist?

No doubt if you defended yourself with martial arts, and the criminal survived, you would be punished, and the police would everything they could to prevent you from using your abilities in the future.

So instead of beating criminals, why not kill them?

A good martial artist can use just about anything as a weapon, or even with their bare hands they can administer lethal blows. And as long as they used some discretion, the dead criminal would just be put down as “death by misadventure.”

If they were patient, just a few martial artists could cleanse a large area of its worst offenders, with the authorities none the wiser. And if trained in another country, there would be nothing about them to even draw suspicion.

But in the final analysis, if a government refuses to protect the public from vicious criminals, yet prevents the public from defending themselves, then the public is left little choice but to take the law into their own hands, and with considerably less finesse than the law would allow.

Certainly government always feels more threatened by vigilantism than by criminals, but if they have failed in their primary duty, then they have lost legitimacy.