Posted on 11/30/2002 5:36:43 PM PST by David Hunter
Mothers grieving over children killed in drug-fuelled gang wars have marched on Downing Street to vent their fury and demand tough new laws. As if to underline the point, just hours before the march set off from south London's troubled borough of Peckham, a man was shot dead in a local pub and another was in a critical condition having been shot in the neck, police said. The two victims, both black, were the latest in a string of "black-on-black" shootings, which have forced London's police to launch a dedicated unit, Operation Trident.
Lucy Cope, whose son Damian, 22, was shot dead outside a nightclub in London's West End in July, told Reuters: "The police are doing all they can -- they've set up Operation Trident and everything -- but the law is no deterrent." She said the 10-year maximum sentence for gun possession should be changed to a 10-year minimum sentence.
Peckham is one of several areas of the capital where rival gangs are battling for control of the lucrative trades in cocaine and its highly addictive derivative crack. Peckham's run-down estates hit the headlines two years ago with the murder of 10-year-old Nigerian schoolboy Damilola Taylor, who bled to death in a stairwell from a stab wound soon after he moved to London.
Superintendent Ed Bateman of the local Southwark Police said he supported the march and pledged to "close down crack houses, which are often the seat and focus of illegally held and used firearms".
Protest organiser Althea Smith said gun crime in the capital was not just black-on-black. "In London, a lot (of shootings) are Yardie or drug-related, but we've also recently seen the Turkish gangs fighting in Haringey," she said. "When someone is killed, it's not just one person that is affected, but the whole community," she added.
The march was expected to number over a thousand, and six mothers of children shot dead on London streets were to carry a petition calling for tougher sentencing to Downing Street.
Err, I think we've already got the toughest gun laws of any democratic country on Earth, thank you very much.
"The police are doing all they can -- they've set up Operation Trident and everything -- but the law is no deterrent."
But didn't the Police recently suggest that any Briton who is accosted by a knife or gun wielding villain should just do as they're told? They've basically set themselves up as the only people allowed to tackle criminals, thus shouldn't they be sued for failing to prevent all these murders?
She said the 10-year maximum sentence for gun possession should be changed to a 10-year minimum sentence.
Oh, that will stop them! Unfortunately, most Yardies are psychopathic crack-heads so I doubt they'd be deterred by this suggestion.
Yet more evidence of the stupidity of the left/liberals. There's a problem with armed gangsters so they reckon we should bring in even tougher gun laws. Even though history has shown us that psychopathic drug-dealers/gangsters are in the business of terrorising and killing people and so are unlikely to be concerned by longer custodial sentences for possession of the tools of their trade. Meanwhile, the law-abiding British public can't even legally carry a penknife to protect themselves with and are being prosecuted for using 'unreasonable force' while they're in fear of their lives.
No doubt next they'll be saying that because gangsters often use shotguns that means shotgun ownership should be more strictly controlled too. I suppose the fact that it doesn't matter what gun laws are in place because professional criminals can just buy their firearms on the back market escapes the left/liberals and the British government. If they want to prevent gangsters from committing murder they should execute murderers, not try to put up more barriers/penalties to the possession of firearms.
But no, its all the fault of those nasty guns isn't it? The fact that after the "good friday settlement" the IRA started to beat people to death with sledge-hammers, since it didn't violate the agreement, just doesn't occur to these people I suppose.
By gosh, that will do it. Of course, sending the savages back whence they came might also have some effect.
I guess the days when Sherlock Holmes would tell Dr. Watson to bring his Webley along will never return. If Sherlock were to fire his boxer pistol indoors nowadays making a V R outline with the bullets he would get a mandatory 10 years in prison.
10 years or a 100 years...it doesn't matter. These people don't imagine for a second that they'll be caught. I doesn't matter what you set the jail time to, because even the most illogical of criminals wouldn't commit the crime if they thought they'd get caught. Yet they still commit them, which speaks volumes of their faith in the law enforcement agencies to catch them.
ROFL. She says that the laws do nothing, then suggests changing the laws. I love it when Socialists reveal themselves so quickly and easily. This woman has no interest in safety, justice or good lawmaking. She is merely interested in controlling people's lives and taking away their rights.
As always, and everywhere, more gun control is directly proportional to more crime. The smart leftists know this and don't care, because gov't controlling peoples' lives - the abolition of individual rights - is far more important than public safety. The dumb socialists (like the mothers in the article) still believe the myth, and no amount of evidence will change their minds.
Here's an article about British gun control from American Rifleman magazine that may interest you, if you haven't seen it already.
If only we had the right to carry concealed firearms for self-defense, then the gangsters might find themselves on the receiving end of some rough justice handed out by people who would otherwise just be witnesses. I bet the threat of coming up against armed citizens would be a rather more effective deterrent to violent criminals than anything the government can provide.
Go Cato!
You're right, most members of the British Conservative party would be Democrats in the USA. Personally, I'd describe myself as a Libertarian, which puts me far to the right of the British Conservative party and similar to American Libertarian Conservatives. As for the BNP, I hate their guts, they are totalitarian national socialists.
The political environment has still not arrived for the libertarian movement in Britain to set up a political party, although the subject is being broached. Unfortunately, the British political psyche is essentially statist, due to our history, and the fact that much of our media are leftists (most notably the BBC). They would paint a fledgling British Libertarian party's stances as reckless, immoral and/or dangerous to law and order etc. I wish we could set up a British Libertarian party to get the ball rolling now, but until the BBC et al. are discredited, such a party wouldn't stand a chance at the polls.
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