The Lazy Road to Oceania

This should come as a surprise to no one (emphasis added):

Despite a ban on handguns introduced in 1997 after 16 children and their teacher were shot dead in the Dunblane massacre the previous year, their use in crimes has almost doubled to reach 4,671 in 2005-06. Official figures show that although Britain has some of the toughest anti-gun laws in the world, firearm use in crime has risen steadily. This year eight young people have been killed in gun attacks: six in London and one each in Manchester and Liverpool.

“Illegal firearms have become increasingly accessible to younger offenders who appear more likely to use these firearms recklessly,” a report on gun crime commissioned by the Home Office cautioned last year.

One of the reasons that I am so vehemently opposed to the sort of police state measures that have crept into Britain over the years isn't just that they are oppressive, but that they don't even accomplish what they set out to do in the first place. In fact, they have exactly to opposite effect. Draconian gun bans result in more gun crimes, treating terrorism as a civil offence rather than a tactic of a military enemy results in Jihadists and IRA killers walking Scot free, the more CCTV cameras are put up the worse our town centres become, and every attempt to control illegal immigrants by implementing ID cards and similar database schemes makes the borders look like a more than usually battered about sieve.

This isn't surprising. Authoritarian measures are self-defeating because they spring from a mind-set born of pure sloth. They are not meant to actually solve a problem, but to go after the softest target available-- and that is almost invariably the respectable, the law-abiding and the peaceful (who are always the ones really to blame in the minds of the authoritarian, anyway). Their purpose is not to protect but to control. To the nascent Thoughpoliceman, having a failed gun ban resulting in a tiny criminal element preying on the majority is an acceptable price to pay if it means that the majority are now disarmed and easier to control. To such minds, the problem is not gunmen or Jihadists or hoodies; it's liberty.

Don't believe me? Consider the counter example from Mark Steyn:

I live in northern New England, which has a very low crime rate, in part because it has a high rate of gun ownership. We do have the occasional murder, however. A few years back, a couple of alienated loser teens from a small Vermont town decided they were going to kill somebody, steal his ATM cards, and go to Australia. So they went to a remote house in the woods a couple of towns away, knocked on the door, and said their car had broken down. The guy thought their story smelled funny so he picked up his Glock and told 'em to get lost. So they concocted a better story, and pretended to be students doing an environmental survey. Unfortunately, the next old coot in the woods was sick of environmentalists and chased 'em away. Eventually they figured they could spend months knocking on doors in rural Vermont and New Hampshire and seeing nothing for their pains but cranky guys in plaid leveling both barrels through the screen door. So even these idiots worked it out: Where's the nearest place around here where you're most likely to encounter gullible defenseless types who have foresworn all means of resistance? Answer: Dartmouth College. So they drove over the Connecticut River, rang the doorbell, and brutally murdered a couple of well-meaning liberal professors. Two depraved misfits of crushing stupidity (to judge from their diaries) had nevertheless identified precisely the easiest murder victims in the twin-state area. To promote vulnerability as a moral virtue is not merely foolish. Like the new Yale props department policy, it signals to everyone that you're not in the real world.

If you went to the Home Secretary and suggested that perhaps the proper way to handle the violent crime problem would be to come back to reality, lift the various bans and allow ordinary subjects of the Crown to keep a loaded shotgun over the mantelpiece again, what do you think his answer would be?

I rest my case.