Study in Disarmament
“Have you any arms?”
“I have my old service revolver and a few cartridges.”
“You had better clean it and load it. He will be a desperate man, and though I shall take him unawares, it is as well to be ready for anything.”
I went to my bedroom and followed his advice. When I returned with the pistol, the table had been cleared, and Holmes was engaged in his favourite occupation of scraping upon his violin.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet (1887)
It is difficult to imagine a scene more alien to the modern British nanny state.
Not because Arthur Conan Doyle’s London was safer than ours, but because Watson’s possession of a service revolver is treated as entirely unremarkable.
Sherlock Holmes asks whether he has arms. Watson replies that he does. Faced with a desperate and potentially dangerous man, he is told to clean the revolver, load it, and bring it with him.
Since the Dunblane Massacre in 1996, however, the UK Parliament has passed extraordinarily restrictive Firearms Acts that effectively banned private handgun ownership across Great Britain.
Speaking on The Joe Rogan Experience, Restore Britain leader Rupert Lowe MP argued, “they don’t want the public to have guns… we now have a society that needs radical change and we need to release the individual.”
Cue much shock and horror from the chattering classes and mainstream media.
Yet, aside from joining the Armed Forces or police, ordinary Britons are completely disarmed, and public weapons training is all but strangled by government mandate.
Granted, a privileged few are allowed weapons: landed gentry boasting Shotgun Certificates, gamekeepers begging police for Firearm Certificates, and some target shooters at clubs.
But past the wall of red tape lies a clear rejection of liberty. The UK’s laws treat the ideal that a free citizen has the right to arm himself and his family against danger as completely illegitimate.
Laughably, enthusiasm for armed policing has collapsed within the force itself: a direct result of putting a police marksman on trial for murder after he stopped a black gang member, Chris Kaba, who was using an SUV as a weapon against police. Color me shocked.
For context, it was a getaway car tied to escalating violence: masked men fired a shotgun outside a primary school the night before and, earlier, Kaba had shot a man in both legs at a nightclub.
A good thing Sherlock wasn’t on the case, then, for if A Study in Scarlet were set in modern Britain, Holmes’s famous line wouldn’t be “You had better clean it and load it,” but “You had better hide it, Watson, or the Armed Crime Unit will be raiding 221B before we even catch the cab”!
Firearms, Foreigners, and the Channel Fantasy
As a boy I fired a 20-gauge double-barrelled shotgun in Devonshire, and I’ve had plenty of trigger time on the British Army Reserve’s SA80 L85A2/A3, and it’s a bloody fun rifle. Low recoil, built like a brick, and easy enough to strip, clean, and zero, these rifles all happily take a beating and still perform well during Annual Combat Marksmanship Tests.
I’ve played with the semi-automatic L98A2 variant, too, though Heckler & Koch only ironed out the mechanical gremlins in the big boy’s version, I believe.
Escaping the UK’s suffocating gun laws, in any case, I’ve also managed to have a blast with the Glock 17 and a CZ 452-2E ZKM, bolt-action rimfire rifle out in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand.
However, from 5.56mm NATO to 9mm rounds, even down to humble .22 rimfire, the authorities in London regard such pursuits with disdain when undertaken by white Britons.
The irony is deafening. Europe is being flooded daily with military-aged male illegals from the Middle East, Africa, and parts of South Asia, while Anglo-Saxons have no Second Amendment rights.
Men who revel in sexual violence towards non-Muslim women, as exemplified by Pakistani rape gangs, or carry out deadly terror attacks across Europe in defence of their “holy” Qur’an.
Moreover, until recently, such men, if granted protection, could even bring pre-existing spouses and children to the country without meeting the salary requirements or paying any visa fees. They never even applied for an entry visa but are still provided free room and board in hotels.
British citizens who marry foreign nationals, by contrast, must generally meet that £29,000 minimum income requirement and pay substantial visa fees. Naturally.
Genuine refugees, whether Afghan schoolgirls, Christian Karenni in Burma, or South African Boer families fleeing persecution, are completely crowded out by this predatory invasion.
Perhaps it’s no surprise the UK Government doesn’t want an armed populace then.
After all, community militias equipped with SA80s could deliver effective section fire up to 400 metres from recreational speedboats and defend the Channel, leaving politicians red-faced.
Deliberate fire at 10 rounds per minute would easily suppress and halt enemy people smugglers.
Then again, under such a fantasy scenario, rules of engagement would likely compel Border Force, Port and Maritime Regiments, and the Royal Navy to prevent such community action.
After all, nothing offends the modern British state quite like self-defense, especially pre-emptive; when human rights lawyers like Lord Hermer rule the roost, self-preservation becomes the real crime.
American Freedom
In America, the Founding Fathers understood what London’s political class forever refuses to admit: a disarmed populace is not a peaceful society, but a conquered one. A dying democracy.
The Second Amendment isn’t really about clay pigeons; it is the ultimate check on state overreach and a declaration of individual liberty. Here in the UK, we have lost that freedom.
It doesn’t matter whether you are a policeman, teacher, clergyman, doctor, or serve in His Majesty’s Armed Forces. Law-abiding citizens in the UK face strict restrictions on weapons.
Meanwhile, foreign criminals in South London and Islamists still acquire illegal firearms.
Full Second Amendment rights might go too far for Britain, in my opinion, but granting them to emotionally mature, active community members would be a net positive.
Considering our demographic changes and the nature of recent attacks, this should certainly extend to all native-born women.
One need only consider the case of the Sudanese migrant, Hadi Alodid, to understand why; the sub-human attempted to behead a man with a kitchen knife in Belfast and gouged out his eyes.
This is one of countless horrors, and by disarming Anglo-Saxons (while abandoning border control), London is forfeiting its legitimacy, little by little. The people have had enough.
Some Americans don’t know how precious their Bill of Rights really is.
The right to keep and bear arms.
(UKR)