It is a truth universally acknowledged that a mayor in possession of a problem must be in want of a policy. But not all policies are created equal, and almost none are as silly or as counter-productive as the one that London mayor Boris Johnson announced on Wednesday: Children will be barred from watching shooting events at the 2012 London Olympics.
The restriction is designed to help stem London’s rising gun-crime rate, and to prevent the “glorification” of firearms. But it is predicated upon a farcical misconception, best characterized by the secretary of the British Shooting Sports Council, David Penn. “There is no link between Olympic-level shooting and crime,” he argued. “It is like saying that a thief would use a Formula One car as a getaway car.”
It is absurd and unsurprising in equal measure. Successive British governments have been nothing if not consistent in their asinine attitude toward firearms, and, since the Dumblane school massacre in 1997, official policy appears to have been to irritate the majority of the citizenry as much as is humanly possible, while leaving the source of gun crime — criminals who don’t follow the rules anyway — untouched. And so the British now have a country in which the national shooting team has to travel to France to practice its sport, pentathletes training for the Olympic games have had to waste time facing down a comical plan to replace their air rifles with laser guns, and farmers are subjected to training courses and expensive compliance procedures in order to avoid confiscation of the shotguns on which their livelihoods rely. Meanwhile, the instances of gun violence on Britain’s streets have doubled in number in the last ten years, and rioters have recently proven that they can roam wild, striking blows against civilization with impunity.
[Read on at above link.]
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