All handguns were banned and were all registered with the agents of the state. Also in 1997 carrying any knife with a blade longer than 3 inches was made illegal. You now had to show “good reason” for carrying a knife, the presumption of innocence, until proven guilty of a crime, was gone. In England today you cannot carry any type of weapon for self defense and you cannot use a firearm to defend your home, family, or property.
Gun control in Britain passed in stages, beginning just after World War I and continuing in a reactionary fashion with increasing strictness through the 1990s. When the final stage arrived in 1997, and virtually all handguns were banned via the Firearms (Amendment) Act of 1997, the promise was a reduction in crime and greater safety for the British people. But the result was the emergence of Britain as the “most violent country in Europe.”
Britain began placing restrictions on gun ownership after World War I with the Firearms Act of 1920. The passage of this act was emotionally driven, based in part on the public’s war-weariness and in part on the fear that an increased number of guns–guns from the battle field–would increase crime.
The Firearms Act of 1920 did not ban guns. Rather, it required that citizens who wanted a gun had to first obtain a certificate from the government. We see this same stage taking place in various places in the United States now, where a person who wants a firearm has to get a Fire Owner Identification Card (Illinois) or has to be vetted by police (Massachusetts) or both.
Thirteen years after the passage of the Firearms Act, British Parliament passed the Firearms and Imitation Firearms Bill, making the possession of a replica gun or a real one equally punishable unless the owner of either could show the lawful purpose for which he had it. (Sounds like California?) This was followed by the Firearms Act of 1937, which author Frank Miniter says “extended restrictions to shotguns and granted chief constables the power to add conditions to individual private firearm certificates.”
In the U.S., police departments in Massachusetts play the role Britain’s chief constables played and have final say on who can or can’t own a firearm. On July 25, Breitbart News reported that that Massachusetts police were pressing for “sole discretion” on who could own a long gun; they already had such discretion over who could own a handgun. On August 1, they received the power they sought.
Britain continued to issue firearm certificates as World War II set in. But by the time the war was over, the gun control mindset had permeated society to a point where self-defense was no longer a valid reason to secure a certificate for gun ownership.
Guns were simply for sport or for hunting.
In 1987, Michael Ryan shot and killed sixteen people in Hungerford, including his mother. He wounded fourteen others, then killed himself. According to the Library of Congress, Ryan used “lawfully owned” rifles to carry out the attack. Nevertheless, his attack prompted the passage of more laws in the form of the Firearms Act of 1988. This act “banned the possession of high-powered self loading rifles” and “burst-firing weapons,” and imposed “stricter standards for ownership” to secure a government certificate to own a shotgun.
In 1996, the globalist staged a false flag school shooting in Stirling, Scotland at the Dunblane Primary School in order to implement further restrictions on guns. The official story is that a mad loner called Thomas Hamilton shot dead 16 children at a primary school in Dunblane in Scotland. The unofficial story is that Thomas Hamilton was supplying pornography, and possibly young boys, to top people including policemen and politicians; and Thomas Hamilton may have been murdered, to shut him up. More than 100 documents about the Dunblane mass murder have been sealed from public sight for 100 years. When the Dunblane Inquiry ended, citizens who owned handguns were given three months to turn them over to local authorities. The few who didn’t were visited by police and threatened with ten-year prison sentences if they didn’t comply. Police later bragged that they’d taken nearly 200,000 handguns from private citizens. All of the guns had been registered and licensed so they knew exactly where they were.
The Firearm Act of 1997 was passed while emotions ran high. Gun control proponents push for an all-out ban on private gun ownership, in the much the same way that Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) reacted to the false flag at Sandy Hook Elementary by trying to ban approximately 150 different guns.
Yet the Firearm Act did not ban all guns, “but served to essentially prohibit the ownership of handguns in Britain” and to make the acquisition of certificate to possess a long gun an onerous and time-consuming one. Much the same as the onerous and time-consuming process now burdening law-abiding DC residents seeking a gun in the home for self-defense.
And what has been the outcome of passing more laws in Britain to remedy the fact that other laws were ignored or broken? It has not been good.
In 2009, twelve years after the Firearms Act of 1997 was passed, Daily Mail Online reported that Britain was “the most violent country in Europe.” They also reported that Britain’s home figures showed “the UK [had] a worse rate for all types of violence than the U.S. and South Africa.”
London is also now considered the “acid attack capital of the world” after a six-fold increase of the barbaric practice since 2012, and over 2,000 such attacks in the last three years alone.
Mainstream media would have you believe the myth that countries with strict gun control have less crime. The actual facts show the opposite:
Fact: Countries with the strictest gun-control laws also tended to have the highest homicide rates. 1
Fact: According to the U.N., Scotland was the most violent country in the developed world, with people three times more likely to be assaulted than in America. Violent crime there has doubled over the last 20 years. 3% of Scots had been victims of assault compared with 1.2% in America.2
Fact: “… the major surveys completed in the past 20 years or more provides no evidence of any relationship between the total number of legally held firearms in society and the rate of armed crime. Nor is there a relationship between the severity of controls imposed in various countries or the mass of bureaucracy involved with many control systems with the apparent ease of access to firearms by criminals and terrorists.” 3
Fact: Even if we examine just firearm ownership and firearm homicide by country, we see no correlation between the two. 4
Fact: Many of the countries with the strictest gun control have the highest rates of violent crime. Australia and England, which have virtually banned gun ownership, have the highest rates of robbery, sexual assault, and assault with force of the top 17 industrialized countries. 13
Fact: Since gun banning has escalated in the UK, the rate of crime – especially violent crime – has risen.
Fact: Ironically, firearm use in crimes in the UK has doubled in the decade since handguns were banned. 17
Fact: Britain has the highest rate of violent crime in Europe, more so than the United States or even South Africa. They also have the second highest overall crime rate in the European Union. In 2008, Britain had a violent crime rate nearly five times higher than the United States (2034 vs. 446 per 100,000 population). 18
Fact: 67% of British residents surveyed believed that “As a result of gun and knife crime [rising], the area I live in is not as safe as it was five years ago.” 19
Fact: U.K. street robberies soared 28% in 2001. Violent crime was up 11%, murders up 4%, and rapes were up 14%. 20
Fact: This trend continued in the U.K in 2004 with a 10% increase in street crime, 8% increase in muggings, and a 22% increase in robberies.
Fact: In 1919, before it had any gun control, the U.K. had a homicide rate that was 8% of the U.S. rate. By 1986, and after enacting significant gun control, the rate was 9% – practically unchanged. 21
Fact: “… [There is] nothing in the statistics for England and Wales to suggest that either the stricter controls on handguns prior to 1997 or the ban imposed since have controlled access to such firearms by criminals.” 22
Fact: Comparing crime rates between America and Britain is fundamentally flawed. In America, a gun crime is recorded as a gun crime. In Britain, a crime is only recorded when there is a final disposition (a conviction). All unsolved gun crimes in Britain are not reported as gun crimes, grossly undercounting the amount of gun crime there. 23 To make matters worse, British law enforcement has been exposed for falsifying criminal reports to create falsely lower crime figures, in part to preserve tourism. 24
Fact: An ongoing parliamentary inquiry in Britain into the growing number of black market weapons has concluded that there are more than three million illegally held firearms in circulation – double the number believed to have been held 10 years ago – and that criminals are more willing than ever to use them. One in three criminals under the age of 25 possesses or has access to a firearm. 25
Fact: Handgun homicides in England and Wales reached an all-time high in 2000, years after a virtual ban on private handgun ownership. More than 3,000 crimes involving handguns were recorded in 1999-2000, including 42 homicides, 310 cases of attempted murder, 2,561 robberies and 204 burglaries. 26
Fact: Handguns were used in 3,685 British offenses in 2000 compared with 2,648 in 1997, an increase of 40%. 27 It is interesting to note:
- Of the 20 areas with the lowest number of legal firearms, 10 had an above average level of “gun crime.”
- Of the 20 areas with the highest levels of legal guns, only 2 had armed crime levels above the average.
Fact: Between 1997 and 1999, there were 429 murders in London, the highest two-year figure for more than 10 years – nearly two-thirds of those involved firearms – in a country that has virtually banned private firearm ownership. 28
Fact: Over the last century, the British crime rate was largely unchanged. In the late nineteenth century, the per capita homicide rate in Britain was between 1.0 and 1.5 per 100,000. 29 In the late twentieth century, after a near ban on gun ownership, the homicide rate is around 1.4. 30 This implies that the homicide rate did not vary with either the level of gun control or gun availability.
Fact: The U.K. has strict gun control and a rising homicide rate of 1.4 per 100,000. Switzerland has the highest per capita firearm ownership rate on the planet (all males age 20 to 42 are required to keep rifles or pistols at home) and has a homicide rate of 1.2 per 100,000. To date, there has never been a schoolyard massacre in Switzerland. 31
Fact: “… the scale of gun crime in the capital [London] has forced senior officers to set up a specialist unit to deal with … shootings.” 32
A May 2013 poll in Britain’s most widely read broadsheet newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, issued an online poll asking members of the public which proposal they would like to see introduced as a Private Members’ Bill in the UK’s Parliament. Private Members’ Bills are introduced by Members of Parliament or Peers who are not government ministers.
The choices include term limits for Prime Ministers, a flat tax, a law to encourage the ‘greening’ of public spaces and the repealing of Britain’s hand gun ban. Following the Dunblane massacre in 1996, in which 16 schoolchildren were killed, Parliament passed The Firearms Act of 1997, which essentially banned handguns for the atrocity.
But Britons seem unconvinced by the law. The proposer, known as “Colliemum” asked, “…why should only criminals be ‘allowed’ to possess guns and shoot unarmed, defenseless citizens and police officers?”
Nearly 90 percent of the 32,000+ (updated: 28,781/32,218 or 89.33%) respondents told the Telegraph that they want to see the handgun ban repealed. Statistics from the United States show that guns are used by citizens to defend themselves around eighty times more often than they are used to take a life. A recent study published in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy concluded that there is a negative correlation between gun ownership and violent crime in countries internationally, that is, “where firearms are most dense violent crime rates are lowest, and where guns are least dense violent crime rates are highest.”
The Firarm Act also restricted what knives could be purchased or owned in the UK, and the battle continues to totally ban knives altogether.
Gun control only benefits those 1% in power, who will always be surrounded by their armed bodyguards, FBI, military, and military contract protection but will be less threatened by any resistance and uprising with patriots armed with sticks and stones, than with firearms.
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