In the wake of three high-profile mass shootings — Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs and Rancho Tehema — I wonder if firearms freedom fence sitters are starting to get the message: gun control doesn’t work. Background checks don’t stop criminals, crazies and terrorists from tooling-up and going postal. Background checks don’t stop them. Assault weapon bans don’t stop them. Ammunition capacity laws don’t stop them. A bullet to the brain? That stops them! Here’s more proof [via dailyrecord.co.uk] . . .
An eccentric pensioner who was found to have a massive arsenal of weapons after the fire brigade rushed to put out a blaze at his home has been jailed for five years.
Paul Bushell had amassed around 160 firearms, some of which were loaded and included sub-machine guns and Russian-made AKM 47 rifles.
The 74-year-old stashed the weapons in a basement and in the top floor room at his Edwardian mid-terrace house, without any of his family knowing about it.
The guns found included a Sten submachine, a British Mk1 machine gun, an Armalite AR10 rifle, and a M10 sub-machine gun.
The pensioner also had a Kommando semi-automatic pistol, a Russian AKm47 rifle and a FN 1910 semi-automatic pistol.
Now I’m not saying that Mr. Bushell is a bad guy. None of the reports of his UK “arsenal” (not the football team) indicated that he planned to do anything nefarious with his firearms.
I highlight his case to make an obvious point: if a good guy can amass 74 firearms — including machine guns — in an island country American antis hail as a “gun free zone,” what are the chances that gun control laws can choke off the firearms supply to bad guys in the U.S., a country with some 300m firearms in private hands? Exactly, precisely, none.
Oh and how did Mr. Bushell get his guns? Strangely none of the news accounts of his crime(s) address that point.
Especially not The Guardian, a news org that’s recently launched a full-on, on-going semi-journalistic assault on American gun rights called Break the Cycle. If only we could break the cycle of anti-gunners’ willful ignorance . . .
412 million guns, but who’s counting?
Probably way more…but who is counting?
Could have been more but I lost all of mine in a boating accident. Sorry all at the bottom of the ocean.
So did he probably.
I wonder if he had a connection in the West?
This reminds me of stories from behind the iron curtain we heard when I was a boy. Now the wall is political not physical as it pertains to rights.
Thanks…..taking on the myth of British gun control success helps deflate the arguments of the anti gunners…..you could also look at the 3 part series from Australia…”Young, Dumb, and Armed” about the increasing gun violence in Australia…..another place that the anti gunners lie about…..Check out the number of shootings Australia has had that were almost mass public shootings. I say almost because the perp had a gun and was in a public space in all of them, and the only thing that kept them from becoming mass public shootings…..the shooter didn’t kill more, the shooter didn’t decide to kill more…….https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_major_crimes_in_Australia
It’s one of the major issues of the political left. On the one hand, they seem to feel that wealth = virtue (ie. getting a firearm should be limited only to the rich), but on the other hand they spend millions of dollars attacking “robber barons” indiscriminately.
Another, similar, issue is that of the police unions. On the one hand, they’re pro-union, especially public unions, including police. Also, police must be the only ones to guarantee the security of residents (I almost wrote citizens) of a given area, they must have no right to self-defense. At the same time, they feel the need to reach out to the “Pigs in a blanket, fry em like bacon” “Blue wall must fall” etc. crowd.
While the left has a much better fleshed out plan of their “ideal world” (ie. everybody guaranteed a job at the same salary as everyone else, etc) than the right’s “Umm, as much freedom as we can maintain”, there are these basic inconsistencies in their platform that raise major questions.
Here is another one:
The anti’s support the absolute zero gun tolerance policy in our schools. Yet they do not support or enforce existing mandatory gun sentencing laws against actual felons.
And mandatory sentencing has been shown not to deter anyone from committing a crime.
They’re off the street!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
“Deterrence” is only one element of a criminal statute. No law “prevents” crime, as in eliminates it. The certainty of detection, the certainty of punishment are the elements of “deterrence” (ignore those and you end up with callous disregard). Once a law is “broken”, punishment is all that remains. Only someone who runs the calculus and decides the odds are terribly stacked against them will possible be “deterred”.
That’s wrong. Mandatory sentencing deters the mandatatorily sentenced criminal from committing more crimes against people outside the prison while he is incarcerated.
Soooo many people overlook this whenever any new criminal law is proposed. The logical flaw is enormous: “this new bill will not deter anyone, so we shouldn’t implement it.”
Flaw: But….all the other laws that do not deter anyone are OK, let’s keep them.
I think that that’s an essential difference between imprisonment and execution that (again) the left has failed to comprehend.
Execution loses a lot of its value if, as the left claims, it fails to act as a deterrent, especially when compared against imprisonment for life.
Imprisonment is different, as it offers the opportunity to, on an individual level, teach the convict that actions have consequences and prevents the convict from repeating their actions for a certain length of time.
The 1yr recidivism rate is 50%, and the 5yr recidivism rate is 75%. Unfortunately, I can’t find the data for longer than 5 years, nor can I find anything about the rates of recidivism for people who were told “You’ll be hear until February 1, 20xx” and stayed that long vs. those that got paroled out early due to prison overcrowding/good behavior/etc.
If an evil genius concocted a sociopolitical movement specifically to exacerbate the worst instincts of humankind, it would look a lot like America’s progressive left (the so-called “liberals” who killed actual liberality and now live inside its corpse; the Biblical “whited sepulcher” comes to mind).
He exists, his name is George Soros.
Their plan is hardly fleshed out or consistent. What you perceive as minor nits are actually two of the most glaring examples of how moronically inconsistent their world view is. The entire leftist world view is a paradox. Money for schools but no concern for results. Help the poor but don’t let them become self-sufficient. Uphold the law, but only against the already law-abiding. Otherwise come up with a million excuses for the lawbreaker. The only thing consistent about the left is that every argument will devolve down to raw emotion and feelz. Nothing else matters to them, and so no leftist government system can long stand.
“Liberalism is a mental disorder, and it will get us all killed.”
– – M. Savage
Hoooooly sh!t, he had a FN1910 pistol. He must be craaaaaaaaazy!!!!!
It’s as if the Progressives think if they could ban guns then there’s _no_way_ they could spill across the border from say Mexico.
Just as alcohol prohibition failed..and drug prohibition has failed…and any attempt to limit illegal aliens has failed…
so too would a gun and/or ammo ban fail…
especially when it comes to criminals and guns
The ironic thing about your statement is I bet the powers that be would start to care more about enforcing border security if they managed to pass a law banning guns here.
One thing government doesn’t like are tools capable of challenging their power.
Speaking of Australia-style confiscation, did y’all check out Tucker Carlson a couple nights ago, when he had the spokesman for Everytown on, and Tucker got him to admit that what he really wanted was Australia-style confiscation. Seriously.
i have not however i would love to. i am an aussie who wishes i could move to the US and definately not to places like chicago, NY, washington DC or commiefornia. in fact many of my friends say that i would have been there at the battle of concord or lexington if i had been around at that time. that is if i had not already been killed in prior actions to the actual start of the war. i also get called a conspiracy theorist a lot but just for starters as far back as 1990 (i was only 16 and the time) i was telling people what the govt had planned as far as our gun laws were concerned. i was pissed off as hell on a bad day when the australian public rolled over to the gun laws instead of fighting back
What’s keeping you there? 🙂 Lots of room left here in America, and you’d be a welcome addition to our efforts. Think about it.
WRONG. ALL these aliens need to stay in THEIR country and fix it. The citizens of Oz are even more pathetic than the Mexicans squatting here in the US. Australia comes from, more or less, the same background as the US. They KNOW what the traditions of Western freedom looks like but have rejected it (as in UK) preferring socialist nirvana.
exactly, and why i wish every day that i was born in the USA and not australia. for the most part i am ashamed of my countrypeople (wont call them men cos they lost that years ago).
So what crime did he commit?
So far as we know, nothing. Except being a gun owner… which far too many in this country would like to make a crime too.
*sigh*
Once upon a time, being black in certain places was a crime. Being Japanese in the early 1940s was a crime. A bit over a century ago, existing as a Native American on what used to be your ancestral land was a capital offense.
Don’t let yourselves be distracted from what we’re facing here: we are gun owners, and our opponents do not care that we have committed no crime, they want us to stop being allowed to be what we are.
Yeah I caught Tucker. He’s the real deal. No idea how these cretins agree to appear. Infinitely preferred to the blowhard O’Reilly…I sympathize with the old dude. What a shite country😫
I love this part:
Ian Foinette prosecuting said: “Approximately 160 weapons were found in the house and a considerable amount of ammunition.”
And from the top of the page:
His ammunition charges involved 136 cartridges.
LOL. A true arsenal…..
Ha! I shot more than that in a short two-hour range trip last weekend. And I was actually aiming at things (and hitting them), not just shooting to shoot fast.
This poor old dude is probably going to die in prison just for owning less than a single day’s range ammo and some mechanical objects with which he did no harm to anyone. I enjoyed my visit to the UK years ago, and I’d love to make another, longer visit, but you couldn’t pay me enough to live there.
I think no wait I know I have to one up his gun count and dwarf his ammunition “stockpile” it’s the American way.
Well, besting the ammo count of 136 rounds shouldn’t be too hard. Unless they meant 136 unique cartridges types, not rounds.
If they counted different types it still ain’t too hard with all the different designs out there. Hollow points, soft tip, AP, API, tracer, FMJ, wad cutter, semi wad cutter, and all the rest plus the different calibers.
I could do that in 18 calibers. Using just the 8 I listed that’s not counting +P, +P+, lite, sub sonic, and high velocity loadings either.
Easy, he found them
Gun control advocates don’t really care if their laws and policies don’t work. Once they’re in place, they can look to them as tangible symbols of their ability to have their values codified as law. If they don’t actually work, gun controllers just use their failure as justification for passing more laws. It’s the symbolism that counts.
Exactly. This, this, and more THIS.
(For what it’s worth, many conservatives suffer from the same problem; but at least they tend to be more honest about what they really want and why.)
The Brits haven’t learned the truth about guns: they multiply like rabbits. Mine do anyway.
“Some of which were loaded.” The hysteria! Funny thing is they can be loaded and unloaded. It happens. He had petrol in his lorry too. And ice cubes in his freezer. Even water in his pipes. Eccentric, crazy old man!
” I wonder if firearms freedom fence sitters are starting to get the message: gun control doesn’t work. ”
While POTG proudly point to failures of gun control as proof-positive that nothing can be done, the failures do not actually reinforce our public perception, do not argue for reduction or removal of “gun controls”. The failures argue FOR gun confiscation. If all the public is left with is confiscation, the failures we hail as destroying the logic of “gun control” will lead us there. Let’s not be absurd, there will be no door kicking by armored LEOs. The “death by a thousand cuts” will do us in.
Don’t we look utterly stupid declaring that our last and best hope to end gun control is to barricade at home and start shooting “gun grabbers”?
Fascists violating the civil and human rights of an innocent victim. He committed no crime. Other than wanting to live as a free man.
It’s time we gave england the cuba treatment.
So, how many people did the old timer hurt? Zero. About 160 guns and not single corpse to be foud. Even full auto machine guns and assault rifles, I’m telling you! Almost as if guns ownership was not a problem. Shocking!
I wonder how many were deactivated? Collecting deactivated firearms in the UK is completely legal (but the deactivation process could be considered vandalism of historical artifacts).
Considering the average constable plod’s knowledge of firearms rivals my knowledge of meso-American pottery shards I doubt they could tell the difference between a working firearm and a deactivated one.
Owning Guns While English — it’s the new Driving While Black.
Bushell’s cool, he said, ” fuck your bloody gun laws!!! ” Sorry to here about the fire.
poor guy. jailed for a goddamn collection.
I only have 14, 12 rifles and 2 pistols. I would be considered “gun poor” if I lived in Texas.
Beware of unintended consequences. He goes to jail with real criminals, they ask, How did you do that? So her tells them. They get out.
Over time, every criminal gets to learn how to get guns.
I’m a British and US citizen. You can’t outsmart how stupid the British are today and under the thumb of politicians.
They will wish they had guns when the Muslims get more power.
I miss the America I grew up in.
Three cheers for the UK’s Gestapo government. The sentence guarantees, that a very senior man without any criminal record will die in jail. The system bureaucrats wanted to make this gun owner an example in the land of pride and glory. In any case, most crimes in the UK are now truck mowing people related. Never cared for the Brits as a whole (except for their actors) and that will never change. Leave it to George Takei (Mr Zulu) to be a self described “anglophile”. I rather go to the German side, they build better weapons, the food and beer are infinitely better, their gun laws are more common sense and the country is prettier. The anti-gunners here better not come for my originally German made SIG pistols.
The “Magic of Monarchy” that Prince Harry of the U.K. has mentioned once or twice (or more) is supposed to stem from the fact that the Monarch takes the people’s overall interests to heart, and can protect the people from oppression by the aristocracy. In practice, however, the current Queen is mostly a figurehead with little real power to help the people.
Consequently, the British government of Parliament and the bureaucracy is largely free to oppress the people as much and as long as they see fit. Sure, the people get to elect the Members of (the lower house of) Parliament, but even majority voting (as with Brexit) can result in delays and restrictions of implementation.
By now, the Brits are so brainwashed by the elites into believing that they have no right to defend themselves that they are mostly complacent about demanding that the government stop infringing on their rights — which natural rights are not protected in any formal Constitution beyond the accumulated Acts of Parliament.
I suspect that the U.K. will not be a leader in the European restoration of gun rights; but that, instead, they will have to follow the leads of such mountainous places as Czechoslovakia and Switzerland.
Ooh, Good! Nobody posted here after I did.
That allows me to correct myself without prior prompting from others:
Of course I meant “The Czech Republic” these days instead of the former “Czechoslovakia,” which no longer exists as a single country.
Farago – another absolute liberal leftist control freak dummy who can’t comprehend that people who ignore God’s law against murder will pay even less attention to man’s laws against guns!