“Home Secretary Teresa May [above] confirmed that gun-runners who supply lethal weapons to gangsters could be given life sentences,” according to the BBC. ‘We know there are middle men, who have firearms that they then rent out to criminals who then use them. There isn’t at the moment an offence for someone to possess a firearm with the intent to supply it to someone else. I think it is right that we introduce that offence, because those people who are supplying the firearms are as guilty as the people using them when it comes to the impact.'” Wait, what? It’s one thing to give a life sentence to someone who actually supplies a firearm to a known criminal knowing that it will be used for a criminal offense. It’s another to lock them up for life because they intended to do so. Department of Pre-Crime anyone?
I can see the British doing that. Not long ago they hung you for stealing bread.
Hell, the British are far worse than that. They have a law called “Anti-Social Behavior Orders”, which allows judges to make up laws on the spot. Literally they can take any legal activity and make it a crime just for you on the spot. There was a pretty famous incident of it a few years ago where some people were exploring abandoned buildings and stuff, but since they couldn’t get them for trespassing they used ASBO’s to make it a crime and, besides going to jail if they go into an abandoned area again, they are also banned from communicating with each other in any way. Yes, the British government can now legally mandate who you can be friends with.
PreCrime? We’re already there folks, no tinfoil required. NarusInsight is just entry level stuff and the work for the last 4 years has been on exactly that – identifying people who may misbehave in any way the government sees fit to track – no terrorism required. It’s in their interviews, it’s in their press releases. That’s the best part – they can be completely honest and people still don’t believe.
There’s a reason NSA is building the world’s largest data center out in Bluffdale UT. Hint: The former NSA tech director Binney (as well as Drake and Wiebe senior directors) stated publicly in multiple interviews that this can (and will) be used against all of use sooner or later. Binney calls it “dictatorship in a box”.
Exactly! weve been there since 2012 NDAA.
Long before 2012. Remember that laptop in a closet at the phone company that only those ‘conspiracy idiots’ thought was there? Yeah that. And that was way late in the game. Cheap computing, incredible storage, better algos, and the fear mongering being effective on the public make all this stuff inevitable. Target can already figure out if you’re preggers long before you know it, the security tools are much, much more in depth. Who is so naive as to believe that the gov wouldn’t use it, especially when they publicly state that they do.
Our country (just like every other one since the dawn of time) functions on “conspiracies”. Some are found, some aren’t, and some really never did happen – it was just odd luck.
“Patriot” was the final nail in The Constitution – there’s nothing the gov can’t legally do after whispering the magic word “terrorism” in a classified closet. Nothing.
The years surely have not been kind to Teresa May…. Just what kind of contraption is that she’s wearing? Sorry to go off topic but how the hell are you supposed to take a person wearing a “collar” like that seriously!!! 🙂
Is all this heavy handedness just that?… A way to FINALLY be taken seriously? In my not so humble opinion (this time) the Little Tin God complex is written all over her face…
It’s a new kind of straightjacket. Those nice coppers are trying to talk her into coming along quietly.
LOL… Now that makes sense….. 🙂 Thank you Sir…
I think it’s the British Space Agency’s new space suit.
I believe that’s late-70s Bowie, but in pastel.
In ye Olde Oxford English Dictionary, they should put that picture under the word “harridan.”
But there aren’t supposed to be any naughty guns in Britain, right? The control freaks keep telling us that the Limeys have worked out gun control and we should follow their example.
Three cheers for Hoplophobicke Olde England! Department stores and hardware stores will have to stop selling knives and hatchets and cricket bats, since they’re on notice that there’s “a possibility” that their wares will be used to commit mayhem.
I throw up in my mouth a little bit every time I read about the autocastration of the once-great England. At this rate it will soon be a criminal offense to leave your car parked in an area where there’s “a possibility” that hooligans might hot-wire it and use it to commit other crimes.
Intent has been a part of common law, and our law, for a very long time. This is not a pre-crime as depicted in “Minority Report.” It’s very similar to possession of drugs with intent to distribute.
We don’t have to put on the tin foil hats to mock this law.
True. This is why I’d be more interested to hear what the burden of proof is for the “Intent” charge to stick.
At this point, nothing done in the UK surprises me any more. They have jumped off the tracks of freedom a long time ago.
Am I the only one wondering why the proposed sentence is so harsh for someone who supplies the tools rather than for the actual criminal using them?
Rhetorical question, I guess, considering the tradition of increasing government control over the British public at the expense of their safety and any degree of common sense they may once have had. But still ridiculous.
What’s next, they attach a 25 year sentence for saying the word “firearm” without permission from the Home Office?
Pretty soon Churchill’s grave will spin so fast it’ll be used for power generation.
Please, Churchill was an original statist.
This is nothing. In NY, you can get life for intent to supply a Big Gulp.
Lets just make Geo. Orwell’s 1984 mandatory reading so we know how to behave when big bro takes over.
It was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual. Sadly, Orwell was just a bit off on the date. The rest, he’s rather spot-on.
Ironically it was a critique of post-WW2 England. “Victory” posters plastered over bombed out ruins, food rationing, crappy weather, Big Brother (rotund Churchill) everywhere, etc.
I’ve never heard that. I’ve heard that it was a critique of the Stalinist state since Orwell was a rather rabid anti-Stalinist left-winger (some say Trotskyiite).
I have a shotgun and firearms certificate in the UK. Also carry permits in WA and OR state. Etc.
UK law loves to focus on intent. It’s one of the (few) ways that general law is different there from the US. The same person carrying the exact same knife to work at a restaurant is entirely legal while carrying the same knife to, say, a public park might be entirely illegal. Or not, depending on the intent…
The same is true for guns. Self defense is an intent and is utterly disallowed as a reason to own a firearm in the UK. Target shooting is totally legit. Carrying a rifle with the intent to shoot a paper target, totally okay. To protect something? Not okay.
Interesting. Until I read your comment, I had a theory that this was yet another example of “war on drugs” thinking gone predictably wrong. I could be mistaken, but I think that’s the area in which the US prosecutes the most crimes of intent by a large margin, eg “narcotics possession with intent to distribute”.
I’ve commented here before that as of some years back, 25%+ of the criminal street assaults in London are now being done by young women (mid-teens to early twenties). Being active with the Men’s Rights Movement we are used to seeing how the anglo-nations borrow and copy each others growing anti-liberty, pro-feminist/anti-male, and police-nanny state laws.
Feminism + Political Correctness + Multiculturalism + Moral Relevancy = a strange mix of social anarchy and fascism.
Read a Brit true-crime book loaned to me by a Scots friend a few years ago…. was interested to learn that for several years after the UK had banned the death penalty for all other crimes in the early 60s the penalty for “murder with firearm” was still hanging. Knife = gaol; gun = gallows.
But….what if the Prime Minister and Attorney General do….say to the IRA? I have seen it done in another country……
England…where Great Britain used to be
In the ongoing interest of protecting the safety, security, mental and emotional well-being of the Crown‘s subjects, who but only the most ignorant and uncivilized among the unwashed heathen masses could possibly object to the Lady’s confirmation? The thought of intending to supply the criminal underclass with lethal weapons? An act demanding a sentence of no less than a lifetime of incarceration under any circumstances.
All rational persons would be well advised to consider how much freedom the Crown still allows those not part of the Monarchy, and thankful that the Crown has so graciously only established but a few and certain well-specified thoughts of the commoners as criminal acts.
By contrast, the legislators in the former colonies in America have now issued so many laws that any thousand of their most educated legal scholars cannot know what’s contained in even a few of the many volumes of Federal codes alone. The enforcers of the many departments are now chronically faced with the dilemma of determining what laws need enforced on any given day and whom they must be enforced against.
Many, if not all of these types of problems and other issues the former colonists in America must now confront could quite easily be remedied if they’d simply lead the way by finishing the alteration of their current structure of a Federalized Dictatorship into the more advanced and civilized form of the New World Ordership.