Protecting yourself from criminals in U.K.---Sounds criminal

I don't know if it's the case in the US, but in the UK handcuffs certainly wouldn't automatically be used in an arrest - they would only be used if there are grounds to suspect that the arrested person may present an actual danger if they are not restrained. I very much doubt the couple in this case would have been handcuffed - there's no suggestion that they did anything other than cooperate fully with the police. They almost certainly wouldn't have been restrained or man-handled in any way, just asked politely to get into the back of a police car.

 

You should listen to yourself. You have a very imperist, elitist view of human rights. You say, "people are allowed to do what is necessary to protect themselves," but then may not "pass instant...physical punishments (to defend themsevles)." It is more easy for a stong, young person to defend themselves or their home and family from an attack, but as for any older, physically impared person---you tell them they are too unworthy of owning even a primitive handgun to defend themselves adequately. If a farmer happens to have a licence for an old shotgun, then maybe you feel he could use it as a last resort. For a city woman, especially an old woman that can't fight well with an edged weapon, or hold a heavy shotgun, what weapon would be more effective than a handgun? Do you belive only in "survival or the fittest?" You have never clarified what device is more effective for most everyone to use for defense? I don't think you want people walking around your kingdom with large rifles hanging off them in plain view.

Defending one's self, property or family is not "punishing the criminal"---this is called reasonable force. Great English minds like Blackstone and Bacon would think your leftist ideas to be pure madness. Only the most elite and connected could ever own a handgun, the most reasonable choice for protection. Of course your rich and powerful can hire guards and live in more secure places. Not so for the common man. Long guns are almost impossible for the average person to obtain, and then they are only to be used for "sport" according to your narrow views.

You have also said that Britons at large do not want guns for themselves. There have been large demostrations in the streets that show otherwise. There is no chance that your biased media or government would conduct a poll of crime victims to ask their opinons on gun ownership.

 

I said nothing of the sort. I said 'people are allowed to do what is necessary to protect themselves'. Punishment is not self defence, and neither is revenge. People are allowed to do what is necessary to protect themselves, but they aren't allowed to continue on into excessive violence and revenge that is not necessary for protecting themselves, because that is something else entirely.

Have there, indeed? When and where were these 'large demostrations in the streets' in favour of removing the gun control laws in the UK?

 

Again, you can't come up with a reasonable alternative for a woman or older person to use to even scare away an attacker superior to a handgun. Is this why England is the rape captial of Europe? Would it be excessive violence for a person to shoot a child molester or predatory rapist attacking their family or themselves? What kind of loaded weapon do you think law-abiding citizens should be allowed to have ready in their homes to denfend themselves with? Would one be more savage bashing someone's skull open with a bat, or placing small holes through them with a handgun? You dodge the gun questions because your logic must be too flawed to stand up to them.

BTW:

[video=youtube;VyozDbg48rQ]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyozDbg48rQ[/video]

 

That's a very interesting video, but I'm afraid completely misleading, in particular about the protest that was shown, which had nothing whatsoever to do with guns. The implication that it had something to do with guns was a lie. That was the protest related to the ban on hunting foxes with hounds (a law which had nothing whatseover to do with guns in any way) held by the Countryside Alliance. They do also support 'shooting', as it happens (although that wasn't the issue they were marching about, of course), but that is shooting for sporting purposes, not 'guns for protection'. The attempt at spinning those entirely separate issues together in that report was nothing short of dishonesty.

Were Americans really being told by their media that the march against the ban on fox hunting was something to do with gun laws? That would really be a shocking level of media dishonesty and misinformation. I know many poeple who supported that march and its aims (including myself, although I also know some who did not, and wanted to see hunting with hounds banned), and I also know many people who didn't support the outright ban on hand guns (including myself, although it was an extremely popular measure at the time, and I know many people who did support it), and I know many people who support hunting and shooting for sport (I have no objections to it myself, and I know several people who do shoot for sport).

I don't know a single person, though, who would want to remove the general gun licensing laws, or who thinks that guns should be completely unrestricted for people to use for 'protection' as they are in the US. It's not like that here, because the people do not want it to be like that. It's quite simple, and that's why none of the political parties support the removal of gun licensing laws (and if there were votes in it, they would).

Any suggestion that the UK government is keeping guns away from the population against their wishes, using licencing laws that aren't wanted by the people, is totally untrue.

 

It isn't. Sweden apparently is, although camparative statistics are difficult between different legal juridictions with different precise defnitions of the crime, of course. The jurisdiction of England and Wales has a similar level of rapes to the US (usually slightly lower, although slightly higher in 2010), with Northern Ireland and Scotland rates being lower.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics

Clearly the common public availability of guns for protection doesn't have a significant impact on the rape statistics - there's lots more guns in the US than the UK, but similar rape statistics, and lots more guns in Sweden than the UK (they have licensing laws, I believe, but hunting is far, far more popular there - apart from anything else, there's far more to hunt!), but a much higher rate of rapes.

 

BTW, that's not true either - it's really very easy for the average person to obtain a licnece and gun in the UK if they want to take up shooting (or want one for pest control).

You only need to fill in a form from the local police station, provide personal references (two, I think), show you have a 'legitimate' reason (i.e. pest control, legal access to land for sport/hunting purposes (we don't have 'wild' land here, and you need to have 'sporting rights' access to land to go shooting anywhere), membership of a target or clay pigeon shooting club, etc.), show that you have a locked secure (usually metal) cabinet to store them safely and securely (and store the ammunition separately), and there you go - license issued after about 2 weeks (as long as the police don't have a legitimate reason to object, which they have 2 weeks to do, such as previous criminal convictions for firearms offences or violence, and so on), and off you go to the registered/licenced gun shop to buy your rifle (or shotgun, if you've only applied for a shotgun licence) and ammo. It's really very easy - I know several licensed shotgun and/or rifle owners, and we have a couple of local gun shops that serve their needs.

In practise, many people in rural areas have licences and guns (shotguns at least, if not rifles), but very few people in urban areas do (really only those few who are members of target shooting clubs). Other people don't have them because they don't want them - almost everybody could get them if they did want them, and get hem quite easily.

 

"none of the people I know"----once again an elitist, socialist viewpoint. As most violence, rapes, robberies and murders in the UK (or Sweeden) are more statistically likely in Muslim and shabby urban areas were you obviously don't live. I highly doubt you associate with the poorer people there that suffer, so you would have little empathy for their situations. "Myself and my own are well off---so as for the others, let them eat cake."

Guns are only tools, but clever people use the right tool for the right job. Hunting animals and sport shooting were not the the original ideas that caused the invention of the gun. It was for warfare and taking out people. This is still their primary use. They say here in America that Sam Colt made all men equal. Your extreme views on self defence blatently discriminate against women and others who are forbidden to use common technology to properly defend themselves with. As you have yet to come up with any intelligent alternative to a handgun. This is why more cops in Britan are finally seeing the light and carrying them.

For anyone that wants even a simple shotgun, the must get a cetificate from the police. Then it can hold no more than 3 rounds, and then must be locked up in a steel cabinet. Certainly anyone could camly unlock and use it during a sudden attack on their home. What a joke.

A plain and simple fact, honest people in almost all of the US can properly defend themselves from attacks, and those in the UK can't. As crime statiscally remains much higher in the UK since the knee-jerk gun ban, the banning of guns has been a policy failure. To more effectively reduce crime the focus should always be punishing violent felons---not mollycoddling them as you insist.

 

And yet an honest American dies by the gun every half an hour, day in day out, safe in the knowledge that having a gun protects them from... whatever.

 

According to our BATF, 93% of firearms used in crimes are obtained illegally. As in Europe, criminals don't care about gun laws---only if they will do hard time or face execution if caught.

Don't know how many "honest" people die from them. Why don't you tell me. How many victims were actually gang members or criminals who were killed in the line of criminal activity?

Don't tell me your another crimal rights advocate.

 

Your assumption about my background and living situation is entirely misplaced, as is your apparent opinion of so-called 'Muslim' areas in the UK, and I am neither an 'elitist' nor a 'socialist', (and nor am I the topic of the thread).

My views would not be considered remotely extreme in the UK - they are perfectly normal. In fact, if anything I would be considered relatively 'pro-gun', since I didin't and don't support the complete ban on hand guns.

No, they aren't. The ordinary police officers on the mainland of the UK aren't allowed to (they do in Northern Ireland, but that's a different situation altogether). They may be carrying other things, such as a baton, CS spray and/or Tasers, but not guns. Only specialist firearms officers are normally permitted to have guns, and they are members of units called on to respond on the rare occasions when firearms are required. And that is the point - 'rare' occasions. The whole point is to prevent escalation - currently few criminals have guns, and armed crime is very rare (and mostly restricted to drug gangs and the like, who mainly use them against each other anyway!). Everyone wants it to stay that way, and everyone wants to avoid escalation, so people are happy to not have many guns circulating around in society (a society of people that don't personally want them anyway), and happy to not have the police routinely armed.

The hand gun ban had nothing to do with 'personal protection' (or the crime statistics, for that matter), since that was never considered a legitimate reason for holding a gun license, and very few people had or wanted hand guns before it came in anyway. Is someone trying to paint a picture in the US that the British public all had our personal protection devicies taken off us when hand guns were banned, and the place has become a free-for-all for rampaging criminals since we all had our guns taken off us? If so, they aren't telling you the truth! The number of people with hand guns was always very small, and they were not being carried or used for personal protection anyway (like shotguns and rifles, they had to be kept in secure cabinets, etc.).

I've never remotely suggested 'mollycoddling' them, and I agree wholeheartedly with punishing violent criminals - in a civilised society, that is the job of the courts, according to the laws of the land, not the job of armed vigilantes taking the law into their own hands.

 

According to our BATF, 93% of firearms used in crimes are obtained illegally. As in Europe, criminals don't care about gun laws---only if they will do hard time or face execution if caught.

Don't know how many "honest" people die from them. Why don't you tell me. How many victims were actually gang members or criminals who were killed in the line of criminal activity?

Don't tell me you're another criminal rights advocate.

 

The difference being that in the UK they are very unlikely to be faced with a gun, so don't need to have one themselves to anything like the same extent. Most criminals here don't routinely carry firearms any more than the police do, and any that do carry them are instantly recognisable if anyone spots it, because nobody else carries one. That's what I meant by avoiding escalation - the criminals don't feel the need to have them like they do in the US, and they are harder for them to get hold of (certainly without expense, and without forward planning - you can't just decide to walk into a shop and buy one, and to most petty criminals they aren't readily available on the black market either - you'd need to have some reasonasbly serious contacts or connections to find them), so the problem of armed criminals hasn't reached anything like the same levels.

They will be punished if they just get caught with a firearm without having a licence for it (as will anybody else), irrespective of whether they actually intend to use it in another criminal act. That's another incentive for not bothering to have one in the first place, and all contributes to the relative lack of escalation of the problems of criminals armed with guns.

They won't face execution whatever they do in the UK, of course, because we have abolished it.

 

Guns can be brought in as easily as tons of narcotics that exsist on the streets. I believe there are some 250,000 unregistered guns in country. As long as hardline sentences are handed out uniformly for those caught using them(as they are not), then crime will be lower. I do not see the guns doing the violence, someone acts to pull the trigger. If guns were the problem, then there would be a strong correlation between the number of guns in a certain area and the crime rate. As the stats show, crime is always lower in places like Switzerland and rural parts of the United States that are exponentially high in guns per family and very low in violent crime. In the UK there has been more of public outcry for justice as predatory rapists now might possibly serve 8 yrs on avg. Child rapists may do something like 15 yrs. In the US, the typical man on the street would say to hang them---but our liberal courts say otherwise.

Self preservation and defence are more than just rights, they are common sense. Extrajudical justice---which you do not tolerate---is not using reasonable force to defend one's self and family. If you were to walk into your flat and see a wife, girlfriend or young child being raped would you tell them to stop and then go call the police. You would say to use force on this rapist---but no too much. This is fine, but what if this is a 300lb cage fighter? If I had a gun, I'd shoot him in the back without warning him first---but that's what any logical guy would do.

 

Guns can be brought in, but generally they are not. It's just not part of the culture. People here (other than drug dealers) don't feel less manly for their lack, they simply don't feel the need to have one. The police openly carry their H&K's at the London airports, but that's more to reassure travellers than anything, since I can't recall them ever being used. Likewise the specialist firearms officers, they work in pairs, and carry their guns in the trunk. There may be one or two such cars on duty in the average UK city at a given time, and that is more than sufficient to meet demand.
The couple referred to in the OP have gone home, no charges, no case to answer.

 

No, it's not, and that's what I've been saying. UK law allows you to do what is necessary to defend yourself and your family, including using a gun if you happen to have one (as the couple in the OP did, and it's easy enough to get one if you want one - you can't get one just for 'protection', but you can get one for other purposes and then use it to protect yourself if you need to). There are all kinds of other 'weapons' you can use too - a gun is usually unneccessary because few criminals have have one anyway (the illegal guns there are aren't in the hands of petty housebreakers, or in the hands of rapists, they are in the hands of drug gangs and serious armed robbers who aren't interested in small time stuff like house breaking), but you can use baseball bats, chairs, swords, kitchen knives, or whatever else you have lying around - nothing wrong with that, as long as all you are doing is using 'reasonable force' to protect yourself and your family. Shooting someone dead as they are quite obviously trying to run away, having already been shot, is not using 'reasonable force' to 'protect yourself', though - it's extrajudicial justice, and that's not the same thing at all.

 

Nope, being arrested is the same. The only difference is that in Britain you get cautioned well before an arrest, in the US you get cautioned (Miranda) when you have been arrested. So as far as civil liberties on that one go, the Brits are in front.

 

Don't be silly. The law of self defence is well established in England and Wales. Admittedly it ain't Texas but then there's a world of difference between the two jurisdictions.

 

Good point and it depends on the law. Where I used to live there used to be an objective standard applied - the "reasonable person" test. A few years ago it was made more subjective, what was reasonable depended on the circumstances in that particular situation. I think it was a good change to the law.

 

There's a whole can of worms there. In England and Wales you can walk away from a police officer who wishes to talk to you unless that officer is using a common law or stautory power to detain you, however briefly. Try that in the States.

 

There is much more to it than that. Believe me you can just shoot people in most places for trespassing. If we could there would be quite a bit less trespassing and crime in general in the US.

But where do you draw the line? Kill a little kid who is retrieving his ball? The kid just learning to ride his bike should die because he crashed in your yard?

If you think it is that easy over here you are mistaken and many times, even if it is justifiable, the shooter is arrested.

A lot of Euro crowd see this Zimmerman stuff and think that that is America. No it was an idiot carrying a gun. I think every American agrees with that. Did he break the law? That is for a jury to decide but if stupid were a crime he would be doing time.

 

...walk away from a cop in the US...lmmfao...... I did check with an attorney about this "arrest" thing. Once you are detained for any reason, in the US, your name goes into the national data base. The query is registered on that data base. Even if you are let go without being charged or ticketed, your name is "updated" and a record now exists of your arrest/detention. There will be no charges listed if none are filed, but a record of that detention is logged and recorded in the eternal computer banks along with the suspect activity. So any time a cop pulls you over, a complete and detailed record can be pulled up on their computers...all of your records.

 

In the U.S if a homeowner shoots an intruder....the police on the scene decide to make an arrest based on the evidence. The homeowner is questioned, pictures are taken, evidence recorded. The cops on the scene make a decision to arrest or not. If they decide not to arrest---that may change later when evidence arises that gives a different picture. But an arrest is done only if there is suspicion of wrong-doing and evidence that collaborates that suspicion.

Apparently....and if I'm wrong let me know but from what I am reading I don't think I am---no matter what evidence on the scene is pointing to a homeowner protecting home and hearth, and no matter what the cops on the scene think happened----the homeowner is arrested.

That is not advanced civil liberties.

 

I think that is a good description of the real difference and why I prefer the American mindset on this one. In the US the basic assumption is that there was no wrongdoing and only if evidence is found that the homeowner did something wrong will they be arrested.

In Britain, the fact that an arrest is automatic shows an assumption that there was wrongdoing, and only after that is shown to be untrue will the people be released.

The difference really appears to be innocent until proven guilty, or guilty until proven innocent.

 

I see what you're saying, but I disagree about the conclusion being reached on the assumption of some kind of 'guilt'. There is no assumption of wrongdoing assumed or implied by a simple arrest - it is an acknowledgement that there is something worthy of serious investigation to see if a crime has been committed (which I don't see as a problem if someone has been shot - that question should always be looked into!).

Perhaps the difference amounts to being that there is a little less emphasis on a quick decision being made by the officer at the scene here, and I don't see that as being a bad thing. The officer on the ground obviously has alot of input to the investigation, but rather than make a snap judgement call at the time, without proper interviews (on tape and under caution, so everything is recorded and can later be used directly as evidence in court if it turns out that there is a case to answer) or examination of evidence, the tendency is for him to arrest on suspicion of a possible crime so that the person can be properly interviewed under caution, and more senior investigatiors with more experience/training in specific investigations like shootings (detectives, as opposed to uniformed street officers, scene of crime investigators, and so on - remember, most ordinary street officers here will have little experience of dealing with shootings of any kind, because they don't happen very often) can get involved, without the pressure of the homeowner and shooter still being on the scene talking to them.

In order to take them from the scene to interview them properly, they need to arrest them. Once they are arrested, of course, they are subject to having rights like the right to having a lawyer present at the interviews, so it is also part of protecting their civil liberties. It means a solicitor (either their own if they have one, or a duty solicitor provided for them) will be present to help and advise them from their very first interview. Remember I mentioned the difference in the rights that are read to them? That's important here, because although they do have the right to remain silent, if they do so for days then come up with a 'story' later, a jury can be told that and draw an inference that they might have concocted a cover story days later (that changed a few years ago - I don't know how it is in the US, but here it used to be that a jury couldn't be told that they excercised their right to remain silent). It's in everybody's interests for the interviews to be conducted under arrest, with the right to a lawyer, as early as possible in an investigation.

Civil liberties are, of course, vitally important, but they always have to be balanced to a certain extent with public safety and a bit of common sense, especially in the case of a very serious incident (which a shooting will always be considered as here). If a person has shot someone else and claimed they were an 'intruder' that was threatening them that they were only defending themselves from, as I said before, they might not be telling the truth (and that has to be investigated). If they are, they have nothing to worry about - they will be interviewed, released on police bail while things are investigated for a few days (and perhaps passed to the CPS for input and a final decision), then 'released' (they weren't actually in custody once being released on bail, of course) without charge, as happened in this case - a rough couple of days for them, of course, but really not a serious infringement on their civil liberties after such a serious incident (and their rights under arrest are there to protect their civil liberties too). The alternative is the risk that it was, for example, some kind of ongoing feud and argument, and the person lied about the whole 'intruder' thing (and set up the scene be breaking a window), and as soon as the police leave they go off to kill someone else over it.

Shootings are very, very rare here (firearm-related death rate per year of 0.46 per 100,00, compared with 10.27 in the US, and although I don't have figures I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that shooting-related incidents overall will be fairly similarly ratioed between the countries, meaning something like about 1/20th the number of shooting incidents, relatively speaking), and such incidents are always taken very, very seriously - everything is done cautiously and 'by the book', and no risks are taken, especially with public safety.

The important principle to realise still is that an arrest is not an assumption of guilt or wrongdoing in any way - it is just a way of progressing a full and proper investigation into the incident.