UK gun owner loses licenses because of internet presence

In 2016, UK shooter and popular YouTube gun channel personality Callum Long-Collins told the BBC, "Being British and a firearms owner, it almost feels illegal to have any sort of opinion on using guns for self-defense." The comments appear to have been proved correct. According to an April 23 article in The Times titled, "Gun licences stripped from shooting activist over YouTube comments," Long-Collins told the publication that he lost an appeal to have his firearms licenses reinstated with the primary reason being the content of his YouTube page, EnglishShooting.

According to a 2018 report from PJMedia, Long-Collins' firearms licenses were revoked in 2016 following a reportedly false assault allegation that was later dropped. However, after coming to the attention of the state, UK authorities began looking into Long-Collins’s social media presence.

Long-Collins’s primary offense appears to have been his advocacy for the right to armed self-defense. Back in 2015, following the attacks at the Bataclan theater in Paris, France, Long-Collins posted a video to his YouTube page about the event. In it, Long-Collins reportedly contemplated that the French should be able to exercise their Right-to-Carry a handgun for self-defense in order to prevent such terrorist violence.

US gun right supporters must pay close attention to the ongoing denigration of rights in the UK and other countries and redouble our efforts to ensure Americans never face these abuses of power.

In an attempt to preserve his ability to own firearms, Long-Collins announced in June 2018 that he would no longer post videos to his YouTube Channel. In a farewell video, Long-Collins explained that after the initial incident, "police then looked at previous videos that I had made in previous views that I had voiced on the channel and they felt that that wasn’t in keeping with that of a licensed firearms owner within the UK." Collins went on to state, "Over the past two years I've made significant efforts to change the direction of the channel change the videos and to change my own beliefs in views around fire firearms and firearm ownership, unfortunately, I've failed to bring the channel and the videos to the standard that the police feel is adequate."

Long-Collins also stated that, "due to repeated comments from other people on the videos [the licensing authorities] felt that the channel was a forum of extremism."

In early 2019, Long-Collins began posting new videos to EnglishShooting. In an April 3, 2019 video Long-Collins explained to viewers that he no longer has a shotgun or firearm certificate.



He told the paper, "The main issue was a video that I made around the Paris attacks where I advocated the French to be able to use handguns for self-defence because of the frequency of attacks that were happening at the time."

The UK government does not recognize its citizens' right to keep guns. In the UK, prospective firearms licensees are required to provide "good reason" for owning a firearm. In most parts of the UK, self-defense is not considered sufficient reason to own a firearm, and the police are given wide discretion in determining whether a person has met the licensing criteria.


Seems obvious freedom of speech, and certainly the right to bear arms, does not really exist in the UK.
I think there was very good reason Americans insisted on the First and Second Amendments in the US Constitution after America broke away from England.
Civil liberties have been getting chipped away in the UK.
(Additional thread about that here)

This also goes to show that the attack on gun rights is not just about an attack on guns, but goes hand in hand with the use those weapons in self-defense.
It's apparent that the local UK authorities in this situation disagreed with the concept of self-defense being a right, did not like those views being expressed and viewed them as dangerous, and so took away the legal permission of this gun owner from being able to use his guns.

 

related thread about UK authorities trying to legislate and control thought over the internet:
Man investigated by police for retweeting transgender limerick

 

Liberals in the US already want to check your on-line presence before you can get a license to own a gun.

 

Anyone notice how the UK is looking increasingly like China when it comes to civil liberties?

The Chinese government's latest scheme was to implement a citizen "trustworthiness score", where part of a citizen's score can come from anything they type on social media that the government does not like.
If a citizen's trustworthiness score is not high enough, they are automatically prevented from using the public train (Most small payments in China now are made electronically via cellphone, where simply scanning a barcode with a personal cellphone automatically makes a payment), a big problem since many Chinese commuters in the city don't have cars and rely on public transportation.
The provincial authorities also send police to conduct random checks at internet cafes, making sure all the customer's identity cards correlate to the name they are using to log in.

 

Nahh I've not noticed that.

We just dont want to kill one another as easily as possible ..... and then somehow call that 'freedom'

40,000 needless violent deaths per annum ..... enjoy your 'freedom' meanwhile I get to live a longer and far safer fear free life

 

Then if the public of the united kingdom truly has no overwhelming desire to murder one another with wanton disregard for the consequences of such, there is no actual or legitimate need for firearm-related restrictions to be in place since that society is not dangerous enough to abuse and misuse their availability.

The majority of all firearm-related deaths are matters of suicide. They do not count, and will not be discussed when the topic pertains exclusively to matters of homicide. Attempting to do such is nothing more than a deliberate exercise in intellectual dishonesty.

 

A sizeable chunk of the uk 's public is now muslim.


Someone distrusting and cynical might wonder whether there's a connection. Maybe intentionally bringing in a couple million from the most war-torn violent parts of the Middle East was ultimately just long-term cover to do away with individual liberties and begin to make the seamless transition into a totalitarian state?
After all, no one will complain about liberties taken away if there's a big problem that can be pointed to.
The population in the uk seems like they have been conditioned to just accept this.

 

As has a sizeable portion of the US population.

 

l live in the UK now and have not noticed any restrictions on my civil liberties. I previously lived in North America for over 50 years.

No it isn’t unless about 6 percent is a sizeable chunk. And why on earth does it matter?

 

How many of those are actual murders? Go ahead. Tell us.

 

The Brits have been under the government's thumb for over a thousand years. They don't know any better.

 

For the UK in 2021

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7654/

The most recent data suggests that there were 35 homicides committed by shooting in the year ending 31 March 2021.

For the USA in 2020

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm

Firearm homicides

• Number of deaths: 19,384
• Deaths per 100,000 population: 5.

 

It is really quite sweet how ignorant a lot of Americans are about life in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
For a start a lot of Americans think that ‘England’ is actually Britain, or actually the UK, and they get themselves into a tiswas when using terms.
It is often reported on these forums that essentially large swathes of the place are under Sharia law above domestic legislation. Totally untrue, but it seems a lot of Americans have a blanket hatred of Muslims so encountering general ignorance about an identifiable group is fuelled by such hatred.
As for being under the thumb of government for 1000 years, there may be an interesting discussion to be had there, but up until the English civil war there was absolute power vested in a Monarch, partially tempered by Christian religious influence. If those times were oppressive it wasn’t due to Islam.
The UK is looking like China?
Eh?
Like what is that supposed to mean?
I mean by a margin of 52 to 48 the UK voted to essentially self destruct, that kind of masochistic ‘democracy’ wouldn’t happen in modern China.
The two places are different.
What’s next? The American War of Independence (which was a good war fought for the wrong reasons) was about taxation and tea, and not about the ‘freedom’ for slave owners to keep slaves?
Or that Americans saved the UK after staying neutral in WW2 until Germany declared war on America in December 1941?

 

You didn't answer the question: how many MURDERS out of that 40,000?

 

I didn’t write the post about the 40,000 deaths per annum and I don’t know where that number came from. I was giving you an idea of the actual numbers of gun homicides in the USA for 2020 compared to the actual number of gun homicides in the UK.

The difference is vast and definitely due to the fact we don’t use guns in the UK to protect ourselves. As an aside, over 90% of the police don’t carry firearms in the UK.

 

You wanted to tackle my question. You should have provided an answer that satisfied the question, not by posting irrelevant information.

 

Whatever.

Maybe somebody else might be interested.

 

See!

The toxic American gun culture DOES spill over to other countries!

please keep it inside your own country

 

Our cops do but more for the fact that they might be called on to deal with a savage dog or something of that nature. They don’t use them much

 

So?? A sizeable chunk of the Australian population is aggressively atheist

 

30,000 of those are suicides. Unless you live in fear of yourself, they arent relevent to your claim.

Why do you think you're safer than, say, me for example?

 

It looks like you're trying to stop freedom from spilling into your country.

 

Why would you make such a comment. Ridiculous. Of course freedom of speech exists.

As far as the right to bear arms, I don’t know any body in the UK that feels the need to have a gun to protect themselves. People use them for hunting.

Indeed, there seems to be a lot of incorrect ideas about the UK floating around.

 

This man's right to be legally permitted to have guns was taken away because of his views he expressed about self defense.

In the Constitution of the United States, for example, the First Amendment lists the right to "freedom of speech" and "freedom of the press", and the Second Amendment lists "the right to bear arms" (the right to own guns).

It seems to me that if one of the man's rights were taken away because of something else, which he should have had the right to do, then his rights have been violated.

You, of course, don't believe ownership of guns should be or is a right, so that is why you don't see any problem with this.

It's interesting to note that the first ten Amendments in the United States Constitution were in direct response to the abuses Britain (now the U.K.) had inflicted on the American colonies. The Americans wanted to make sure their newly formed government would not inflict those abuses on the people and would respect their rights.