As just about everyone already knows, Great Britain has some of the toughest, strictest gun control laws on the entire planet. But it wasn’t always that way.
So what exactly was the catalyst for one of the great Western democracies to criminalize self-defense?
What really got the ball rolling was that the government-in-power was scared to death of their own people.
All the way back in 1919, there was a revolution-in-the-making not only in England, but Wales and Scotland as well. You see, in just the year before, the Bolsheviks had effectively murdered Russia’s true democracy that was still in its cradle.
That’s right. Thousands upon thousands of coalminers, dockworkers, even police were on strike for a number of reasons. As cited by the decidedly freedom-loving Liberty Alliance of Britain (emphasis mine);
Randolph Bourne observed that “war is the health of the state,” and it was World War I that set in motion the growth of the British government to the size where it could begin to destroy the right to arms, a right that the British people had enjoyed with little hindrance for over two centuries. After war broke out in August 1914, the British government began assuming “emergency” powers for itself. “Defense of the Realm Regulations” were enacted that required a license to buy pistols, rifles, or ammunition at retail. As the war came to a conclusion in 1918, many British gun owners no doubt expected that the wartime regulations would soon be repealed and Britons would again enjoy the right to purchase the firearm of their choice without government permission. But the government had other ideas.
The disaster of World War I had bred the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Armies of the new Soviet state swept into Poland, and more and more workers of the world joined strikes called by radical labor leaders who predicted the overthrow of capitalism. Many Communists and other radicals thought the World Revolution was at hand. All over the English-speaking world governments feared the end. The reaction was fierce.
In Britain, the government worried about what would happen when the war ended and the gun controls expired. A secret government committee on arms traffic warned of danger from two sources: the “savage or semi-civilized tribesmen in outlying parts of the British Empire” who might obtain surplus war arms, and “the anarchist or ‘intellectual’ malcontent of the great cities, whose weapon is the bomb and the automatic pistol.” At a Cabinet meeting on January 17, 1919, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff raised the threat of “Red Revolution and blood and war at home and abroad.” He suggested that the government make sure of its arms. The next month, the Prime Minister was asking which parts of the army would remain loyal. The Cabinet discussed arming university men, stockbrokers, and trusted clerks to fight any revolution. The Minister of Transport, Sir Eric Geddes, predicted “a revolutionary outbreak in Glasgow, Liverpool or London in the early spring, when a definite attempt may be made to seize the reins of government.” “It is not inconceivable,” Geddes warned, “that a dramatic and successful coup d’etat in some large center of population might win the support of the unthinking mass of labour.” Using the Irish gun licensing system as a model, the Cabinet made plans to disarm enemies of the state and to prepare arms for distribution “to friends of the Government.”
Although popular revolution was the motive, the Home Secretary presented the government’s 1920 gun bill to Parliament as strictly a measure “to prevent criminals and persons of that description from being able to have revolvers and to use them.” In fact, the problem of criminal, non-political misuse of firearms remained minuscule. Of course 1920 would not be the last time a government lied in order to promote gun control.
Does any of this sound familiar? While no self-respecting Trumpster could ever be mistaken for a Bolshie, there simply is no getting around it… the British government was simply scared to death of their “temporary” privately-owned gun restrictions coming to an end.
The same London government did their level best to ridicule those with any grievance (real or imagined) with the government as either wild-eyed rubes or an over-educated conspiracy nuts.
Don’t forget, Chairman Chou Bia-Dung and the rest of the woke military, the lapdog media and the Lefticrats need is one good manufactured crisis.