'Nother Solent

Democracy is wonderful.

I recant all of that wicked anarcho-capitalist drivel I was spouting to Brendan O'Neill. Online democracy is the wave of the future. And you, YOU, can ride on the very crest of that wave by voting for me at the War Now poll for cutest female blogger.

Go on, then.

What are you still here for? Hop to it! Do you seriously want to argue with Momma Bear?

[Responsibility outbreak here.] Believe it or not, there are reasons for following the links above other than voting for me. Voting for Diane E. of Letter from Gotham, for instance. She's a bit behind right now, possibly because she is one plain spoken woman, not afraid to express unpopular opinions. Momma Bear's denmate Andrew Ian Dodge continues with the much admired rock and roll series - this has the same effect on me as the naval terms in CS Forester or Patrick O'Brian: I have only the vaguest idea what Andrew is talking about, but breathe deep of all that authenticity. The Brendan O'Neill link has his response to my response to his post on the monarchy. Although Brendan tries manfully to provoke, the whole dicussion is actually morphing away from the monarchy and into Individual Rights versus People's Will. If it were not past my bedtime I'd start on about Athenian ostracism and the Federalists. And War Now has a fascinating post about Bruce Hill's first few weeks of wearing a kippa.

(Bruce, it's just the way my mind works; I have to know these things. Having slugged the guy and taken your leave, did you ever get to see how the The Seige ends?)

Natalie and Blogger.

When it works, I don't. Some of this stuff has been lying untreated on a trolley in the lower half of my Blogger screen for a shocking amount of time. UPDATE and looks set to stay there for yet longer. Look, I'm not asking for a qualified Blogger doctor, even the charge nurse will do...

Confessions of a Criminal Justice system: Christopher Pastel writes:

I don't know what is meant by "a suprisingly large proportion" of Japanese crimes being successfully prosecuted based on confessions, but I can tell you that the percentage in the States (at least back in the early 1980's) was about 80% of guilty verdicts being based on confessions.

There was more on comparisons of crime between Japan and the US from Antoine Clarke. (Hey, Antoine! I found your Alternative Clarke Budget in my filing cabinet the other day. I never did slip it under Ken's door, coward that I was, so it's my fault that Labour won the next election and I am personally responsible for everything from then on.) Antoine wrote:

The explosion in crime rates in both the USA and the UK coincide with the simultaneous massive expansion of the welfare state, the virtual abandonment of the death penalty (in the US, New York got it back in about 1996), reductions in prison sentencing (especially for young offenders under 21), restrictions in firearms ownership and in the British case, the arrival of immigrants who didn't assimilate as easily as predecessors. This last point I blame squarely on the welfare state which created short-term rewards for failure. See Charles Murray's "Losing Ground" and his pamphlets for the IEA) on prison and on the underclass.

I don't know what the Japanese welfare state is like, but it might have something to do with crime rates. The ratio of "alienated" immigrants compared with the UK may also have something to do with it.

My own particular Charles Murray plug would be for his least known book, "In Pursuit of Happiness" which focuses squarely on why welfare gives you a horrible life.

Antoine also brings out into the open my dark suspicions as to why I had to part with £20 in order to get my car scrapped. "Two reasons why you had to pay," he writes, "(1) Raw materials continue to fall in price (except gold since 9-11) [market]" That's no fun! I can't slag off the market, it's not in my job description. C'mon, gimme one I can use. "(2) Recycling costs more than building from scratch but it mandatory and there's a new tax on landfill. [state]" Better! Thank you!

A cold wind over French free speech.

Turkeyblog is first with a translation of the link to the French court decision regarding internet forums. Or fora, if you insist. (Reminds me of an oldie: one maths professor sent a note to another saying, "Shall we meet this evening to discuss some conundra?" The other guy writes back,* "I can think of nothing more boring than sitting on our ba doing sa.") But it's not just France. Tom Fox of Triple Dub writes:

I think that the UK has a similar problem, as Demon Internet found out to their detriment. I myself used to be in charge of the Web for a National UK paper. Unmoderated forums were a no-no. Things get more interesting when people use services such as YACCS, which may well be in a third country. In this case it would be the US, which has more "liberal" libel laws.

Liberté has been an oft forgotten word in France. The police protested last autumn over the introduction of the presumption of innocence, over 200 years after the revolution.

I think it was Hannah Arendt who asked why the paradigm of revolutions has so often been the French and not the American, and speculated that the defining difference between the two types was large-scale seizure of property.

*This must have happened at the high noon of Royal Mail excellence around the turn of the century when a letter to the same town could be sent and replied to in one day.

Gotta go.

Meant to say much more about other stuff, including loads of good mail on multifarious subjects, but time's up. Please, please, look at Airstrip One and UK Transport for differing opinions as to whether it's all the EU's fault that the rail and track were run separately.

And all who sail in her.

I have discovered Brendan O'Neill's site recently. He is of the vile and accursed tribe of progressive republican (UK sense) meeja activists. Teaches a course in online journalism at the Surrey Institute of Art and Design, and you don't get much more quintessentially Enemy Class than that. (Just look at the titles of the dissertations.) Apart from that, splendid chap, and quite sound on drugs (legalize don't lionize) and on the sins of the left.

Anyway, our Brendan decides to put the cat among the pigeons by means of this post slagging off the monarchy and right wing bloggers. Scroll down to find it, he has one link point per day.

Perry de Havilland pecks back.

As does Peter Briffa.

and me, by e-mail, quoted later.

Brendan says the defences of the monarchy are not strong, serious and democratic. Makes 'em sound like they have to be Tony Blair disguised as Milk Tray Man to qualify.

Perry again. "Yes. Undemocratic. Good. You heard right."

In comes David Carr. "With knobs on, " says he.

"And bells and whistles," says Peter. He made the point about the onus of proof being on the innovator, too.

Now, my two pennorth. Brendan O'Neill did not fully quote my e-mail. I'm not complaining; I know from experience that it's easy to make a cut that you, the cutter, think does no more than make the thing more snappy, and then feel quite taken aback when the originator gets into a lather about misrepresentation. So no hard feelings, but what I originally said was:

"But I've met loads of people - mostly middle class women, not that anyone important cares about them - who are quite consciously doing the street party thing to defend their vision of their country against people like you."

The section in italics was cut. But it was not mere padding. That's how it goes in a democracy: your fortunes depend on whether important men care about you. There are winning groups and losing groups. Frequently the winning group is not even the majority but a committed minority of activists. They get to decide. Why? What crime did the losing group commit?

So Brendan O'Neill says the middle class housewives are bored and dotty and has a nice line in ridicule by little-telling-detail, as if the mere mention of sausage rolls made whoever served them unimportant. (Warning: don't try the same line of ridicule by mention of chapattis. If you do people who know about Ethics of Journalism come down hard. Sausage rolls are safe, though.) Then he has the nerve to tell off Peter Briffa for empty, meaningless, 'witty' criticism, and insufficient attention to broader charges.

Let's go to his exact words:

"That just because some bored and dotty middle-class houswives plan to serve mini sausage rolls to their bored and dotty middle-class neighbours, we should all put up with a system that reduces us from citizens to subjects and means that, in the year 2002, we still have an unelected head of state?"

What's with the "just", Mr O'Neill? You're the democrat. You're the fan of the people. Here's the people doing things they like. Pro-monarchists are in fact the majority, as are middle class women come to think of it, but all that sort of consideration is your problem not mine. But I would think, given your professed concerns, that you'd be a tad more concerned. Don't you think the wishes of bored people count then? Pity they don't call themselves "alienated," that would sell better. As for "dotty", the imputation of insanity to those who disagree with you is rather reminiscent of the way Tony Blair's pollster calls those who might vote against the Euro "wreckers": not very democratic, but that's not unusual for democracies.

Here's people doing things they like.That's my defence of the monarchy, along with its consequence "we would be sad if you took it away from us." Since I'm no more than a last-resort democrat I don't need any more. (Though the comparative records of monarchies and republics provides plenty.) I don't even need a definite article before "people". Peter Briffa made a universal and important political point that you ignored. You say that defences of the monarchy have to be "strong" in order to count. But why should we play by your rules? How come it's us who have to put up with the constant demands to explain ourselves?

XXXXXX, Égalité, Fraternité.

This ruling may mean the death of unmoderated internet discussion forums in France. It holds the webmaster responsible for libel committed by a forum member. (Found in the Libertarian Alliance Forum.)

Crime in Japan.

David Crookes writes:

I have no citation but the Economist a long time ago
addressed this question and one thing I remember was it claimed that a suprisingly large proportion of Japanese crimes are successfully prosecuted based on confessions. Furthermore, the article stated that police interviews weren't recorded, allowing forced confessions to be more easily extracted.

So Japan might have a nice low crime-rate thanks to police brutality and a general presumption of guilty until proven innocent.

Interesting, if painful to think about. I very much hope that that "thanks to" is really a "despite", since I'd rather not believe that one must choose between a low crime rate and police brutality. It looks as if the Japanese police have not changed. At home I have a book called "Traveller from Tokyo" by John Morris. He was an Englishman who ended up living in Japan for eight months after Pearl Harbour. Even allowing for the fact that any Book Club selection for March 1945 (I found an invoice for 2/6 loose inside the back cover, with a letter to Book Club members from Christina Foyle on the back) was scarcely likely to praise Imperial Japan, the description of Japanese police methods is still harrowing.

My second letter, from Tim Starr, also made reference to a period that Japan would like us to believe is utterly buried:

You write that Japanese gun laws are at least as restrictive as those of
Britain. Sadly, that is no longer true. Japan, for instance, allows Olympic pistol shooters to keep their guns, Britain does not.

As for Japanese crime rates, Japan has had strict gun control since the founding of the Tokugawa Shogunate, when all the guns were collected and melted down into a giant Buddha statue which the rulers promised would bring good karma to those whose guns were taken. However, this failed to prevent a wave of political assassinations in the 1920s and 1930s which brought the Militarists to power. They got their guns from the Japanese Army, of course, because the assassins were from the Army.

So, it's sort of the opposite of Britain. Pre-WWII Britain had little homicide and plenty of guns, pre-WWII Japan had few guns and plenty of politicide.

Two, no three, hot potatoes in one wrapper.

If correct, this letter to the Telegraph slams three Guardipendent myths about the railways in one neat package, delivered by a man who ought to know.

Sir - Stephen Byers, a former law lecturer at Newcastle Polytechnic before he became an MP, never ran a business, or worked in industry or commerce creating wealth and jobs. His legacy is a demand for a shake-up of railway maintenance and the need to look at the role of contractors, the sub-text being that a return to British Rail practices is in order.

I was a former senior chartered engineer with British Rail in charge of a division of professional engineers. We found that, generally, direct labour was more expensive than contractors. All work was checked and verified before approving interim payments to contractors. Ten per cent of the tender price was retained to cover a 12-month maintenance period. Good management is required under any form of ownership.

Mr Byers stated that Railtrack has been a failure, totally unaware that the number of deaths per year is lower than under the former British Rail, even when carrying 25 per cent more passengers.

The writer doesn't say over what period he makes the comparison. If it's going back to the Tay Bridge Disaster or something like that, then this ain't news. But if the comparison is fairly recent, and true, it should be headline news.

The key to the whole issue is the Railway Act 1992, responsible for setting up Railtrack, which was issued under the European Communities Act to bring Britain in compliance with EC Directive 91/440, stipulating that track ownership must be separated from that of operational companies.

Idiots in Brussels, knowing nothing about engineering and the relationship between a train and its track, signals and operations, imposed this daft scheme.

Is this true? Is the separation of ownership between rail and train, which all sides seem to agree is a disaster, also the fault of the European Union? It's no use asking Transport Oracle Patrick Crozier because even he says he isn't sure. (Given that he was posting at 6.43am this morning, perhaps it's asking rather a lot that he has an answer by ten.) Anyway, our writer goes on:

My British Rail colleagues and I did not oppose privatisation on ideological grounds. Japan privatised its railways and they are among the safest in the world. The principal problem inherited by all private companies was to discover much of the track and rail coaches were 30 years old and life-expired. Such replacement takes time and money.

From:
Walter Ablett, Chelmsford, Essex

Childhood goes on until 25. Except for Israelis.

This BBC News 24 report on the shot Israeli "settlers" slips in a quote that the students killed were studying "before their military service". To British readers who have long forgotten that Britain once had National Service that sounds a little as if the school had some particular link with the military. It also makes you think of them as near adults. What it does not mention is that the victims were fourteen years old.

EU - the Guardians of Truth slandered?

I've had an e-mail from "Mr Happy" - Iain J Coleman saying the Telegraph, not the EU are the villains in the case of the Oddie versus the EU Islamophobia report. Say it ain't so!

Here is Iain Coleman's e-mail:

You quote William Oddie's reaction to the Telegraph's report about the EU Islamophobia document. Oddie is correct that his views have been misrepresented, but wrong to blame the document's authors. Rather, the fault lies with the Telegraph.

If you read the report, at this link you'll see that Oddie's words and intent are reported accurately. The report summarises comment from a wide variety of politicians, journalists and other public figures, without making any moral or political judgements on their opinions, as well as collecting all the recorded cases of anti-Islamic violence and harrassment. It is the Telegraph which has put a nakedly partisan anti-EU spin on the report, saying commentators were "castigated" or "taken to task" when no such thing took place. For example, the entire entry on Melanie Phillips reads:

Melanie Phillips in The Sunday Times 04/11 "Britain is in denial about the angry Muslims within" expressed her horror at the presence of a "fifth column in our midst",referring to reports that many young British Muslims are supporters of Osama Bin Laden. "Thousands of alienated young Muslims, most of them born and bred here but who regard themselves as an army within, are waiting for an opportunity to help destroy the society that sustains them. We now stare into the abyss, aghast."

In the Telegraph, this becomes:

The newspaper columnist Melanie Phillips was taken to task for writing in the Sunday Times that Muslims had become a "fifth column in our midst", an army of thousands of angry young Muslims "waiting to destroy the society that sustains them".

And it's all like that. The writer of the Telegraph article doubtless assumed that none of his readers would bother checking the actual EU report. In Mr Oddie's case, this was clearly a safe assumption.

I disagree. The report does misrepresent Oddie. So does the Telegraph but to a lesser extent. On page 29 the report says:

William Oddie in The Telegraph 08/11/01 "British hypocrisy could prove the salvation of society" ....suggests that Tony Blair's insistence in separating Islam and terrorism is a desperate and unconvincing attempt to "prevent or at least obfuscate" some people's perception of the British Muslim Community as a threat."

Compare his own account of what he said:

"For this country, there is [an] imperative, which will be with us long after the war is over: to prevent, or at least to obfuscate, a perception of the British Muslim community as being an alien wedge."

In other words the report says that Oddie disapproves of Tony Blair trying to prevent or obfuscate the perception of Muslims as a threat, whereas Oddie says that he himself wants this prevention or obfuscation.

I agree that the Telegraph's take on the matter is not quite right. It suggests the report objected to the mere words "alien wedge", which don't seem to be the issue.

Summarizing others' opinions is difficult. I left out certain subtleties for reasons of space. It could just be incompetence all round. CRE twits misquote Oddie. Telegraph twits misquote CRE. But my taxes don't pay for the Telegraph.

You may hear more later on whether the report really castigated Melanie Phillips. I could get into some serious analysis of castigation-by-positioning. There's a sort of good guy / bad guy rhythm to the report which does hit Mel on the bad-guy beat, as it does Thatcher and Tebbit earlier. However perhaps life's too short to really get into this.

Othello's occupation's gone.

I don't know, Peter, what are you going to write about now? Let's hope the mice are in good health.

Unlike Mouseman and Swordsman I don't think that Mandleson will rise from his unquiet grave just yet. Byers' job will go to Hoon. Why? Because he stood up for Gibraltar. So it stands to reason they'll move him away from Defence as fast as they can.

UPDATE: Nah, it was Alastair Darling got the Black Spot. All I can remember about him is that back when he was Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury... no, better not say that, it was a long time ago and proof would be difficult. How about "in the nearest thing I ever had to a personal encounter with Alastair Darling, which was not very near, he was rather snitty, but perhaps he'd had a bad morning and the offence was not great." Remember, when you want the real dirt, come to this blog first.

Better control those digressions, girl. I read Tim Blair having a bit of a laugh at some poor schmuck's expense, and thought, this guy sounds like me. Mind you, I'd rather be Peter FitzSimons than Doug Brown, wouldn't you?

Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note / As her corse to the rampart we hurried.

The change of gender you may have spotted there refers to the fact that the burial that has occupied me yesterday and this morning was not that of Sir John Moore but that of my Ford Fiesta Popular. Cars, like ships, are forever female whatever some oh-so-modern bureaucrat at Lloyds List might claim.

But she lay like a warrior taking her rest,
with her bonnet and wheels around her.

So now she is at the top of a wall of cars, awaiting in Valkyric splendour the passage through the crusher to the Happy Driving Grounds. I may have mixed up my mythologies there. Blame the mental disarray consequent on discovering that I had to pay twenty quid to have her scrapped. Time was when they paid you. I have my dark suspicions as to why this change might have taken place. I prefer not to dwell on such sordid matters. Rather let us salute an old, brave car who did not shirk her duty to fill the air with health-giving hydrocarbons hence staving off the next Ice Age. (Have I hit the right point in the environmental scare cycle? I always have trouble keeping in synch.) No matter that I forgot to take the cassette player out. Let it serve as a funeral offering.

We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone -
But we left her alone with her glory.

Wobbly.

The hopefully amoralistic Airstrip One quotes a cringeworthy pro-European Project speech by President Bush. I could go off this man. Bush, that is. Emmanuel Goldstein is a sweetie-pie.

SIAR* on indicating whether replies to e-mails are desired.

A reader writes:

"there's already a well-established FLA.

NNTR,

Nick"

*SIAR = Says It All, Really. I just made that up. Is NNTR well-established? I hadn't met it before. I've never seen FLA either, though its deprived younger sister TLA is a dear friend of mine.

Nitty-gritty.

Layman's Logic has a post about the recent decree issued to the police that they must not use this term because of its supposed origins in the slave trade. (A claim which many etymologists dispute.) Follow the link in Ben Sheriff's post to a post by Eugene Volokh which tells 'em good.

It's gone from the net now, but the BBC's Talking Point forum had a whole discussion on this headed "Has PC gone mad?" Interestingly there was not one single comment in favour of the decree. I've never seen such unanimity before. Normally the BBC makes an effort to at least look as if it is presenting all sides of a debate, and they usually manage to give the PC people a surreptitious boost. On this occasion there clearly was no actual debate to present all sides of. From memory, the closest anyone came to supporting the decree was on the lines of "it's ridiculous to censor words because of their long-forgotten origins, but we should nonetheless censor words that are more clearly offensive."

Another good thing about Labour winning the election...

Not my usual start line, I'll admit. But here Robert Harris argues that the Queen's present popularity is connected to Labour's victory. I remember thinking when the Conservatives won their last general election victory that, say what you will, it was Labour's turn next, and about bloody time. Power can corrupt, but so can lack of it. Labour needed to be brought down to earth by actually being responsible for something. Sometimes you have to reach New Jerusalem in order to remind yourself that it's just another New Town.

The EU, guardians of truth.

Here's a self-explanatory letter to the Telegraph from one William Oddie (presumably not the same Bill Oddie I used to enjoy watching in The Goodies):

SIR - You report (May 24) an EU racism watchdog as focusing (in a document entitled "Islamophobia") on an article I wrote for The Daily Telegraph in which I am supposed to have asserted that "Britain's Muslims [are] an alien wedge".

What I actually wrote in that article was: "For this country, there is [an] imperative, which will be with us long after the war is over: to prevent, or at least to obfuscate, a perception of the British Muslim community as being an alien wedge."

In other words, my plain intention was the direct reverse of what I am accused of. Articles by other British journalists were similarly distorted in this EU report: the document as a whole is thoroughly disreputable, and should be withdrawn immediately.

A fantasy for the Guardian

. I see the Guardian is still pretending that there is a serious body of opinion that thinks the Jenin quote massacre unquote actually took place, despite the fact that the Palestinian Authority themselves have dropped the claim that hundreds of civilians were killed. (Here's Mark Steyn's "Palestinians agree with Israel shock horror" column again.) Admire the way that the anonymous writer of this article seems so impartial. "Palestinians claim the camp was the scene of a massacre. Israel denies this and claims it is a centre for would-be suicide bombers." Can't you just imagine him, her or it smirking, "oh, I just reported the claims. After all some Palestinians still claim there was a massacre." The Guardian does not shrink from making an assessment of the validity of claims made by George Bush or Iain Duncan Smith, but they come over all bashful when it's their friends in Occupied Palestine.

Peter Briffa has given the Guardian a rude nickname, the "Wanker". Normally I'm such a nicey-nicey well-brought-up person that I laugh at this but do not imitate it. I have to admit, though, that the image perfectly describes the way the Guardian works itself up over its own fantasies. (UPDATE: Peter Briffa says he got it from Damian Penny.)

Oh yeah, and the heroic Palestinians have been killing toddlers in ice cream parlours. Scarcely qualifies as news these days, does it? Over the last few decades there has been a lot of outrage over the callousness of the phrase "collateral damage." It seems to stand for the mechanistic, inhuman side of our civilization, that sees human lives as mere tools, or worse, mere mess clogging up the progress of some great cause. Then you compare that attitude to that of to the Palestinians. Palestinians don't bomb places where families congregate as an unfortunate side-effect of hitting an armaments plant; they aim for them so they can kill families. And suddenly the phrase "collateral damage" and the apologetic behind it starts looking like a Normandy beachead: the first ground gained for civilization against barbarism.

Be ye therefore wise as serpents and harmless as doves.

Here's a seriously intellectual website containing arguments for Christianity. Also lightbulb jokes, and an ethical defence of same.

Oops.

Got into a code loop somehow. Or a time loop. Ignore this post.

Go on, surrender to blackmail now!

I just had this cosmically urgent appeal for action:

Natalie,

As per instructed by the web-frau MB, I voted for you in this contest at War Now! How about a plug for my sex, drugs and rock & roll series? Of course I blew the deal since I voted BEFORE sending this email, but anyway. :}P

Andrew.

Dodgeblog.blogspot.com

"Insanabile cacoëthes scribendi"

Now there's a man who knows his special characters. And I will of course plug his sex n drugs n rock n roll series, as hitherto it has only been noticed by picayune specialist blogs like... oh, what is that thing called again? Ah, I remember now... Instapundit.

Y'all vote for me now. Or the sushi gets it.

What will be will be splendidly pedantic.

. I had several e-mails about the wisdom of Doris Day. Ray Eckhart's was typical:

My foreign language skills are not formidable, so it took a bit of work to get all of Mr Steyn's witticisms.

What you might be missing, however, is the way many (especially them ignorant Texans) in America mispronounce the Spanish of Doris Day's song, "Que sera sera" (there should be an accent on the "a", so that the translation is "whatever will be, will be."), and instead, pronounce it as sera sera, as in the Italian for "evening", with the accent on the first syllable. In truth, the lyricist made an error, in the sense that the proper Spanish (if I trust my memory and High School Spanish teacher), should be "lo que sera, sera" (again with the accent on the a) Don't know how to do accents.

Thanks to Turkeyblog I do! Go to Webmonkey and search for "special characters." They all start with & and finish with ;. Just write the whole string in place of the character. It looks really weird on "Edit this post" but, trust me, comes out OK on the published page.

The popular misquoting of the words results from mixing Spanish with Italian. According to Babel Fish the Italian would be "Che cosa sarà, sia." (Let's see if their accent copies to my page!) This means "What thing will be, would be." But - trusting my memory and a teacher of long ago - I think that "sia" is the subjunctive and unecessarily posh. I hope I'm right to say that many Italians would drop the subjunctive and the "cosa" and actually say "Che sarà, sarà."

For fans of the song, Mr Eckhart provides the lyrics here. He did give another link, too, but it's not working for me.

"Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime...

" Deeply concerned about criminals, completely freaking indifferent to victims of crime. I think I'll make this a series. The widow of the murdered head teacher Philip Lawrence was asked to apologize to his killer by the killer's probation officer. It seems the poor darling was upset at his victim's widow criticizing him for, you know, being a murderer. This was the action of one probation officer who has since had a bollocking, true. But it's symptomatic of the training and direction this officer will have recieved. Which in turn is symptomatic of the culture.

It Can't Rain All The Time, says Myria. A reader with what I think is an Irish name replies, "Obviously you've never lived in Ireland."

BTW I need a more explicit "naming" policy. My intention is that if the author of an e-mail to nataliesolent@aol signs their name then I assume, unless told otherwise, that it's OK to quote them by name. But what does it mean if I can easily get the name by digging in the "Details" field, but the main e-mail is not signed? Is anonymity desired or not?

The truth is out there.

It just ain't found its way here yet. Samizdata links to it. Instapundit links to it. It's the Boston Globe story about the disastrous effects of British gun control.

Far be it for me to snipe about this timely exposition of facts I have been shouting into a black hole ever since I had this blog. I merely offer for discussion some complicating factors. The first is that I am pretty sure author Joyce Lee Malcolm is not quite right to call British gun restrictions "the toughest in any democracy". Japan is at least as strict, and has been for longer. This has been cited as one of the causes of Japan's famously low rate of crime by many anti-gun observers. Pro-gun people have to supply other explanations for Japan being different, such as general social cohesiveness. (Does anyone have a url for an accessible summary of different countries' gun laws?)

Secondly, it has to be said that althought the US burlgary and mugging rates are now looking either similar or lower than British rates, it is still true that the British murder rates are lower than US. Next question: is this because of the absence of legal guns? Answer: no. Or it least that's my answer. The British murder rate in the early part of the twentieth century was far lower than it is now, as the article says, and guns were then freely available for self-defence. Considering the more recent past, of the few anti-gun control facts that has become widely known in Britain - the knowledge having been hammered into us in a spectacular and bloody manner - is that the 1997 Firearms Act has been followed by an explosion of gun crime.

That, however, leads us to a third point. It bears repeating that the framers of the 1997 Act were not really interested in reducing ordinary shootings by ordinary criminals. This is not some stupid conspiracy theory. Gun-control was a genuinely popular and well-intentioned movement. But, as I wrote in Rachel weeping for her children:

The main aim of the handgun ban was not to cut down general gun crime. That was only ever thrown in as a makeweight. It is important to realise that what ordinary people wanted from a handgun ban was to stop another Hamilton or Ryan. They shut their eyes and wished hard. If troubled by the question, "won’t the next mad killer just get hold of an illegal gun, as ordinary criminals so frequently do?" then they firmly told themselves, "At least it’s a gesture in the right direction." The law served as a gesture of comfort to the bereaved and to the public.

For more on this subject, see Iain Murray's published work. The June 21st 2001 article is spot-on relevant, of course, but quite a lot of the others also tie in.