Don’t put wire on your windows

? it might hurt burglars!

Late news in from the UK.

"Residents in Surrey and Kent villages have been ordered by police to remove wire mesh from their windows as burglars could be injured. Home owners in the villages of Tandridge and Tatsfield in Surrey and in Westerham, Brasted and Sundridge in Kent have said they are furious that they are being branded 'criminals' for protecting their property."

At least a few people (minus our resident red coat) have a set!

Reply to
Oren
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In news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com, Oren spewed forth:

on kinda the same note, I recieved this in an email

You're sound asleep when you hear a thump outside your bedroom door.

Half-awake, nearly paralyzed with fear, you hear muffled whispers.

At least two people have broken into your house and are moving your way. With your heart pumping, you reach down beside your bed and pick up your shotgun. You rack a shell into the chamber, then inch toward the door and open it.

In the darkness, you make out two shadows. One holds something that looks like a crowbar. When the intruder brandishes it as if to strike, you raise the shotgun and fire.

The blast knocks both thugs to the floor. One writhes and screams while the second man crawls to the front door and lurches outside..

As you pick up the telephone to call police, you know you're in trouble. In your country, most guns were outlawed yearsbefore, and the few that are privately owned are so stringently regulated as to make them useless. Yours was never registered.

Police arrive and inform you that the second burglar has died. They arrest you for First Degree Murder and Illegal Possession of a Firearm. When you talk to your attorney, he tells you not to worry: authorities will probably plea the case down to manslaughter.

"What kind of sentence will I get?" you ask.

Only ten-to-twelve years," he replies, as if that's nothing. "Behave yourself, and you'll be out in seven."

The next day, the shooting is the lead story in the local newspaper. Somehow, you're portrayed as an eccentric vigilante while the two men you shot are represented as choirboys. Their friends and relatives can't find an unkind word to say about them.Buried deep down in the article, authorities acknowledge that both "victims" have been arrested numerous times.

But the next day's headline says it all: "Lovable Rogue Son Didn't Deserve to Die." The thieves have been transformed from career criminals into Robin Hood-type pranksters.

As the days wear on, the story takes wings. The national media picks it up, then the international media. The surviving burglar has become a folk hero. Your attorney says the thief is preparing to sue you, and he'll probably win. The media publishes reports that your home has been burglarized several times in the past and that you've been critical of local police for their lack of effort in apprehending the suspects.

After the last break-in, you told your neighbor that you would be prepared next time. The District Attorney uses this to allegethat you were lying in wait for the burglars.

A few months later, you go to trial. The charges haven't been reduced, as your lawyer had so confidently predicted. When you take the stand, your anger at the injustice of it all works against you. Prosecutors paint a picture of you as a mean, vengeful man. It doesn't take long for the jury to convict you of all charges. The judge sentences you to life in prison.

This case really happened. On August 22, 1999, Tony Martin of Emneth, Norfolk , England , killed one burglar and wounded a second. In April, 2000, he was convicted and is now serving a life term. How did it become a crime to defend one's own life in the once great British Empire? It started with the Pistols Act of 1903.This seemingly reasonable law forbade selling pistols to minors or felons and established that handgun sales were to be made only to those who had a license. The Firearms Act of 1920 expanded licensing to include not only handguns but all firearms except shotguns.

Later laws passed in 1953 and 1967 outlawed the carrying of any weapon by private citizens and mandated the registration of all shotguns. Momentum for total handgun confiscation began in earnest after the Hungerford mass shooting in 1987. Michael Ryan, a mentally disturbed man with a Kalashnikov rifle, walked down the streets shooting everyone he saw. When the smoke cleared, 17 people were dead.

The British public, already de-sensitized by eighty years of "gun control", demanded even tougher restrictions. (The seizure of all privately owned handguns was the objective even though Ryan used a rifle.)

Nine years later, at Dunblane , Scotland , Thomas Hamilton used a semi-automatic weapon to murder 16 children and a teacher at a public school.

For many years, the media had portrayed all gun owners as mentally unstable or worse, criminals. Now the press had a real kook with which to beat up law-abiding gun owners. Day after day, week after week, the media gave up all pretense of objectivity and demanded a total ban on all handguns. The Dunblane Inquiry, a few months later, sealed the fate of the few side arms still owned by private citizens.

During the years in which the British government incrementally took away most gun rights, the notion that a citizen had the right to armed self-defense came to be seen as vigilantism. Authorities refused to grant gun licenses to people who were threatened, claiming that self-defense was no longer considered a reason to own a gun. Citizens who shot burglars or robbers or rapists were charged while the real criminals were released.

Indeed, after the Martin shooting, a police spokesman was quoted as saying, "We cannot have people take the law into their own hands." All of Martin's neighbors had been robbed numerous times, and several elderly people were severely injured in beatings by young thugs who had no fear of the consequences... Martin himself, a collector of antiques, had seen most of his collection trashed or stolen by burglars..

When the Dunblane Inquiry ended, citizens who owned handguns were given three months to turn them over to local authorities.Being good British subjects, most people obeyed the law. The few who didn't were visited by police and threatened with ten-year prison sentences if they didn't comply.

Police later bragged that they'd taken nearly 200,000 handguns from private citizens. How did the authorities know who had handguns? The guns had been registered and licensed. Kind of like cars. Sound familiar?

Reply to
ChairMan

They're going to take our cars?

R
Reply to
RicodJour

Give them a few years, but yeah, eventually. Of course, they will find a way to get gas up to five bucks a gallon, so we can't afford to drive them anyway. Another 20-30 years, we'll all be in politically correct glorified golf carts, and nobody will travel more than 40 miles from home.

Reply to
aemeijers

Correct. Driving has long been declared to be a privilege, not a right.

Reply to
krw

Well, yeah. The authorities did exactly that in New York. And California.

Fortunately, I live in a state that does not register firearms.

Reply to
HeyBub

ound familiar?

Oh, a few years - okay. I wasn't sure if I should get rid of the car now.

I find it odd how people become feisty fighting for their 'right' to keep something they're used to, when other better choices were taken away from them without so much as a whimper. The US had the best mass transit system in the world, and the burgeoning auto industry systematically set about to destroy it. Shell corporations, and all the rest to drive mass transit into the ground and make everyone dependent on cars. They did an excellent job.

Did you ever see the documentary, Taken For A Ride?

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from the Dallas paper's review: "By 1946, the U.S. Justice Department had begun an investigation that led to indictments of GM and its partners for criminal antitrust violations, and ultimately to convictions. The punishment? Each company had to pay a $5,000 fine."

Hmmm, now why does that remind me of huge organizations gang-raping the country's sphincter in our recent financial meltdown? Oh, right - greed. The video is on YouTube if you want to check it out.

Gas is far above $5/gallon in Europe and their mass transit systems actually work.

R
Reply to
RicodJour

We've been through this repeatedly. 1. Europe is a hell of a lot smaller than the US, and towns are a lot closer together. 2. Other than in the medium to large cities, there never was that much mass transit in US. Out here in flyover country, they did have interurbans 100 years ago, and local bus systems, but the interurbans gave way to bus lines like Greyhound, and the local bus systems seldom got out of the 'old city' areas into the suburbs. (In the older eastern giant cities, the transit spokes helped CAUSE the suburbs, and the sprawl everyone seems to decry.) 3. Mass transit seldom, if ever, pays for itself. On a bus line that is near-empty most runs, it would be cheaper to have free dial-up cab service.

Disclaimer- I like mass transit, and in previous towns, used it a lot. In this town, if the buses still ran out this far, it would take me over an hour each way to and from work, versus 12-15 minutes driving. Ain't gonna happen- I don't have that many years left.

2nd disclaimer- not defending the megacorps, and the games they played to eliminate competition. Sharks do what sharks do. But if you think similar things don't go on in oh-so-progressive Europe and elsewhere, look again. It's always about the money. Gas isn't so expensive in Europe because the actual cost is that high- they use it as a social engineering tool, and a profit center. Evading income taxes is a national tradition in much of Europe (so I've been told), and they gotta pay for all their government programs somehow.
Reply to
aemeijers

" snipped-for-privacy@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

it even says so on many driver's licenses,and that's the excuse they use for DUI roadblocks and other unconstitutional actions.

Reply to
Jim Yanik

What's even sadder is that's all you got from that.

Reply to
ChairMan

better hope it stays that way, too

Reply to
ChairMan

Zoom!

Reply to
aemeijers

Notice the way I phrased my statement.

Reply to
krw

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