"To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing,
if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?"
-- Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, 1803

Life in Blighty

by Lee

Here’s an update to a story I’ve blogged on before.  (Because of the server switch I’m having problems locating the original link.) Tony Martin was a guy for whom British laws utterly failed.  After being repeatedly robbed he ended up shooting and killing a teenage burglar, and was sent to prison for it.  In Britain, not only do you not have the right to own firearms, you don’t have the right to defend yourself, period.  But are the British safer?  Not on your life.

Any MP will tell you that it is not the affluent who are the real and chronic victims of crime: it is the poor and the vulnerable whose lives are degraded; the poor, the vulnerable, and, yes, the weird. Tony Martin is called a “weirdo”, as if that justified what has happened to him.

Well, the world is full of weirdos. It would be a sad thing if Britain, of all countries, did not see that the weird have a right to protection. It was his very oddness that made Tony Martin a target, and as the criminal bullying intensified he became odder still. In the minds of his supporters, he became weird under the tormenting pressure of knowing that the burglars would come again, and knowing that nothing would be done to protect him.

I spoke to the annual meeting of an Oxfordshire village the other day, and was amazed by the focus on crime, the anger that nothing was being done. The dentist’s windows had been smashed so often that he was thinking of quitting the village. The sports hall had sustained £20,000 of damage from vandals. A woman told how she had been bricked in the face, and the librarian described how she had been barricaded in her office.

There were 20 of them, they said, of all ages, some of them barely pubescent. They were egged on by the girls, and they had set up a rival pole of authority in the village; that is, their thuggishness was so consistent that people were beginning to defer to them, to seek their consent before some undertaking or other.

Now bear in mind that this is leafy Oxfordshire; this is not some sink estate in the Midlands, of the kind described by The Spectator’s Dr Theodore Dalrymple. They wanted to know what I was going to do about it, of course, and we went through the options.

There are the Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, but the trouble is that the magistrates won’t issue them in sufficient numbers. There are “Acceptable Behaviour Contracts”, but these need staff to enforce them, and there is not enough money. You could try talking to the parents, I suggested, and there was hollow laughter around the room.

Basically the police are there to protect all British citizens, which obviously they cannot do all the time.  So when citizens use force to defend themselves and their property they are held criminally liable, and told that they should have let the government handle it.  Do the British people not see the asininity in this point of view?

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