Gunishment
Posted on Sep 05 2007 | Tagged as: Politics, The Stupid
In this New Statesman piece on the origins of all the guns that are supposedly flooding the country, Martin Bright reports that guns are often designed to be easily taken apart and arrive in the UK separately as various components. (Probably tried on a much larger scale for Iraq’s “Babylon Gun”.)
According to the academics, these are quite hard to identify. Bright quotes Wolvehampton University gun-crime expert Peter Waddington as saying:
“You need to be a very good Customs officer to say ‘that’s a trigger mechanism’.”
In which case if guns coming into Britain is as big a problem as we’re being told, why aren’t customs officers being trained to spot the components?
on 07 Sep 2007 at 11:39 am 1 Ceri said …
Because:
1)That would mean fully accepting that we have a gun problem in Britain, without the aid of an 18-month policy review, which is then put out to consultation, completely rewritten, and presented for consultation again as a white paper.
2)It would make far too much sense. Actually providing relevant training which pre-empts and intercepts criminal activities is something which to my knowledge only happens in Scandinavia.