War on Weapons

[Xyleneb]

The ban on old ladies carrying anything to defend themselves with is a joke. The rest of this stuff is so arbitrary and ineffective that I doubt if it ever saved anybody from being victimised.

How many hand-claw stabbings (either pre or post-1997) have you seen on your block?

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[Floppy]

This doesn't sit right with me and I'll need some serious convincing. Honestly, I don't think people should be carrying weapons around at all. I'm definitely going to need some evidence on how weapon restrictions don't keep people any safer before considering an upvote on policy to remove them.

Vote: ❎

[Xyleneb]

First of all, I think that you're already aware that we've banned everything. You name it, we've banned it. What I think you want to know is; under what metric has that ban worked?

Availability;- Pepper spray has been banned since 1968. Technically, the ban covers every spray bottle as an offense under the firearms act. Yes, every spray bottle so long as it's "noxious". Is it less available? Not really. The independent seems to think they're available.

Manufacture;- Ground chilli and surgical spirit. In a spray bottle. Call it hot sauce, call it a dangerous firearm... or let a jury interpret it for you.

Marketing;- Yes, marketing is banned too. The words "zombie", "military", "tactical" and "special ops" are UK no-nos. In someone's head in an office somewhere, this stopped a crime from happening.

UK retailers can be threatened or fined for not keeping ahead of all of this. German retailers - not so much.

Safety;- The point that you're going to pull this policy on. Well, you'd think that knifecrimes.org would be openly partisan on a topic like this, but even they provide a nice summary of how throwing legislation at the problem hasn't made it go away.

I used to hold the same view as them too, namely that I would be willing to inconvenience a hell of a lot of people to not have to find out what it feels like to get stabbed in the spleen. "Throw them in jail", "make them carry a license" etc etc. But in the end, I remember a conversation I once had that went along the lines of; "Would you be content to live in a zoo where you are safe but not free?"

The answer to that, is that you can put no price on your liberty.

Regulations that are not demonstrably a necessity should be abolished. The burden of proof should fall to those who claim that these laws, are laws that we can't live without.

[philipjohn]

Likewise, I'm going to need to see some evidence that;

1) the current legislation does not adequately prevent violent crime 2) there are other ways to deal with the problem that work elsewhere in the world 3) that those other ways could feasibly work here

Vote: ❎

[openpolitics-bot]

Closed automatically: maximum age exceeded. Please feel free to resubmit this as a new proposal, but remember you will need to base any new proposal on the current policy text.