One in Ten Brit Kids Has Gun

In Britain, where guns are illegal, “one in ten teenage schoolboys
has carried some kind of gun in the past year, according to the largest study on
the impact of Britain’s firearms culture on urban youth.” That is the lede in a news report
in the London Times
on the Blair government’s new crime reduction bill.

Er, am I missing something here? “Britain’s firearms culture?” I thought the
British were a peacable people that didn’t have a gun culture, unlike the cowboy culture of the
United States, for example.

In fact, of course, modern Britain has a more violent culture than the United States, and
James Bartholomew, author of The Welfare State
We’re In, reckons he knows why. Violence and crime have escalated 2,300 percent in Britain in the
last century, roughly paralleling the growth in the welfare state. By the way, a hundred years ago
in Britain gun ownership was widespread and crime was rare. Today “many children
[blame] a growing sense of lawlessness on the need to carry a gun or knife in self-defence.
The most common reason was the fear of attack from other children.”

But the British government is pushing a Violent Crime Reduction Bill through Parliament.
It is “aimed at cracking down on the problem and giving teachers the
power to search pupils for knives.”

That should do it.