From an old grizzled veteran (my age) named Mike, who contributed a lot of wisdom to our Veterans’Tales site for a few years:
You’re asleep when you hear a thump outside your bedroom door. Half-awake, and 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, since, in your country, most guns were outlawed years before, and the few that are privately owned are so stringently regulated as to make them useless, except for hunti9ng rabbits.
Yours was never registered..
Police arrive and inform you that the second burglar has died, and 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 and 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” had 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 and 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 allege that 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.
Then, 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, where Michael Ryan, a mentally disturbed man with a Kalashnikov rifle, walked down the street 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 sidearm’s 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 Tony 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. Just like cars.
(The only thing wrong with this story is that citizens can still know about it. True authoritarians don’t want grandchildren listening to the grandparents about the Good Old Days, whether voting, fully-stocked grocery shelves, or personal home protection. Of even killing a rabbit for the dinner table, BriTain and her gun laws took over 80 years to fully cycle.)
So Mike provided this other piece of the story, from a letter from another vet our age,
When I was a kid, I couldn’t understand why Eisenhower was so popular. Maybe this will explain why .
General Eisenhower Warned Us.
It is a matter of history that when the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, General Dwight Eisenhower, found the victims of the death camps he ordered all possible photographs to be taken, and for the German people from surrounding villages to be ushered through the camps and even made to bury the dead.
He did this because he said in words to this effect …
Ike: “Get it all on record now – get the films – get the witnesses – because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened”.
This week, the UK debated whether to remove The Holocaust from its school curriculum because it ‘offends’ the Muslim population which claims “it never occurred.” It is not removed as yet. However, this is a frightening portent of the fear that is gripping the world and how easily each country is giving into it.
It is now more than 70 years after the Second World War in Europe ended.
This is being sent as a memorial chain, in memory of the six million Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians, and 1,900 Catholic priests Who were ‘murdered, raped, burned, starved, beaten, experimented on and humiliated while many in the world looked the other way!
Now, more than ever, with Iran, among others, claiming the Holocaust to be ‘a myth,’ it is imperative to make sure the world never forgets.
How many years will it be before the attack on the World Trade Center ‘NEVER HAPPENED?” Or mention Christmas or prayers in school. Many schools no longer recite the Pledge of Allegiance and many children do not know the words to our National Anthem, or that we even have one!
(Thanks, Mike.)
