Guns in the UK. in Brexistential Breakdowns

Well, this is all sorts of fucked up.

Our MPs hold weekly surgeries in their local constituencies for the public to meet, raise and discuss local issues with them in a face-to-face situation. Today Jo Cox, Labour MP for Batley and Spen, W. Yorkshire, was shot and stabbed whilst at her surgery, and later died of her injuries.

What in the absolute fuck?

A woman who works for the Labour party, an elected MP who’d also been the head of policy for the charity Oxfam, gets up in the morning, gets dressed and eats breakfast with her husband and two kids, and goes out to meet and work with the members of the public who’d elected her to serve them. And now two children will be getting home from school to find out they’re never going to see their Mum again.

In this country, in 2016.

It’s utterly fucked up, yesterday I was talking to a friend in America and I’d said I had absolutely no idea how she coped with having to deal with pro-gun advocates in the wake of a firearm-related tragedy because it’s not really something we have to deal with, it’s not a thing over here, and hasn’t really been a thing since 1997. There’s been some, don’t get me wrong; we still have gangs and criminals just like every other nation, and there’s been one mass shooting since Dunblane, but the undeniable truth is that the public response was right, the political response was the correct one, and the police response was stupendously effective.

The police reckon there’s now less than a thousand illegally-owned guns left in the country now. Less than a thousand guns in criminal hands. In gang-related raids in 2011 police found them with flintlock pistols, flintlock pistols in 2011. Our gun control was so effective that within fourteen years of it being enacted British gang members were reduced to using these:

And today I’ve seen people claim it doesn’t work.

And I just don’t know how you can believe that.

Even today, even in the pure, raw pain that today has brought to my nation, to believe that the efforts of the last nineteen years have been in vain and had absolutely no effect on the state of gun violence in this country is just incomprehensible to me.

And yet today an MP was shot in a busy market place.

Today I argued with pro-gun advocates about gun control in this country.

Today I thought “so, this is what being an American feels like…“

Seriously, what the absolute fuck?

Last updated June 27, 2016