Whoda thunk it?
Massachusetts registers firearm owners, it registers firearms, it registers firearm carriers, it registers all firearm transfers between people (even private sales), it even requires registration to possess a single piece of expended brass – an object that poses no threat to anyone older than two (choking hazards and all that). And yet here we have an individual officially judged unsuitable for firearm ownership due to repeated (and serious) mental illness issues, and he still owned firearms. He was ordered to turn those firearms in, and he still owned them. The police knew where he lived, knew that he owned firearms, knew that he had not turned them in, and he still owned firearms – the very firearms he used to murder those seven people.
From the linked post:
There's a good bit missing from the retrospective. First, Brad points out this nugget:
Despite the passage of time, Stephen C. Doherty, the now-retired Wakefield police chief who rushed to the company minutes after shooting erupted in the usually placid town, said his memories of the carnage surface almost every day.
(emphasis mine). Minutes. When seconds count, police are only minutes away. We repeat this mantra often, at the risk of losing sight of what it represents. This is the very reason we carry our own guns - by their very nature, the police cannot be everywhere at once.
Ref that last, I'm going to bring up one of Robert Peel's 9 Principles:
7) Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent upon every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
And it was an expected thing that a citizen had the right of self-defense, and the right to use the tools necessary to defend; a part of the Principles that far too many LE and politicians really don't want people to think about, or consider.
Speaking of the last, Lawdog noted that BBC did a series of shows based on Sherlock Holmes and Doc Watson, updated to current days; I've seen two of them, and they were good. What comes to mind right now is from the first, when Watson realizes he's in a situation were things are getting very odd and somewhat dangerous and asks the people giving him a ride "Can we make a stop so I can pick something up?" They stop at the place where he's been staying and he goes in, digs out the pistol he snuck back from 'Stan, checks the mag and slips it under his belt, under his sweater; don't you know a bunch of people at BBC and in the Brit government shit bricks when they saw that? I'm really surprised it made it in.
2 comments:
Thanks for the linkage :).
This scenario, bloody though it may have been, more than adequately shows just how useless the pipe dreams of anti-rights nuts really are... MA is damned near their ideal utopia, and yet none of those laws stopped the murderer from his bloodthirsty goal - it is almost like he did not care about those laws.
Who would have thought?
In Doyle's original stories, Dr. Watson didn't have to smuggle his army revolver home, or keep it hidden. The police did not need to carry firearms, *because* they could request backup from any respectable citizen when needed, and usually got it - often including the citizen's hunting weapon or military service sidearm.
Englishmen were citizens then. Now they are subjects once again.
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