British police want to trawl gun owners’ social media for wrongthink after the Plymouth ‘incel’ shooting.
Gosh, what could possibly go wrong?
Plenty, to judge by the orgy of breast-beating, cant, hypocrisy and hysteria which has characterised the political and media response since Thursday’s mass shooting.
A grim incident — the killing of several people by self-described ’23-year old virgin autist’ Jake Davison, who subsequently committed suicide — has been seized on by the media and political class as a beneficial crisis. They will now exploit this as an opportunity to advance a long-running Establishment agenda: the war on private gun ownership, and the redefinition of anyone with vaguely right-wing ideas as a potential terrorist threat.
Here are some examples:
Former Metropolitan Police commissioner Lord Stevens has told the Sunday Telegraph that the police should now trawl the “online content” of potential gun owners for “an in-depth assessment of who these people are and what they think.”
The paper goes on to report:
The Government is now looking at whether incel groups are sufficiently on the radar of police or should be dealt with as more of a priority.
Of course it is. That’s because the bought-and-paid-for MSM has for the last two days more than fulfilled its side of the Satanic bargain by inventing a moral panic in which, suddenly, the greatest threat to Britain’s security are lonely young men with no sex lives and a mild enthusiasm for Donald Trump.
Typical of this is the widely-quoted “community leader”, one Kev Sprowston (a “neighbourhood watch co-ordinator”), telling anyone who will listen:
This is our September 11.
Right. And who, exactly, decided that this random person was suddenly the arbiter of what does and doesn’t constitute Britain’s equivalent of 9/11? The desperate, disingenuous MSM, of course!
And here is Jonathan Hall QC, the Government’s “independent” reviewer on terrorism legislation, doing his bit (after a dutiful, insincere nod to liberty):
Obviously we don’t want to live in a society where what we do online is routinely looked at by the state, but I see the force of the point that social media may be a valuable context of firearm licensing.
Meanwhile, in MSM analyses, much attention has been focused on the concept of ‘incels’ (involuntary celibates) and their dangerously right-wing views on issues like women.
Here, for example, is a classic case of boundary-blurring and whipped-up hysteria from the Sunday Telegraph, in a section subtitled ‘Plymouth killer steeped in internet subculture that has been identified as increasingly dangerous’:
A man who supports women are [sic] ‘cucked’, a reference to a type of pornography.
This is irresponsibly, disgracefully, wilfully off-beam. A cuck is not, by any reasonable definition, a man who “supports women”. Rather it is a term of not unjustified contempt for the kind of politically correct, left-wing agitator who renounces all forms of traditional masculinity and who embraces Third and Fourth Wave feminism. See the difference? What the Telegraph is doing here is rebranding ALL males who are sceptical of the woke agenda as crazed, right-wing terrorist loons.
It’s particularly bizarre that the Sunday Telegraph, traditionally a newspaper for the kind of Conservative-voting rural folk who enjoy the perfectly legitimate hobby of shooting game, should be participating in a charade whose obvious real purpose is to make Britain’s stringent gun laws even stricter — to the point where owning a shotgun becomes virtually impossible.
American readers will recognise exactly what is going on here because it is a familiar response every time there is a mass shooting incident: always, but always, the anti-Second-Amendment lobby will seize on it as an excuse to advance their nefarious agenda to disarm citizens and strengthen the totalitarian state.
But in Britain the political and media class are pushing at a largely open door. Gun ownership is increasingly seen as frivolous, dispensable and dangerous — a preserve of a few reactionaries who refuse to understand that guns have no place in a civilised society and that shooting game is cruel.
And even though many Conservative MPs enjoy shooting, as do many readers of “Conservative” newspapers, it seems no one has the courage to stand up for gunowners’ rights.
Make no mistake, this is the beginning of the end for legal gun-ownership in Britain. The government and media response to the Plymouth incident is a classic case of Problem, Reaction, Solution.
Yes, the local police do indeed have questions to answer as to why Davison had still had possession of a pump-action shotgun when he had been on a police assault charge two months earlier and when members of his family had contacted mental health professionals for help.
But that is simply a case of current regulations being poorly administered — not an indication that rules need to be made stricter.
As supporters of the Second Amendment fully understand, an armed populace is the best defence against encroaching government tyranny. Most Americans get this. And there was a time when Britons understood this too.
Here is what George Orwell, who was certainly no right-wing ideologue, had to say on the matter:
The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer’s cottage, is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.
If that is our job then we have failed dismally. We are about to reap the whirlwind.
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