Prema wrote:
I bet you're from the US, the most aggressive militant nation in the world, obsessed with weapons, and the single nation since the end of WW2 responsible for and engaged in by far the most wars around the world and deaths as the consequence of it (estimated 2 mil +) ?
......it's called Texas son, and my ancestors were here long before it was ever apart of the United states of America - we are only aggressive when provoked or when foreigners need saving from their own pacifist nature or are too cowardly to save themselves, their loved ones or their neighbors from harm, just as any human's god-given Right to self preservation allows.
Remember Dunkirk in 1940, in the dark days following the British Expeditionary Force's evacuation, Great Britain was a nation virtually disarmed. And not just by the need to abandon equipment on France's beaches to save British "Tommies" to fight another day, but by the policies of its own government.
The days of devotion to civilian markmanship, "volunteer rifle clubs" and the idea that there should be "a rifle in every cottage," as proposed by the Prime Minister Marquis of Salisbury in 1900, had given way to restrictive gun control laws that required subjects to demonstrate "good reason" to merely obtain a handgun or rifle. So with Hitler's legions poised to cross the English Channel, the British people were defended by an ill-equipped and defeated army and a "Home Guard" armed with little more than sporting shotguns and pikes.
Help for the beleaguered nation came from both the American government and from the
American people, (Texans included) the latter through the "American Committee for Defense of British Homes." In late 1940, the committee sent an urgent appeal -- which, of course, appeared in NRA's magazine, the American Rifleman, (of which I'm a Benefactor/Life member and still receive to this day) -- for Americans to send "Pistols - Rifles - Revolvers - Shotguns - Binoculars" because "British civilians, faced with the threat of invasion, desperately need arms for the defense of their homes." Thousands of arms were collected and sent to England, one of which was a .30-'06 Model 1903 target rifle owned by Major John W. Hession. Hession was one of the pre-eminent highpower rifle target shooters of his day, and he used that rifle to win Olympic gold at Bisley Camp in England in 1908. The rifle, unlike the majority sent and subsequently destroyed by the British government, was returned and can now be viewed in the national Firearms Museum.
I and members of the Texas State Rifle Association, (Life member there also) sought to reclaim these weapons and have them returned to Texas, to place some of them in the National museum along Hession's and some here in the Texas Firearms museum, but to no avail - my grand-father was one that sent arms back then and the lilly liver'd Brits destroyed 'em.Now, sadly, Britain is again a disarmed nation, where even Olympic athletes wanting to represent their country cannot own a handgun and where an act of self-defense can land a subject in jail. As with virtually all rifles and handguns, those likely few remaining guns sent to England in its time of desperate need have been confiscated and destroyed.
Despite the very near enslavement of England being so close a mere six decades ago, the lesson of the false promises of gun control and personal disarmament were not learned.Which explains how and why grown men abroad have now become so neutered morally as to actually fear the mere sight of a firearm.
I never knew about an attempt from across the Atlantic, to try to arm the Home Guard. Wasn't this seen as being against the neutrality of the US? In any case, once the autumn came with its rougher seas, Britain was safe from invasion, at least until the following year.
I can imagine someone never having seen a gun up close, let alone held one. When the military were deployed in the streets of our larger Belgian cities after the attacks, those who fly out on holidays would have seen their firearms, but those who don't would normally only see the handguns the police carry in their holsters. I don't believe I have ever seen a policeman with a drawn pistol ever, in my life. I hope that will continue to be the case, but I do fear the influence Hollywood is having on perceptions over here.
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