Handguns, knives, and even big sticks are strictly regulated in the UK. (There is even discussion whether police ought to be permitted to use Tasers.) Criminals continue to show ingenuity and to persevere. In this case, the robber was armed with a banana*. No, seriously:
A US teenager who was thwarted in an attempt to rob an internet cafe armed with a hidden banana ate the “weapon” before he was arrested, police say.
And now, for the obligatory Monty Python clip:
Lest anyone get the idea that criminals resorting to this sort of “weaponry” proves gun control is effective, keep in mind the oft-reported UK statistics are not accurate. And that a couple of Harvard professors – hardly NRA wingnuts – studied and reported on the futility of gun control as a method of crime control:
[P]er capita murder overall is only half as frequent in the United States as in several other nations where gun murder is rarer, but murder by strangling, stabbing, or beating is much more frequent.
The NRA is growing rapidly (thanks to both valid concerns about Obama’s desire to ban guns and their free membership option), the GOP is pretty united on this topic, and even Blue Dog Dems are against gun control. But the tiresome, ongoing attempts by Democrats to restrict access to guns will probably not be nearly as effective as Obama’s backdoor methods.
As to the likelihood of the ban-happy Brits outlawing bananas… well, maybe not. But after guns, knives and big sticks were banned, “possession of an imitation firearm with intent to cause fear of violence and possession of a sharply-pointed article” became crimes.
Ted Nugent gets the last word, (h/t PW):
Did they ever tell you about the Bataan Death March in college? Did they ever tell you about how the trains lined up in Nuremburg in ‘37 and ‘38 and took people to Auschwitz, to the internment camps, and then ultimately to their death? Did they ever tell you about the Japanese emperor who gathered up Japanese little girls for the army to rape and torture and murder so they could get in the right frame of mind for war. My point is: In the absence of the most evil moments in human history you can pretend those moments didn’t happen, so you can pretend that certainly no human would ever force another human to be unarmed and helpless. Unfortunately, there are people in America, there are people in politics, there are people in positions of authority, who want to forcibly unarm, and force in to helplessness, American citizens. That’s what this is all about… None of the politicians who want gun control – they can’t claim ignorance – they all know that forced unarmed helplessness is a guaranteed victim orgy. They know that. So, they can’t claim ignorance, they are either evil to the core or just deranged. Either way, they must be stopped.
* I should have also linked this banana robbery which actually occurred in the UK. The link above is to a more recent one in North Carolina. The point I was clumsily attempting to make is that criminals commit crimes however they can; banning weapons is a more or less endless process that the UK started on quite a while back. Disarming the law-abiding is going to be just as ineffective here as it has been in the UK, and Nugent makes a good point that the politicians who are doing it can’t claim ignorance of the results.
Cross posted at the Green Room.
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