Apparently the UK’s Daily Mail yanked a pro-gun rights piece off its page because the ideas therein were deemed too dangerous. As Joe pointed out in a post just now, you can go read the too-dangerous-for-print post over here.
I’m continuously struck by how radical a document our constitution is. Too radical for us to really follow, apparently, and too dangerous for Europeans to even speak of, or debate. This is 200 years after most of them were dead.
What would it take to pull something from a paper lovingly known as the Daily Hate?
Please keep us posted as the story develops. There are two things going on here, the articles assertions about Europeans arming themselves AND the reason why this was pulled at all. It hardly seems that controverisal, even less controversial for something like the Daily Mail.
I think they are about to learn about the Streisand Effect.
It is hard for Americans to understand just how entrenched the British anti-gun lobby actually is. 90 years of heavily funded organizing has made it as powerful as the American anti’s like to claim our NRA is.
I have no doubt that the Daily Mail’s editor was deluged with angry telephone calls as soon as the item was posted. And continued to be well after it was taken down.
Stranger
I’m not sure its so much “heavily funded” as totally “entrenched”; from what I remember of the history, when the Bolsheviks won in Russia the British ruling class freaked out. After all Marxist theory said their type of society was where this would occur; only in retrospect have we learned that only Marxism-Leninism is effective (the revolutionary doctrine developed by Lenin) and pretty much only in mostly agrarian societies vs. heavily industrialized ones.
And it’s been pretty much all downhill since then, with the ironic twist of US citizens donating a lot of their personal weapons to Britain for the Home Guard after Dunkirk.