If you're not a US citizen, be careful with your pics.

[clowdis]

If we jailed a few of those making threats on social media we might have avoided an assassination attempt and maybe taken a few more lunatics off the street. There is a point where freedom of speech or freedom of the press ends and common sense takes over and those people have to be investigated or removed. The guy in England had apparently made some sort of threatening comment and then posted a photo of himself with a gun on social media. That should be investigated.

 

[Laurie]

According to Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons, when the Brits phased out their L96A1 "Green Meanie" military & police sniper rifles to replace them with more modern versions, they didn't sell them off to try to recoup some of their cost. No, they chopped them up into pieces and then dumped them into the North Sea... which is the same thing they did with the vast majority of firearms that American NRA members generously donated to help them defend themselves from expected Nazi invaders during WWII.

There is a paranoia amongst British politicians and Chief Constables about a former government / military / police etc firearm being used criminally. So years ago - can't remember when, but probably after the 1987 Hungerford massacre - a government level decision was made that no such weapons would be sold to the British gun trade / public, and Chief Constables were so instructed. Note, I say British as the British Army stocks of Enfield L42A1 sniper rifles were subsequently sold abroad after this model was withdrawn and most ended up in the US and Canada. (A few have been re-imported since for British Lee-Enfield collectors, but very few.)

I worked for a gunshop / major firearms dealer late last century for a while. It did a lot of police business, and during my time there we got in a set of 'bits & pieces' from one force, the remains of 14 or 15 Parker-Hale M85s. A considerable number of these rifles had been purchased by UK police forces in the 1980s, later to be replaced by Accuracy Internationals. Being unable to sell the entire rifle, the police armourer had stripped off all the non-pressure bearing parts and accessories - stocks, bipods, (M14) magazines, iron sights etc and sold those. The barreled action would have been scrapped. We, and a lot of other people too, were really angry about this. Not only were these rifles a major part of our gunmaking heritage (Parker-Hale Ltd had gone bust by then), they were valuable and very collectable. I took the stocks down to Norman Clark in Rugby, a really good collection of the later synthetic McMillan stocks, not the early wood version. About half were in Arctic Camo' (black / dark blue / white pattern), the only time I ever saw this finish which was originally developed for the Royal Marines who are our Arctic warfare specialists. As Norman had bought all of Parker-Hale's remaining components inventory and employed some of its former gunsmiths when they shut down, he no doubt found good homes with customers who wanted to re-stock their P-H M85s. P-H sold 1,100 M85s IIRC to UK gun dealers in its final years having failed to obtain the British Army replacement sniper rifle contract.

https://www.rifleman.org.uk/Parker-Hale_M85.html

Not all police forces followed government instructions, some apparently feeling as we did! The same gunshop bought cased ex-police Remington 700s kits on a couple of occasions while I was there and sold them quietly without any reference to their origins.

The reason for the official paranoia on this issue is straightforward and in many ways understandable - the hysterical behaviour of our media on firearms, especially some the popular 'redtop' newspapers. They would have publicly crucified the government or police if another Hungerford type mass killer had used an ex-military / police rifle. I don't suppose this would be that much different in the US if any of the school, church etc massacre perpetrators of recent years had used an ex-P.D. AR15!

There is a point where freedom of speech or freedom of the press ends and common sense takes over and those people have to be investigated or removed.

There is a legal maxim in British common law that goes back long, long before the Internet and social media was invented, but is if anything even truer now that we have them. Citizens have a right to express their opinions / views freely in public or private, but that doesn't give anyone the right to stand up in a crowded building or sports arena and bellow "FIRE!" when there isn't one causing panic, death, injuries as hundreds crowd the exits. I'd imagine US law says something like this too. The problem is getting the balance between rights and responsibilities right, and the UK certainly hasn't done that in recent years.

 

[Coyotefurharvester]

The left wants the US to question freedom of speech, it's the first Amendment that socialists/communists fear the most. Since they have already eroded the 2nd Amendment.

 

[Syncrowave]

There is a legal maxim in British common law that goes back long, long before the Internet and social media was invented, but is if anything even truer now that we have them. Citizens have a right to express their opinions / views freely in public or private, but that doesn't give anyone the right to stand up in a crowded building or sports arena and bellow "FIRE!" when there isn't one causing panic, death, injuries as hundreds crowd the exits. I'd imagine US law says something like this too.

That's a big myth whose only purpose is to justify government censorship.
The folks who parrot it might want to do a little homework before parrotting it again.
• There is no law that prohibits yelling "fire!" in a crowded theatre.
• There was never any court case that involved prosecuting anyone who did so.
• And there was never any court decision that upheld any such prohibition, or any such prosecution.

 

[Kracken McGraw]

Oye! Dem forks be dangerous, too!
View attachment 1717611

How’s em going to cut their roast beef?

 

[Chubbs]

If what the guy did was so "serious," then why didn't they charge him with anything?
A threat is a threat. If he's threatening people, then charge him with making terroristic threats.
And if it isn't a threat, then it isn't a threat and, as they love to say in the UK, "F_ck off."
They didn't need to go to his house at 10 pm. They didn't need to go to his house at all. All they needed to do is get onto the Internet and look at what he said. Or, at most, contact LinkedIn and find out what he said. Then, either charge him or don't. But don't go back to the guy's house over and over and over and over.

That's not law enforcement. It's Busywork for Babysitters.



The Brits have a funny relationship with their guns.

According to Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons, when the Brits phased out their L96A1 "Green Meanie" military & police sniper rifles to replace them with more modern versions, they didn't sell them off to try to recoup some of their cost. No, they chopped them up into pieces and then dumped them into the North Sea... which is the same thing they did with the vast majority of firearms that American NRA members generously donated to help them defend themselves from expected Nazi invaders during WWII.

Golly, you'd think they were de-milling flogging hydrogen bombs or NBC weapons, not small arms.

Did they really need to cut up all those guns AND dump them into the North Sea? Couldn't they have -- I dunno -- just recited some simple incantations...maybe something along the lines of "Bad gun! BAD gun! You're a bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad GUN!"...while melting them down in a crucible over a bonfire built with MAGA hats?

You can just see those British cops in their silly checkered, chartreuse stormtrooper suits out there on barges, ceremoniously kicking cut-up pieces of rifles across the rail into the drink. "Grr, take THAT, you awful, evil, icky GUN!" [kick] "Guess I showed 'im, innit?" As if doing so showed one to be a fearless warrior. As if doing so would make even one electron's worth of difference to anybody anywhere whatsoever in the entire life of the Universe.

Now we have these big public charades in England where they have so-called "Knife Amnesties" where they collect knives from the public (kind of like a "gun turn-in" or "gun buyback" -- except with knives) ...

This whole silly exercise, mind you, is run by the Home Office ... the national government.
Imagine the FBI or the federal government squandering our tax dollars on the same kind of publicity stunt.

and then they pretend that a) the people handing over their knives would have presented any danger to anybody in the first place, and b) that collecting a bunch of butter knives from grannies is going to make even one iota of difference in the grand scheme of things.

It's all a big charade...just phony feelgood horse sh_t for low-information voters ... just like gun control ... just like dumping those awful, icky, ugly, evil guns into the North Sea ... just like practically everything they do. It's all words and no action, or as Texans like to say, "All hat and no cattle." More Busywork for Babysitters.

It reminds me of California Governor Gavin Newsom banning plastic straws and then pretending that doing so will make even the most miniscule change to anything for anybody ... while all across California, murder victims are stacked up like cordwood, and every day, Public Works employees in San Francisco have to shovel 5 to 10 cubic yards of human sh_t off the sidewalks in their "unhoused person" camps.

None of it means anything. It's all done for show. And it's as effete, phony and feckless as Monty Montgomery at Dunkirk, with his silly beret, his Maybelline moustache and his ridiculous riding crop. All of it brought to us by the same people who brought us Appeaser-in-Chief Neville Chamberlain.
What an embarrassment to Western civilization.

Why so angry ? What have the Brits done to you ?

 

[Syncrowave]

Why so angry ? What have the Brits done to you ?

I dunno, threatened to "come get me" -- or anyone else, anywhere in the world -- if they don't like what we say on social media?

WTF do these clowns think they are? The Planetary Speech Police?

They obviously think they're far more important and powerful than they actually are.

(As usual.)

 

[ronsatspokane]

You have incorrectly conflated investigations with imprisonments. 99% of these have seen no action taken by the police or authorities after complaints made to the police by so-called 'victims'. With the exception of one major incident, anybody going to jail for a social media post is very rare indeed. (Your words were 'the other 12,000 jailed .............') Those few who have gone to jail have been accused of making serious threats against others, trying to incite public violence or disorder, trying to foment terrorism and suchlike.

The sole major incident was the aftermath of the murder in summer 2024 of three little girls and injuring several more at a Taylor Swift dance class in Southport, a seaside time and holiday resort in north west England by a knife wielding 17 year old called Axel Rudakubana. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, there were violent riots and threats of disorder after false rumours circulated that the perpetrator was an illegal immigrant. They were at least in part stoked by social media posts spreading false information and calling for violent action such as burning down immigrant hostels. A very small number of people making these posts were subsequently jailed alongside violent rioters. The poster case of these is one Lucy Connolly who got 31 months prison. The harshness of the sentence, but not its rightness as she did plead guilty to the charges, has provoked considerable public anger and disquiet across the country.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdx5v1vzy01o

Even in the Southport riots case, the number prosecuted for posts (or attempted to be prosecuted as some failed) was single figures as opposed to a much larger number of violent rioters. Britain has a history of extreme nervousness amongst the authorities over major public disorder with armed soldiers being used to quell riots as late as the 19th and even early 20th century. The then newly elected Kier Starmer government apparently conformed to this norm.

I would question 'The Times' 12,000 police investigations figure anyway as an out and out SWAG. There are no reliable figures as online abuse / threats etc aren't usually recorded separately from other more traditional kinds. Irrespective of numbers, we Brits have become thoroughly fed up and angry with 'woke' police chiefs investigating and even sometimes arresting those accused of upsetting others online, often from serial vexatious complainers over 'trans' and similar issues, and there has been major public and media kickback resulting in the government Home Office and HM Chief Inspector of Policing telling them to lay off. As in the US which runs several years ahead of us on such issues, the pendulum is now swinging against the woke-outrage minority here and hopefully will see a return to common sense.

I appreciate the view from the ground, however I conflated nothing. I simply reported what we are hearing on this side of the pond and what the Times of London reported.

That said, we have politicians here in the US advocating for violence against those they disagree with. And that violence is occurring. Murders, assassinations, attempted assassinations, crimes against law enforcement while in the process of enforcing the law and so forth. It comes down to how you define "incite public violence" in conjunction with the mechanisms that protect free speech. While I'd like to see those politicians jailed, the law of the land disagrees with my belief in what constitutes the act of inciting public violence. We are erroring in the opposite direction of the UK. The folks who are currently inciting said violence in the name of "progress" may find themselves in the same position Robespierre and Trotsky found themselves in having successfully fomented revolution. More often than not these people eat their own. Let's hope they eat their own having failed in their attempts at revolution.

 

[Chubbs]

I dunno, threatened to "come get me" -- or anyone else, anywhere in the world -- if they don't like what we say on social media?

WTF do these clowns think they are? The Planetary Speech Police?

They obviously think they're far more important and powerful than they actually are.

(As usual.)

I wouldn't judge everyone by a few. I fail to see what Monty has to do with it. Your not German are you?

 

[SteveOak]

The Times of London reported in April that police are making around 12,000 arrests per year over supposedly offensive posts made online, or an average of 30 per day.