[Urbane Guerrilla]

It means England is more vulnerable now to a genocide than ever before in her history. It's already meant violent crime has taken off into a growth spurt. To stop this, you're going to have to push Queen and Parliament into liberalizing concealed carriage of weapons and into active encouragement of private arms -- quite in accord with the long English tradition of limited government. It is, I think, essentially how limited government was kept a limited government.

Now if the victims had had guns, how long would the machete-wielders have survived? The victim populations were not armed, and that is why they died. If you want private arms to inoculate against genocide, the arms must be efficient. In point of fact, for several reasons including ergonomics of shooting and availability of ammunition, the arms should be assault rifles. The defense against genocide is more central to the matter than the means of the genocide.

The mass murder/suicides that make headlines over here, and are not unknown over there, have a feature in common that the public handwringers never mention: the shooter could be confident no one could shoot back at him. Because no one else could shoot back, the perp could rack up a sizable total before finishing himself off. Suicide is so often paired with this kind of multiple murder as to indicate a furious anger at the self as well as others.