Posted September 15, 2002

Imagine the wife of a senior U.S. cabinet official, robbed on the street in Washington, D.C. Two troubled youths steal her jewelry and purse and throw her in the gutter. Later she tells a newspaper reporter of her gratitude that the perpetrators left without kicking her in the stomach. Her baffled husband feebly bemoans the city's shocking crime wave.

No way, you say, this is not an American story. And you're right. It happened just days ago in London. The newspaper was the Times, and the victim was the wife of England's Shadow Chancellor, Michael Howard. It was just another Clockwork Orange day in the tableau of degradation that England has become.

Mrs. Howard could have refused to be a victim if her culture and her husband had allowed her to defend herself with, say, a stylish little revolver. If her assailants had reacted as most American street hoodlums react to a victim who displays a firearm, she would have chased them away without firing a shot.

But in 1997, when Mr. Howard was the Home Secretary, he cheerfully implemented the near-total handgun ban known as the Firearms (Amendment) Act. This gun control law mostly disarmed Mr. Howard's countrymen and women. The succeeding Labor government finished the job, taking away the Olympic target shooting team's guns for good measure. The result was an unarmed populace left to the tender mercies of thugs like the two who savaged his wife.

In a Home Office news release dated February 27, 1997, Howard promised that the near-total handgun ban "gives this country some of the toughest gun control laws in the world" that would surely "provide protection for the public." But it hasn't, and armed young predators rule England these days, robbing, beating, and shooting the rich and poor alike. It seems that no one is immune.

Mrs. Howard is only the latest in a string of celebrity victims of violent crimes in London — Liza Minelli, former James Bond actress Britt Ekland, Phil Collins's 85-year-old mother. And for each of these famous there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of everyday people killed or crippled in body or mind. They must accept their lot in contemporary English life, because the law does not allow them to defend themselves.

How did England sink to this moral paralysis? The 1997 handgun ban was only the latest step in a century-long journey to disarmament of the English population. Historian Joyce Lee Malcolm describes in her book Guns and Violence: The English Experience how successive Parliaments and domestic officials took away the long-established right of armed self-defense. Citing a fear of gun crime, Parliament passed the Pistols Act in 1903 and started a cascade of increasingly severe restrictions on gun ownership. The irony was that violent crime in England had already reached historic lows, according to Malcolm.

America's founders were all too familiar with the tendency of England and other monarchies to expand their power over the lives of their subjects. An affirmation of individual rights is the common thread throughout our founding documents, and the right of self-defense is one of those rights. Violent criminals, who are tyrants on a personal scale, understand one reality — their work is far riskier when prospective victims are empowered to exercise that right.

Burglars in particular seem to realize this workplace hazard. American burglars show a well-documented reluctance to work in a home when its owners are there. Only 13% of burglaries of American homes are committed while the residents are home, according to a University of Arizona law review article by David Kopel. In supposedly handgun-free England, by contrast, about 60% of burglaries are committed with people at home. Those defenseless occupants are often further humiliated and terrorized with rapes and beatings.

American political tradition has so far upheld the right of armed self-defense. In contrast, the English seem to have lost their instinct for self-preservation. They have slowly and methodically given up that right for a promise of security from their government, which is only too obviously unable to deliver.

As the pitiful Mr. Howard told the Times after his wife's ordeal, "It was very shocking. I was very relieved that she was not hurt. I know only too well that it is sadly not uncommon." He apparently has no clue that his 1997 handgun ban only cleared the way for such outrages.

A measure of a nation's civilization is how well it maintains social order. That in turn depends not so much on intrusive police powers as the morality of its people. As England slides further toward darkness, let us resolve to keep the light of liberty — and the right of self-defense — shining in America.