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Just to point out the UK does not have a wholesale ban on guns. A shotgun license is pretty straightforward to get. Rifles slightly less so. Handguns are generally banned except perhaps ironically back home in Northern Ireland.
Semi-auto rifles (ie. the one thing you need to give authoritarian overreach the potential to cause pain to said authorities; the Right Arm of the Free World, if you will) are AIUI completely banned in useful calibres?
Again depends on locality, but in England I believe that's kind of accurate. You can have self-loading .22 rifles but nothing in a higher caliber. You can also have lever action rifles so you can cos-play as your favorite Wild West hero.
But given most people don't bother to apply for gun licenses, I wouldn't imagine being allowed AR-15's or whatever would make much of a difference in the populace's ability to fight the government. You would still only have a very small number of people.
Remember this is not the US, the culture is not the same.
I know, but neither is it the same in Canada, and lots and lots of people have various self-loading rifles -- they are super-fun, and there's a case to be made that a suppressed .223 semi-auto would be much more effective and humane for a lot of the hunting in the UK than what's currently in use. (much moreso than for Canadian use cases if I'm being honest -- also we aren't allowed suppressors)
Even if not many people actually own the things, their potential existence constrains governments -- the 'firearms threat' associated with the trucker protests turned out to be mostly non-existent, but you can bet your ass that the presence of a bunch of yucky blue-collars who happened to be unarmed this time hanging around the seat of government got some wheels turning on how far the population can be pushed.
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Do you believe that the UK has a functional right to self-defense?
Yes indeed. Though largely you can't want a gun for those purposes. Again excepting Northern Ireland where you can get a firearms license for that reason alone.
Edit: Though this has nothing to do with the correction that the UK does not have a wholesale ban on guns. The rest of jeroboams post may or may not be true, but that particular statement is straightforwardly incorrect.
UK has duty to retreat, carrying any weapon is illegal, pepper spray and stunners are illegal and famously the pensioner who shot someone in his own home was jailed.
What right to self defense?
Tony Martin did shoot one of the burglars in the back with a gun he did not have a license for. Even in the US shooting someone in the back as they run away may find you having trouble with a self-defense plea.
I've been in three violent altercations in my life, all in the UK, all where I was defending myself. In all three I called the cops, and in all three the cops did not arrest me, but either arrested or attempted to arrest the attacker. Now none of these involved guns or weapons (other than a pint glass in one case), but that doesn't stop them being self-defense.
Edit: and the duty to retreat was removed in 2008. Then in 2013 the standard for self-defence in one's home was improved from not being unreasonable to not being grossly disproportionate.
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I'd have to look up how things are in the UK, but Europe is pretty staunchly against self defense, and I haven't heard anything that would indicate the UK is any different.
IIRC there are situations where self-defence is allowed, but as @FCfromSSC implied there's no functional right to self-defence; if you have a gun to hand when someone goes active shooter, I think you're allowed to return fire... but you 99.99% of the time don't have a gun to hand if you're following the law, because you're not allowed to take a gun (or a knife or armour) with you for the purposes of self-defence, which makes the point moot.
Forget guns, a lot of Europe has this idea of "proportional force" which requires you to make constant legal evaluations as you're fighting for your life, resulting in cases like this where people watch helplessly as an attacker scales a ladder to assault them in their own home (there's a more disturbing video version of this somewhere that I can't find now, because all searches suck now).
Is that because of the legal framework or because most modern people are very unfamiliar with violence and hesitant to engage in it? I heavily suspect the victim there was not worrying about the law.
My experience having had a bit of a rough and tumble upbringing is that a lot of middle class people whether in the UK or US shy away from violence even in self-defence, not because of legal worries, but because they have never really had to engage in it.
I'd default to believing that these things reinforce one another. If a legal framework demands constant checks when physically defending oneself, then a culture of just shying away from violence is a reasonable response. And if there's a culture of just shying away from violence, then structuring the law to punish the few outliers who choose not to disengage, since engaging causes more direct, immediate harm is a reasonable act. Perhaps one was the chicken and the other the egg, or perhaps both were birthed by some 3rd common factor, but ultimately, those don't matter; if there's a self-reinforcing cycle, then every part of the cycle is caused by every other part.
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Sorry, not sure how am I supposed to engage with this argument. My experience having had a bit of a rough and tumble upbringing is that just about the only thing that would make someone meekly submit to a knife attack in their own home is the threat of an even stronger punishment. How do you propose we resolve the disagreement?
Well my observation is that most people in a crisis situation are not making rational decisions, but acting out of instinct, (in)experience and fear.
Given the West for anyone in the middle class and above is much less violent than decades ago, most people are going to have much less experience with violence. They freeze, they plead, they try to de-escalate. They don't in my experience think a lot about the law.
If you and I have both had a rough and tumble start to life, then we have had more exposure directly to violence than many. I've been glassed, and I've been attacked with a barbed wire club, I've been threatened by a paramilitary leader. I grew up in a nation where we had bomb evacuation drills in school and had soldiers on the streets.
My observation is that many people without that, simply on some level do not believe that violence will be the outcome. This is a place where I think Hlynkacg was correct. They have internalized a world view where this is a rules based existence, because to them it has been.
That's why you often see people flipping their belief systems once they have been a victim of violence. Their worldview was upended.
In other words my feeling is you may be underestimating the aversion and unfamiliarity with violence by the average middle class Western person who may never have thrown a punch in anger in their life, let alone had a knife wielding maniac at their door. I think it is highly unlikely they are being concilitory and non confrontational because of the law, but simply because that is how the modern world has taught them to deal with violence. You don't punch your bully, you avoid them and tell the teacher.
Or to put it more simply, violence is scary to people who have not some experience with it. And many, many people in wealthy Western cultures nowadays grow up without any exposure to it. Which is generally good! But it has neutered their threat responses. (Obviously generalizing here, but overall i think my point is correct. Few people even know what their own nations self-defence laws are..because they very rarely have to know. )
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Sure. You've established that the UK does not have a wholesale ban on guns, I'm trying to get to what they do have and how to describe it. What's the optimal encapsulation of the socio-political position of firearms in UK society?
Generally, most people do not keep firearms even though they most likely could have a shotgun or semi-auto .22 rifle, or larger caliber bolt-action rifle if they wanted to. This is mostly because of cultural attitudes to firearms in the UK and is not particularly a live political issue. Even back home in Northern Ireland, where you can get a firearms license for self-defence alone, and where you can get handguns legally, the vast majority of people do not do so, even during the Troubles. It is also not particularly difficult to get hold of an illegal Kalashnikov or similar automatic rifle in Northern Ireland, but very few people outside of the paramilitary organizations do so.
Restrictive firearms laws are generally supported by the majority of the population, because the cultural attitudes towards firearms are very different than in the US. Most people who have guns will likely be farmers or other rural folk, (most of my uncles have shotguns and rifles for example), and the average person (certainly in England) is likely to be somewhat uncomfortable around guns, and most police will not be be armed (again as almost always excepting Northern Ireland, where almost all officers are armed, and the population is exposed to people carrying firearms probably on a daily basis).
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Going for maximum brevity: you are allowed a gun for shooting objects or animals, but never ever ever for shooting at a human being no matter what.
(i.e. generally the law tries to say yes to sport and hunting, but no to lethal self-defence or rebellion. In days when people had more faith in government, this was pretty well understood and supported as being the government retaining its necessary monopoly on violence. Now, of course, two-tier anarcho-tyranny beckons.)
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