The Fire This Time

England used to be a kind and gentle place. It used to be a place where ladies and gentleman practiced the arts of courtesy, decorum, and politeness, and where people respected each other.

It used to be a place where queuing up, waiting your turn on line, was a defining sociological characteristic.

Gerard Van der Leun lived in London at that time. He remembers it fondly.

But, what could have turned this paragon of decorum into a playground for criminals and louts. What could have caused its citizens to set it aflame?

Van der Leun places the blame on leftist and socialist policies, ranging from the ban on all handguns, to the imposition of a more therapeutic, more sensitive, method of enforcing law and order.

Britain did not just condone bad behavior; it underwrote it with an absurdly generous welfare system.

The government offered to trade guns for empathy. We now know how it worked out.

As Van der Leun explains: “The ‘trade-off‘ offered by the state was to be more ‘effective’ policing and a more ‘culturally sensitive‘ police force with a lot of ‘outreach‘ into various pockets of the population that were, as they grew, proving more troublesome than the standard, garden variety Brit who believed, foolishly, that surveillance cameras equalled security and social peace. It was all a lie, of course and now we see the fruits of the decades of slow leftist mission creep into the disarming of a people.”