An Unhealthy Interest in Firearms

Posting a picture of himself with an imitation Beretta bedroom pistol on Facebook has landed a citizen of the Place Great Britain Used To Be in prison for five years.

If we were to take the newspaper report at face value, I would add that he also had no healthy interest in preserving his own life.

Now, I don't know if Merry Old Fleet Street has the same multiple layers of fact checking as our colonial broadsheets, but if they do the perp posed with what looks like one of those pot metal nonguns you used to see in one-inch ads in the back of Mechanix Illustrated. According to the report:

"During a search in his bedroom (Bobbies) found an imitation pistol, illegally converted to fire 8mm bullets and capable of killing."

Killing whom, pray tell? The cops might have saved the Queen a pretty pence in incarceration expenses by making the accused demonstrate his gunsmithing ingenuity through discharging one of the "8 mm bullets." My bet would be forearm lacerations and a quick bleedout.

And, Ladies and gentlemen, may I present one of our worst nightmares of the later periods of the Obama Administration.

"Det Chief Insp Reed added: 'What does a normal member of society need with a firearm? 'When we looked at his computer, we discovered he had an unhealthy interest in firearms'."

Of course it can't happen here, and I am pleased to live in a nation where the authorities would never even think of snooping in a citizen's personal computer to discover, publish, and punish his or her unhealthy interests.

H/T to Jay

One way to think of the Sunday sadness: Once you were allowed to participate in American government despite being poor, sick, illiterate, or somewhat stupid. Now you are allowed to control American government because you are poor, sick, illiterate, or somewhat stupid.

Things like this keep crossing my mind:

Have we surrendered America to the the whiners and to the unfortunate? When did this nation decide it was is created to fall to its knees and worship people because they have managed to get sick? Or because in a land where we spend immense fortunes on schools they have remained ignorant and indolent?

This is a place and a culture of compassion and aways has been. From colonial days most American people have given time and treasure to the churches and to the secular helping organizations. Hardly ever did we demand that people we help lead perfect lives. Someone was always there, voluntarily, for the drunks, the addicts, the sick, and most varieties of the merely poor.

When did we decide this marginal section of the population, by their very deficiencies, owned the right to dictate national policy?

PDB is not one of the Americans who looks at the Sunday massacre of the American future and decides to grin and bear it.

(HT Roberta)