(bear in mind here, this is an Englishman's perspective, and relates to the UK)
Here, we have RIDICULOUSLY overbearing firearms laws. Owning anything other than an antique muzzle-loading weapon firing powder and ball without a license, excluding kid's plastic bb airsoft 'guns', and airguns under a certain pressure rating, is illegal, and with a license, a shotgun being either a break action double or single or tri-barreled shotgun, or a pump action with a mag size of no more than two shells, meaning two in the mag and one in the chamber, is obtainable.
TECHNICALLY firearms certificates exist. But nobody will ever get them. Hunters can also IIRC obtain permits for some low caliber bolt action rifles, although these are restricted to rimfire cartridges only, and even a .22 centerfire round is illegal (IMO ridiculous. What difference does the way the hammer hits the primer and the primer ignites the powder have on the end result of the powder igniting and propelling the bullet out of the barrel? not much I should imagine)
Even the olympic pistol teams had to train out of the country, so restrictive are these laws. Not sure, but that MIGHT have been changed. But even for the olympic team, apparently it is a crime for one shooter to even physically contact the gun of another. Meaning they could if witnessed or snitched up, be arrested and punished were a shooter to drop their loaded weapon with the safety off and they were to act in order to catch the other's gun before it hit the ground and prevent an accidental discharge.
Little old ladies have been arrested when they have been the victims of a crime, and without ever having interacted with, or even knowing about the gun being present in the house, after the filth turned up and found it, whilst (probably either illegally, or by duping or outright threatening and bullying the old pensioner crime victim into allowing the pork to search her house) present, and finding their now-deceased former husband's old WWII service revolver. I remember a case where this actually happened. And she was punished too, IIRC.
Makes me thoroughly sick. The govt. here wants to keep its citizens in a defenceless state, so they can easily send police to assault anybody they want if they decide to do so and know the populace cannot mount a resistance, no matter how far corrupt and bent a government in power might become.
The guns are criminal to own, ergo only the criminals have guns, bar a few that are required for working, such as farmer's shotguns or vetinary captive-bolt guns for humanely killing animals and DIY nailguns. Meaning the gun owners here, and there are plenty of the buggers, are all violent criminals if they have anything other than those, or an airgun. Which also means that anybody who pisses off a person who turns out to be a member of some crime family, gang or thug etc. is kept defenseless, whilst the latter, who don't give a toss about the law to begin with by their very nature as criminal thugs, can be armed to the teeth and be sure to meet no resistance with a firearm when they decide to go and inflict a punishment kneecapping on some mother who spoke out against them, on their own doorstep in view of the mother's little children.
This outright wrong IMO. We should be entitled to, of course with SOME regulation, be able to obtain firearms certificates and obtain viable weapons. Hell I've been made a victim by the pigs myself. Arrested and held, without access to water, after they knew from previous harassment that I owned a perfectly legal dart-rifle and a couple of airguns, and they made up the excuse to obtain a warrant that they 'knew I had a sawnoff double barreled shotgun' (in reality, a single-barreled, scoped break action .177 cal. air rifle), and a gas powered airpistol, plus a break action single shot .22 air pistol that was weak as hell, and had only been bought so I could modify it and turn it into a fixed-mounted bench-top gene gun (a tool for genetic engineering, used for implantation of genetic material, plasmids etc. thats a lot simpler than having to custom build the likes of a retroviral vector)
They couldn't charge me. Yet despite admitting that they had no legal authority to keep the guns, they repeatedly refused to return them, and basically stole them, then destroyed them all. Those who are expected to enforce the law here make it up as they go along (I have heard one pig actually say this, verbatim, that they make it up as they go along) in whatever way suits them best as and when they feel like it. And getting redress has been difficult, and is starting to feel impossible, although I will be pressing charges. No more regard for the law than the violent gangland criminals in my experience, and selectively enforced to suit their whims (the whims of the pigs that is). I've even had a bottle of SOCl2 stolen, plus several containers of n-dodecyl mercaptan, neither illegal to own. The thionyl chloride, is on the chemical weapons register as a precursor subject to regulation. However that regulation is as follows 'facilities producing and/or selling more than 30 tonnes annually must declare this officially'. Even a donut-munching swine of the dumbest possible kind cannot possibly mistake a single glass bottle containing, after I'd used whatever quantity I'd used by the time it was stolen by the pigs, cannot possibly contain 30 tons, simply by virtue of being a glass bottle of a size that a man can pick up and hold in one hand. I doubt I could FIT 30 tons of SOCl2 in the house and garden put together if I stripped the house bare of furnishings.
Even after acknowledging that nothing they took was illegal, no licenses needed, and that I lawfully owned the property, what did they do? again refuse to return it, and thus, stole it. Then destroyed both the SOCl2 and the dodecanethiol (which isn't even mentioned in any legislation, nor is it anything like a terrorist's chemical weapon. It stinks something awful, being a mercaptan type sulfurous compound, but even then, is comparatively mild compared to most other mercaptan/thiols due to the high molecular weight.
The criminals here operate with relative impunity, whilst the innocent are harassed and punished extrajudicially, by pigs who are no different to criminals themselves. IMO the overzealous gun laws here, should be changed. Because people need the ability to protect themselves when those officially tasked with doing so, refuse to do their jobs, and even to protect themselves and their homes, property and relatives, as well as their liberty from these legally empowered, seemingly oversight and law-immune thugs with badges.
Edit-@bigguycia-of course legislators make one think. One must, upon matters of law, and which ones to follow, which ones to bend or to piss all over. WE must think on these because otherwise nobody would think at all, the legislative arms of governments invariably do not. Rather, they chiefly respond by way of a knee-jerk when something kicks off. Bunch of cretinous backwards verminous wriggling little maggots, vomiting forth their stomach contents upon the decaying filth on which they feed, in order to digest their meal. And unfortunately, not only upon the government, but upon people, too.
The gun laws were tightened to a ridiculous extent after the atrocity that was the Dunblane school shooting. A single incident does not a global, overall threat make. Yes, it was a tragedy and a barbarous atrocity, but all the same, it was a single incident, which now means nobody has much chance of defending themselves either against the murderous criminal thug gangs, or the murderous, thieving gang of thugs invested with a uniform and socalled authority.
No, I'm not much of a conformist sheeple in that respect. I can't afford to be in my line of work. But despite certain laws needing to be ignored, (don't think, btw that I ignore them all. Rather, of course, I respect such against cold blooded murder, as long as the target were not to be a rapist/child molester or torturer of animals or the most vulnerable of people, I'm no thief, but in my line of work, ignoring certain 'laws' such as the disgusting psychoactive substances bill introduced after that bitch theresa may slimed It's way into power as PM, banning without respect in the least to safety or danger to society any psychoactive poses, blanket-bans them ALL, save for nicotine, alcohol and caffeine. The ones the government rakes in massive profits from, whilst in the case of tobacco, while they do stupid things such as banning open display of tobacco products, shops now being required to hide all their tobacco produce behind shutters, and not even allowed to open them for an adult to see what they have in order to tell the shopkeep what they want to buy. And also, banning smaller packs of tobacco, claiming they want to decrease tobacco consumption. Now a smoker buying say, rollup baccy cannot buy 12.5/14g packs of burn, but are forced to buy ones containing just over an ounce. In the name, apparently of stopping kids smoking and reducing overall consumption-by INCREASING the quantity of tobacco which must be bought as a minimum)
And taxation of a drug they KNOW without doubt to be severely harmful to society, whilst blanket-banning drugs that as of the moment I type this post, have yet even to be invented. Its already illegal, before ever being conceived of on paper, let alone my whipping out the flasks, plugging in condensers, connecting up the vacuum pump and starting to weigh out reagents to create something new. For example, the 3-bromo-4-(1,1-difluoromethoxy)-5-methoxyphenethylamine, as well as the corresponding amphetamine and its corresponding pthalimidopropiophenone* are illegal, yet I cannot even find a research paper in cell lines determining affinity for serotonin receptors for these future psychedelics via radioligand displacement assay. These will be novel psychedelics, totally untested in man, I'll probably be the very first to taste them)
(*the pthalimidopropiophenone is essentially a cathinone [beta-ketoamphetamine], protected as the pthalimide, which is designed to stabilize it, until it enters the stomach to be diluted in solution where stomach acid cleaves off pthalic acid, because the psychedelic amphetamines or cathinones unlike simple stimulants such as say, meth, or entactogens like MDMA and analogs, are ultra-unstable, especially as the freebase, when they dimerize so fast to form an inert pyrazine compound, that one ends up with useless purple polymeric crud between the time one could place a powder in a measuring cup, add H2O and then draw it up into a measuring syringe for volumetric dilution for sub-milligram precision, which of course is a precaution I always take when testing an entirely new compound such as these novel mescaline analogs, the product, after all the effort it would take to prepare it, wouldn't even make it to having fully been introduced to the measuring syringe before turning to the inactive pyrazine purple crap)
A little invention of mine, to protect the amino nitrogen, so that it can't turn back like a scorpion's tail and 'sting' that poor little carbonyl group to condense with another molecule of the product and form rubbish, yet when sufficiently diluted in stomach juices that one molecule is less likely to meet another, and kept in acidic conditions, the pthalimidopropiophenones serve to permit primary amine cathinones to exist and survive and be active when studied in man (I don't ever, ever test in animals, I loathe the very concept of subjecting those who cannot consent to such things). And to be able to be stored on a shelf in a vial without degrading in mere seconds.
That kind of law I can neither respect, nor follow. As an inventor and selfemployed chemist, its just incompatible with both that, and my respect for the freedom of people to own and have the final, ultimate say on what may, or may not happen to or be done to or with their own bodies. In just the same way as a woman or man as the freedom to say 'no' or 'yes' to sex, and the absolute right not to be raped, a person's mind is a person's own. A principle I consider sacred and inviolable, no matter what my be written in lexae legis. Nobody has the right to FORCE me to consume a thing of any sort, and by the same token, nobody has the right to demand, and threaten or assault me to force me not to do so. I would never so much as force another to take a mouthful of beer, I have not that right, let alone to demand they not do so if it is their wish. And less still to threaten to kidnap them, to steal from them, potentially even send armed shock-troops prepared to kill them.
The laws for the good of the individual and for the protection of rights, those I respect. Otherwise, I live by my own code of personal ethics, that I will not swerve from because of some bullying attack-dogs and their masters/mistresses. I find I cannot bring myself to respect such abominations, as would violate the sanctity of body and mind inherent to every human being and indeed every other being which has the capacity to suffer. I'm not religious, but that principle is one I hold as close to being holy, as anything in my worldview can possess the attribute of holiness.
