The United Kindom has a very strict gun control scheme. It's not particularly easy to get a firearm and it's not something that would ever fly here. Many of the laws on the books are a reaction to some kind of violent crime, including a mass shooting in Dunblane, Scotland in 1996 that left 17 people dead, as well as the scumbag shooter.
But that wasn't the last shooting, and a recent one has a relative of one of the dead asking, "How many murders does it take?" It's the right question, for the wrong reason.
You see, the woman wants more gun control in the UK.
The sister of a mother killed in a triple shooting has called for tougher gun laws in the wake of the Nicholas Prosper case, asking: ‘How many murders does it take?’
Emma Ambler has dedicated her life to gun reform after her twin sister Kelly Fitzgibbons, 40 was shot dead by her partner Rob Needham who gunned down the mother and her children Ava, four, and Lexi, two, as they lay together in bed in 2020.
The depressed 42-year-old, who managed to get a firearms licence by lying to police hiding his criminal record and cocaine addiction, then turned the gun on himself.
Now Mrs Ambler is writing to the Home Secretary to demand urgent changes to gun laws, saying the appalling shotgun rampage of Nicholas Prosper has exposed how easy it is to get a lethal weapon in the UK.
The 19-year-old spent months researching firearms and was able to dupe a pensioner into selling him a £600 shotgun by presenting a fake firearms certificate he’d copied from real versions online.
The problem is that it's not particularly easy to get a shotgun. Nicholas Prosper had to find a way to navigate around the hoops that were in place, pretend to be interested in shooting sporting clays--one of the few lawful reasons you can own a firearm in the UK--and the pensioner in question followed the law to the letter.
The question of "How many murders does it take?" is valid, but the real question is how many murders does it take before people realize that gun control doesn't actually work?
The UK seems to be just one more set of gun control laws away from ending so-called gun violence...right up until the next high-profile shooting rattles the British population and they go through it all over again.
Plus, let's not forget that they've had to resort to knife control because violent criminals haven't just stopped being violent, but regular folks can't defend themselves from larger, more aggressive predators because someone had to ask how many murders it would take before guns were taken away forever.
My question is, and will always be, how many murders does it take before people wake up to this stupidity? How many people have to die because they weren't able to defend themselves? How may have to be killed because no one seems interested in making criminals afraid?
The question itself is fine. The reason it's being asked, though, is all too often the wrong one.
