Brits are being urged to hand over their guns because firearms crime is on the rise.

Wait, what? Guns? In the UK? Where they implemented some of the most stringent gun control measures in the world in an effort to prevent another Dunblane?

Yes, apparently so.

The National Gun Surrender started on Monday and will run until 26 November.

Air guns, rifles, BB guns, shotguns and pistols, including antiques and ex-military, are among the weapons police said should be handed in.

The amnesty comes less than a month after national figures revealed the number of crimes involving firearms in England and Wales increased by 27% to 6,696 in the year ending June 2017.

How many of us remember Piers Morgan crapping himself on national television after showing himself a major FAIL at coherently debating gun control? Let me remind you.

Ben Shapiro also schooled poor Piers in 2013. Piers wants America to be more like good ole civilized Britain, with its lower rates of homicide and “gun violence,” and he thinks the best way to tackle the problem is to disarm the innocent, painting a large, red target on the backs of would-be prey.

Except, do we REALLY want to be more like the UK? And will MOAR GUNZ CONTROLZ get us there?

I don’t think so.

In addition to skyrocketing rates of crime committed with firearms, knife crime is also on the rise, jumping to its highest level in seven years to 34,703, and homicide rates writ large increased between March 2016 and March of this year by 26 percent, according to the Office for National Statistics.

The majority of police officers in the UK say they are prepared to carry firearms on the job, according to a Police Federation survey. I guess they are sick and tired of fighting armed thugs with stern words and night sticks.

And now that the UK is seeing increased violent crime, they think the best way to combat it is to make guns even MOAR ILLEGALLER!

Because, you know… criminals who are willing to rob, rape, and murder will immediately turn in their firearms, because they’re… uh… illegal.

/sarcasm

OK, I’ll stop waxing sarcastic. Maybe. Yeah, no I won’t. Never mind.

Look, this has to be the STUPIDEST idea since the 2003 amnesty supposedly took 40,000 guns off the streets  after the murders of Letisha Shakespeare and Charlene Ellis and another one in 2014 that took a few thousand off the streets. Only one problem with both the post-Shakespeare/Ellis homicide and the Dunblane massacre that saw the UK implement some of the most draconian gun control laws in Europe: homicides actually increased after both incidents, while the 2014 amnesty resulted in practically no change to homicides committed with firearms.

Now, I’m not an idiot like some of the gun grabbers we see crawl out from under their rocks every time a shooting takes place (unless, it’s Chicago or Baltimore, because who really cares about them people of color dying at the hands of armed thugs – that ain’t news), but the increase in homicides after some of these amnesties take place tells me the problem is not guns – no matter how many they may collect.

And while frothing ignorami like Piers Morgan bleat that the UK has lower rates of gun crime than the United States, and there we should all strive to be just like merrie olde England…

…they ignore the obvious and unpopular.

1. Comparing violent crime rates between the UK and the United States is actually disingenuous, because the definitions of “violent crime” differ. Daniel Bier over at the Skeptical Libertarian says, “The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports defines a ‘violent crime’ as one of four specific offenses: murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.” By contrast, “the British definition includes all ‘crimes against the person,’ including simple assaults, all robberies, and all ‘sexual offenses,’ as opposed to the FBI, which only counts aggravated assaults and ‘forcible rapes.’” That makes the comparison about as valid as apples to hemorrhoid cream.
2. According to my trusted go-to Gun Facts, the UK has always had a lower homicide rate than the United States, even when British citizens could legally buy machine guns prior to 1968. The difference appears to be cultural, rather than having anything to do with the tool itself.
3. And speaking of cultural, some of the most dangerous places in the United States are cities with strict gun control laws and prevalent gang presence, such as Detroit and Chicago. Gangs are responsible for an average of 48 percent of violent crime in most jurisdictions and up to 90 percent in others and are generally concentrated in large urban centers. What does that tell you?

The Brits will continue doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results in response to rising violence. They focus on guns as if other violent crime doesn’t matter, as long as the gun wasn’t involved, and criminals will continue to ignore these amnesties and gun control laws, because they’re criminals. That’s what they do.

Innocent people, who do abide by the law, will keep becoming prey year after year, and many of them—bleating sheep, too uninformed to see that the government “doing something” about rising crime is really doing nothing—will be satisfied that something is at least being done, effectiveness be damned.

And that’s the real tragedy.