Category: Foreign Affairs

Oppression By Bureaucracy

Anti-Gun Nannies, Foreign Affairs, Rights, Shootin' Time, The Gun Thing

It’s not often I get an email that creates both sadness and almost-ungovernable rage, but Reader Bruce sent me this:

Last week, on one of the saddest days of my life, I went to a local police station and handed over my three rifles for destruction by the “Commissioner of Police”.

They were nothing special: a B/A Savage 320D in .22 Hornet; an Anschutz .22RF 1451 Sporter (with custom fibreglass stock); a Savage Model 12 .223 Varmint heavy barrel (in a custom fibreglass stock). But they were MINE! to me, they represented something: that society had accepted me as a responsible human being. I obsessively hand loaded for the Hornet and .223, seeking the best performance each was capable of.

So why did I do the unthinkable?

Firstly, my wife and I “downsized”. We moved from a suburban 4 x 2 on a huge lot into a 3 x 2 apartment close to the river. And then came the first cruncher. By law, my firearms had to be kept in an approved gun safe, bolted into brick or concrete on two surfaces. And the only place for that in our new abode was in the lock-up roller door garage. Uh-uh … the law says it has to “be under the main roof” … and it isn’t. My safe was “grandfathered” anyway. Had I bought another firearm or had one of mine rebarrelled, I would have been compelled to buy a new “approved” and vastly more expensive safe. So I had nowhere to store my guns (or ammo, for that matter).

Secondly, I have been a competitive target shooter for 51 years, from air pistol to pistol to full-bore to rimfire. I am nationally qualified as a Range Officer. I was, until I let it lapse, a qualified Commonwealth Shooting Coach. I have been able to use my rifles competitively and for hunting, quite legally. Not so now. If I want to use them competitively, I have to get “another” licence category for them, and compete a regulated number of times per year. Once they are so classified, I can no longer use them for hunting or vermin control. The reason? Our the Minister for Police declared that target firearms are likely to have lightened triggers and are not “safe” to use off a range.

My dilemma. Give up plinking or bunny busting or fox shooting, or give up competition. OK, so I’ll just use them for the former and forego competition. Problem. I can only shoot on “approved” properties. My friend has a farm. I can shoot there, provided he registers me every year on an internet portal with the police department. If his neighbour wants me to shoot a few foxes on his property, I am not allowed to unless he also registers me electronically. Oh, and calibres are limited by the size of the property you have permission to shoot on.

And so I handed them in. I have owned a firearm (or more than one) since 1967. I’m pleased to say I’ve never done anything dangerous or even vaguely illegal with any of them. And to now be told that I can’t have them unless I jump through bureaucratic hoops hurts. Deeply.

My point? DON’T GIVE YOURS UP! Fight the bastards until you can fight no longer.

Note that gun ownership can be ended simply by incremental “reasonable” gun control regulation — e.g. guns must be stored in a safe —–> safes must be encased in brick walls (an almost impossible condition to meet for most people, which is the point of such bastardy).

Bruce, my friend:  if you ever make it to Texas, I’ll organize a Schutzenfest for you with some of my fellow Texans, at a place where we can bang away all day without fear or apprehension.  As for guns… let’s just say you’d be overwhelmed by choice.

Hidden Motive, Hidden Enemy

Foreign Affairs

Over among the Big Brains at American Thinker, John DiLeo has a take on the current trade blowup with Canuckistan that I hadn’t considered:

A more important fact to remember, though, is that Canada is far more dependent upon American goods than the USA is on Canadian goods. The USA is the origin of somewhere between a third and a half of Canada’s global imports. Canada cannot win a trade war with the USA. By having a trade war with us at all, Canada loses, no matter what.

So the question would seem to be, why did Carney start this?

We know where Carney is getting his advice. A longtime central banker who was not in electoral politics before being selected as Canada’s PM last year, he has hired American Democrat activists (yes, that’s USA Democrats) as key advisors, including as his chief of staff, to assist him in planning policies that will hurt President Trump and the Republican party in the midterms this fall.

That much, I’d figured out already.  Then this:

In his first year and a half on the job, Carney has signed new deals with Mainland China, committing to increase Canada’s already considerable linkage with the CCP economy. He’s basically committing Canada to be a willing vassal in China’s notorious “Belt and Road Initiative.”

So the old law-and-order question comes:  “Cui bono?”  (who benefits) from this rather unnecessary trade war?  Why would “the Canadians walk away from a trade agreement to which their negotiators had already agreed, when Prime Minister Mark Carney recalled them specifically to create a fight”?

DiLeo spells it out:

Trump Administration trade negotiations are designed not just to get more manufacturing here in the USA, but also to get more manufacturing in Canada, and more in Mexico, and more in the UK, and more in the EU.

As we watch these battles, we see that the governments of some of those countries are kicking and screaming at the prospect. Amazingly, they don’t want to protect the jobs of their own citizens; they want to leave the status quo in place, watching their own manufacturing sectors continue to be hollowed out, watching China continue to fill the vacuum.

And:

The Chinese remain what they have been for decades: a dishonest partner, practicing every trade crime from Uyghur slave labor to currency manipulation, from material dumping to intellectual property theft.

Yup.  China is asshoe, and worse:  they’ve become our sworn enemy, just as much as the Soviet Union was during the Cold War.

And they have more allies in the West than we do.

Well, Well, Well

Foreign Affairs, Good Stuff, Immigration

Here (via the Daily Mail ) is a little graphic of how Europe’s political landscape is changing on the topic of dealing with mass “immigration” (invasion):

Notably absent from the above is Britishland.  How are they dealing with the issue?  Well, officially they aren’t:  thousands of “refugees” arrive by boat every week, to be greeted with a cup of tea, free accommodation and, it seems, a license to prey on White British girls.

Needless to say, this little development, then, has caused no end of pearl-clutching:

Britain’s busiest ferry port was blockaded by hundreds of men dressed in black, causing an hours-long gridlock and miles of tailbacks on surrounding roads. 

Footage showed demonstrators piling out of the back of a van before they marched through the town, chanting ‘Whose streets? Our streets’ and ‘stop the boats’ as dozens of police officers were called in to follow them. 

Politicians have condemned the balaclava-clad mob who stormed the port of Dover yesterday – as migrant protesters warned ‘it’s only the beginning’. 

When I first saw pics of this (completely peaceful) protest, I thought it was one of the Antifa-style shows:

But no… these stout bulldogs were just taking a leaf from the Antifa playbook — and considering the attitude of the BritGov lackeys, who are conspicuous by their heavy-handed treatment of these so-called “rightwing” groups (they aren’t), one can’t really blame them.

Also note that there’s no display of “triggering” regalia (that would be the St. George Cross of England) that might give any advance notice to the fuzz as to the group’s identity and motivation.

Interesting times.  All these groups — British and European alike — need is an electoral victory à la Trump to start the immigration rollback.  And the current crop of Leftist politicians are terrified of such an event, because I suspect that the “rightwing” parties’ repatriation drive will make our ICE look like a bunch of choirboys.  (Well, one can only hope.)

Which is why the other political parties form coalitions to stop groups like the German AfD and Austrian FP (see chart above) from coming to power.  But they won’t be able to keep the cork in this particularly-well-shaken bottle of fizz to pop for much longer.

Popcorn futures are soaring Over Here…

Finding Space

Foreign Affairs, Marxists

Apparently there’s this foolishness emanating from the BritGov and its new (Marxist) Prone Monster:

Andy Burnham’s review into the prisons early release scheme will be conducted in the “coming days and weeks” and decisions need to be made “very quickly”, a Labour minister has said.

Under the new Sentencing Act set to come into force in September, some 6,000 criminals were due to be released under the early prison release scheme, but the Prime Minister on Thursday paused the plans and ordered an urgent review.

That’s because among the 6,000 would-be releasees are a pair of cop-killers — and needless to say, this eventuality has created a serious stir, even among the normally-passive Brits.

Under changes in the Sentencing Act, some offenders were set to be let out of prison after serving a third of their sentence, rather than half, in a bid to ease prison overcrowding.

Hell, I have a problem with that “half”, let alone a third because the Brits have appallingly-low sentences for serious crimes to start off with.  When attempted murder gets seven years (I watched one such example on a TV documentary, a few nights back), that would mean his effective sentence is barely two years.  For attempting to kill someone — in the one I watched, he stabbed the victim fourteen times, and only a miracle saved the victim’s life.

Frankly, I’m not at all sympathetic towards the moans about “overcrowding”, particularly when I see how the folks in El Salvador handle their violent criminal population:

And if we all feel strongly about this — and I’m pretty sure we do — allow me to offer a solution to their overcrowding problem:

Now I know that many are against the death penalty, and for once I’m going to be a little sympathetic to their concerns.

So start off by hanging only the murderers who killed more than one victim, add those who were caught in the act of murdering — say, in a public place where there were lots of witnesses — and let’s throw in the child-murderers for good measure.

Not only will the overcrowding problem be eased, but I’m willing to bet that would-be murderers may start to think twice before pulling out the kitchen knives and what have you, and the crime rate will start to drop.

It’s worth a try, because nothing else the BritGov has tried or even suggested has worked.

All this, of course, because the same BritGov — of whatever party — spends more money on cossetting illegal immigrants than on building new prisons in, say, the Outer Hebrides where there’s lots of space and a climate guaranteed to chill [sic]  all thoughts of mayhem from prospective criminals.

It’s just a question of priorities, really.

 

Out Of His League

Foreign Affairs, Marxists

…in so many ways.  That little dwarf African Muslim Commie, Hizzoner NYC Mayor Mamdani is playing reindeer games again, this time with the Vienna Convention of 1961:

New York City (NYC) Mayor Zohran Mamdani shared that he is considering directing the New York Police Department to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in September, describing him as a “war criminal.”

I want to see him try.  I want so badly to see him try.  I can see it now:  Israeli Mossad bodyguards mixing it up with New York’s Finest.

Some senior diplomat — I’m thinking SecState Marco Rubio — should summon this self-important asshole to his office and read him the Riot Act.

And if Mamdani still insists on going down this road, I’m pretty sure that he can be arrested.  Which would be fun.

Afterword:  It seems that DJT has now waded into the fray.

Stifling Dissent

Big Brother, Foreign Affairs, Government Thugs

I see with extreme displeasure that the foul UKgov has finally managed to suffocate the brilliant Kathy Gyngell and her wonderful newspaper, The Conservative Woman.

Did they do it by an outright ban?  Noooo that would have been the manly thing to do, and would have caused a massive backlash — and rightly so.

Instead, they did it by stealth:

TCW is closing as a daily site because the British state and its allies have made honest dissent increasingly impossible to sustain. The cowardice began under a Conservative government. During covid, lawful doubt was treated as a public danger. Citizens who questioned lockdowns, masks, vaccine mandates, school closures and the destruction of livelihoods were smeared as cranks or extremists. Platforms were encouraged to police opinion. The MSM supinely obeyed. The BBC was, as usual, complicit. Conservative ministers talked about liberty while presiding over one of the greatest assaults on free speech in modern British history.

Then the Tories put the machinery on the statute book.

The Online Safety Act was driven through under a Conservative government and received Royal Assent in October 2023. The Act passed into law on October 26, 2023, and made Ofcom responsible for implementing the new online safety regime. It was sold as ‘protection for children’. In reality, it created a vast regulatory structure for online speech and made Ofcom the policeman of the internet. Platforms were pushed into permanent risk-avoidance. Lawful speech became a compliance problem. ‘Safety’ became the master word. Once that word rules, freedom withers. Free speech has never been ‘safe’.

This was one of the great betrayals of modern Conservatism. The party that should have defended liberty built the legal runway for censorship. It handed power to Ofcom, trained platforms to fear liability, and wrapped the whole operation in the language of harm prevention. The result was predictable. Companies do not defend free speech when regulators are watching. They protect themselves. They over-remove, over-block, over-filter and over-comply.

That is how dissent gets buried.

The same Act reinforced Ofcom’s media literacy role. That matters. Media literacy sounds harmless. It is not harmless when the regulator, the Government, public broadcasters and tech platforms are all marching in the same direction. It becomes the polite name for teaching the public which sources to trust and which to distrust.

This is the bridge to the next phase. First the state regulates platforms in the name of safety. Then it works with broadcasters, tech companies, charities and public bodies to shape what citizens are taught to regard as reliable. Then it proposes to promote ‘trusted news’ above rival voices.

That is the censorship escalator. Labour is now riding it with enthusiasm.

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology’s 2026-2029 Media Literacy Action Plan, A Safe, Informed Digital Nation, dresses control in the language of confidence, safety, critical thinking and resilience. Published on March 16, 2026, it sets out the steps departments across government are taking to strengthen media literacy over the next three years, including helping people ‘think critically about online content’ and ‘find trustworthy information’. The state wants to shape how citizens consume information online. It says it wants people to find trustworthy information. That sounds innocent until you ask the only question that matters: trustworthy according to whom?

Well, there you have it.  If the above doesn’t make your blood boil, we can’t be friends.

And this, children, is why we have a First Amendment Over ere, despite the many efforts by Gummint, the Left and their lickspittle allies to undermine or bypass it.

Am I angry about this?  You bet your ass I am.  It’s bullshit like this which moves people from:

…to:

And note that had I published this post in the UK, I would have been shut down and/or arrested for “inciting violence” or some such twaddle.

It’s also another reason why I have eschewed any form of advertising on this particular website:  I’m not going to hand the cocksuckers a means to shut me up.

Range time?  What do you think?  I had planned on doing some .22 plinking anyway, but now I think I may have to expend something of a somewhat larger caliber.