…and they’ll just use something else. Such as knives:
London saw four fatal stabbings on New Year’s Eve, taking the total of such knifings in the capital to 80 for the whole of 2017.
And the use of knives in general is now a serious problem all over the country. In June 2017, the Office for National Statistics listed thousands of ‘blade offences’ in the previous 12 months, including 214 killings, 391 attempted murders, 438 rapes, 182 other sexual assaults, and 14,429 robberies.
There were also more than 18,500 assaults involving an injury or intent to inflict harm with a blade and 2,816 threats to kill with a knife.
So much for taking away guns to reduce crime. But that’s not the worst part of the linked article. This is:
I have long known that crimes which would once have been classified as murders are often now downgraded to ‘manslaughter’. This is done to save money and time, and to make it easier to release the culprits early to stop the prisons from bursting. But in most cases it is legally difficult to point this out.
The Johnson case is different. He is a murderer, but people who should be alive are now dead because he was wrongly convicted of a lesser crime.
In 1981, Johnson pushed his wife Yvonne off the balcony of their ninth-floor flat, after first hitting her with a vase and an ashtray. He was allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of ‘provocation’. She had, he said, been arguing with him.
She was, of course, not there to give her own version of who did the provoking. He was sentenced in 1982 to three years in prison. That’s right. Three years, though in those days it really meant three years. He was out by 1985.
In 1992 Johnson strangled another woman, Yvonne Bennett, with a belt. She had annoyed him by refusing to accept a box of chocolates which he had bought her to try to win back her affections.
He tried to hang himself from a tree, but the string snapped. String? Yes, string. He was much better at killing others than at killing himself. Doctors decided he was suffering from a ‘depressive illness’ and he was sent ‘indefinitely’ to a secure hospital.
Not indefinitely enough. He was out and under ‘psychiatric care’ after two years. He went on to kill a third woman, Angela Best, by beating her with a claw hammer and throttling her with a dressing-gown cord.
As after his second killing, he tried and failed to commit suicide afterwards, this time by jumping in front of a train.Now, having first tried the manslaughter plea again, on the grounds of ‘diminished responsibility’, he has pleaded guilty to murdering Angela Best.
His injuries from the attempted suicide have left him in a wheelchair, though I wouldn’t like to guarantee that he is harmless even now. Far too late, the courts have sentenced him to 26 years, which might just be enough.
Once, I would have said this was all evidence of a system which had lost all force since it stopped treating murder as a specially hideous crime. So it is. Once, I would have said that we should restore the death penalty for heinous murder. Now, I know this cause is lost. So I can only urge you to take care.
The law refuses to protect you. Those in charge of it lack the courage or the resolve to do so. Get used to it.
The next time some idiot tells you that the death penalty doesn’t prevent murders, feel free to use the above example to show that the death penalty applied to this asshole after his first murder would indeed have prevented two more.
Fortunately, we in the United States don’t have to “get used to it”; it’s our criminals who have to get used to the fact that a career of crime might be deadly — to themselves.
Carry a gun, and make sure you know how to use it. The life you save might well be your own, or of your loved ones. The life you take will be of no consequence to anyone except the goblin’s future victims.
Remember: when anyone asks you if your wallet is worth a life, remind them that that decision was not yours, but your assailant’s. He made the decision that your wallet was worth taking a life (yours), and all you did was go along with his decision, simply substituting his life for yours.
And be glad that you live in the U.S. and not in Britain, where you would face imprisonment for self-defense, instead of congratulations.
