UKIP
leader Nigel Farage has called for our firearm laws to be relaxed, calling the
current ban on handguns "ludicrous”. He says that as long as you
promise to keep your handgun in a locked box you should be able to have a gun
licence and keep a handgun.
Farage
didn’t score highly on analysis when he said that Tony Blair’s Labour
government had introduced our gun laws. Actually, they were introduced by John
Major’s Conservative government in 1996 after the Dunblane massacre when Thomas
Hamilton shot and killed 16 young children and a teacher, before killing
himself.
Quite
why - given our economic, social and environmental challenges – Farage thinks
this is a priority over the cost of living issues I don’t know. Suffice it to
say that I’ve never had a constituent lobby me to demand that every adult
should be able to keep a handgun. I have had many lobby me to get even tighter
gun laws and give tougher punishments for those who have one unlawfully.
We
have a low gun murder rate in the UK, but it’s still too high. In the USA, with
the type of gun laws that Farage demands, you are 36 times more likely to be
murdered with a handgun. Is this seriously what we want for our country? I
think not.
Nothing
that Nigel Farage says now surprises me. Last week, he completely disowned
UKIP’s 2010 election manifesto, which he had ordered to been taken off UKIP’s
website. He called it ‘486 pages of complete drivel’. His attempt to
distance himself from it was a little surprising, given that he’d written the
foreword, co-authored the summary of these ‘straight talking’ policies,
and then helped launch it, as is shown in the video of the event.
Farage
was correct in saying that his manifesto was drivel, but none of those policies
was as dangerous as ‘handguns for all’. Just say no.
