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JustSomeOldGuy wrote: ↑Tue Aug 06, 2024 1:50 pm It always boggles my mind that the nation that gave us the Magna Carta, one of the roots of the 2nd Amendment, could rotate so far in the other direction, especially so soon after the blatant object lesson of WWII.....

It was the two world wars that really turned the UK leftist.

When WW1 started the government urged men to go and fight for King and Country and return to a land fit for heroes. So they went and fought on foreign soil and died in large numbers and then returned home to an almost bankrupt country out of date industries and constant wage cuts. Therefore they were very anti war in the 20s and 30s so bought into appeasement.

Then when another government took the country to war again in 1939 there was a grudging acceptance but the underlying mood was “when this thing is over you are going to owe us big time”.

So the pretty much all the governments from 1945 up to the time of Maggie T appeased the masses with the welfare state and free medical services. UK industry never really recovered during this time partly due to inept management, wary investors (who were only interested in low risk short term high returns) and government interference. The UK did get better during the 1945 to 1973 time frame but all the time it was trailing further and further behind not just the USA but Germany Japan and France. Look up the history of the Advanced Passenger Train ATP to see a catalogue of flawed thinking, bad decisions time and money wasted. It is a classic example what when wrong with the UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Passenger_Train

So you have a country with huge and ever growing welfare demands, without the industrial capacity to support it unable to compete with the rest of the world in either old school or cutting edge industries. All the while hoping that the financial services based in London can support the economy of the country. I could see the whole thing was unsustainable 20 years ago.

philip964 wrote: ↑Fri Aug 02, 2024 9:55 am

Grayling813 wrote: ↑Fri Aug 02, 2024 9:08 am

Noggin wrote: ↑Thu Aug 01, 2024 7:16 pm It's now just over 11 years since I left the UK for the last time, over those years I have had almost no desire to return, even for a short visit, those feelings are even stronger now.

Over there you can be arrested for carrying a screw driver (as it could be an offensive weapon) unless you can demonstrate that you have a valid reason for carrying it. Pepper sprays and the like are of course banned the penalties for having one are on a par with having a machine gun. Knives with locking blades are also outlawed. Heck I just think of the number of UK laws i break every time I go shopping, it's not just my pistol but the ammunition inside it, which I believe is forbidden to the small number of armed police in the UK.

The Communists (mostly D's,some R's) want to make it the same way here.

I wonder if their loss of gun rights had any thing at all to do with their downfall.

They lost their gun rights because the never "formally" had them and so few people there had ever even held a real gun let alone shot one, so for the majority over there something was taken away that they never really experienced in the first place. I think it is difficult to find an analogy for over here. Maybe if the government made it illegal to own a private aircraft, there would be some protests but as it is something enjoyed by only a few then the mass of the population would hardly notice or care. It was a bit like that when Tony Blure's government outlawed fox hunting most people did not care as they thought it was just something the Downton Abbey crowd indulged in (which was not entirely true it involved people from all classes in rural communities) but the urban and suburban hoards did not know that, they simply bought into the leftist party line that it was cruel to foxes and since they massively outnumber the rural folk the ban was a forgone conclusion.

When you pack nearly 70 million people into a country smaller than the state of Idaho, then its obvious the urban voter block is going to crush the rural vote.

I was able to see the writing on the wall after the Hungerford Massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungerford_massacre

So I decided to sell my 4" .357 wheel gun and my HK4 pistol. Because a couple of years or so after I did that Dunblane happened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunblane_massacre

It's now just over 11 years since I left the UK for the last time, over those years I have had almost no desire to return, even for a short visit, those feelings are even stronger now.

Over there you can be arrested for carrying a screw driver (as it could be an offensive weapon) unless you can demonstrate that you have a valid reason for carrying it. Pepper sprays and the like are of course banned the penalties for having one are on a par with having a machine gun. Knives with locking blades are also outlawed. Heck I just think of the number of UK laws i break every time I go shopping, it's not just my pistol but the ammunition inside it, which I believe is forbidden to the small number of armed police in the UK.