November 14th, 2009 / No Comments » / by Bemused
After seeing it on the Constantly Furious blog, I absolutely cannot believe my eyes.
Former soldier Paul Clarke discovers a shotgun abandoned, and instead of leaving it where anyone could pick it up, picks it up himself and takes it to a local police station.
Now what might be a reasonable response form the Police?
“Thanks very much, could you just make a statement about where you found it for our records? Have a cup of tea.”
No.
It was in the cells with him and and charged with Possession of a firearm without a certificate.
You see, that charge relates to an absolute offence. Intent or circumstance cannot be used as a defence. If you have a firearm without a certificate you are guilty and it’s a minimum 5 year sentence.
The judge is powerless to say “You did a sensible thing and removed a threat from a public place, go home.”
Even though this is what any right minded, responsible citizen would do.
Instead, the message is “If you see an illegal firearm, walk on by and pretend you didn’t see it”.
In this target driven age, I would not have been surprised if - had he called the police to come and collect it where he found it - he would have been charged with the same offence. Whilst he may not have touched it, for the period where he would have been stood by it, waiting for the Police to arrive, he would have effectively been in control of the location and state of the firearm.
The law is so poorly written that literally being in the vicinity of he firearm could be construed by a half-decent prosecution barrister to mean one was in possession or control of the firearm.
There is no action the man on the street can reasonably take without being prosecuted other than walking by and pretending he didn’t see it. If the next passer-by happens to be a child who has not been trained in firearm safety, so be it (and in the current political climate - where it is hoped that if firearms are hidden from children they will forget about their existence, the odds of the next passer-by being unfamiliar with firearm law and safe handling is increasing daily).
In this case:
- where there is no evidence of harmful intent on the part of Mr Clarke;
- where there is no evidence he is guilty of any other offence than possession;
- where there is no evidence that he had committed a crime with the firearm;
- where there is no evidence to contradict his story that he had come directly to the station after picking it up
(and nevermind the fact he actually went to hand it in at the police station - thousands wouldn’t), the arresting officer should have used his discretion, sent the firearm for destruction and and sent Mr Clarke on his way with a word of thanks, or at most a word of warning to call the Police to the site in any future incident instead of taking it to the station himself.
Instead, the pen-pushing idiot decided to arrest him, and then the CP fucking S decided it was in the public interest to pursue a prosection and fill a jail cell for 5 years with an otherwise law abiding citizen, whilst rapists and violent criminals are let off with cautions. I mean, cautions? For rape?
Not that this is the first time the CPS have wound themselves into a tizzy over firearms laws. Anyone remember Mick Shepherd? The slightly eccentric but legal and registered dealer with an historically significant collection of antique firearms.
In 2006 (to much fanfare), the Police swooped down, arresting him on suspicion he had sold firearms illegally which could be traced to no less than 14 gang-related shootings.
After 9-months, during which time Mick had to explain to the CPS prosecutors the areas of obscure law they were trying to charge him with, and during which time he had to identify half the guns for the Police armourer - such was their rarity - he eventually ended up in court.
The judge immediately threw out half of the 21 charges, but the CPS - having already pissed away hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers money on this case - pressed on, as their amateurish case was torn to shreds by an informed defence counsel. Instead of just dropping their case, they strung it out for weeks until eventually Mick was cleared of all charges when it was established that all 900 guns in his collection were legal and RFDs do not need to assess intent when selling antique firearms and curios. They sell them for what they are. Furthemore, the suggestion his sales went to gangland shootings were also utterly unsubstantiated, so he was not even cast grey morally, nevermind legally.
And now they are at it again, like rabid dogs at the slightest sniff of the word “gun”, they are seemingly determined to piss away enormous sums of money on condemning anyone who has so much as set eyes on a firearm - legally held or not. What has this country come to? That a man is arrested and sent down for 5 years at the public expense, for doing what any respectable, and responsible citizen would have done?
Even 20 years ago noone would have batted an eyelid.
Indeed, Mr Clarke would probably have been told if he acquired a Shotgun Licence he could keep the thing.
And public safety would not have been compromised.
In 2009 however, one extra criminal will be on the streets because a cell is filled with a man who should not be there.
Police forces across America frequently go by the slogan “To Protect and Serve”. Who are the British Police protecting here? It’s not the general public. Who are they serving? They no longer enforce the law by public consent.
What has this country come to, that such non-sensical drivel serves as an excuse for a judicial system?
For shame britain. We no longer deserve the title “Great” nor even a capital “B”, and we haven’t for some time.
For shame.
EDIT: It has been pointed out, that had Mr Clarke been resident in Suffolk, he would likely have had little problem handing in the firearm, which just goes to show this is either an example of inter-force disparities in the application of the law, or the desk jockey striking up a cheap win for the stats.
Posted in: Law, Politics
Tags: Crime, Idiocy, mick shepherd, paul clarke, Police, Punishment
November 4th, 2009 / No Comments » / by Bemused
In my humble opinion, more of their marketing should use material from this shoot.
Anschutz Photoshoot
Posted in: Media, Shooting
Tags: Anschutz, Media, photoshoot, Rifle, Shooting, sport
October 21st, 2009 / No Comments » / by Bemused
Eee gads. Dave is doing his best to lose this election isn’t he. It’s his for the taking, and yet he’s just trotted out another retarded idea.
No doubt inspired by “Blair’s Babes” of 1997, he’s announced some constituencies will have all-women shortlists for the post of Tory Prospective Parliamentary Candidate.
In 1997 this was fine, but since then we’ve had 12 years of Harriet Harperson and Jacqui Smith lecturing us and singing the “praises” of positive discrimination like the harpies they truly are.
People want the best person for the job to be their Tory candidate. If that person happens to be a white, middle aged business man with a wife and 2.4 children, then so be it. We shouldn’t be trying to vote in Nigerian transgender paraplegic lesbian muslims (think I got every minority group in there!) purely for the sake of quotas.
Indeed, dissent has already arisen from within the party:
Tory MP Ann Widdecombe said they were an “appalling” idea and would make women MPs “second class citizens”.
How can a woman hold her head high in the Commons if she came from a constituency where not everyone was eligible to be voted in as the Tory candidate?
Indeed this has backfired on Labour in recent years when a male Labour MP - prevented from re-running after his first term because Labour HQ wanted an all-women shortlist - ran as an independent MP and retained his seat.
Positive discrimination will chop out the best man for the job 100% of the time, and will cut the best person for the job 50% of the time (assuming the workforce should be 50% male, 50% female).
It goes against every principle of meritocracy. If someone is the best candidate and truly deserves a post, they then they won’t need a poxy “Equal Opportunities” policy to get it. And in their position, I would not want to think I only got it because of such a policy - in trying to make people “equal”, it actually infers that certain groups are “inferior and so need help to reach the same standard as everyone else”. A gross insult I think you will agree, and indicative of the twisted thinking and all-pervading doublespeak that has infiltrated our government, media, businesses and lives.
Posted in: Media, Politics
Tags: Parliament, Politics, Positive Discrimination, Tory
October 21st, 2009 / No Comments » / by Bemused
It was going so well. They’d expelled the most extreme party members, garnered some public support, and were trying to clean up their act, turning round the neo-fascist beginnings the peaty was born from, and which the general media have generally tried to paint them (an inaccurate painting of late).
They’re even changing their constitution and have MEPs. And then they do this.
So, they didn’t do their research and realise this particular Spitfire was part of a Polish RAF Squadron. Such an oversight is forgivable unless you are a monumental WW2 plane bore.
Unfortunately, when the MoD had a bit of a jibe at the BNP, they made the error of comparing current military chiefs to Nazi war criminals, the like of which had been tried at Nuremberg.
Now I’m not going to jump to the defence of General Sir Mike Jackson (a.k.a the Prince of Darkness) too quickly, given that he was broken in as Tony Blair’s well-trained lap dog and started barking the party line as soon as he was appointed to Chief of the General Staff. Yes he’s given them a shoeing since, but too little too late some feel.
That sits in stark contrast to Sir Richard Dannatt who has consistently being giving the government a shoeing over it’s poor funding of the armed forces, leading to the TA being shut down for 6 months. The Army cannot decide not to go to war - a laying down of arms would be horrifically illegal. If you want to blame someone for these illegal wars, look to Tony Blair and his dodgy dossiers. Sir Rich has just been doing his level best to get the right kit for his squaddies. He’s a true friend to squaddies, and Nick Griffin has really fecked himself over by comparing him to a Nazi war criminal.
Of course, none of this matters because the BNP are going to get slaughtered on Thursday anyway when the notoriously left wing BBC fill the Question Time audience with hand wringing liberals and left-wingers. What’s that? They’re required to provide a balanced audience? Don’t give me that! This is the BBC who nearly drove Philip Lader to tears by filling the QT audience with jihadists two days after 9/11. Their charter and income stream is granted by the government, and as such any idea that they are impartial is utter fantasy. The BNP question time will be an utter fix.
Lets get this straight:
BNP: You’re saying what much of the country is thinking. Immigration is out of control, positive discrimination is destroying any semblance of a meritocracy and the government is full of snout-in-trough piggies.
THINK BEFORE YOU FUCKING SPEAK.
EVERYONE ELSE: Regardless of what you may think, the BNP is a legally registered political party, and voters have democratically shown their support (Peter Hain - are you paying attention?). They have MEPs for gods sake. Lets not forget. It is not the place of the political parties to tell us what our opinions should be (despite what ZanuLab may have tried to have us believe over the past 10 years).
It is the place of the people to support parties who represent views or values that the voters hold dear. If support for the BNP is growing, then it’s because they say (at least sometimes) what people think. It might be a wise idea to have a look at their policies and work out why support is flooding away from mainstream parties instead of trying to demonise them and pretend they don’t exist.
I’m not supporting the BNP in this. I’m just saying they are gaining an increasing share of the popular vote. If you are standing there screaming “They’re racist! Don’t listen to them!”, and they are taking votes from you, then YOU are doing something wrong. Not the voters, and not the BNP.
The media’s popular line seems to be to suggest that anyone who votes for the BNP is making a mistake. Walking into the voting stall and randomly ticking the wrong box. But they’re not. In their mind they believe that the BNP are going to represent them best. They no longer feel that you represent their best interests or their views. Whether that opinion is accurate or not is irrelevant. It’s the vote they are casting, and you need to work out what you’re doing wrong - why they they are not voting for you.
Think about that. Think about that long and hard, and work out if it is not the voters or the BNP, but you that needs updating, you that needs to change.
Posted in: Media, Politics
Tags: bnp, Government, Parliament, Politics
October 20th, 2009 / No Comments » / by Bemused
So, they’re actually going to do it. The workers of Royal Mail are going to bankrupt one of our cherished institutions and make 130,000 people redundant.
Seriously. In this recession, they should be glad just to have jobs, and yet stories of people knocking off early, squirreling away undelivered mail, as well as (in our extensive experience), getting within 100yds of the house and red-carding our letter box with “sorry you weren’t in” cards for parcels and mail needing a signature, even when we are in.
Their timing could not be worse. No doubt they think they’re very clever. Striking in the run-up to Christmas is like transport workers striking at rush hour.
Unfortunately, by their own admission, whilst letter business is down, parcel transit is up, and there are plenty of alternative couriers since the monopoly was abolished.
RM’s second largest customer - Amazon.co.uk - have pulled out of a £25m deal for Christmas deliveries, with Tesco Direct and Argos following suit as they line up alternative delivery networks. Odds are if they are satisfied with their alternative suppliers they will stay with them. Permanently. Even as far back as 2006, Tesco awarded their Clubcard mail business to DHL. No doubt they will have little qualms moving other sectors of their postal traffic across if they feel the need. Meanwhile Energy firms are advising customers to bank and pay bills online.
This action is not only going to force commercial business across to rivals, but force people to make changes that will see a fall in overall mail delivered by the industry as a whole. It’s going to cost Royal Mail hundreds of millions of pounds a year in permanently lost business.
I’ll be surprised if they are still in business by January 2010.
Posted in: Politics
Tags: Business, Idiocy
October 11th, 2009 / No Comments » / by Bemused
In a scene vaguely reminiscent of Brown’s epic blunder of 1999 - when he sold half the nation’s gold reserves at artificially low prices, when the trading price was low anyway, it seems now - in the middle of a recession, in a buyer’s market - he is going to asset strip the nation before being swept from power next June.
Lets recap what happened. In May 1999, gold was trading at $282.40/oz. Having announced that he was going to dump 400 tonnes onto the market, the price dipped to $276.60/oz. That’s not a big drop if you’re selling an ounce. It’s a metric fuckton of a drop of you’re selling 400 tonnes. In fact, the artificially low price (that $6/oz) left the UK shortchanged by £2bn off the going rate.
Worse, gold prices were at their lowest point in a decade. Go back another ten years and gold was trading at $850/oz. Today it’s at $900/oz. That’s right, Pa Broon sold it off at the bottom of the market, at a third of what he could have got.
And now he’ll do it again. Throwing caution the the winds - he knows he won’t need to worry about the fallout - the one-eyed Scottish idiot is going to sell off Totes (a governemnt owned betting agency); the student loan book; the government’s stake in the Dartford crossing, and the government’s stake in the Channel Tunnel. He aims to raise $16bn, which will barely make a splash compared to the UK’s outstanding debts.
Furthermore, whilst it may see him out of his term in office (which is all he cares about), if that’s the best he can come up with, we’ll be in the brown and sticky this time next year when the Tory government find out he’s sold off all the assets and there’s nothing left. We need long term strategies. Like not shipping tens of millions of pounds to furnish a new palace for Mugabe. The UK foreign aid budget is £6-7bn annually, yet the NHS has a budget deficit of £1.5bn, and the nation owes hundreds of billions in national debt. Meantime, the Territorial Army is being told to stand-down and stop training for 6 months because the MoD can’t pay the bills (they aim to save a relatively measly £20m through this).
GORGON - CHARITY STARTS AT HOME. THE UK IS BANKRUPT. SORT OUT OUR FINANCES BEFORE YOU TRY AND SORT OUT THE REST OF THE WORLD.
And yet today we hear MPs may be getting asked to repay more expenses in the fallout of the Legg Report, in some cases to the tune of SIX figures. What planet were these people on when the filed those claims? And even Premier Broon is not immune to these proceedings. Pathetic. Sadly i fear even June is not soon enough. They will do much more damage before their time is out.
Posted in: General, Politics, War
Tags: Brown, Idiocy, Parliament, Politics
September 25th, 2009 / No Comments » / by Bemused
I’ve recently come across a new political movement calling themselves “Jury Team“. Their slogan is “Politics without Parties”. The argument being that the idea of whipped parties is distinctly undemocratic, with Parliament in it’s current guise simply rubber-stamping government proposals with a low level of scrutiny. Wikipedia.
They stood in the European Elections in several regions, despite only forming in March 2009, three months before the elections. They got 80,000 votes across the country - staggering considering they had only had 12 weeks of existence - although not enough to earn an MEP slot.
They have a candidate for the Glasgow By-Election - the much lauded baggage handler John Smeaton who was last seen punching terrorists as they fell out of their burning truck in front of Glasgow Airport in 2007. John will apparently run as an “independent candidate”, because of course their slogan is “Politics without Parties”.
It seems we have here a party that wishes to exist to support independent candidates, and which wants to hold independent referendums outside the parliamentary process on issues which parliament is shying away from. That said, the language on the website comes across as overtly political - “We intend, we want to…”, as though they have a set of opinions they want their “Independent” MPs to follow through with into Parliament. That said, it could just be me.
In effect, I get the feeling they are trying to get Parliament 51% full of Independent MPs. The government will not be able to force anything through with whips, and will not just have to broker deals with another Party to get their 51%, but will need to draft reasonable and generally acceptable bills in order to garner sufficient support to pass them. They want Parliament to be able to stand upto the government, and for MPs (who are elected as representatives of their constituencies) to represent their constituents, not their Party line.
Of course I shall have to reserve judgement until I have garnered their candidate’s opinions on the legal use of firearms for sporting purposes. It’s no good having Independent candidates who can think for themselves, if they think the bullshit spouted by the government and mass media over the past decade is anything like accurate, or if they’re so limp-wristed that they agree with PETAs appraisal that poisoning Pigeons is a more humane method of pest control than shooting them (a slow, painful nd species-indiscriminate method versus a quick and sharp method where they literally don’t know what’s hit them). It’s not just about shooting of course, but if they haven’t seen through the smoke screen put up by the media to hide a legitimate sport, how can we expect them to see through other smoke screens or government mis-information?
We shall see.
Posted in: Media, Politics, Shooting
Tags: Crime, John Smeaton, Jury Team, Parliament, Politics, Shooting
September 23rd, 2009 / No Comments » / by Bemused
No, I thought we were a few months off as well, but apparently it is:
Before a motley audience of international notables, the Prime Minister, who is in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, was named World Statesman of the Year.
The award was presented on behalf of the Appeal of Conscience Foundation - which campaigns for religious freedom and human rights - by the veteran US former secretary of state Henry Kissinger.
Rock star Bono, Queen Rania of Jordan, and New Israeli defence minister Ehud Barak were among the audience as Mr Kissinger praised Mr Brown for his “vision and dedication” in handling the world economic crisis.
“His leadership has been essential to our ability to overcome the moment of danger,” said Mr Kissinger.
What a joke.
Posted in: Media, Politics
Tags: Brown, Idiocy, Politics
September 7th, 2009 / 1 Comment » / by Bemused
Lets clear one thing up straight away. The Scouts have NOT been banned from carrying or using knives during Scouting activities, although to read David Wilkes from the Daily Mail, or Lucy Bannerman of The Times, one could be forgiven for thinking that.
The whole thing stems from an article in the April/May 2009 edition of “Scouting” magazine (good to see the journos are quick on the uptake, it’s only September!), around about pages 50-51 where Scout Master and blade-smith Dave Budd wrote an article detailing and explaining the complex law on knives and bladed articles, listing where it would be legal/appropriate to carry or use different types of knife, and where it would not be appropriate or legal to do so.
That’s it. This entire fiasco is about a single advisory article from a bladesmith who really hates Scouts having knives [/sarcasm]. So much so he ran a knife-making activity with his Scout group. The Scout Association have not banned the use or carrying of knives, nor even had a change in policy. It’s pretty much up to individual leaders to decide where and when their Scouts can use knives (within the framework of their extensive Health and Safety template). I do hope Mr Wilkes and Ms Bannerman extend Dave their apologies for making misquoting his material out of context, and issue a formal retraction. I’m not holding my breath though…
Update:
Scout Association reply
Reply on Chief Commissioner’s Blog
Posted in: Media
Tags: Crime, knife, Law, Scouts
