UK Police losing war with smuggled guns

Shockingly, it seems that Her Majesty's Scepter'd Isle is not so protected by the English Channel as Her Majesty's Government would like:

Police and border officials are struggling to stop a rising supply of illegal firearms being smuggled into Britain, a senior police chief has warned. 

Chief constable Andy Cooke, the national police lead for serious and organised crime, said law enforcement had seen an increased supply of guns over the past year, and feared that it would continue in 2019. 

The Guardian has learned that the situation is so serious that the National Crime Agency has taken the rare step of using its legal powers to direct every single police force to step up the fight against illegal guns.

These are new guns, not existing ones stolen in burglaries.  Some are shipped into the country in packages - the explosion of online shopping has led to new smuggling channels.  Not surprising, as drugs are smuggled by the ton and are available for sale on every street corner.  Of course, this was easily foreseeable - and in fact I blogged about this 8 years ago:

So there was another mass shooting in gun-free Great Britain. To those who think that Yet Another Tweak of the gun control laws will prevent this in the future, to those who believe in their heart of hearts that "Common Sense Gun Control" really is possible, I have one question: 

Which weighs more, a ton of cocaine, or a ton of Glocks?

The more things change, the more things stay the same.

But fear not, the UK Police are on it.  Well, they're on something, at least:

British citizens trying to craft a New Year's resolution for 2019 don't have to worry. Your government is taking care of it. You're going to commit to eating less food. 

It doesn't matter whether you want to or even need to eat less food. Public Health England has decided that growing obesity numbers require all British citizens to eat less food. And they're going to force the matter by controlling the size of just about every single piece of food and prepared available for purchase.

If you follow the first link, you'll read a quote from a police commander complaining that they're too understaffed to catch all the illegal guns coming into the kingdom.  But the second link says that they'll be even more understaffed as their police force will be called on to round up Big Mac scofflaws.

Err, when they're not blockading hospitals to make sure that desperately ill children don't escape the National Health Service:

[The Archbishop of Liverpool] tells us that everything “humanly possible” has been done to help the child, ignoring that the Police hold him hostage in a hospital that intends to starve him to death.  Police that turned away a German Air Ambulance come to take him for treatment far from the shores of Her Majesty's Scepter'd Isle.

But no doubt that one more tweak of the gun laws in Blighty - or on these shores (*cough* ATF Bumpstock Ban *cough*) will solve the problem nicely.

And so the Government can't do basic things that the public expects (provide security) while it busies itself sticking its nose into your business (or killing your kids).  Ah, well.  It's clear that the UK.gov has no legitimacy:

Things get ugly when the government, as the Chinese say, loses the Mandate of Heaven.  We are seeing political signs pointing to this all over the place: the election of Donald Trump, BREXIT, the waxing of nationalist political parties across Western Europe, the alliance in Italy of left-wing and right-wing nationalist parties.  Everywhere you look the populations are rejecting the existing governments.  Each of the governments are desperately trying to suppress this rejection.  And so the air is going out of the legitimacy balloon. 

But remember, a millennium of expectations do not go softly into that good night.  The deal was that blood feud would be replaced by the State using its monopoly of force to ensure justice.  What happens when a big enough portion of the population thinks that the deal has been broken?  How big does that group need to be? 

I certainly don't have answers to any of these questions, but the answers are not important.  What's important is that the questions can be asked and not be rejected out of hand.

I'm old enough to remember when it was widely thought that the Government was competent, and if it put its mind to it could do amazing things.  That was in the 1960s.  What we've seen since then is a more frequent demonstration that the Government couldn't bring tomorrow in on time.

But hey, some more stupid or useless gun control laws would be awesome, amirite?