From The Editor... By Peggy Tartaro, Executive Editor Women of a certain age-by whom I mean me-have a certain fascination with all things British, which I think comes from a deep seated need to release our Inner Princesses or something. But Americans of both sexes seem to think more highly of the British Isles than we do of any other country. Having been the only country smart or tough enough to cast off the Empire after just a few years, it's as if we have some sort of guilt complex about it. And while Britain continues to be one of our strongest allies in the world and, via shared language, we are able to easily share culture-it's a good idea to remember that Britain is not so much the Mother Country as the Aged but Revered Relative Country, perhaps as played by Dame Edith Evans. One should try to be courteous, polite, even accommodating to such a relative, but one really doesn't want the Aged Relative to arbitrate on one's life in all matters. Since 1776, for example, airplanes have been invented, so there's really no need for a long discussion about how it used to take three weeks to walk to Twicken-upon-Thames. For many years, the anti-gunners in the US have used foreign countries as "good examples" to the American public, in much the same way an Aged Relative might use the most irritating child in your circle as a "good example" of how you should behave. "Hyacinth is such a well-behaved girl," the A.R. might drone, and most right-thinking children will immediately tune out the rest of the encomium. In any event, a U.N.-roster of "good examples" is often intoned by the anti-gunners, as models of "sane," or "sensible" gun policy. Japan, Canada and most of Europe (with the notable except of Switzerland) are offered as part of a "why-can't-you-just-be-like-Hyacinth" finger-wagging. The best and brightest example is always Britain, perhaps because, as noted above, it is a country with which we have always shared much. Playing on our national anglophilia, the anti-gunners use Britain as a club to beat us wild colonials into seeing things their way. Never mind that since the argument came into being 30 years ago, American pro-gunners have been disposing of the argument on the facts. As long as Britain could claim a lower murder rate and less violent crime overall, the anti-gunners were still swinging the scepter. "Britain," the mythical peaceful kingdom of the antis, almost never included Northern Ireland, a somewhat telling omission, akin to dropping Detroit from Michigan's statistics, Los Angeles County from California's or Boston from Massachusetts'. "Never mind that Irish bit," you can almost hear them saying, as they slap a hand over a goodly hunk of the map of "Britain." That green and pleasant place of song also had a habit of cooking the books when it came to crime numbers, or at least using something quite a bit different than our own Uniform Crime Reports. When the murder of school children in Dunblane, Scotland, occurred in 1996, the nation was horrified, and, British anti-gunners took full advantage of that horror, passing the most restrictive laws yet, to cap an almost 80 year march to disarm Britain. It effectively outlawed the private ownership of handguns, as well as most other firearms, by the British public. And similar events were going on in other former Empire outposts: Australia, also in a wave of hysteria following a mass shooting in Tasmania, began a serious campaign of making its citizens into criminals via gun control, and Canada has been struggling with a national registration system that is a cross between a Monty Python sketch and an Enron board meeting. It is unfortunate for the people of Britain that it has taken nearly five years for the evidence of "gun control" to show that the average citizen is not only not safer, but in greater danger in a country where the "common man is debarred arms." A popular BBC reporter was gunned down in the streets of London just a few months after the enactment of the "sane" legislation; home invasions-with the unarmed homeowners present-are at record levels, and on New Year's Day 2003 two young women are slain in the streets of Birmingham, the apparent victims of crossfire in a gang war. Even on an island, even in a place where the populace has always had more respect for authority and has had eight decades of small steps to acclimatize themselves to the loss of freedom, the argument of the British model looks very shabby indeed. British historian Joyce Lee Malcolm's new book, Guns and Violence: The English Experience (Harvard University Press, 2002), traces the history of Britain from the Middle Ages to the present, and while a history of this nature might not be everyone's cup of Lapsang Souchong, one would hope that folks like Michael Moore, Sarah Brady and Josh Sugarmann would give it a look before they tell us yet again how England is a better, saner, safer place. Malcolm quotes 19th Century English jurist, AV Dicey: "Discourage self-help, and loyal subjects become the slaves of ruffians." It might not fit on a bumper sticker, but Americans apparently have been paying better attention to history than their English cousins. Peggy Tartaro Photo © Copyright 1998 Nancy Floyd, used with permission.