a not-so-hypothetical riot

You own a shop.

This shop cost you money to purchase/lease, and it is filled with an inventory of products that probably represents more than your personal net value.

This shop is in a decent part of town, and you have never really had a problem with shoplifting or other issues you could not handle with a phone call to the cops.

Only now, people are rioting down the street from you, and the police are retreating:

From the news, you know what is happening to other shops in other areas around your town:

So here is the question. Would you rather be left to your own bare fists and determination to stave off a violent, destructive mob that is forcing riot-gear-clad cops down the street:

Or would you prefer to have a simple, mass-produced tool that not only physically removes you from immediate violence, but also provides you sufficient force multiplication to effectively defend yourself and your property said combative mob?

I am not so stupid as to claim "gun control" caused the London riots – in truth, other scribes are doing a fantastic job documenting the various roots of this particular display of unchecked, animalistic idiocy – but I will state that "gun control" has dramatically reduced the ability of law-abiding subjects to defend themselves and their property… much to their detriment.

Even looking past the murders these rioters have committed, every shop torched, every car destroyed, every home ransacked, every product looted is a piece of someone’s life they are never going to get back.  These rioters are figuratively murdering their fellow British subjects by inches, and they are gleefully doing it. 

And you are going to sit there and tell me that those shop owners, those homeowners, those British men and women should not be afforded the tools necessary to exercise their right to self-defense and self-preservation in the face of an overwhelming mob?  Hell with you.  Those people’s lives are literally on the line, and you want them to sit back and wait for help that almost assuredly will not be there soon enough to matter? 

I respect and appreciate that not all people want to own firearms, and I would never force anyone to own anything against their will (unlike anti-rights cultists who would force me not to own something against my will); however, your inability to get over whatever phobias, hangups, or other issues you may or may not have does not give you the right, and sure as hell should not give you the ability, to arbitrarily and whimsically abridge other people’s basic human rights.  And if you do start thinking this sounds like a great idea… well, we now know where your dreams will end up – a society like once-Great Britain’s, which is collapsing almost as fast as London is burning: 

They are products of a culture which gives them so much unconditionally that they are let off learning how to become human beings. My dogs are better behaved and subscribe to a higher code of values than the young rioters of Tottenham, Hackney, Clapham and Birmingham.

Unless or until those who run Britain introduce incentives for decency and impose penalties for bestiality which are today entirely lacking, there will never be a shortage of young rioters and looters such as those of the past four nights, for whom their monstrous excesses were ‘a great fire, man’.

(Video courtesy of Taxing Tennessee.  Split image courtesy of Gizmodo and BBC.  Western Union photo courtesy of The Daily Mail, from an article you really need to read.  Koreatown photo courtesy of Los Angeles’ Korea Times.)