Last week as she was leaving a library in Birstall, England, 41-year-old MP Jo Cox was stabbed and shot in broad daylight. While murders in Britain unfortunately aren’t rare—homicides in England and Wales were up 14 percent last year—this tragedy underlines another alarming trend: a rise in gun crime.
While handguns have been effectively banned in England for two decades, gun crime rose 4 percent last year, with London recording a 10-percent increase. If England’s gun laws are working as well as Hillary Clinton and others say, where are these illegal guns coming from? Could it be that criminals across the pond, much like those in America, don’t obey gun laws any more than they do other laws?
Unfortunately, the disarmament of law-abiding citizens may have played a part in Cox’s fate: Witnesses say just before the murder, a good Samaritan saw what was about to happen and attempted to stop the assailant. But when the murderer pulled out a gun, the man—a law-abiding citizen armed only with bare hands—was forced to stand down.
