It comes down to this: in most cases where citizens have no right to keep firearms, they will always be an election away from a tyranny they can neither overthrow nor defend themselves from. In our case, it took seven elections, but the result is the same. #Lockdown2 #COVID19

The walking corpse of John Major's Conservatives and then the newly elected left-wing radicals of New Labour took away our right to bear arms. They did it, as you rightly guessed, by fear-mongering - and yes, with help from the media. And they didn't achieve their stated aims.

A report into the tragic and emotive 1996 Dunblane Massacre recommended banning all handguns except those that took .22 calibre ammunition. It used to be said that hard cases make bad law. Nevertheless, John Major's Conservatives duly introduced the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1997.

Later that year, Tony Blair's Labour introduced the Firearms (Amendment) (No. 2) Act. It banned all handguns irrespective of calibre, so that the only small arms British citizens (excluding Northern Irish) could legally own were black-powder muskets, pellet guns, and so on.

And guess what happened to gun crime in Britain after the ban? That's right. The number of firearms offences increased, peaking at 11,088 in 2005/2006, compared to only 4,904 in 1997. The numbers subsequently went down, but remained higher than in 1997 (e.g., 6,492 in 2018).

Is it a coincidence that Britain has become far less free in the years since the ban? That the state became bolder and bolder, imposing ever more totalitarian legislation on us ('hate crime' laws, etc.), culminating in the Coronavirus Act (2020)? Hard to say. Maybe..