News from the UK.

According to The Times, in a message to his 17,000 YouTube subscribers, Mr Long-Collins said: ‘I was told that due to repeated comments from other people on the videos, [the police] felt that the channel was a forum of extremism and it was promoting views that were not in line with legal firearms ownership in the UK.’

He told the paper: ‘The main issue was a video that I made around the Paris attacks where I advocated the French to be able to use handguns for self-defence because of the frequency of attacks that were happening at the time.’

Mr Long-Collins lost an appeal against the decision to revoke his gun licences in 2016 at Portsmouth crown court.

He has been told by police recently that they are unlikely to reinstate the licences in the near future, The Times reports.

The crown won’t allow men to defend themselves.  They won’t even allow men to express opinions at variance with their own.  It’s sort of like a communist country, yes?

Now, contrast that with the words of Jesus.  We’ve discussed it before at length.

… for some evidence, see Digest 48.6.1: collecting weapons ‘beyond those customary for hunting or for a journey by land or sea’ is forbidden; 48.6.3.1 forbids a man ‘of full age’ appearing in public with a weapon (telum) (references and translation are from Mommsen 1985). See also Mommsen 1899: 564 n. 2; 657-58 n. 1; and Linderski 2007: 102-103 (though he cites only Mommsen). Other laws from the same context of the Digest sometimes cited in this regard are not as worthwhile for my purposes because they seem to be forbidding the possession of weapons with criminal intent. But for the outright forbidding of being armed while in public in Rome, see Cicero’s letter to his brother relating an incident in Rome in which a man, who is apparently falsely accused of plotting an assassination, is nonetheless arrested merely for having confessed to having been armed with a dagger while in the city: To Atticus, Letter 44 (II.24). See also Cicero, Philippics 5.6 (§17). Finally we may cite a letter that Synesius of Cyrene wrote to his brother, probably sometime around the year 400 ce. The brother had apparently questioned the legality of Synesius having his household produce weapons to defend themselves against marauding bands. Synesius points out that there are no Roman legions anywhere near for protection, but he seems reluctantly to admit that he is engaged in an illegal act (Letter 107; for English trans., see Fitzgerald 1926).

When Jesus told his disciples to go and purchase swords, debating over how many they got, or whether they used them and for what purpose, completely misses the point.  The point is that by telling them to do so, the Lord of the universe was ordering them to purchase and bear arms in violation of the law.  “This is a fact, and no amount of spiritualizing, Scripture twisting or hermeneutical machinations can get around it.”

I’ll stick with Jesus.  The UK has decided to follow satan.