More Brits want to be able to defend themselves and their families.
Following the terrorist attacks in London this year, as well as the growing threat of radical Islamic terror in the UK and Europe, there has been a renewed call by many Brits for loosening gun restrictions on the country.
UK gun rights advocacy groups criticized the British government for failure to adequately protect its citizens and for basically mandating that the citizenry remain unarmed and helpless in the face of such terrorist threats.
Organizations such as Firearms-UK, Arm UK Citizens, Legalise Guns in the UK, and England Wants Its Guns Back all peppered social media with cries of double standards, hypocrisy and government ineffectiveness in combating terrorism.
They say that an armed citizenry is the first and best response to terror and crime, and they are demanding that the government relax its strict gun control policy to allow more citizens to own and carry firearms.
"These tragedies may have been the eye opener to just how ineffective our laws are," said Dave Ewing, from Firearms-UK.
A Firearms-UK facebook post accused the politicians who are elected to represent the people of having the luxury of "24 hour armed bodyguards protecting them while they continue to sell the lie that firearms are not suitable for personal protection."
A few years ago The Telegraph asked its readers in the UK what measure they would most like to see introduced into the House of Commons. The top proposal, with 86 percent of the more than 20,000 respondents agreeing, was a repeal of the 1997 handgun ban.
While many Brits look across the pond, so to speak, and envy the United States' Second Amendment, many others do not wish to abolish wholesale their government's oversight and restrictions on firearms. They merely want laws loosened to more freely allow UK citizens to use guns for self-defense.
Britain has some of the tightest gun laws in Europe, with strict government oversight on gun ownership, extensive background checks and mandatory weapons training. Additionally, much of the populace has lived under this system for so long that they find the idea of citizen gun ownership confusing and odd.
"It's frustrating for me that when you tell someone you own a gun you're instantly labelled a weirdo. It's like a secret society," says Callum Long-Collins, one of the 700,000 gun owners in England and Wales.
That's 700,000 gun owners of a total population of around 56 million. That means that approximately one percent of Brits have the capacity to effectively defend themselves against crime and terrorism, except of course when they leave their homes, at which point they are required to remain unarmed. But even in their homes, UK laws are very restrictive concerning self-defense.
"Criminals are, I think, laughing at us at the moment," said Long-Collins. "They know a lot of people are scared to do anything offensive in their home because of the repercussions."
Ironically enough, violent crime in the UK is rising, despite all of the country's draconian gun laws. But the movement to return gun rights to the citizenry is growing, albeit slowly. More people are coming to the realization that strict gun laws do nothing to stop criminals or crazed terrorists from committing their heinous acts.
What those gun laws do, however, is restrict people from exercising a basic human right that is as old as humanity itself: the right of self defense.
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