Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are moving back to the United Kingdom. This has a lot of people very upset. The British can get over it, though, because we don’t want them, either. Still, the reason they left the UK is interesting, as is the fact that they’re moving back. After all, the concern was about security.
Members of the royal family might not have a lot of power in the United Kingdom these days, but they’re important symbols of the country. Hurting one of them is a surefire way to make a point. Security is important.
And when Harry and Meghan stepped back from their royal duties, they lost their publicly funded security detail. And then, as Reason’s Reed Ibrahim notes, things got interesting.
Prince Harry and his American wife Meghan Markle are reportedly moving back to the United Kingdom after living in the United States for over six years. While the return has already sparked conversations about their rift with the royal family, whether their children Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet will be able to spend more time with King Charles, and the exact reasons for the move, there is one aspect of the conversation that has gone overlooked: British gun laws.
Their decision to return to the U.K. is certainly a surprise, especially because Prince Harry himself said that they would not be returning for security reasons.
“I can’t see a world in which I’d be bringing my wife and children back to the U.K. at this point,” Harry told the BBC in an emotional interview last year. “Look at the risks. Look at the threat. Look at the impact. If anything was to happen to me, my wife or my father’s grandchildren—if anything was to happen to them—look where the responsibility lies, you know? So there’s a duty of care that has been completely thrown out the window,” Harry told the BBC.
Safety concerns were a central reason for Harry and Meghan’s decision to leave Britain in 2020. After leaving the royal family and stepping back from official responsibilities, the couple lost their publicly funded security privileges. Harry subsequently filed a request for a judicial review of the U.K. Home Office’s decision to take away their security. He even offered to pay for the security himself, so that it would not be at the expense of the taxpayer. The request was denied, prompting the family to move to the United States.
The United Kingdom rejects self-defense as a legitimate reason to own a firearm. They’re so anti-gun that even the police are largely unarmed, which was fine before they started importing terrorists in bulk and calling it diversity.
Still, Harry and Meghan were vulnerable, and there was nothing they could do, even at their own expense.
So they went somewhere that they could.
At the heart of Harry and Meghan’s woes is a dispute over a legal system which prohibits private armed security. In the U.S., private armed security is legal and is an enormous industry in itself. More than 1.28 million security guards work across America and, subject to the law, many can legally work armed. In Britain, self-defense is not a legally permitted reason to obtain a firearm, and even American FBI agents must get special permission from the government to carry.
Interestingly, the pair are also anti-gun themselves, despite the fact that the UK’s gun laws were part of why they couldn’t get private security there. They don’t seem to recognize that not all of us are able to outsource our security needs, even at our own expense.
British gun laws reject self-defense, but they’ve also had a long history of relative domestic peace apart from the whole IRA thing back in the day. Even then, that was mostly car bombs or the sort of situations where the authorities saw a profound difference between that and other kinds of violent crime.
The United States has never had that.
We’ve been an open nation since before we were an independent nation. We might have immigration laws, but we’ve always been open to immigrants to some degree or another. That has created some cultural tension, particularly with the way racism worked back in the day, where “Italian” and “Irish” were viewed as separate races. Hell, my mom recounted stuff like that happening when she and my father lived in Brooklyn, and that was the 1960s.
Because of that tension, people needed to protect themselves. The Second Amendment already existed, obviously, but it also meant there were people who wanted and needed guns for self-defense, and they were willing to fight for it.
Thank God, too.
Harry and Meghan’s problems weren’t because the government took away their security. It was because there was no other option for security beyond that, which included even Harry — a combat veteran who saw ground combat as a forward air controller in Afghanistan — having a gun for self-defense.
Here, that’s different, and that’s why they came here to be safe.
Yes, they’re going back. No, I don’t know what changed, nor do I care. That’s not relevant to the overall point to be made, which Ibrahim made pretty well.
UK gun laws were the problem then and would be the problem now. My guess is that the pair will
step back into their public roles and enjoy the benefits from there.
Not everyone in Once-Great Britain gets that option.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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