Roundup of the London Riots

Now that the recent riots in London have faded from the headlines (at least here in the United States), I thought I would post links to some of the reports and analysis offered over the last week.

First, here is a description of the riots from the perspective of a British police officer. Here is an August 7 report from the Telegraph. This is an August 9 report from Fox News concerning the riots in London. And here is a later report from Fox News about the riots spreading from London to other cities.

Some analysis from the British as to the roots of the rioting, here, and a lament that the British public have given up their right to keep and bear arms, and its inevitable result:

Britain’s gun laws are among the most draconian in the world, yet the nation has some of the highest levels of violent crime and burglary in the West, and there is no shortage of gun crime in major cities such as London and Manchester. While criminal gangs are often able to acquire firearms on the black market, ordinary law-abiding British citizens are barred from owning guns for self-defence.

The Samizdata blog notes that in some neighborhoods, the people took steps to forcibly protect their property, and were successful at it too. This op-ed from Alister Heath provides a succinct explanation of the rioters motives:

What they wanted is free money and free goods and so they helped themselves. They were driven by greed, a culture of entitlement, of rights without responsibility, combined with a complete detachment from traditional morality, generalised teenage anger and a sense that anything goes in the current climate. This wasn’t a political protest, it was thievery.

Commentators on this side of the pond have similar thoughts. This op-ed piece from Forbes straight-away states that a cause of the lawlessness is that the British government has failed to safeguard property and taken away the average citizen's right to defend himself. Victor Davis Hanson, at the National Review, also provided an analysis of the London riots and the recent flash mob attacks here in the U.S. Interestingly, on June 19, after experiencing a series of petty thefts, Mr. Hanson  discussed the very same incentives that ended up playing out in London.  

A majority would believe the thieves took things for drugs, excitement, or to buy things like an iPhone or DVD, rather than out of elemental need (e.g., the thief hawked the chainsaw to purchase the family’s rice allotment for the week). In this view, contemporary American crime arises not so much then from Dickensian poverty, as we see in South America or Africa, but out of a sense of resentment, of boredom, from a certain contempt for the more law-abiding and successful, or on the assurance that apprehension is unlikely, and punishment rarer still. After all, Hollywood, pop music, the court system, and the government itself sympathize with, even romanticize those forced to take a chainsaw, not the old middle-class bore who bought it.

The remedy to address theft would be not more government help — public assistance, social welfare, counseling — but far less, given that human nature rises to the occasion when forced to work and sinks when leisured and exempt. I don’t believe my thieves have worked much; instead, they figured a day’s theft beats tile setting or concrete work beginning at 5 AM.

I conclude that most Americans would agree that chain-sawing a peach tree or pumping irrigation water enriches the nation, while cruising around looking to destroy such activity does not. The latter represents the sort of social parasitism that I read about each Saturday night in our environs (and, in terms of illegal immigration, once wrote about in Mexifornia — a book I seem doomed to relive in Ground Hog fashion each day — nearly a decade ago): gangbanger A shoots up gangbanger B; B goes to emergency room for publicly funded $250,000 worth of surgery and post-op treatment by C, an MD, who otherwise would have been insulted and intimidated by A or B should he have met either earlier in the day. Indeed, C is more likely to be ridiculed or sued by B than thanked. And yet C does not need either A or B; both need the former in extremis.

The over-arching lesson here is the failure of the modern liberal welfare state. The practical lessons are: (i) civil unrest and riots can spring up suddenly; (ii) the neighborhoods that fared the best were those where the people collectively took responsibility for their own defense; (iii) you can't rely on law enforcement for protection.