5 July—On the related subjects of Endeavour and Independence Day, if you were able to stay awake during the last episode of the former, you may recall that DCI Fred Thursday took a revolver out of the kitchen cabinet he was secreting it in and in one of the last scenes gave it to DS Endeavour Morse. And Morse gave Thursday a briefcase full of cash. In very public Radcliffe Square, by the way. Go figure. Anyway, the top-break revolver was most likely a Webley .455 caliber that Thursday had kept after being demobilized after his army service in World War II, like many of the world’s military personnel did.

British cops don’t carry guns, you’re thinking. Of course they don’t (except in Northern Ireland)—even though they should—except in exigent circumstances. But they’re all trained in firearms use just in case. Back in the sixties and seventies it was somewhat easier for people in the UK to keep firearms in their homes. But even police weren’t supposed to. That’s likely why Thursday hid it.

Now, of course, the United Kingdom’s oppressively suppressive laws pertaining to firearms are the stuff of the wettest dreams of Joe Biden, Ned Lamont, Richie Blumenthal, and countless other self-serving pols who are doing their damnedest to circumvent the Constitution’s clearly enumerated right to keep and bear arms without infringement.

Simply put, in the United Kingdom, the general public’s access to firearms is severely restricted. Members of the public may own rifles and shotguns—but only if they’re licensed. The people and the long guns. Most handguns have been banned in a knee-jerk reaction to the Dunblane school massacre of 1996, like Connecticut politicians’ knee-jerk reaction to the Sandy Hook school massacre of 2012.

Handguns are permitted in Northern Ireland, the Channel Islands, and the Isle of Man, which have their own semi-autonomous legislatures. On the other hand, Scotland, also stuck with its own semi-autonomous legislature, even licenses airguns. The rest of the UK just makes it a royal pain to have anything to do with them.

Believe it or not, in Connecticut, you’re not even supposed to carry a BB gun (among other arbitrarily classified dangerous weapons) in your car unless it’s unloaded and locked away. Lock and unload?

Generally speaking, all firearms in the UK must be licensed, with the certificates renewed every five years. An applicant for a firearm certificate must provide justification to the police for each firearm. And then the fuzz must be satisfied that the applicant has a “good reason”—limited to sporting, collecting, or work-related—to own each firearm. Believe it or not, since 1968, self-defense has not been considered a valid reason to own a firearm in the UK. That’s right, self-defense doesn’t count.

And so on. It gets more depressing the more you know about UK gun laws. So I’ll leave it there.

Of course, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland doesn’t have a supremely authoritative constitution to preserve and protect firearm rights or anything else. Having skillfully achieved our independence from the land of hope and glory, the United States of America does. All the states do. That’s why the UK’s draconian anti-gun laws could never be enacted over here. Except that the administrations and legislatures in states like Connecticut, New York, and California consider themselves to be above the laws they themselves don’t make. And not just when it comes to guns . . .