HIDEOUS ARMS BUSINESS

LISTENING to the media debate about the efficacy of whether or not to sell arms to Saudi Arabia, it’s crystal clear that the establishment is desperate to carry on with this utterly hideous business.

One of the tricks they are trying to play on us is this business of making out there is somehow some moral equivalence between selling arms and not selling arms to evil dictatorships.

The argument goes that, if we don’t sell the Saudis bombs, we will lose all this business and the Saudis will just go and buy weapons from somebody else.

The Kingdom would then fall under the influence of these other people who we ought to understand are not like us – ie, we are the ‘good guys’ trying to exert some morale influence on the wayward Kingdom.

These other people are undoubtedly the ‘bad guys’ – ie, the Chinese or the Russians.

We wouldn’t want those poor ‘innocent’ naive Saudis to fall under their influence, would we?

But there is a superior argument to this and we have to look at the awful events that took place in Dunblane 22 years ago to get the answer.

Back then, 17 children were murdered by a madman named Thomas Hamiliton.

The reaction by a small number of gun shop owners was amazing.

They put closed signs in their windows and never sold a single weapon ever again, and the reason was that they knew that, if they had sold such guns to a madman, that they, too, would have been morally responsible.