The slippery Slpe of Liberty Control

From National review online: The slippery slope doesn’t end with the confiscation of guns, but with the destruction of the right to self-defense itself.

Despite very severe anti-knife laws, Great Britain has been suffering from a surge in knife crime. Some Britons propose making the laws even harsher. Others are offering more constructive solutions to get to the root causes of the problem.
Britain’s experience demonstrates the importance of the Second Amendment. Under the logic of the Supreme Court’s District of Columbia v. Heller decision, knives are certainly among the “arms” protected by the Second Amendment. Courts in Connecticut, Wisconsin, and Washington are among those that have recognized as much, with courts in the first two states finding that particular knife controls went too far and were unconstitutional.
Although England’s 1689 Bill of Rights recognized the right to possess defensive arms, that right is now a dead letter, as are many of the others enumerated in that document. So today, Great Britain has trapped itself in a vicious cycle of rising crime and intensifying repression.
By the government’s count, knife crime in Britain rose 36 percent between 2013 and 2017. Some of the statistical increase can be attributed to changes in the recording practices of police departments, which have long underreported all sorts of crime. But the Home Office, whose functions include collecting crime statistics, acknowledges that knife crime is up sharply.
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 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Great Britain had very low homicide rates, and knife controls were close to nil. So what’s driving the present surge in knife attacks? According to the British Home Office, gang and drug activity are significant, interrelated contributors. Between 2014 and 2017, the proportion of homicides involving drugs increased from 50 percent to 57 percent. Conversely, non-drug-related homicides decreased.
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In short, the U.K. has a drug and gang problem masquerading as a knife problem. Knife control is, by itself, a shallow solution. The futile effort to restrict the supply of knives and anything else that could possibly be used as a weapon ignores the root causes of criminal activity: As is the case everywhere else, crime in the U.K. is strongly associated with broken homes and poverty.
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 Arms rights in England were never as robust as in the United States. The U.S. Second Amendment, ratified in 1791, declares that the right to keep and bear arms “shall not be infringed.” The more limited 1689 English Bill of Rights allowed “subjects” to “have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law.” Today, there are no conditions under which English subjects may possess a suitable defensive arm in public. The English government prioritizes the safety of criminals over the safety of their victims. As England shows, the slippery slope of gun control doesn’t end with the confiscation of handguns, but with destruction of the right to self-defense itself.