In a rare win for common sense across the pond, the UK government has announced plans to dismantle its dystopian non-crime hate incident (NCHI) regime, redirecting precious police resources toward, you know, actual crimes like burglary and assault instead of hurt feelings logged in some Kafkaesque database. For years, this system has allowed cops to investigate and record incidents that aren’t crimes—think someone overhearing a spicy pub rant about immigration or muttering something insufficiently woke—tacking them onto individuals’ records without due process. Over 150,000 such entries have piled up since 2014, per official stats, ensnaring everyone from journalists to kids with the wrong sticker on their laptop. The Home Secretary’s pivot, outlined in a speech this week, promises to scrap the mandatory recording of these non-offenses, freeing up an estimated 10,000+ officer hours annually for real policing. It’s being hailed as a rollback of the speech police state, but let’s call it what it is: a grudging admission that weaponizing bureaucracy against dissent doesn’t make streets safer.
Dig deeper, and this reeks of the same slippery slope that 2A advocates have been warning about for decades—governments bloating public safety into a catch-all for control. In the UK, where private gun ownership is already a fairy tale (only 1.3% of adults hold a firearm certificate, per 2023 Home Office data), NCHIs have been a soft enforcement tool for the establishment’s cultural agenda, chilling speech that might challenge disarmament narratives or glorify self-reliance. Remember the 2021 case of Harry Miller, a former policeman whose business was flagged over gender-critical tweets? Courts eventually ruled it unlawful, but not before his life was upended. Now, with Labour’s Keir Starmer eyeing tighter knife controls amid rising violence (knife crime up 7% last year), this scrap feels like damage control after public backlash—not a principled stand. They’re not repealing the hate speech laws; they’re just pruning the low-hanging fruit to look tough on catching criminals while riots expose policing’s true priorities.
For the 2A community, this is a flashing red light on the road to serfdom: if the UK can log your words as quasi-crimes today, imagine what happens when they tie it to 3D-printed suppressors or hate speech about government overreach tomorrow. Stateside, we’ve got ATF knock-and-talks and red flag laws nibbling at the edges of due process—echoes of NCHIs without the accent. Celebrate this UK retreat as a tactical victory, but double down on vigilance; the nanny state’s always plotting its next logbook. Arm up, speak freely, and keep the pressure on—because liberty doesn’t scrap itself.
