Debate is raging over the story of a 12-year-old Scottish girl seen on social media last week brandishing an axe to defend herself and her sister from an alleged migrant sexual predator at Dundee Estates. 

Millions of British subjects and international onlookers sympathized with and were inspired by the child-warrior apparently forced to take up arms for her own protection. They have watched for years as government policies have turned thousands of young girls into what critics depict as prey for migrants in their own city streets.

The little Scottish girl, with the scowl on her face and the weapon in her hand, became a symbol of every man, woman, and child in Great Britain who feels the government isn’t there to save the people — so the people have to save themselves.

As the girl’s picture spread across the United Kingdom at nationwide protests this past weekend, the local police conducted an investigation of the Dundee Estates event and concluded that they had found no evidence of harassment by the man in question, who turned out to be a legal immigrant from Bulgaria walking with his wife.

Few believed the police, though. British officials’ credibility has yet to recover from the uproar over so-called grooming gangs during the 2000s and 2010s in which, critics contend, police and political figures, gripped by ideology, denied the skyrocketing number of rapes of British girls by migrant men and left the borders of the United Kingdom wide open to an endless stream of perpetrators who would never be held to account. 

Adding insult to actual injury, those who spoke out online or at protests about the problem were arrested under Orwellian “hate speech” laws enacted by the government.

The ultimate insult in the little Scottish girl’s story was news of her arrest after the incident for possession of an “offensive weapon.” Under U.K. law, citizens may not defend themselves with any weapon that might be successful in launching an actual defense. Forget firearms — the people of Great Britain are forbidden to carry knives, pepper spray, or even batons to beat back grown men with eyes for pre-pubescent girls.

Not only are borders, safety, and free speech denied by the British government to its citizens, but so is the right to self-defense. Several U.K. police forces and safety organizations recommend citizens carry personal alarms. If their attackers are unbothered by loud noises, they are out of luck, I guess.

If there is a straw that breaks the camel’s back, this might be it. An early 19th century American jurist and legal scholar, St. George Tucker, called the Second Amendment the true palladium of liberty. “The right of self-defense is the first law of nature,” he wrote. 

Even the most suppressed and compliant of people beaten into submission by years of manipulation, censorship, and state power has the instinct for basic self-preservation and can be pushed too far.

The second half of Tucker’s sentence about the right to self-defense reads, “in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible.” 

For the people of the United Kingdom, it doesn’t get more narrowly limiting than the government, in effect, telling its children they have been turned into targets and must bear the bullseye on their backs. More 12-year-olds, one imagines, are going to get their own axes.

We may never know if this particular Scottish girl was harassed by this particular Bulgarian man but this is no longer a story about two people. It is a story about a country pushed well past its limits by a government that is mad with power.

As if the Labor party were looking to make a bad situation even worse, the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, announced in parliament on Monday plans to expedite full-scholarship student visas for Gazans chosen to enter the country with their immediate family members, and to make permanent a framework for “refugee students” to come to Britain later this year. She didn’t even wait 24 hours after the last remigration protestors left Newcastle and Aberdeen.

Perhaps driving British citizens mad is Labor’s political strategy, given it is trailing Reform UK in the polls. More “far-right racists” in the streets means Labor can take further action to control them and simultaneously claim the mantle of the “anti-fascists” saving the West from the real threat — Westerners.

Ms. Cooper ended her comments by saying the government is determined to restore the confidence of the British people. This is hardly the way.

The next national elections, barring unexpected developments, aren’t until 2029. If one is an unarmed British citizen living near the Epping migrant hotel or a young woman in a tank top at Leeds, that’s bad news. Ms. Cooper and her party are not coming to your rescue, and they still refuse to allow you to rescue yourself.

The good news is that the authoritarians have stepped over St. George’s line and awakened a protective instinct in the people of the United Kingdom. The question remains — is that enough to save Great Britain?