You do realise that the term Big Brother is from the George Orwell novel "1984" which is a scathing attack on the UK all the way back in 1948. So yes the UK government is quite literally Big Brother.
Besides, I don't really think having a gun is likely to encourage the government to spend LESS spying on you.
And what's that, exactly?
Fewer bystanders struck down by random gunfire? Fewer "illegal" guns in the hands of criminals? I doubt it does, but that's not my concern here. My concern is that - if there's any truth to this - our security services could be lulled into wasting their time sifting through completely and utterly unmanageable quantities of data that they can therefore make no practical use of.
More importantly it's technically impossible. A friend of mine works for one of the largest ISPs in Denmark (but not the largest). Now of a population of only 5 million people, of which probably 800.000 have Internet connections, and the ISP he works for has maybe 20% of that market, and they log less than 1% of the total traffic. They log more than 12 TB of data every day. Imagine the storage requirements for an ISP like BT, if they had to log absolutely everything? The main problem here is that 'terrorism' is always used as a reason to bring in ever increasing amounts of surveillance.
Don't forget pedophiles! Those of us who do legally obtain them have more respect for people and life in general.
Sure. But most of the guns (in the US) that end up in the criminals hands, were originally bought legally, and then stolen.Besides, I don't really think having a gun is likely to encourage the government to spend LESS spying on you.