Gun Control's Twisted Outcome

Big Don

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[h=2]Gun Control's Twisted Outcome[/h] Joyce Lee Malcolm|Nov. 1, 2002 12:00 am Reason.com EXCERPT

On a June evening two years ago, Dan Rather made many stiff British upper lips quiver by reporting that England had a crime problem and that, apart from murder, "theirs is worse than ours." The response was swift and sharp. "Have a Nice Daydream," The Mirror, a London daily, shot back, reporting: "Britain reacted with fury and disbelief last night to claims by American newsmen that crime and violence are worse here than in the US." But sandwiched between the article's battery of official denials -- "totally misleading," "a huge over-simplification," "astounding and outrageous" -- and a compilation of lurid crimes from "the wild west culture on the other side of the Atlantic where every other car is carrying a gun," The Mirror conceded that the CBS anchorman was correct. Except for murder and rape, it admitted, "Britain has overtaken the US for all major crimes."
In the two years since Dan Rather was so roundly rebuked, violence in England has gotten markedly worse. Over the course of a few days in the summer of 2001, gun-toting men burst into an English court and freed two defendants; a shooting outside a London nightclub left five women and three men wounded; and two men were machine-gunned to death in a residential neighborhood of north London. And on New Year's Day this year a 19-year-old girl walking on a main street in east London was shot in the head by a thief who wanted her mobile phone. London police are now looking to New York City police for advice.
None of this was supposed to happen in the country whose stringent gun laws and 1997 ban on handguns have been hailed as the "gold standard" of gun control. For the better part of a century, British governments have pursued a strategy for domestic safety that a 1992 Economist article characterized as requiring "a restraint on personal liberty that seems, in most civilised countries, essential to the happiness of others," a policy the magazine found at odds with "America's Vigilante Values." The safety of English people has been staked on the thesis that fewer private guns means less crime. The government believes that any weapons in the hands of men and women, however law-abiding, pose a danger, and that disarming them lessens the chance that criminals will get or use weapons.
The results -- the toughest firearm restrictions of any democracy -- are credited by the world's gun control advocates with producing a low rate of violent crime. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell reflected this conventional wisdom when, in a 1988 speech to the American Bar Association, he attributed England's low rates of violent crime to the fact that "private ownership of guns is strictly controlled."
In reality, the English approach has not re-duced violent crime. Instead it has left law-abiding citizens at the mercy of criminals who are confident that their victims have neither the means nor the legal right to resist them. Imitating this model would be a public safety disaster for the United States.
The illusion that the English government had protected its citizens by disarming them seemed credible because few realized the country had an astonishingly low level of armed crime even before guns were restricted. A government study for the years 1890-92, for example, found only three handgun homicides, an average of one a year, in a population of 30 million. In 1904 there were only four armed robberies in London, then the largest city in the world. A hundred years and many gun laws later, the BBC reported that England's firearms restrictions "seem to have had little impact in the criminal underworld." Guns are virtually outlawed, and, as the old slogan predicted, only outlaws have guns. Worse, they are increasingly ready to use them.
Nearly five centuries of growing civility ended in 1954. Violent crime has been climbing ever since. Last December, London's Evening Standard reported that armed crime, with banned handguns the weapon of choice, was "rocketing." In the two years following the 1997 handgun ban, the use of handguns in crime rose by 40 percent, and the upward trend has continued. From April to November 2001, the number of people robbed at gunpoint in London rose 53 percent.
Gun crime is just part of an increasingly lawless environment. From 1991 to 1995, crimes against the person in England's inner cities increased 91 percent. And in the four years from 1997 to 2001, the rate of violent crime more than doubled. Your chances of being mugged in London are now six times greater than in New York. England's rates of assault, robbery, and burglary are far higher than America's, and 53 percent of English burglaries occur while occupants are at home, compared with 13 percent in the U.S., where burglars admit to fearing armed homeowners more than the police. In a United Nations study of crime in 18 developed nations published in July, England and Wales led the Western world's crime league, with nearly 55 crimes per 100 people.
<<<SNIP>>>
The English government has effectively abolished the right of Englishmen, confirmed in their 1689 Bill of Rights, to "have arms for their defence," insisting upon a monopoly of force it can succeed in imposing only on law-abiding citizens. It has come perilously close to depriving its people of the ability to protect themselves at all, and the result is a more, not less, dangerous society. Despite the English tendency to decry America's "vigilante values," English policy makers would do well to consider a return to these crucial common law values, which stood them so well in the past.
END EXCERPT
Yes, this article is ten years old. That doesn't change the facts therein. Gun ban idiocy is clearly defined:
insisting upon a monopoly of force it can succeed in imposing only on law-abiding citizens.
 

Sukerkin

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I would argue some of the statistics but the central truth is still there :nods:. My personal belief that a cultural change has also occurred in the past half century fuelled by the psychological drip-effect of violent media and a too rapid change in our societal composition - many of those involved in violent and armed crime do not 'come from here'. Not very PC to say so I know but I'll take my lumps for it and stand by that belief until someone proves otherwise.
 

billc

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Thanks Don, this sticks out for me...

Nearly five centuries of growing civility ended in 1954. Violent crime has been climbing ever since. Last December, London's Evening Standard reported that armed crime, with banned handguns the weapon of choice, was "rocketing." In the two years following the 1997 handgun ban, the use of handguns in crime rose by 40 percent, and the upward trend has continued. From April to November 2001, the number of people robbed at gunpoint in London rose 53 percent.
Gun crime is just part of an increasingly lawless environment. From 1991 to 1995, crimes against the person in England's inner cities increased 91 percent. And in the four years from 1997 to 2001, the rate of violent crime more than doubled. Your chances of being mugged in London are now six times greater than in New York. England's rates of assault, robbery, and burglary are far higher than America's, and 53 percent of English burglaries occur while occupants are at home, compared with 13 percent in the U.S., where burglars admit to fearing armed homeowners more than the police. In a United Nations study of crime in 18 developed nations published in July, England and Wales led the Western world's crime league, with nearly 55 crimes per 100 people.
 

Tez3

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English people didn't quiver and get upset most didn't notice it quite frankly. The Mirror might have made a bit of it, well they would they are a tabloid, tabloid readers ( I use the term loosely) likes a bit of Yank bashing every so often in between their ogling of topless women.

As for the rest, well,... whatever makes you feel better about yourselves frankly.

As for violent crime, you should have been around London in the 50s, makes todays criminals look soft. Londons been violent for centuries as has Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/crime_01.shtml

http://www.victorianweb.org/history/crime/banerjee1.html


You can shout as much as you like about what you think goes on here and how you perceive it but the truth is, you don't live here so you can keep your opinions to yourself. If I once start saying similiar about the USA as you do about the UK you all start howling at me, I get neg rep and messages but it seems fine for you to bring us in, negatively, to use as a bogey man to wave at those who want to ban guns.

Despite what certain parts of the media and politicians would have you think it's actually getting less violent not more.
http://www.democraticaudit.com/brit...-violent-and-lawless-than-it-was-15-years-ago


First of all, it was noted that:
Overall BCS crime remained at its lowest levels since the survey was introduced in 1981. Police recorded crime showed a four per cent reduction between 2010/11 (4.2 million offences) and 2009/10 (4.3 million offences). This places police recorded crime at its lowest level since the National Crime Recording Standard (NCRS) was introduced in April 2002.
Specifically on the subject of violent crime:
There was no statistically significant change in the number of violent crimes estimated by the 2010/11 BCS compared with the 2009/10 survey...The underlying trend for violence was downwards on the BCS between 1995 and the 2004/05 survey (although not all year-on-year changes were statistically significant) and overall BCS violence fell by 44 per cent over this period as a whole. Since the 2004/05 BCS, the trend has flattened...The 2010/11 BCS showed overall violence was down 47 per cent on the level seen at its peak in 1995; representing nearly two million fewer violent offences per year.
Finally:
The trend in acquisitive crime generally mirrors the recent reductions in both measures of overall crime.


Some commentators have been expecting to see rises in acquisitive crime due to the recent recession and the related rise in unemployment. However, despite difficult economic conditions these latest statistics show no consistent evidence of upward pressure across the range of acquisitive crime.
But have these improvements been appreciated by the public? Yes and no. Since 1996 the BCS has asked people how much they think the level of crime has changed in their local area and in the country as a whole over the last two years. The overall tendency has been for respondents thinking crime has gone up locally to decrease (it now stands at 28 per cent). However, 60 per cent of adults think that there was 'a little more' or 'a lot more' crime in the country as a whole.
The recent civil disturbances may mark the beginning of an upswing in acquisitive and violent crime, perhaps a delayed reaction to the economic slump, or they may be a blip.
But what seems safer to assume is that they have confirmed the views of those who believe crime - nationally at least - is rising. This mismatch between perception and reality matters, particularly at present, when possible responses to the disorder of August 2011 are a subject of public discussion, much of which will be poorly-informed"

Gentlemen I suggest that you attend to your own problems and stop twisting what you think is happening here into something that's not. I have to go off and clean my guns.
 

Tez3

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The actual crime figures from the horses mouth as it were.

http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/public...atistics/crime-research/crime-stats-2002-2010
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/public...atistics/crime-research/crime-stats-1898-2002

In the unlawfully killed ie murder figures you'll have to take off over 400 people in 10 years as these were military killed in Afghan.
Homicides in the UK in 2002/3 1047
Homicides in the UK 2009/10 615



Homicide figures have gone up but not in proportion to the rise in population.
Uk population in 1900 38,000,000. in 2012 62,262,000.

luckily we don't have this any more.
http://www.bunker8.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/orgcrim/3804.htm

http://eastlondonhistory.com/2010/11/18/east-end-gangland-edwardian-style/


some research http://www.academia.edu/1748715/The_Dangerous_City

You might want to contemplate the fact that spending on the police has dropped dramatically since the Conservatives took over, police officers are actually being made redundant or not replaced when officers leave/retire. The Tories won't spend money on the police and are demanding spending cuts, so if the crime figures go up don't blame the lack of guns blame the governments parsimony and blinkered thinking...Conservatives under them the rich get richer and bugger the rest.


Oh and who is Dan Mather anyway?
 

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