Last Monday evening (May 12) I was watching Fox News and the scrolling banner at the bottom of the screen said (paraphrased) "75% of British police officers are opposed to a mandate that they carry a firearm.  60% of the British police said they would quit rather than carry a gun.  Gun violence in England is rare."

I was not under the impression that gun violence in England was "rare."  For example, here is a quote from an article highlighted in the "Firearms News" section of the AR15.com web site: "... total gun bans in England and Australia have unleashed gun crime violence of epidemic proportions."

Does anyone have real numbers they can point to in order to support their position?  Words like "rare" and "epidemic" are too vague.  After all, one man's ceiling is another man's floor.

Personally, I think England's gun ban has caused an increase in violoent crime, but I want to be able to prove it with facts and not feelings.


JimH

[rant]Any country that has to drink tea at a certain time everyday or they get all uptight probably shouldn't be allowed to have guns anyway[/rant]

Guns are dangerous.  You could put an eye out.

Makes sense to me. Everyone knows it's the guns that incite the violence. If the good guys don't use them, the bad guys won't either.

Now bring me another cup o' tea, Watson.

cynic

Makes you wonder

I hate going out in public without a glock on my hip(when i go drinking or to work).  Why a cop would rather quit his job than be forced to carry a gun is beyone me????

[url]http://reason.com/0211/fe.jm.gun.shtml[/url]

November 2002

Gun Control’s Twisted Outcome

Restricting firearms has helped make England more crime-ridden than the U.S.

By Joyce Lee Malcolm

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.

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rest at the link above.

Gun crime in England [i]is[/i] "rare" by American standards.  It always has been.  The problem is, it's going [i]up[/i] - by double-digit percentages each year.  

I've been studying this stuff for a long time, and here's what I can tell you:

From 1958 to 1997 the number of violent crimes (all types) went from 69 per 100,000 population to 674 per 100,000.

In England and Wales (a single political entity) during the twelve month period in 2000/01 where the data is collected, there were 7,362 recorded crimes in which firearms other than air weapons were reported to have been used.   Handguns were used in 4,019 offences, an increase of 9 per cent on the previous year and the highest number since 1993. Two thirds of robberies in which a firearm was present involved a handgun.  Remember, all handguns were banned in 1997.

Homicide in England and Wales reached a low in about 1962 and has been trending pretty steadily up since then.  In the 2000/01 period there were still only 846 recorded homicides, and guns were used in only 9% (about 76) of them.  The 846 figure is up 11% over the previous 12 months.  

To give you a good idea of the homicide comparison, the number of homicides per million population for England & Wales was a minimum of about 6.8/1,000,000 in the late 60's, and has now trended up to 15.5/1,000,000 as of 2001, but that was a bit off because of a single incident in which 58 people died of suffocation.  The actual ratio should be in the mid 13's.  In the U.S. the ratio over the same period started at 73/1,000,000 went to as high as 102/1,000,000 and then dropped down to 63/1,000,000 as of 1998.  But this isn't all that new.  We've ALWAYS had a much higher homicide rate, all the way back into the 1800's.  The difference is, ours bounces around.  There's does nothing but go up.  Slowly, but up.  

England has never had much of a gun crime problem, so ANY gun crime gets people's attention.  The problem now is that the criminals have no fear, and can easily get guns, so they do.  The question of the British police arming themselves has come about because in some neighborhoods they've HAD to, and it looks to some like a slippery slope.

I've got several megabytes of stuff archived, that's where these numbers come from.  If you're that interested, I can e-mail it to you.

who cares what british cops think. they're subordinate to a "prince". how gay is that?

"One adam-12; i have a couple of wankers in front of big ben with muzzle loaders. please save my sorry candy-ass straight away....i'm frightened...over!"

...fags!

KBaker,

Thanks for the great information.  I am specifically wondering if there has been a [i]change[/i] in the rate of gun crime since the 1997 handgun ban.  Maybe the answer is in your reply and I just can't see it right now (I'm on some pain killers for a kidney stone and my brain feels fuzzy).

I am a firm beleiver in the 2nd amendent and I think that the 2nd amendment by itself should be enough to shut up people like Feinstein and Schumer.  But, since they are not interested in liberty, it would be helpful if we could show them (or at least the people who listen to them) how their ideas backfire.  I'm sure the NRA and others have been doing this for years, but I can't point to anything specific.

Oh hell yes.  Gun crime has gone up by double-digit percentages every year since 1997.  Give me a bit and I'll find you a link.

Actually, I think stabbings,and "beatings with large blunt objects" are mainly what the threat consists of in England these days. The poor Brits have been sciddish of firearms since that "unpleasentness" back in 1776,when a few determined colonists showed them what could be done with them in the right hands!  

Again, VIOLENT crime HAS gone WAY UP!! But I don't think it's guns so much,as England has always had rather strict gun laws. (Easier to keep the peasants in line if they can't fight back!)

OK, here's a link to the BBC:  [url=news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2069400.stm]Gun crimes shoot up[/url]That's admittedly localized, not nationwide, but it gives you a feel.

Here's a [url=news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1120018.stm]breakdown of crime stats for 1999 to 2000[/url]

[url=www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-530727,00.html]This article[/url] notes: Really?  I thought handguns were made [i]illegal[/i] in 1997.  Shouldn't the number of handgun offenses at least gone [i]down?[/i]

Anyway, was that what you were looking for?

I also found a reference to the International Crime Victims Survey by Leiden University in Holland in a old American Handgunner. It says that Australia and England lead the world in violent crimes. Reportedly, in England and Wales, 3.6% of the population has been "contacted" by criminals, while in America it's 1.9%.

As sad & pathetic as that sounds, I've actually seen people use this argument before.  Most recently on the Buffy usenet discussion group when some poster wondered why the goodguys don't upgrade their weaponry (from obsolete crossbows & swords)to fight the demons & vampires  "..if Buffy starts shooting vampires with wooden bullets then the evil, bloodsucking undead fiends will escalate & get guns also.." [rolleyes]  Some people are hopeless & in a better world would have been eliminated from the gene pool already thru social darwinism already...

KBaker,

That is exact;y what I am looking for!  Thanks!  You are the man!  (uh, at least I [i]think[/] you're a man [;)]  Hard to tell from the "Bunson Honeydew" avatar!

JimH

Britain can shove it.