[url]http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/crime/story.jsp?story=119358[/url]

[b]The [/b](latest)[b] attack happened the day after a car chase through Wandsworth and Battersea in which gunmen in an Audi sprayed a Ford Mondeo with bullets from a Uzi sub-machine-gun, [shock] killing the passenger and sending the driver running to a police station for protection.

Another senior police officer, speaking anonymously, made a more extreme interpretation. With gangsters firing sub-machine-guns in the middle of the day, he said, the situation was "very much like New York in the 1980s".

An emergency call for help to New York seems justified in the light of statistics that show a 46 per cent year-on-year rise in shootings,[shock] with police called to 10,000 incidents where the use of a gun was reported.[/b]

Imagine that!  In a country with NO legally owned handguns, licensing and registration of rifles and shotguns, and strict "safe storage" laws, a 46% yearly increase in shootings in London.  Oh, and machine guns have been illegal in England since the 1930's.  

[b]The Home Office is expected to issue new figures for street crime shortly, but leaked figures yesterday suggested there had been a 55 per cent increase in crime in London since 2000. In the past nine months that figure has increased by 33 per cent, from 26,715 incidents to 35,572.

Londoners are now six times more likely to be robbed or attacked than New Yorkers.[/b]

Yup, gun control makes you [i]safer[/i].  Let's try it here![b]

One of the main elements of Mr Giuliani's policy was putting more police officers on the streets. His visit is certain to raise questions over how London crime can be reduced when Police Federation figures show that there is one New York police officer for every seven recorded crimes, against one for 41 offences in London.[/b]

(cont'd)

The fair and balanced viewpoint:

[b]But the criminologist Professor David Wilson said comparisons with New York did not reflect that the murder rate in New York City was still 11 times higher than that in London, despite the improvements of the past decade.[/b]  

And the ratio in the 1980's was what?  According to the data available [url=www.icpsr.umich.edu:8080/ABSTRACTS/03226.xml?format=ICPSR]here[/url], the average number of homicides per year in New York City from 1980 to 1989 was 1,681.  In 1990 the toll was 2245, but in 1999 it was 670, a 70% decrease in ten years.  No wonder they're consulting Giuliani.  According to this [url=www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm199899/cmhansrd/vo990422/text/90422w02.htm]link[/url] the average number of homicides in London for 1986 to 1989 was 182.  That makes the homicide ratio between New York and London in the 80's approximately 9:1.  Huh?  According to the same link there were 180 homicides in London in 1999, that's a ratio [b]3:1[/b], not [i]11:1[/i].  Gee, you don't think that criminologist Professor David Wilson might be [i]lying[/i] do you?

According to this [url=www.cipherwar.com/news/01/guns_uk.htm]link[/url]:

[red](A)2000 report from the Inspectorate of Constabulary charges Britain's 43 police departments with systemic under-classification of crime – for example, by recording burglary as "vandalism." The report lays much of the blame on the police's desire to avoid the extra paperwork associated with more serious crimes.

Britain's justice officials have also kept crime totals down by being careful about what to count.

"American homicide rates are based on initial data, but British homicide rates are based on the final disposition." Suppose that three men kill a woman during an argument outside a bar. They are arrested for murder, but because of problems with identification (the main witness is dead), charges are eventually dropped. In American crime statistics, the event counts as a three-person homicide, but in British statistics it counts as nothing at all. "With such differences in reporting criteria, comparisons of U.S. homicide rates with British homicide rates is a sham," the report concludes. [/red]

Perhaps criminologist Professor David Wilson is just fudging the numbers a bit too?

[b]Lee Jasper, Mr Livingstone's special adviser on policing, said: "To say that it is like New York in the Eighties is an exaggeration. We are nowhere near what New York was like when Times Square and the Bronx were at their worst." He added: "Street robbery has increased, but the majority of that is young people robbing other young people of mobile phones and I don't think that was the case in New York in the mid-1980s."[/b]

Perhaps not, but a mugging is a mugging whether you're 16 or 60, and just [i]what[/i] they steal seems inconsequential to the act.  Especially if they're willing to injure you to get what they want.

It also looks like having a bunch of tv cameras everywhere is no help either.  Imagine that.  Watch-Six

Now, its ONE thing if they want to disarm their subjects over their, leaving them defenseless against teh WORST elements of society, and NOT something I'll lose alot of sleep over. Eventually, they will figger it out - more guns DOES INDEED mean less crime.

But when they start lying about us just to make themselves look better, now THAT pisses me off.

Would they care to show some documentation that London now looks like"very much like New York in the 1980s" - with "gangsters firing sub-machine-guns in the middle of the day."

I lived only 120 miles from NYC in the 80's, and can tell you, THAT is a blatant lie.

Wandsworth, Battersea, as well as other places such as Lambeth and Brixton are not exactly nice places to live. In fact they make some areas of Harlem and Watts look absolutely liveable. The basic fact behind the British gun crime is that it mostly involves blacks killing each other- and of course, the British public couldn't care less frankly, as long as black Jamaican drug dealers are offing other black Jamaican drug dealers. That is the unsaid message here.

Of course, once the gun violence and its accompanying crime spread to the suburban white community, then they'll finally care, and scream for protection- including ARMED security and cops (as well as CCW for...sniff...the right sort of people, m'lord)- but by then it will be too late. They'll never be able to shut the lid on Pandora's Box.

Sheep.




...........................
One is forced to the rather startling conclusion that the use of firearms in
crime was very much less when there were no controls of any sort and when
anyone, convicted criminal or lunatic, could buy any type of firearm without
restriction.
- --METROPOLITAN POLICE SUPT. COLIN GREENWOOD (UK)

How can I put this most delicately?
London, in fact Great Britain, is not the same country as it once was.
It is “devolving” from the country that stood up under the Blitz. The land of the courteous English Gentleman and the home of the “stiff upper lip” is being washed away by a human tide.

I tread most carefully here, but the truth should be spoken because it is undeniable. Look at the perpetrators of these recent violent crimes. It’s not the Cockney. In the last half century, and more so in the recent10 years, there has been an influx of immigrants. There are over 2,500 illegal immigrants a month in the UK.  There is an impression of Great Britain as an easy target.

More than two-thirds of the immigrants who come to the United Kingdom are failing to assimilate into the English melting pot. They bring with them their ways of doing things from their countries, and their countries are disorganized and violent. The"mongrelization" of Great Britain is happening and with it an increase in crime.

The only thing that surprises me is that both the Tories and the Labour Party are in the same state of denial. But one thing is for sure, in their current state of denial, it is easier to clamp down on the whole population with ever more restrictive laws that it is to brave the maelstrom and admit the problem is one of race and ethnicity.

I work a job where I drive around Manhattan & Brooklyn all Day & Night. Since gulianie became Mayor I never see anything bad going on. NYC is one of the safest places on the earth, Much safer than any "Socialist" European city & Many so called "Gun Easy Access" places in the USA.

See the trick here is that We spend lots of money on Police & Jails;
We actually Lock up our bad guys Here!

Gun laws in the city suck if you are an honest citizen, In 92 I had to move all my Black Rifles out to Nassau county, I had to make a few of them PC (I removed the Bayonet Lug & Flash suppressor from My M1A., M1 Garands & Carbines are Exempt.)  

Comparing NYC to London is sickening, I Have a friend that relocated to London, Everyone he knows had their car stolen & Home robbed more than once. He woke up one night in his London apartment & Saw a stranger walk past his bedroom door, They fled when he got out of the bed (Luck was on his side), The London police told him this is common there. I Know of no one who lives in NYC who ever had this happen.    

Well, obviously all this gun violence is a result of us Yankee thugs sending all our guns to their criminal element.

I once read somewhere where they were trying to blame the increased violence on illegal guns being shipped from the U.S.  Come on!  Why would people bother smuggling them across the Atlantic when there is a cheap and ready supply of Soviet block guns in Eastern Europe?

The former colonies are now the colonizers.  The empire strikes back! [:D]

BTW, here's a link to the latest big crime story:
[url]http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/england/newsid_1814000/1814163.stm[/url]

British attitudes towards guns aside, there may be another factor.

America's most unlivable cities have a common denominator: extreme liberal mayors.  The 1970's and 1980's when the New York was so unlivable, it was administered by guys like David Dinkins, Mario Cuomo, and Ed Koch.  DC's Marion BArry was fairly incompetent.  Folks in Dallas are coping with a bad mayor, I hear on these boards.

London's Lord Mayor right now is "Red" Ken Livingstone, an avowed socialist and IRA apologist/barrister.