Terr, make your point if you have one.
I did. What the fuck does Florida have to do with anything in this thread?
www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/sn01940.pdf
Page 11. Total “firearm offences” in UK since 1990, by year.
You can see that prior to the gun ban it fluctuated around 12,000. Immediately after the gun ban it shot up, peaked at 24,000, then started coming down and is still at around the same level.
So I wonder how it is that you ban guns and the number of crimes committed with guns doubles?
It has to do with the question a poster asked. If you have a problem with that question, address the poster.
Calm down. I asked if it was OK in the USA to shoot people in the back as they run away - Terr was answering me on that one.
Well, for one thing, banning guns means there is a whole new category of offences for people to be charged with.
The table lists offences “in which firearms were reported to have been used”. Just having one is not such an offence.
That’s true, but that’s Florida. Who gives a fuck about Florida? Fancy answering any of the unanswered questions in this thread, the one about the UK? Use your own words, if you can.
(Apologies, Floridians)
Having read the document through now, I can see you’re correct here, but looking at the definition of ‘firearms offence’ in that document, I think the figures could quite reasonably be expected to fluctuate, as it includes things like crimes where a concealed object presumed to be a firearm is involved.
Also, this is the statistics for recorded incidents - and in your linked document, it says:
The number of recorded incidents for any category of crime, although it ideally should reflect the actual levels, is likely to vary depending on a variety of factors incuding public awareness and any particular campaigns focusing on specific crimes - it’s not a great stretch of the imagination that the police would be ‘cracking down’ on gun crimes immediately following the ban, and this would increase the number of recorded incidents.
I would have to see how that method was changed to evaluate whether the increase is due to the method or is real.
There are also some things about how crimes are measured in the US vs UK that inflate US numbers vs. UK’s. In US, if someone is charged with murder, then the charge is reduced, it goes into stats as murder. In UK, the reductions in charges get removed from the stats.
In all honesty though, the one thing that increase almost certainly cannot have been is a surge of armed crime against gun-deprived defenceless people, because guns, as a common mode of personal defence, were never part of the picture.
I’ve answered my own question: shotguns only account for 9% of gun crimes, and in fact replicas are used more than shotguns (23%). Rifles just 1%. However, when they are used against a person, they are more likely to be fired. With handguns this is 13%, while with shotguns 53%. I didn’t see anything about deaths, probably none.
So I’m guessing the crimes are probably lots of farmers threatening naughty teenagers to get off their land or something.
I’d like to know what papers this guy is reading. I can’t remember the last time I saw a report that a child has been shot in my local paper (and no, I don’t live in some remote rural parish…)
I don’t really move in those circles but I’ve been led to believe that, while it’s fairly easy to buy a handgun, it’s much harder to get hold of ammunition.
UK murder rate = 1.2/million (List of countries by intentional homicide rate - Wikipedia )
US murder rate = 4.8/million
UK firearm related homicides = 0.04/million (List of countries by firearm-related homicide rates - Wikipedia )
US Firearm related homicides = 3.6/million
The Victims of Crime Trust was an organisation chiefly concerned with being quoted in the media, as detailed here. Not really worth paying attention to.
The last report I remember was a few years ago when a girl was shot in a corner shop in London as part of a drive-by shooting that went awry. Then there was the kid from Liverpool shot whilst on his bike about three years ago, again I think this was gang related and a mistake. I can’t remember any others.
All the evidence shows it is not at all easy to buy a firearm, see previously quoted sources. It is so difficult that the prices have tripled and ones that have been rented out and used are no longer disposed of.
Note also from p 41 of this report that in 2008-9 6000 of the 14000 reported firearm offenses were air-weapons not guns.
With increasing gang problems it is no surprise that in absolute terms gun crimes might go up. We in Britain can look across the Atlantic and see what things would be like if guns were ubiquitous. But we like our kids unmassacred and we like our criminals to find it really hard to get guns. And we like to keep guns out of the country so that we can crack down on those that have them more easily.
Look, I know some Americans find it hard to believe, but in the UK we don’t like guns. They aren’t fetish objects. We don’t sit around fantasising about UN black helicopters, we don’t worry about armed raiders breaking into our homes.
We want guns off our streets and out of unlicensed private hands. We don’t want anyone owning handguns or semi-automatics. This is not a political issue. At the moment, thanks to reforms over the years, guns are expensive and very hard for criminals to get their hands on. They are so rare that there is a bibg rental market.
The police are successfully cracking down on gangs, they have gone hard after armourers who convert deactivated weapons and sarting pistols. We’re even going hard after knife use.
And yea - we by and large don’t think pursuing fleeing suspects and shooting them in the back should be legal. We have a huge leeway to using force to protect ourselves in the home, even excessive force. If I shot an intruder in the face with a shotgun I very much doubt I’d be prosecuted. As previously quoted - almost no one has been for years.
Which is why the Tony Martin case keeps being waved around as if that supports rather than undermines the case for a gun free-for-all.
We can see what guns for all has done in the USA. We want no part of it.
Thats the two I remember as well.
Locally (Medway Towns) we have the occasional report of a stabbing (And these are pretty rare). I don’t think there has been a shooting as long as I have lived here.