The question is, how has violent crime in Britain been affected by their gun laws? If their violent crime rates were lower than the U.S.'s before and after Britain’s gun laws went into effect, then the variable might be Americans, not guns, i.e., cultural differences.
Do you really believe that?
Then we have never been civilized and probably will never be. Force is the basic building block of power.
The negatives include 700 accidental deaths/year and about 15K accidental gun injuries per year. The positives include a large number of defensive gun uses.
So do the other European countries all have free access to assault weapons?
I don’t understand what you’re asking. I was addressing a specific point DirkGntly had mentioned in passing. Who said anything about “free access to assault weapons” in Europe?
I’ll have to do some digging. Certainly violent crime was much higher a decade or so ago; I found this Daily Mail article from 2001 (N.B. it’s the Daily Mail and thus prone to more excitable interpretations of data) talking about it. But was this due to the 1997 Firearms Act (brought about in large part by the Dunblane shooting, although the 1988 Act had already placed a large number of restrictions on gun ownership)? Or despite it?
The answer AFAICT is “it’s complicated”. The DM article states that “Experts said one reason Britain had higher crime rates [than America] was because it had a higher population density.” They’re also including robbery under "violent crime, which is more common in urban areas. And remember that 1997 was also the end of the long Conservative government (Thatcher and then Major), with serious cuts to public services for the poorer folks (creating conditions more conducive to crime) and to police numbers; that will likely have had some effect on crime numbers for the years immediately to follow.
I’ve seen data that shows that gun crime increased by 40% after the 1997 Act but not any attempt to establish causality, and in fact the percentage hides the fact that the numbers involved are quite small to begin with. If I may be permitted to cite Wikipedia:
So that “40% rise” is from 49 to 96 at its peak. Not quite running gang battles in the streets of Chelsea, then. And note that the 2010/11 number includes the shooting spree by Derek Bird, who killed 12 and injured 11 using a 12-gauge double-barrelled shotgun and a .22 calibre bolt-action rifle.
Also note that over 37% of gun crimes in the UK involve air weapons and over 14% involve imitation weapons:
My conclusion was never meant to be “and therefore the US should do exactly what the UK has done”. The cultures are entirely different, for starters; there’s no assumed right to have a firearm and apart from a few reactionary (by European standards) people nobody wants more guns in the hands of the public. Crime will never go away entirely and I don’t claim to have a definitive answer to even the UK data alone. I just wanted to counter the views expressed by Alex Jones and others that the British public are now cowering in fear in their homes while anarchy reigns in the streets, and all because the good God-fearing people have been denied the right to defend themselves.
Interestingly (and still using Wiki), the UK and US started from a common point: English Common Law in the 18th century included the right to bear arms. One may find Blackstone’s words strikingly familiar:
In England’s case, as in America’s, the need for arms was not merely conjectural as the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution were only a few decades in the past. And yet look at how differently things have ended up since then.
I withdraw any snark that I may have cast in your general direction.
My impression is that guns have been rare among the common citizenry in the UK for a long long time. Its less objectionable to disarm a population where gun ownership is so rare that the police don’t feel the need to carry guns.
Yes. People have a tendency to think that trends will continue, and a tendency to under-estimate reversion to the mean. That’s why you have economic bubbles.
Of course, it’s one thing to predict that US attitudes towards guns will eventually move towards international norms, and another thing to say when it will happen. I don’t know when it will happen.
Why do you talk of “gun death” rates? Of course they will be higher in areas with more guns because guns become the weapon of choice to do violent misdeeds.
But to paraphrase Archie Bunker, it doesn’t make it better if they was pushed outta windows. 
The argument was put forth that access to guns, and especially youth access to guns, makes people more violent and homicidal. The homicide rates that Chickenlegs pointed out, seem to suggest otherwise.
Ask someone who lives on the first or second floor.
Gun = equally dead, regardless of floor.
Window = much less dead on first floor, probably not so hot on 20th floor
And that’s the point. When someone has to find alternate methods, we get much more variability in lethality. Look at the mass knife attacks that have been in the news. Look at suicide success rates.
It just isn’t the case that people successfully substitute other methods at the same rate as they would with firearms.
Well, something’s gotta give. The “gun death” rate is much higher in West Virginia than in New York City, but the “homicide” rate is much lower. Somebody in NYC is doing a hell of a lot more killing with other weapons.
As a data point, consider SSM. I can remember when, not all that long ago, people on this very list and elsewhere were telling me that SSM was dead in the water, that state after state were instituting bans in their constitutions, that the Iowa Supreme Court were being punished for their stance on SSM and that the next court would overturn their ruling, that even “liberal California” couldn’t keep SSM on the books for long. What a difference a few years makes.
Will the same thing happen with gun control? No idea. But just because things are going one way now doesn’t mean they will continue to do so.
Is it? That’s interesting. What are the rates specifically, by the way?
I would cite it for you, but going back to the first page is more instructive.
Phillyguy comes out with stats about “gun deaths” that seem to indicate that West Virginia is awash in gun deaths while Illinois and NYC are peaceful by comparison.
Then ChickenLegs brings out “homicide” stats that show the opposite.
Either the cites are lies, damn lies, and statistics, or there is substitution of a preferred choice of weapon in homicides.
There are cultural differences that lead to some places tending towards suicide, some towards homicide. Since, excluding the tiny number of suicides by the terminally ill, I don’t have much preference for one over the other with respect to anyone I care about, I normally add them together in looking at violent death.
As for West Virginia having three times the gun death rate of New York City, I mentioned that when a poster praised the safety level of gun-heavy West Virginia as compared with big cities. So I addressed that stereotype, by presenting a reasonable case for gun-shy, low suicide, NYC being safer. Now, NYC does have a homicide rate that is higher than West Virginia (5.03 per 100,000 vs. 4.31 for the most recent reporting years for each, 2012 and 2011 respectively). In that statistic, yes, West Virginia is better. Not better than New York State, but only better than a big city famous for its crime.
Putting aside the big city stereotype busting, we should compare state to state, since every state has a mix of urban and rural. If you compared West Virginia to New York State, using stats in my previous links, you’ll find any even stronger case for the relationship between disarmament and safety. The same is true if you compare the largest community in West Virginia, Charlestown, to New York City. In an average year, Charlestown has about twice the homicide rate, gun or no gun, of NYC:
http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Charleston-West-Virginia.html
As you can see, I happen to like New York. And, also, Bobby Short:
I don’t disagree that a lot of areas of Charleston are shitholes with a lot of violence, and that the city is horribly mismanaged. By contrast, NYC has had a string of very effective (even if not likeable) mayors with regard to crime fighting. It has made progress leaps and bounds above other large cities (I’m looking at you, Chicago).
But my larger point stands. When we look at the cause for violence and death, we control for common variables. If gun access was the or even a determinative issue, then you would expect rural areas to be higher crime. You have to therefore conclude that it’s not the guns that are the problem, but something else. Crime in urban areas are a case in point. Crime rates are higher there regardless of gun laws.
If we want to find solutions, let’s focus on what matters, not what is the easy target.
Airplanes…
Determinative of what? I was looking at violent death. That overlaps with crime. But most violent death isn’t crime, and most crime isn’t violent death. One advantage of looking at homicide is that statistics for it are much more reliable than for any other crime.
As for gun access, I wasn’t primarily looking at that. I was looking at gun ownership. Hawaii has by far the lowest gun ownership rate of the fifty states, but you can keep a long gun in your home. Only 6.7 percent of Hawaiians choose to do so, compared to number 2 New Jersey with 12.3 percent gun ownership. I’ll attribute that to the good sense of Hawaiians, who, by the way, enjoyed the lowest state homicide rate – not just gun homicide – in the most recent reporting year, 2011.
As for rural gun death, and overall rural violent death, rates in high and low gun ownership areas, googling, I’m not finding statatistics on that. Maybe we should blame the NRA war on science:
I don’t think reversion to the mean works that way. Does it? Don’t you use your own historical mean for that sort of reversion? Historically we have always had more guns that other places and over time regulation has gotten stricter and stricter. Wouldn’t reversion to the historic mean bring us back to our guns laws circa 1900 or so (maybe 1968)?
Yes on suicide, much less so on other forms of gun violence.
This is kind of graphic but there is a youtube video of a presentation by an ER doctor on gunshot wounds.
WARNING: REALLY graphic at times, like you see dead people.
Hrmm, I guess 12 years is too soon. I was able to laugh about it after Obama killed Osama.
I think Hawaii had a virtual ban on guns (in practice) until Heller. Now there is are long lines to get gun licenses.
Hawaii is one of the few places in America that an effective gun ban can work. Its really hard to smuggle guns from Virginia to Hawaii in the trunk of your el dorado. Criminals there simply don’t have access to guns, until recently noone did. Hawaii now MUST issue gun licenses but they are keeping track of the guns and who has them so I don’t foresee much of an increase in gun violence.