With the tragedy in Virginia going on right now, I have been reading a lot of blogs and listening to a lot of talk radio across the political spectrum.
Under discussion of course is gun crime and gun laws in the US and elsewhere.
One frequent fact thrown around by the gun lobby is that the gun crime in the UK is on the rise despite the virtual banishment of all firearms since Dunblane.
I would therefore like the SD on the following:
Since Dunblane, how common are armed robberies in the UK?
How common are armed home invasions?
Have there been any other high profile shootings?
What percentage of murders in the UK are from firearms?
How easy is it to obtain a legal handgun, long gun, shotgun?
How easy is it to obtain an illegal firearm if I wanted one?
This isn’t a fact - the category of weapons banished post-Dunblane was the handgun. Shotguns, for example, are allowed as are hunting rifles. These are licenced and there are conditions for storage etc. Semi-automatic weapons were banned after the earlier Hungerford massacre IIRC.
No incidents anything like the scope of Dunblane. It’s important to note that pretty much any shooting is national news. At New Years in 2003 two teenagers, Letitia Shakepeare and Charlene Ellis, were killed in a gangland style attack aimed at someone else, and this was front page news for days, and provoked one of our national bouts of naval-gazing and hand-wringing.
Handguns are virtually impossible, but sporting rifles and shotguns are available.
I’ve never seen one outside central London or a major transport hub.
I’m not being facetious when I say ‘define armed robbery’. Even something as apparently simple as comparing raw numbers of such a crime isn’t easy - IIRC, English law includes any robbery where the intent was to make the victim believe there was a gun (replica gun, airgun, “I’ve got a gun”…) If another jurisdiction does not use this definition, comparing these numbers will be misleading.
Counting actual shootings is easier. One rough figure I know without having to look up is that Manchester (a conurbation of 2.5m and with a reputation for gun crime) has about one shooting per fortnight. And nearly every victim is already involved in gangs, drugs and guns. As Struan says, the very few occassions when this is not the case, it’s a national headline. If you’re wanting to get hold of an illegal weapon, you’re probably already in a position to know how to get it.
In areas with gang/drug/gun problems, police armed response units are regularly out in public - but in vehicles. They’re there as support, to be called to an incident. All police forces have such units, but the majority do not have them out all the time.
Present trends seem to indicate that zip guns of various kinds are more commonly used than regular working firearms. These may be converted blank firers (mostly made in Germany), converted air guns or occasionally reactivated DEWATs.
Home Invasion: not very common. More common than it was, though.
Armed Police: not often except at the airports, Parliament, outside Scotland Yard.
This is definitely true, and it’s almost always gang shootings. But the issue is really about citing a gun crime sample so small compared to the UK population as to be statistically meaningless. And if you want to throw meaningless stats back at such proponents, you could tell them that there have been no gun massacres in the UK since handguns were banned.
Interestingly, there have been no gun massacres in Australia in the 10 years since assault guns were banned. There were more than one a year in the decade before that.
Gorilla Man: I live just a few miles outside Manchester and I have to point out that as a whole Manchester and outlying suburbs are gun free
It is in the districts of Moss Side,Hulme and Cholton-cum-Hardy that gangs and gun ownership is on the rise, mainly because these areas are also the drug capitals of Manchester.
Strange really because all these places used to be the “posh” areas, now they are the pits
Although even here my girlfriend said she could apply for a shotgun license, there are two farmers in her family and so a place where she could store and use it and two references for an application, which she said at the time was all she needed.
It always amused me as a kid to drive through towns and see shotgun shells for sale in shops in NI, thinking that this was surely some sort of terrible security oversight
Along these lines, when we debated Australian gun laws a while back, it was noted that while the number of gun deaths has dropped dramatically, the overall number of murders stayed the same.
If someone really wants to kill you, they’ll find a way.
The 2003/2004 stats for murder in England and Wales (the majority of the population of the UK) was 793 and the 2004/2005 was 820, so I’m not sure how the 2001 figures could be in the 3000’s. In fact the Home Office stats for homicide in England and Wales for 2001 is 771, no where near your stats.
“These statistics are calculated extrapolations of various prevalence or incidence rates against the populations of a particular country or region. The statistics used for prevalence/incidence of Homicide are typically based on US, UK, Canadian or Australian statistics. This extrapolation calculation is automated and does not take into account any genetic, cultural, environmental, social, racial or other differences across the various countries and regions for which the extrapolated Homicide statistics below refer to. As such, these extrapolations may be highly inaccurate (especially for developing or third-world countries) and only give a general indication (or even a meaningless indication) as to the actual prevalence or incidence of Homicide in that region.”
Which makes me wonder why they bothered to extrapolate the stats in that fashion…
The definition is generally the same in the U.S. (of course you have 50 different laws defining each crime so it is hard to give a concrete answer). In my experience the person would be charged with armed robbery if there was a threat of a weapon but it would likely be downgraded during a plea bargain.
Of course - and this is also true of the country as a whole, which I suppose demonstrates the same point. I picked on Manchester as a whole because it does, unfairly, have a reputation as a city completely awash with firearms. And because I’ve lived there, and have a friend who works with kids from gang members’ families (and is my source for that once-a-fortnight statistic).
So there ya go: you’re 3 times more likely to be murdered in the US than in the UK, but 27 times more likely to be murdered with a gun in the US than in the UK.
Looking at the figures from both of those cites, there is a differance but given that the figures are probably from differant years, I’m not too surprised by it, and the figures are of relatively similar orders.
However it would seem that we have to be more ingenious in our killing as the comparative murder rates do not show quite as big a differance, the US has about 3.5 times our murder rate per 100k inhabitants.
This in itself is misleading too, because some cities in the US, and even certain districts exhibit very much higher murder rates, whilst in others such crime is vanishingly rare.
