Just to say that if you wanted to see an armed Rozzer in England, take a stroll past the Metropolitan Police HQ building in London, New Scotland Yard (as I do, twice a day, going to and from work). The area is aswarm with them.
You will also see armed officers outside Embassies.
Otherwise, I’d wager that the average Brit will go through his or her life without ever clapping eyes on one.
[QUOTE=seosamh]
Just to say that if you wanted to see an armed Rozzer in England, take a stroll past the Metropolitan Police HQ building in London, New Scotland Yard (as I do, twice a day, going to and from work). The area is aswarm with them.
You will also see armed officers outside Embassies.
Otherwise, I’d wager that the average Brit will go through his or her life without ever clapping eyes on one.
[/QUOTE]
I agrre that armed police are rare, but you’ll certainly see them at major airports (such as Heathrow).
I think I’ve also seen armed police at Liverpool St station. Presumably part of the City of London force, or supplied by the Met, rather than belonging to the Transport Police?
[QUOTE=jjimm]
Homicide per capita comparison:
US: 4.2802 per 100,000 people
UK: 1.40633 per 100,000 people
Firerarm homicide per capita comparison:
US: 2.79271 per 100,000 people
UK: 0.102579 per 100,000 people
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.
[/QUOTE]
Or put it another way - the difference in murder rates could be accounted for largely by all the firearm homicides. Take them out and you get 1.49
for the US compared to 1.30 for the UK. Although I suppose a proportion of the large number of US firearm homicides might still have been perpetrated by other means.
[QUOTE=seosamh]
I’d wager that the average Brit will go through his or her life without ever clapping eyes on one.
[/QUOTE]
I think you’d lose. The average Brit travels abroad at least once in their life, and if you spend anytime in an airport you’ll see an armed copper.
I was stopped by armed police on Blackfriars Bridge in the early 90’s just after the ‘Ring of Steel’ was erected. Was in a Transit full of compressors, piping and scaffolding, I guess I looked suspicious. Had the whole “Get out of the van!” gun in the face experience. MP5’s are quite intimidating when you’re staring down the wrong end of the barrel. Once they determined that I wasn’t IRA, they were very polite and explained why they stopped us.
Hm, well alright, it’s the first site that popped up that had a nicely formatted table. I didn’t notice that the table didn’t mean what anyone would reasonably assume it to mean. Apologies.
I found it a bit surprising that murder rates were nearly the same.
OP here. Thanks for the info. How about the apparent increase in UK handgun crime since post-Dunblane gun laws were enacted? My belief is that it has absolutely nothing to do with handguns being banned but simply a result of declining social and cultural values - something which seems to be happening in most ‘western’ countries.
Is there any evidence at all that increased handgun crime is a result of the 1997 Firearms Act?
Twice I had students removed from my classroom with loaded handguns.
Another time one of my students left my classroom, attended another class, went home and got a gun, came back to school and murdered another student.
One of my students shot to death another student on graduation night.
Since I retired, I was robbed at gunpoint. The handgun turned out to be a BB gun, but he had used a knife to hijack a car earlier in the day. He was rather unlucky because he kept robbing people with no money and so he couldn’t afford to buy a regular handgun. He was caught and got twelve years.
It doesn’t seem right that I should have to endure so many threats in my lifetime just so that someone else has the right to carry handguns. Why handguns?
[QUOTE=Zoe]
Twice I had students removed from my classroom with loaded handguns.
Another time one of my students left my classroom, attended another class, went home and got a gun, came back to school and murdered another student.
One of my students shot to death another student on graduation night.
Since I retired, I was robbed at gunpoint. The handgun turned out to be a BB gun, but he had used a knife to hijack a car earlier in the day. He was rather unlucky because he kept robbing people with no money and so he couldn’t afford to buy a regular handgun. He was caught and got twelve years.
It doesn’t seem right that I should have to endure so many threats in my lifetime just so that someone else has the right to carry handguns. Why handguns?
[/QUOTE]
Well, maybe it is because of where you live? “Location: the forest primeval” Move to Washington DC or New York City, they ban handguns so you should be just fine there.
guns are not the problem, people are. And kids are because we voted for zero tolerance, we agree with no teacher being able to punish or even touch a kid or we will sue for a million dollars and we as jurors give out those big bucks to people who don’t deserve them in the hopes that when it is our turn, we will get $$$ too.
We jail parents who discipline their kids. DHS is like the IRS, people are guilty until they can prove they are innocent.
Why is this so, because we are afraid of common sense and want a perfect world and it does not exist. so we pass a law about every little thing and the only thing that happens is the lawyers get the $$$ and the country goes into a decline.
It is not guns, knives, bombs or poison or clubs or anything else. It is us whop have raised our kids to think that the world owes them. that they are not responsible for anything and now they are old enough to vote.
Comparing us to another country is silly, completely different mind sets are in operation.
You can give up the gun freedom and then the … We have given up the right to a lawyer when it comes to the Homeland bunch, they can do anything and we have no recourse.
As parents, we have failed over all. Too many are not doing the job and we have put ion place a system that just encourages it.
I really hope you all do not take away my ability to protect my family from the monsters you let run loose. The police come after the fact, not before.
I do not fear the same things you do. We will always disagree on the gun thing. You get more votes, you get it your way. I don’t think you will really like it because we are not English or Swiss, the majority of people here do not think like they do so what works for them does not necessarily work for us.
I still think Washington DC is your best bet.
Good luck.
[QUOTE=Askance]
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.
[/QUOTE]
Cite!
Seriously, what is this based on?
1 Massacre a year in a population of <20 million? I assume ‘massacre’ must be defined as any firearm incident resulting in two or more deaths. And I find it hard to believe that no incidents meeting that incredibly standard have occured since.
[QUOTE=Askance]
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.
[/QUOTE]
Cite!
Seriously, what is this based on?
1 Massacre a year in a population of <20 million? I assume ‘massacre’ must be defined as any firearm incident resulting in two or more deaths. And I find it hard to believe that no incidents meeting that incredibly low standard have occured since.
[QUOTE=MrFloppy]
OP here. Thanks for the info. How about the apparent increase in UK handgun crime since post-Dunblane gun laws were enacted? My belief is that it has absolutely nothing to do with handguns being banned but simply a result of declining social and cultural values - something which seems to be happening in most ‘western’ countries.
Is there any evidence at all that increased handgun crime is a result of the 1997 Firearms Act?
[/QUOTE]
No. It amuses me when these spats appear across the pond among people who believe the inverse correlation actually proves something. It implies that pre-1997, the gangsters and drug runners were diligently applying for firearms licences. While I’m not going to agree with the sweeping statement about the general decline of society, the increase in handgun crime is related to specific very difficult social problems in small areas of a handful of cities. Whether or not there was a complete ban on handguns, these guys would probably be using illegal ones.
It’s also important to note that the handguns available in the UK pre-Dunblaine were for sports shooting only. There was no “concealed weapon” licences, like America has.
What you said applies to the UK as well. The compensation culture and “naughty step” culture are alive and well in the UK.
[QUOTE=GorillaMan]
No. It amuses me when these spats appear across the pond among people who believe the inverse correlation actually proves something. It implies that pre-1997, the gangsters and drug runners were diligently applying for firearms licences. While I’m not going to agree with the sweeping statement about the general decline of society, the increase in handgun crime is related to specific very difficult social problems in small areas of a handful of cities. Whether or not there was a complete ban on handguns, these guys would probably be using illegal ones.
[/QUOTE]
Additionally of course, for the pre-1997 legality of handguns to have kept any kind of a brake on gun crime, presumably private-owned guns would have constituted a deterrent to gun crime; yet this isn’t borne out, since instances of defensive gun use were virtually nil for all you ever heard about it. Or in fewer words, legally-held guns weren’t used for crime prevention, for the most part.
[QUOTE=Malacandra]
Additionally of course, for the pre-1997 legality of handguns to have kept any kind of a brake on gun crime, presumably private-owned guns would have constituted a deterrent to gun crime; yet this isn’t borne out, since instances of defensive gun use were virtually nil for all you ever heard about it. Or in fewer words, legally-held guns weren’t used for crime prevention, for the most part.
[/QUOTE]
Their are several massive flaws in that reasoning.
The most obvious is that guns can be a deterrent to crime the same way that having a security guard stationed outside your door can be a deterrent to crime. You rarely hear about people attacking security guards in order to commit crimes, rather the deterrent value manifests as criminals choosing easier targets, ie those without security guards or without armed people inside.Once it becomes common knowldege that 99.99% of the popiulation does not posess a firearm both those deterents fail to work.
A second flaw is that you seem to be assuming that a firearm is only a deterrent if someone actually shoots a criminal, and hence you get to hear about it. Of course this is silly, and the firearm can be a perfectly effective defence if it is simply seen, or if someone can issue a believable verbal warning that they have one. It is possible that every single firearm owner used thier weapons to deter crime every single year and you would still never hear about it. AFAIK there is no legal requirement to report a threat to use a firearm, nor are there any statistics kept on such events, nor would any but small-town newspapers bother to report such an event.
[QUOTE=Blake]
Their are several massive flaws in that reasoning.
The most obvious is that guns can be a deterrent to crime the same way that having a security guard stationed outside your door can be a deterrent to crime. You rarely hear about people attacking security guards in order to commit crimes, rather the deterrent value manifests as criminals choosing easier targets, ie those without security guards or without armed people inside.Once it becomes common knowldege that 99.99% of the popiulation does not posess a firearm both those deterents fail to work.
A second flaw is that you seem to be assuming that a firearm is only a deterrent if someone actually shoots a criminal, and hence you get to hear about it. Of course this is silly, and the firearm can be a perfectly effective defence if it is simply seen, or if someone can issue a believable verbal warning that they have one. It is possible that every single firearm owner used thier weapons to deter crime every single year and you would still never hear about it. AFAIK there is no legal requirement to report a threat to use a firearm, nor are there any statistics kept on such events, nor would any but small-town newspapers bother to report such an event.
[/QUOTE]
And the obvious flaw in your reasoning is that 99.99% of the UK population did not possess handguns or keep them at home even prior to 1997; still less did they carry them around with them.
Suggestion: don’t argue against what I “seem to be assuming”. I was including in the definition of “defensive gun use” any report of a gun being shown or warned about, and in the UK’s largely gun-free culture I assure you it would make more than small-town newspapers.
Ironically, I’d say most UK gun crime these days is targeted at exactly that sector of the population most likely to possess guns of their own.
[QUOTE=Malacandra]
And the obvious flaw in your reasoning is that 99.99% of the UK population did not possess handguns or keep them at home even prior to 1997; still less did they carry them around with them.
[/quote]
And how is that even relevant to my reasoning, much less a flaw in it?
Great. Since you are repsonding and since you are making these fatul statemntsin GQ:
CITE!. Please provide evidence to support the assertion that someone saying “I have a gun” from behind a locked door would make any newspaper at all.
Well of course. Criminals have always been the target of most firearm crime.
In fact criminals have always been the target of most crime, it’s an occupational hazard combined with the type of environment that produces criminals. And as others have said, that sector of the population most likely to have firearms today are criminals. Or as someone once said, if you make it a crime to own firearms only criminals will own firearms. I’m not sure what that rather banal point is meant to tell us about the detterent value of lawful firearm ownership.
[QUOTE=Blake]
And how is that even relevant to my reasoning, much less a flaw in it?
[/quote]
Because you were assuming that gun crime would naturally increase once it was widely known that 99.99% of the law-abiding population went unarmed; whereas I was pointing out that this was in fact the case before 1997 as well as after.
How in blazes would you expect this to be citeable? A statement of policy from a newspaper editor as to what they do and don’t include in crime reports? :rolleyes:
The OP asked a question about gun crime in the UK. As a resident of the country for the last forty years, I’m offering informed opinion about my country’s culture. Reports of burglaries and attempted burglaries make the papers and the TV news. Unusual incidents such as “Burglar scared off by gun warning” would be headline stuff over here. Take the word of a literate and experienced UK resident if you want questions about UK culture answered. Don’t take it as a slur on the Great God Gun, which you’re free to worship in your own country all you want.
Ditto - I was just about to make the same point. Of course it is relevent. Malacandra can answer for himself but I took his point to be that even prior to the ban so few Brits had a gun - certainly not a handgun - this was not a consideration in a crimminal’s mind and hence had no sort of deterent effect. Hence the ban can have had no impact on crimminal’s behaviour
Again this is very dodgy reasoning. You’ve set up a straw man, " ‘massacre’ must be defined as any firearm incident resulting in two or more deaths" just so you can chop it down with “I find it hard to believe that no incidents meeting that incredibly low standard have occured since”. The general dictionary definition of massacre is on the lines of “indiscriminate slaughter” [Chambers] so would include Dunblane, Hungerford and Virginia Tech but - to my mind - would exclude the deaths of Letitia Shakepeare and Charlene Ellis. Although they were not the intended victims the gunfire was not indiscriminate - it was a gang shooting with a specific target, however botched. I think this is consistent with what most people - including **Askance ** - would understand by a “gun massacre”.
Before I get jumped on I should state clearly that I am totally opposed to the UK ban on handguns. It was a knee jerk reaction by politicians caving in to pressure from an absurd tabloid media that has had almost no effect on the ability of crimminals to obtain firearms but has inconvienced legitimate owners and law abiding citizens. But let’s not confuse the issue with spurious arguments.
[QUOTE=Malacandra]
Because you were assuming that gun crime would naturally increase once it was widely known that 99.99% of the law-abiding population went unarmed.
[/quote]
No, I never made any such assumption, nor was it implied. Go back anbd read what I actuallyposted.
Roll your eyes all you like. You made a stament of fact in GQ, and you have nothing to back it up. In short you were making shit up.
And I contend that your opinion is demonstrably not based on information (a point you have conceded) and is based primarily on flawed reasonsing.
Once again, you repeat this extraordinary claim, but have absolutely no evidence to back it up.
I would dearly love to.
However since you are unable to cite one you presumably expect us to take your word instead.
No dice. This is GQ, the place for factual answers. You have nothing whatsoever to back up your claims and as such they can be disregarded as baseless opinion. Try IMHO next time.