Handgun ownership prior to the ban was largely confined to sports shooters who kept their guns under lock and key at the club.
The UK simply does not have a gun culture, although one is developing among some in some parts of some cities.
At any time in the 20th century you could rob, assault or break into any place (other than a farm, country house or gun club) in the certain knowledge you had more chance of being struck by lightning than encountering an packing householder. So guns had no deterrent effect prior to the ban. Therefore removing them did not lessen the deterrent.
Now there is a limited gun/drug culture in some inner cities that is leading to more shootings - as noted already with converted pieces rather than modern weapons. A recent haul paraded on the news featured a sawn off antique shotgun. Gun crime is rising but that is connected to wider social factors
I’d much rather those criminals who want guns have to go to great lengths to obtain even a converted starter pistol or a souped up air rifle than have ready legal access to more effective weapons and ammunition and concomitant access to an awash illegal market.
It’s entirely possible that burglars in the UK are always scared off by people claiming to own a trained bull elephant and threatening to let it trample all over the would-be-criminal, and that this happens many times every day, but remains completely unreported in all of the media. It just isn’t very likely at all.
Malacandra is essentially right - guns just aren’t used much for self-defence in the UK and they weren’t used much that way before the ban. Anyone insisting they were (or might have been), should be the person to pony up the citation supporting that positive assertion.
Thanks, guys, but Blake’s still going to insist on cites or accuse you of “making shit up”. I didn’t think GQ was the place for that, either, but I obviously know no more about that than I do about the country where I’ve lived all my life bar two years.
Are you really claiming that a massacre in the scale of Dunblane, Hungerford and Virginia Tech occured every eleven monthsin Australia in the late 80s and early 90s?
That is ridiculous.
If that is not the case then what the hell is your point here? A claim was made that a “massacre” occurred in Australia every 11 months in the late 80s and early 90s (population >20 million people), but that none have occured in the last 10 years.
If you believe that the defintion of massacre hasn’t been trivialised then you either believe that such massacres really were occuring every eleven months, or you are simply attacking a strawman characterisation of my post.
‘Guns were [/may have been] used for self-defence before they were banned in 1997’ is a positive argument, for which a citation is required. Without that citation, it’s just an opinion and would be no stronger or weaker an argument than it would be if you substituted any other word in place of ‘guns’.
And I’m sure someone who made such a statement would produce such a claim. Someone who points out the logical flaws in a claim “that deterrent firearm used invariably gets reported in newpapers” of course has no such onus.
And I’m sure your just itching to agree that a claim that gun warnings are unusual events is a positive argument, for which a citation is required.
And I’m sure your just itching to agree that a claim that any use of guns as a deterrent would be reported in nespapers is a positive argument, for which a citation is required.
You will be agreeing with those statements directly right Mangetout? I mean, we wouldn’t let someone in GQ get a pass on talking shit without a cite just because she agrees with our position? Right?
Coz I know we don’t do that sort of thing around here.
By “she” do you mean me, Blake? Do I have to memo everyone on the Dope separately?
Why you object to someone giving you a feel for what gets reported in the national newspapers just on the basis of being a resident with a long history of newspaper reading, and what cite you’d expect, is something I’ve still to grasp.
And you still can’t back up your extraordinary claims with any evdience whatsoever.
Ana GQ still is not the place for your baseless opinion. Of course you’re free to post baseless nonsense here as long as the Mods tolerate it. But I’m also free to request cites every time you do so, and point out when ypou can’t produce any evidence for your ridiculous assertions.
“It’s the country where I’ve lived all my life” is hardly evidence, nor does it make you an expert on the nation. Quite the contrary. What do they know of England who only England know?
If you want to express what you feel then take it to IMHO. This is GQ. the place for factual answers, not for your feelings and opinions. You presneted a statement of fact, not astament of feeling. Can you back up that claim with anything at all?
Present us with the evidence that enabled you to boldly declare it a fact, that we too may evaluate it. I don’t much care what that evidence is, so long as it exists. We can then evaluate it too. And if it turns out the evidence is simply “I feel” and “I’ve never lived elsewhere” and “It’s my opinion” then… well you can guess the rest. Essentially you will have been simply making shit up and presenting it as fact in GQ.
Mangetout,
None to hasty to agree with my statements then? Do not all positive statments require citations then? :dubious:
Either Blake enjoys stirring the pot, or is just unwilling to accept a raw statement of how it is. Or is employing the intellectually dishonest position of quibbling with a minor hyperbolic statement to discredit the entire argument.
I’ll restate it. It is like that here. Guns != self defense for the overwhelmingly vast majority of the population. The last guy who shot someone on his land got sent to jail, became a cause celebre, and was in the papers for weeks. Your apparent assertion that it isn’t like that here needs to be backed up. If you’re just nitpicking to annoy - well do grow up.
I haven’t a clue what you’re even asking any more - I must say I don’t care for this style of pushy, aggressive argument at all. Why should I do anything other than decline to comment on arguments you have prepared that you demand I should be ‘itching to agree with’?
A question for you, then, Blake. If you wanted to know what typically does and doesn’t get reported in the national newspapers of a foreign country, to whom would you go for the information?
Gun lovers are using an illogical extension of the old MAD theory. We didn’t have an atomic war with Russia because we both had the bomb and knew it’s effects. So if everybody has a gun and is allowed to carry it wherever they go ,crime will disappear.
Hell why don’t we just give atomic weapons to every country in the world. Then we could sleep in peace.
More weapons =more violence and crime
I fully agree that someone defending their home from an intruder with a firearm would get into the newspapers in the UK. As much as anything else, it would be jumped on by groups demanding fewer restrictions on guns as an example of their legitimate usage.
The trouble is, we’re going to have a big problem finding examples because anyone admitting to waving a gun at an intruder is risking almost certain prosecution. This means no-one is going to rush to the papers to admit it, and an intruder isn’t likely to advertise their break-ins either.
In the cases where these situations have come to light, it is mainly because someone ended up getting shot, which certainly makes the news.
There are newspaper reports of people defending their homes with imitation or toy guns and getting arrested for their trouble. We really need a rethink on our self-defence laws.
I personally think we should increase the sentence for being caught with a real gun from 5 years to life to help dissuade the rise of gun culture in criminal circles. More than that though, I want the law changed so home-owners have a lot more rights to defend themselves with force not involving guns.
That is a misrepresentation of the arguments made. The assertion is not that crime will disappear if a populace is armed, nor that people should be armed with weapons that destroy massive amounts of property.
One assertion is that people who are armed and trained in the use of their arms stand a better chance at self-defense from armed aggressors than people who are unarmed. But even more importantly, an armed aggressor amidst an armed crowd faces a many-to-one odds scenario, whereas an armed aggressor amidst an unarmed crowd is shooting fish in a barrel.
The subsequent handgun buyback cost an obscene amount of money and, ironically, did not ban the handguns that the shooter used. Innumerable historic military pistols were destroyed in the buyback, although rather a lot of them did end up in museums instead of going to the crusher.
You may well be right about the argument made in the US but the discussion here was about the UK.
The original point was that it was not possible to argue that the UK ban on handguns removed a deterence against gun crime because the ownership of guns in the UK pre-ban was so low that it was not a factor any criminal would take into account.
The analogy of Mutually Assured Destruction is relevent as one of the points made by the US and the UK was that the USSR had to believe we would respond with nuclear weapons - a significant uncertainty undermined the strategy. If the enemy do not believe it will happen they will ignore the potential threat. In the UK both before and after the ban the probability of a criminal coming across an armed citizen was so low as to be ignored.
In the UK, the common counter argument to this is that armed potential victims/targets increase the likelihood of an aggressor going out armed, thus raising the stakes.
