Tell me about gun crime in the UK.

Factual Questions
61

Not in any way defending the Australian buy and crush policy - as I said up thread I am totally opposed to the UK handgun ban - but I can see where the “no massacres in 10 years” statement comes from and where the Monash shootings fit.

This article, published by the BMJ, gives this “no massacres since the ban” figure based on the following definition: ’ “mass shooting” is defined here as one in which 5 firearm-related homicides are committed by one or two perpetrators in proximate events in a civilian setting, not counting any perpetrators killed by their own hand or otherwise.’ By this definition the Monash shootings don’t count as “only” two were killed.

On the other hand it has the necessary characteristic of being a random shooting of strangers (apart from one victim) and would no doubt have reached the necessary 5 deaths if not for the bravery of two of the people present. Incidently, it is interesting to me that neither of the people who prevented a worse tragedy was armed. You also have to ask what would have been the result if the perpetrator had been able to get hold of semi-automatic weapons? Could the two people have stopped him?

The same article answers Blake’s question.

There were eleven mass shootings (with 5 or more victims) between 1987 and 1996. (Table 1)

62

There’s a big problem with trying to extrapolate out from single scenarios such as ‘the aggressor might go armed’ or ‘the aggressor might not go out at all’ - the problem is that we have to make the jump from individual case logic to general statistics and that always *seems *much easier to do than it actually is.

63

Agreed, which is why I brought up the other “maybe”.

Personally, I try to think of it from a rationalist perspective. I have a gun. I want to rob a house. Two equally wealthy neighborhoods. In one, every home is armed to the teeth. In the other, no one is armed. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’m heading to Unarmed Acres.

In the case of a lunatic, though, rationality is moot. And that’s what the second argument is for. A lone hijacker or nutcase school shooter is most likely going to hurt someone before he’s brought down. But it stands to reason that he would be brought down sooner if someone in the vicinity were empowered to bring him down — versus there being no one.

64

Sure, and I completely understand the logic, but if lots of those people are empowered to bring the nutter down, there’s a possibility/danger that they’ll do other things with that power at other times. Personally, I prefer to be in a place where guns are very rare to the extent that it’s very unlikely I’ll see one at all.

65

Yep, and the further worry is it could make it easier for said nutter to pose as a defender and obtain his gun. I know things are different for the career criminal community, but as things stand, if I snapped and decided to shoot-up the teletubbies at BBC central, I’d have no clue of how to get hold of a gun (which is why I would murderously assail them with a megaphone and my Spice Girls impression).

I think this is one of those arguments where both sides are valid and the right answer depends on the place and circumstances. In the UK, people are leaning towards removing as many guns as possible, and I fully support that, personally. The pro-gun lobbies do exist here, but they are not as numerous or vocal, it seems.

66

Indeed - the USA is a place with embedded cultures of gun ownership and use and there is no easy or painless way to change it into something else (should that even be successfully argued to be wholly desirable). Trying to pull out a tiger’s teeth won’t make it a pussycat.

Conversely, the UK is a place largely without those embedded cultures adding widespread, easy gun ownership would (I believe) just make a big, horrible, dangerous mess.

67

I understand that as well. And I would prefer to be in a place where laws are made to secure people’s rights and property, and people obey those laws. But I don’t think that ignoring a criminal subculture is going to help. I can understand why a violence virgin would think of guns as hard to get. Anything is hard to get when you don’t know how to go about getting it. But criminals do know how to access the underground economy that organized crime is only too happy to supply to them.

I think that a perception of danger in an armed populace persumes that the majority in the crowd are mentally or emotionally unstable. And I can understand cases where a liability agent would want to purge a crowd of weapons. Say, for example, I’m the owner of a sports stadium. I want my revenue from alcohol concessions, and I understand that emotions will run high. I therefore prohibit arms on premises. But because of the limited access to my venue, I am able to actually enforce my policy by thoroughly scanning everyone at the gates. Only a paratrooper would get by my security.

An open community, on the other hand, means people coming and going freely not just along roadways, but cutting across land boundaries which, after all, are just lines on a map, and don’t exist in reality. A person can traverse a campus without ever encountering a roadblock. It is in that sort of scenario that I prefer to be armed myself and, in the even that I’m not, I prefer that enough others be armed so that a chance exists of stopping a nutter before he gets to me.

68

For a start, the types who tend to commit the majority of burglaries tend nots to be in any position to buy a handgun, even if they know where to get one, drugs kind of does that.

If a previously convicted person was caught with an handgun in possession, we are looking at five years for starters, and it goes up from there, and that is without using it to make any kind of threat.

The wider the possession of handguns, the more our police will have them, it then gets to be a vicious circle.

Handguns among criminals in the UK is actually rare, though if you were to read our newspapers, you would think otherwise.

Yup, you can look at the number of firearms incidents in the UK if you want, and get what appears to be a substantial number, but that needs to be set against the number of crimes perpetrated in total, and then the numbers suddenly shrink - statistics lies and all that stuff.

Any incident where a person make a report of a firearm is counted as a firearms incident, as is any incident where armed police are in attendance - but the reality is that the perp didn’t actually have a firearm at all, or the police were responding to an incident where there was a potential for violence, such as someone waving a sword about.

The number of true firearms incidents, where a proper handgun is actually employed in commission of an offence is very much smaller than the number of so-called firearms incidents - and yet even these include incidents with airguns, which form 40% of incidents where a firearm was proven to be real, and in many of the cases where a firearm was not fired or recovered, one must assume that many of those were either imitation or airgun.

http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/crime-victims/reducing-crime/gun-crime/

Firearms accounted for 9% of all homicides in the UK in 2004, in other word, 91% of all murder victims in the UK were killed by some other means, guns are a problem, but not the biggest one by a long long way.

The crime figures in the UK also certainly do not bear out all the rubbish that has been spouted about householders in the UK being under threat from armed burglars, since not one person in the UK was killed by an armed burglar in 2004, so let us shut up about this nonsense that is being spouted about guns being a deterrant to burglaries in the UK. Burglars in the UK don’t use guns, householders also don’t have them so arguments along this line are going to be rather unproductive.

If you want cites then why not take a look, from a reputable source, easy enough to find,

http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs06/hosb0206.pdf

When you see stuff in the press about gun crime rising by some large percentage, you need to bear in mind that a doubling of a small number is not always going to produce a large number, but it will be reported in the hysterical media as an increase of 100%.

The same hysterical press tends not to be too much troubled with analysis, preferring to ignore inconvenient facts like many incidents where guns were reported were either false, mistaken or simply hoaxes.

In 2005/2006 there were 21k reported firearms incidents in the UK, but 14k of those were imitations or airguns.

Compare those figures to the overall commission of crime in the UK over the same period, and gun crime is very rare in the UK, which is why when it happens, it gets reported widely.

People often do not understand what the term ‘rare’ actually means, they think that around 7k gun crimes is a lot, it seems beyond them to work out that in the context of a population of around 60millions, where around 6 million offences took place.

People are stupid, but it doesn’t stop them pushing their short range intellects around with little regard to the facts.

If you want to talk about gun crime in the UK then fine, but the huge majority of armed police that the UK public see are there to deal with terrorism, and not what most people would imagine as part of general crime.
I tend to despise those in the US who somehow try to use the rise in UK gun crime as a pet pony to bolster their own position, facts are discarded, distortions are common, but we are a completely differant culture, if US gun lobbyists want to argue their point, they should do so on the merits of the situation in the US, not some specious self serving argument involving carefully selected and crafted data that is completely irrelevant to their position.

69

You have to state your reason for wanting a gun when applying for a firearm certificate. “Self defense” is not a valid reason, and has not been since 1947, I believe.

As for saying that removal of the few handguns gives the bad guys security because now they know the homeowner will not be armed: there were 160,000 handguns confiscated/turned in. There were over 2 million shotguns in circulation, and probably still are. Are the criminals really going to be all that emboldened by an approximately 7% reduction in weaponry?

And for anecdotal evidence: I am British and I have never seen a handgun or shotgun in private ownership, or heard of anyone I know that owns one other than one Olympic rifle-shooting participant. Quite simply, we don’t do guns. And it is frustrating to see American gun enthusiasts drawing horribly ignorant conclusions by misapplying UK statistics. In fact, in most cases the gun ban had no effect whatsoever on crime statistics, which is not surprising really - if you ban something that almost no people do, then lo and behold there is very little effect.

70

Both my father and my newest nephew-in-law own shotguns, though I don’t believe Dad’s has been fired in fifty years. Nephew-in-law does a spot of small game shooting, as does one of my next-door neighbours, but I’m not sure if the latter has his own gun and if he has I’ve never seen it. I do not believe I have ever known anyone who had his own handgun even before the ban.

Equally I do not know, even by reputation, anyone who has been on the wrong end of a gun-related incident in this country.

71

Well, you know me - there was another reason I used Manchester as my example :stuck_out_tongue: (Edit: by which I presume ‘gun-related incident’ doesn’t include actual shootings!)

72

Yeah, but if you count “some guy on the Internet” as “acquainted by reputation”…! :smiley:

In meatspace I don’t know anyone involved in a gun incident. I know someone who was mugged by a bunch of black guys in Acton for his (expensive) camera, but no caps were popped or threatened to be. But on the whole I’ve lived my life in places where guns don’t turn up - even in inner-city Norwich.

73

Unfortunately I do, but one was an extremely non-typical incident (pretty much the non-typical incident), and the other was a shotgun suicide. Shotgun suicides tend to be the method amongst a certain group, but young males will always find a way, I guess.

74

Liberal, I know you mean well, but I hope my country never turns into that which you would hope it becomes.

I like living in an almost totally gun-free environment, and I want it to stay like that. It’s a much simpler and less frightening existence.

75

I knew a guy in college who worked the door at a club in Wigan (possibly one of the roughest in the town) who was shot at a few times. It’s got a reputation for stabbings.

Inner city Norwich? :stuck_out_tongue:

76

No, it doesn’t take anything like a majority of mentally or emotionally unstable people to cause danger - a small minority of armed nutcases would be plenty bad enough.

Just a few weeks ago I was confronted and nearly attacked by a violent, aggressive man in a blind, irrational rage. (link) I dread to think what this man might have done or might otherwise be capable of if he had a firearm. I suppose the counterpoint will be that in such case, I could have been similarly armed and could have defended myself, well, yes, I suppose I could, if I’d have had the chance. But even then, all that happens is that a violent confrontation is now upgraded to a violent confrontation that has guns involved. How would that make things any better?

I was scared shitless, but I’m damned glad neither of us had guns.

77

Despite what you might hear in the media, it’s not a very frightening existence here either, except to the paranoid. I’ve never been particularly frightened in even “bad” neighborhoods. I rarely if ever feel the need to carry a weapon even though I legally can. It isn’t the wild west.

78

When it comes to gun crime and gun ownership Ireland is as close to the UK to make no difference. We also have increasing guns deaths but like the UK this is almost 100% criminal on criminal acts. When a non-criminal is killed by a gun then it is national news.
Outside airports I’ve only seen guns(non farmers/clay pigeon shot guns) three times in my 36 years in Ireland. One time was US security guys protecting Clinton, the other was at a road block looking for IRA and one was when the cops raided my house looking for a IRA man(my father was a bit of a silly pup back in his youth and got his name on a police list of possible IRA supporters)

We get the odd farmer taking himself out with a shotgun or some unwanted visitor but that’s rare as well.

There have been a fair few execution type killings in Dublin over the last years but they’ve all been criminals killing each other. A ‘civilian’ got killed the other month during one of these incidents a few months ago but that was because the poor bollocks was in the house doing a job when the killers arrived and they just didn’t leave a witness.

There is no gun culture at all in normal society and that’s the way the vast majority want it. The US is the US and you’ve got your own thing going on but it isn’t just your accent that’s different. The culture and the whole way you think about and relate to guns is very very different than this side of the pond.

79

It IS true. Two people is not a massacre. The definition used is four or more. And even if it were true, one in 10 years is a huge drop from 11 in the previous 10 years. To what do you attribute a 91% fall other than the gun buyback and ban?

80

Two deaths is not a massacre; the standard used was four or more. The facts are that in the ten years before the ban there were 11 massacres (4 or more deaths in one incident) in a 10 year period, in the 10 years after it none whatsoever. There was one incident in 2002 which killed 2 and injured 5 - using five handguns in a close room with twelve students and a lecturer.

I can only assume your standards of comparison have been so debauched by the ongoing brutality of what passes for normal life in the US that you find it hard to comprehend what actual real normal life is like in a relatively civilised society. Maybe that’s why some US folks can still convince themselves that what’s going on in Iraq is OK? I think it was on this very board I read the other day some claim that the murder rate in Baghdad was less than in Washington DC. While it was hugely and ridiculously untrue, the fact that anyone could entertain such a belief for more than a microsecond is indicative. It reminds me of those people who thought the joke that a middle aged US woman was more likely to be kidnapped by a terrorist than get married was true.