Lumpy:
Please detail.
We’re very polite, but we’re not as nice as you blokes.
Lumpy
April 29, 2012, 8:34pm
102
My point was that once upon a time Britain allowed private firearms and didn’t seem to have a problem with it. As this paper put it:
Years before European countries adopted the restrictive firearms policies that most of them have today, [142] they [Page 1003] enjoyed very low rates of violent crime. [143] In the absence of prohibitory legislation, England and continental Europe were important markets for so-called pocket pistols (small, light- caliber handguns), which were fabricated in innumerable small factories all over Europe, [144] and in the years preceding the First World War, at least a million .32 caliber Browning pocket pistols, and a hundred-thousand .25 caliber pistols, were shipped to Europe from the United States. [145]
And
It is, moreover, an historical solecism to hold the English nation up as an exemplar of peaceable law-abidingness or, for that matter, of the effectiveness of gun control laws as a means of controlling homicide and other crime. During the Middle Ages, in fact, England without guns may have had a murder rate more than double the current American murder rate. [148] The “English were noted throughout Europe for their turbulence and proclivity to violence.” [149] It was not until the nineteenth century that England began to assume its modern reputation for peacefulness, and by the time it adopted restrictive gun control legislation, the Firearms Act of 1920, [150] England ranked among the world’s most placid nations. Yet prior to 1920, the principal gun control law in the country was that policemen would not carry firearms.
And
Colin Greenwood wrote in the early 1970s, “one is forced to the rather startling conclusion that the use of firearms in crime” in England “was very much less” before 1920 “when there were no controls of any sort and when anyone, convicted criminal or lunatic, could buy any type of firearm without restriction. Half a century of strict controls has ended, perversely, with a far greater use of this class of weapon in crime than ever before.” [154] Since then, violent crime, and particularly firearms crime, has so steadily increased that ever increasing numbers of English police are being armed. [155]
So taken naively, the reason there’d be a “bloodbath” if Britain allowed guns is… because it doesn’t allow guns
Our normal condition is more violent then you’re used to, we’re not proud of this but this is what we do,
It almost seems as if the lawful possession of guns links with reduced violence in exactly the same way that possession of nuclear weapons leads to reduced world wars.