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UK arms control and the fake USA crisis

Discussion in 'Politics' started by Mav88, Jul 31, 2012.

Mav88
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ah well, why not another thread?

First, once again there is no US gun homocide problem unless you are black (see attached).

Second, the UK has some of the strictest laws in the free world. Liberals love to point out the low gun crime rate but ignore the obvious. The UK has a low gun crime rate because of culture, something very obvious to thinking people but out of reach to the fragile brainwashed liberal mind.... or is it something more sinister, say they don't care since all they can imagine is their liberal stifling government run paradise.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_the_United_Kingdom

Incidents in 1987 and 1996 in which men holding licensed firearms went on shooting sprees and killed on a large scale led to strong public and political demands to restrict firearm use. The result has been the enacting of laws which are among the strictest in the world.[7] The Firearms (Amendment) Act 1988, passed by the Thatcher government in the wake of the Hungerford massacre, made most semi-automatic long-barrelled weapons illegal; it was generally supported by the Labour opposition although some Labour backbenchers thought it inadequate.[8] After the Dunblane school massacre, the Major government passed the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1997 which made private possession of most handguns larger than .22 calibre illegal. The Snowdrop Campaign pressed for a wider ban, and led the incoming Labour government in 1997 to introduce the Firearms (Amendment) (No. 2) Act 1997 which extended the ban to most handguns with a calibre of .22 (there are exceptions for some antique handguns and black-powder revolvers.)

However, in 2006, writing in the British Journal of Criminology, Dr Jeanine Baker and Dr Samara McPhedran found no measurable effect detectable from the 1997 firearms legislation with ARIMA statistical analysis [9] instead the opposite happened, gun crime went up.
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Are guns available in the UK?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/aug/30/ukcrime1

The gun shown here, a Webley, is up for sale in London for Â£150, one of hundreds of such weapons that are easily and cheaply available on the streets of the UK's big cities, a Guardian investigation can reveal.

The variety of weapons on offer in Britain is extensive and includes machine guns and shotguns, as well as pistols and converted replicas. A source close to the trade in illegal weapons contacted by the Guardian listed a menu of firearms that are available on the streets of the capital.

"You can get a clean [unused] 9mm automatic for Â£1,500, a Glock for a couple of grand and you can even make an order for a couple of MAC-10s," he said. "Or you can get a little sawn-off for Â£150. They're easy enough to get hold of. You'll find one in any poverty area, every estate in London, and it's even easier in Manchester, where there are areas where the police don't go.

"People who use shotguns tend to be lower down the pecking order. There is less use of sawn-off or full length shotguns, and if a criminal wants street cred, he wants a self-loading pistol, a MAC-10 or an Uzi submachine gun."

This week a man who ran a "factory" for converting replica weapons into working guns was jailed for life. Police believe the products of Grant Wilkinson's workshops were used in more than 50 shootings, including eight murders. His speciality was turning legally purchased MAC-10s into weapons that could fire live rounds, an increasingly common practice.

According to David Dyson, a leading firearms consultant, it is possible to learn through the internet how to make a firearm, given a degree of skill, and converted deactivated weapons also feature in shootings
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Relative effectiveness?

http://www.saf.org/journal/16/guncontrolinengland.pdf

Upon the passage of The Firearms Act (No. 2) in 1997, British Deputy Home Secretary Alun Michael boasted: âBritain now has some of the toughest gun laws in the world.âi The Act was second handgun control measure passed that year, imposed a near-complete ban on private ownership of handguns, capping nearly eighty years of increasing firearms restrictions. Driven by an intense public campaign in the wake of the shooting of schoolchildren in Dunblane, Scotland, Parliament had been so zealous to outlaw all privately-owned handguns that it rejected proposals to exempt Britain‟s Olympic target-shooting team and handicapped target-shooters from the ban. While the government might concede that âchanges to statutory lawâ could not âprevent criminals from gaining access to guns,â the government insisted such legislation would make it more difficult for potential offenders to get guns and would âshift the balance substantially in the interest of public safety.âii Britain now had what was touted as âthe gold standardâ of gun control.
I. RISING VIOLENT CRIME
The result of the ban has been costly. Thousands of weapons were confiscated at great financial cost to the public. Hundreds of thousands of police hours were devoted to the task. But in the six years since the 1997 handgun ban, crimes with the very weapons banned have more than doubled, and firearm crime has increased markedly .iii In 2002, for the fourth consecutive year, gun crime in England and Wales roseâby 35 percent for all firearms, and by a whopping 46 percent for the banned handguns. Nearly 10,000 firearms offences were committed.iv The shootings in a single week in the fall of 2003âof a Liverpool football player and two other men in a bar, of three men in a drive-by attack in Reading, of a 32-year-old builder leaving a health club in Hertfordshire, of a 64-year-old woman trying to protect her daughter during a Nottinghamshire burglaryâprovoked Oliver Letwin, shadow home secretary, to remark: âOne might have thought that this was Baghdad. In fact it‟s Blair‟s Britain.âv
At the annual conference in May, British police chiefs were warned that gun crime in the UK was growing âlike a cancer.âvi They already knew. For the first time in their history some police units are now routinely armed. American policemen have been hired to advise the British police. Clearly since the ban criminals have not found it difficult to get guns and the balance has not shifted in the interest of public safety.
Armed crime is only one part of an increasingly lawless English environment. According to Scotland Yard, in the four years from 1991 to 1995 crimes against the person in England‟s inner cities increased by 91 percent. In the four years from 1997 to 2001 the rate of violent crime more than doubled. The UK murder rate for 2002 was the highest for a century.
The startling crime rate increases are not the result of a low starting point. British crime rates are high compared to those of other developed nations. A recent study of all the countries of western Europe has found that in 2001 Britain had the worst record for killings, violence and burglary, and its citizens had one of the highest risks in the industrialized world of becoming victims of crime.vii Offences of violence in the UK were three times the level of the next worst country in western Europe, burglaries at nearly twice the next-worst level. The results are in line with the findings of a United Nations study of eighteen industrialized countries, including the United States, published in July 2002. The UN study found England and Wales at the
top of the Western world‟s crime league, with the worst record for âvery seriousâ offences and nearly 55 crimes per 100 people.viii The government insists things are improving but, as Letwin pointed out, âOne thing which no amount of statistical manipulation can disguise is that violent crime has doubled in the last six years and continues to rise alarmingly.âix
The comparison with the United States is especially interesting because people who support gun restrictions are fond of contrasting England‟s strict gun laws and low rate of violent crime with America‟s, where there are an estimated 200 million private firearms and where 37 states now have shall issue laws that allow law-abiding residents to carry a concealed weapon. But the old stereotype of England as the peaceable kingdom and America as the violent, cowboy republic no longer holds. By 1995, with the exception of murder and rape, England‟s rate for every type of violent crime had far surpassed America‟s.x The American murder rate has been substantially higher than the English rate for at least 200 years, during most of which neither country had stringent restrictions on firearms.xi But the English and American rates are now converging. While Americans have enjoyed over a decade of sharply declining homicide rates, rates described by the Boston Globe in 1999 as âin startling free-fall,â English rates have risen dramatically. In 1981 the US rate was 8.7 times the English rate; in 1995 it was 5.7 times the English rate, and in 2002 3.5 times the English
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#1 Jul 31, 2012

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Mav88
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oops here's the attachment
- guns vs homicide.png
  
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#2 Jul 31, 2012

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euclid
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But the English and American rates are now converging. While Americans have enjoyed over a decade of sharply declining homicide rates, rates described by the Boston Globe in 1999 as âin startling free-fall,â English rates have risen dramatically.
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In other news.. Crime data: Homicide at 30-year England and Wales low http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18900384

#3 Aug 1, 2012

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Mav88
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Quote from euclid:

In other news.. Crime data: Homicide at 30-year England and Wales low http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18900384
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and.... http://blogs.justice.gov/main/archives/1765

This week, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) announced that in 2010 the U.S. homicide rate fell to 4.2 homicides per 100,000 residents, the lowest U.S. homicide rate in four decades.
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THEREFORE I'm sure you agree that we have no gun problem and that the left is wrong and should just shut up about guns.

#4 Aug 1, 2012

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Dragons Teeth
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Why in the ever loving fvck can Americans not discuss the pros and cons of firearms without dragging some other country into it.
Is introspection completely absent from the American psyche?

#5 Aug 1, 2012

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Ricter
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Quote from Dragons Teeth:

Why in the ever loving fvck can Americans not discuss the pros and cons of firearms without dragging some other country into it.
Is introspection completely absent from the American psyche?
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Same reason we observe the competition.

#6 Aug 1, 2012

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euclid
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Quote from Mav88:

This week, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) announced that in 2010 the U.S. homicide rate fell to 4.2 homicides per 100,000 residents, the lowest U.S. homicide rate in four decades.
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THEREFORE I'm sure you agree that we have no gun problem and that the left is wrong and should just shut up about guns. [/B]
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Of course, 4.2 homicides per 100,000 is not a problem. The occasional mass shooting is also not a problem since it doesn't affect the statistics much. No problems anything to do with guns. It's all good.

#7 Aug 1, 2012

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Lucrum
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Quote from Dragons Teeth:

Why in the ever loving fvck can Americans not discuss the pros and cons of firearms without dragging some other country into it.
Is introspection completely absent from the American psyche?
More...

Ricter is the same about economics and income equality.

#8 Aug 1, 2012

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Mav88
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Why in the ever loving fvck can Americans not discuss the pros and cons of firearms without dragging some other country into it.
Is introspection completely absent from the American psyche?
More...

the brits are a lot like us, we can watch a gun control experiment before making any decisions. We can examine data and observe others to better form conclusions about what might happen.

I do agree though that it should be all about what we alone want in the end.

#9 Aug 1, 2012

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Dragons Teeth
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Quote from Mav88:

the brits are a lot like us, we can watch a gun control experiment before making any decisions. We can examine data and observe others to better form conclusions about what might happen.

I do agree though that it should be all about what we alone want in the end.
More...

There are cultural similarities but the UK population as a whole never had the same access to firearms the US had and the regulation of firearms started in 1903 so as a baseline we are a bad choice for both sides of the argument.

#10 Aug 2, 2012

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