I’ve read a few chapters of this book, but not in the order they appear. Much of the beginning of the book is material about Britain in the middle ages, and is not relevant to armed crime in Britain today. There’s also a great deal of historical data which while interesting does not relate to the title of the book. So I skipped ahead…
It has been said that some folks on this BBS have got a hard-on for America, by which it is meant that some people are obsessed by American issues. By the same token, it has to be said that Joyce Lee Malcolm has got a wide-on for England. Instead of providing an objective analysis about crime patterns in our (relatively) unarmed society, she appears to have started out with the conclusions, and then goes in search of historical facts to substantiate them.
If the object of her analysis was to prove that guns don’t cause crime, then a more objective analysis would have been to consider other unarmed societies – Japan, France, Spain, Ireland, Iceland, New Zealand, Bermuda – we have guys from all those places on this BBS who are satisfied with their country’s unarmed status and do not want to see a proliferation of weapons where they live.
The book attempts to make a correlation between unrelated facts. For example, despite a gun ban, Britain has seen an increase in crime in a period when US crime has gone down. The author points to this fact and tries to draw the conclusion that “guns don’t cause crime”. But in another passage in the book, the author herself presents the reasons why American crime levels have decreased while British crime levels have increased. And that’s because America has enough police who are efficiently deployed, with greater crime detection rates, adequate jail accommodation and tougher sentencing. Here, we have too few jails, not enough police therefore lower detection rates, not enough jails, and over lenient sentencing. The guns issue does not enter into the equation.
The book also makes comparisons between Britain and America using relative values. For example, the author mentions a “dramatic increase” in British crime, and a “dramatic decrease” in American crime. As the theme of the book is gun violence, one is entitled to assume that the crime under discussion is gun crime. If Britain were to see a doubling of gun homicides, the figure would still only be about 120. A paltry figure compared to the American tally, but a doubling would be dramatic. By the same token, the dramatic fall in American crime means that unlike 1992 in which more than 13,000 people in America were victims of gun homicide, the total now is only about half that. But despite changing crime levels (Britain’s “dramatic” increase and America’s “dramatic” decrease), American levels of gun related homicide per 100,000 population continue to be many, many times greater than Britain’s. The author avoids the issue by discussing the issue in relative terms and by avoiding actual statistics.
There is interesting material within the pages of this book. It covers a lot of our history and is interesting if off topic. Marks out of ten? Right now, I give it a 5. But I’ve not finished reading it.
