Lazs,
I doubt that your homicide rate would stay as high in the absence of guns. But to substantiate that it would be necessary to study the FBI stats more closely to see how these homicides occur. I have started to do this, and there are two main categories that stand out - robbery, and "other arguments"...
your crime is going up... ours is going down.
Not with respect to homicide. If you would look at the table below, extracted from the FBI website, you can see that homicides have risen every year since 1999. As we're talking about guns, it follows that the crimes we're talking about are homicides.
Source:
http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_03/xl/03tbl2-13.xls
As for your claim that "Britain's crime is going up", I don't know what your source is. The Home Office published a report for crime trends 2003/04. This report shows that crime has fallen, including gun crime. Here is an extract.
And so to Mr. Toad!
Mr Toad's sources at the BBC said
BBC: Home Office figures showed that firearm offences in England and Wales have risen from 13,874 in 1998-99 to 24,070 in 2002-03. The number of recorded crimes involving imitation weapons has tripled from 566 to 1,815 during that period.
... and yet if were to look at
THIS link to the BBC news archives, you would see
There were 10,248 gun crimes - 0.41% of all crime - in the year to March 2003. But only 9% resulted in injury. There were 81 homicides involving firearms compared with 97 the year before.The number of firearm robberies dropped by 13%. And the use of handguns to commit a crime dropped by 6% or 5,549 offences.
So I decided to check the Home Office Report - part of which I reproduced above for Lazs. This report confirms my version. Source:
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs04/hosb1004.pdf Look to page 80 in this report, where a bar graph shows the number of firearms offences - nowhere near the 24,070 your report suggested. Much closer to the 10,000 that my report suggests.
The Home Office report also observes that there were 68 gun homicides in 2003/04 (the BBC said 97), down from 80 the previous year - a fall of 15%. However, as I have said all along, I interpret such movements as year on year fluctuations rather than an overall trend.
The report states that there were 5140 offences where handguns were used, and 2150 in which imitation firearms were used. So, according to the HO, 29% of that 7290 total is with imitation firearms. OK, that is less than the two thirds I originally said, but nowhere near as wide of the mark as you'd like to believe.
. I was quoting a Labour spokesperson (I should have known better!) I went to search for the newspaper report, but searches seem to have been disabled.
Something else you should notice from the HO report is that two thirds of gun crimes happened with the areas monitored by three police forces: Metropolitan (London), West Midlands (Birmingham) and Greater Manchester. Those are our three largest cities.
Highly unlikely. You forget the Canadian example. They have lots of guns. Their stats are very good and they haven't gone to the draconian measures that England/Australia have used.
Clearly, there is more to it than restricted hangun supply = fewer gun homicides. Canada shows that.
Clearly, you don't read my posts. I have already covered this in the other thread. There are TWO ingredients to a gun homicide: 1) the gun itself; 2) the idiot holding it. Places like Canada/Switzerland have lots of #1. Britain has lots of #2. The US has lots of both #1 and #2.
I maintain that the abolition of pistol shooting is a worthwhile price to pay, if that has to part of a package of measures to rid our society of handguns.
You feel that your annual 10,000 gun deaths are a price worth paying so that you can have you want - a personal firearms arsenal as big as you want and can afford.
The British status quo has been arrived at by a few hundred people giving up a hobby. Your status quo results in thousands of people giving up their lives.
