Originally posted by Toad
Beet, you're just showing you don't really understand your own history.
Your gun crime rates are essentially the same over the last 50+ years. That covers a period from when Englishman could have a handgun if he merely stated it was for "self-defense" across the years of slowly eroding freedom to the point where handguns are now illegal in your country.
I call Bullshirt on this. The reason you KEEP believing that our gun laws don't make a difference is because you PERSIST in your ERRONEOUS belief that there was a time, within the last 50 years to use your own time line, that ordinary Brits - people like my parents - could just walk into a gun shop and buy a gun like lazs's .44 magnum/.45 semiauto for self defence - just because they wanted to, and for no other reason.
And I KEEP telling you, but you REFUSE to believe it, that such a scenario NEVER EXISTED in Britain - never mind what your worshipful company of masterbeaters would have you believe. Although granted, their task is easy because it's what you WANT to believe.
Firearms legislation was first contemplated c1911, and certainly before WW1 which, in our case, began in 1914. Up until that time, police were being shot at and killed (6 killed and 92 wounded between 1908-1912). The firearms legislation was PROACTIVE which is much better than being REACTIVE. That is to say that we never allowed gun crime to get out of hand the way you did in America.
So no, there was no dramatic fall in gun crime because firearms legislation saw to it that gun crime never got a foothold in the first place. That's why there have been no more than TWO British police officers shot and killed since 1983, and why there are about FIFTY shot and killed EVERY year in the US.
Toodle Pip.