Moving guns is no harder than moving Cocaine, if not easier for a variety of detection reasons. If needed: "Just add "x" number of weapons and "X" amount of ammon to the next 100kg shipment Raoul, and deduct the cost please..."
The difference between smuggling drugs and cocaine is that cocaine sells for far more.
If you import a kilo of hard drugs into the UK, it's final street price is upwards of $80,000 a kilo. A handgun and some ammo weighs about a kilo.
One of the major ways of importing cocaine into the UK is by using drug mules from the Caribbean, who smuggle in a kilo or 2 at a time, and get paid a couple of grand (plus airfares etc). Do the same with guns, and they would be far too expensive for most criminals.
Major drug dealers no doubt do smuggle guns, as they need them to protect themselves from other drug gangs. But smuggling guns to sell to common criminals just isn't worth while.
Perhaps the US just has way more Manchesters per square mile?
The problem with that is the FBI breaks down murder rates by community type. At its best, the US murder rate approaches the British average. Even small towns in the US, 10,000 or less population, have a higher murder rate than the UK including the big cities.
Perhaps the drug distribution infrastructure is more "results driven" in the US high crime areas?
Even if you exclude all drug related murders in the US (although including those carried out by addicts to fund habits), the US still has a much higher murder rate than the UK
including drug murders.
And gun crime hasn't decreased in the UK since the 1997 ban.
Depends what you measure. If you measure something absolutely quantifiable, like murders committed with firearms, it has. If you take nebulous figures, like police recording of incidents where "firearms" were reported, it has increased, but that's far more to do with police recording of incidents that didn't use to be worth a mention.
Of course, the "ban" in 1997 was in fact a further tightening of already tight laws, so its effect on gun crime was marginal.
You also see plenty of daylight/resident home invasions (which you don't see in the US all that much)
Actually you do see them in the US, but the FBI classifies many of them as robberies rather than burglaries.
About 15% of robberies in the US occur in private residences, in the UK, where robberies in the home tend to be classified as burglaries, the figure is about 6%
because, as best I can gather from this board and on the net, not only is the homeowner barred from firearms for defense but discouraged legally from providing any defense. http://www.wmsa.net/pubs/reason/rea...crime_in_uk.htm
No, the government issued guidelines to homeowners on the legal basis of self defence a couple of years ago. To quote the director of public prosecutions:
"If you are confronted by a burglar in your own home and you fear yourself and members of your family are about to be attacked, you are entitled to take action to incapacitate that burglar"
"The key thing to bear in mind is that, as long as someone hasn't stepped over that line into retribution or revenge, it is quite difficult to perceive of a level of violence that would not be regarded as reasonable by a prosecutor."
As to Joyce Lee Malcolm, see is either lying or very, very mistaken. From the article you linked to:
That willingness was further undermined by a broad revision of criminal law in 1967 that altered the legal standard for self-defense. Now everything turns on what seems to be "reasonable" force against an assailant, considered after the fact. As Glanville Williams notes in his Textbook of Criminal Law, that requirement is "now stated in such mitigated terms as to cast doubt on whether it [self-defense] still forms part of the law."
What Glanville Williams says is that there is some doubt if "reasonablesness" is still part of the law:
"The requirement of reasonableness is unhappy. Enough has been said in criticism of it, and the CLRC has recommended that it should be expunged from the law. In practice, as we have seen, the requirement may be construed indulgently to the defendant, for, as Holmes J memorably said in the United States Supreme Court, “detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.” As we shall see in the next section, the requirement is now stated in such mitigated terms as to cast doubt on whether it still forms part of the law."
So, it's not the case that there is doubt that self defence is part of the law, there's doubt about whether your actions in self defence have to be reasonable (ie self defence is being interpreted more leniently than it was)
Another "fact" from Malcolm:
and 53 percent of English burglaries occur while occupants are at home, compared with 13 percent in the U.S.
The USDOJ's National Criminal Victimization Survey says that in 17.5 of domestic burglaries, the householder was asleep at the start of the burglary, in another 11% the householder was carrying out "other activities at home". There's another 20%+ covered by "don't knows" and "other" that would also have a percentage at home.
Why twist it around? I didn't say America won the Battle of Britain. The RAF did a fantastic job fighting the BOB. But, long term reality is Germany would have been back eventually and they would have invaded without America coming into the war. The BOB didn't prevent the invasion, only delayed it. American involvement prevented that invasion long term.
When exactly would the invasion have been?
In 1940 the RAF defeated German invasion plans.
In 1941 Germany invaded Russia at about the time the weather became practical for an invasion, and spent the rest of the year focusing on Russia.
In 1942 the Germans were fully embroiled in Russia, and losing.
American involvement in Europe (inc Russia) didn't become large scale until after the German failure at Stalingrad, and there was no way the Germans were coming back from that.
I will bet anyone here that I could get a handgun in england in less than a week.
I'd take you up on it. I don't think you've got any conception of how difficult it is to get a real gun in the UK, and what connections you need.
If guns are easily available, the police will seize a lot of them, right? Yet every time you go looking for the numbers of guns seized by police, you find they add in toy guns, replicas, and anything that looks like a gun, to bump up the numbers.
And if it is possible to get a handgun then why not more handgun crime?
Faulty premise.
Several reasons... the penalties are the biggest but.
Don't you have a death penalty? Sentences in the US are much longer than in the UK.
ake england.. at the turn of the century there were no laws against carrying handguns
Handguns were also rather expensive and rare, but becoming less so.
and there were no murders.
There were 2 policemen shot dead in 1909, 3 in 1910, 1 in 1912, 3 in 1913. 9 in 5 years.
That's with a population about half the current population.
There was 1 policeman shot dead in 1995, 1 in 2003, 1 in 2005. 3 in 11 years.
white on white gun homicide is rare.
Still far more common than all homicide, by all racial groups, in the UK.
Firearms incidents recorded by the police have nearly trebled in eight years.
That's the key phrase "recorded by the police". Years ago the police used to try to catch real criminals, because the government has made that too difficult, they focus on other things now.
"The chief constable of South Wales has issued a warning about giving toy guns to children as Christmas gifts.
Barbara Wilding said the force deployed armed officers to 263 incidents - many involving youngsters with imitation firearms. "
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/south_east/4536138.stmnd, as noted, there are apparently urban areas of Britain that give any US city a run for their money
No, there are one or two areas of Britain with gun crime comparable to America's average, (ie our worst is equal to your average), there is nowhere in Britain equal to America's worst, and our average is considerably lower than the US average.
The murder rates of the U.S. and U.K. are also affected by differences in the way each counts homicides. The FBI asks police to list every homicide as murder, even if the case isn’t subsequently prosecuted or proceeds on a lesser charge, making the U.S. numbers as high as possible. By contrast, the English police "massage down" the homicide statistics, tracking each case through the courts and removing it if it is reduced to a lesser charge or determined to be an accident or self-defense, making the English numbers as low as possible.
The US figures reflect homicides as initially recorded by police. However, they exclude negligent manslaughter.
The UK figures are for homicides as recorded by police, including negligent manslaughter. Records are of course kept as to the outcomes of trials, inquests etc, (as they are in the US) but the published figures are for homicides as initially recorded.
So the only substantial difference in recording between the UK and US is that the US does not count negligent manslaughter, the UK does (and it can be a fair number, too, eg 20 Chinese immigrants who died in Morecombe Bay, 58 Chinese immigrants who suffocated in the back of a lorry being smuggled into the UK, etc.
