One of the great fallacies about gun control put forward in these debates is that restrictive ownership laws are necessary to get violent crime under control.
In the case of the British, that argument is bogus. In the 1920s, when the British government passed its first gun control law, the incidences of firearms murder in London could be counted on one set of hands, with a few fingers left over. That law was passed as a result of government paranoia about the possibility of violence within the labor movement resulting from the growing influence of communist agitators.
The incidences of violent crime remained low throughout the first part of the twentieth century, but began an upward swing in the 1950s. While the majority of this crime was unrelated to firearms ownership, the government used it as an excuse to pass even more restrictive legislation, in blatant violation of the spirit of the 1689 Bill of Rights which guaranteed the right to own arms for protection to the English people.
Perhaps more destructive to public safety was the adoption of an attitude by the government and the courts that victims of violent crime must always back away from a violent confrontation, no matter the circumstances, and of an attitude that it should never be necessary for a citizen to carry a "weapon" of any sort for personal protection. There was no "need" for self defense because "society" would protect the individual.
Note the incongruity of those two attitudes. Citizens must back away from a violent confrontation, but society will protect the citizens threatened by violence. The term "society" in this case refers to the institutions of authority and ones fellow citizens. The individual attacked must rely on his fellow citizens and governmental authorities for his protection. These governmental institutions might have the power to disarm the law-abiding populace, but they do not have the power to protect the individual from personal violence. All too often, one's fellow citizens ignore the individual's plight and walk right on by as he or she is being attacked. As is becoming all too obvious in present day England, "society" only arrives in time to pick up the pieces.
Despite it's proponents trumpetting the benefits of the handgun ban for curbing violence, the truth remains that Britain's homicide and other crime rates are growing steadily, at a time when America's homicide rate is falling dramatically. While thirty years ago America's homicide rate was about seven times that of Britain's, in the year 2000 that gap had narrowed to three times the rate, and has continued to narrow.
The causes of violent crime are never as simple as the mere presence of guns, for much of the increase in violence in modern western nations is due to a change in youth culture, which revels in violence, sex, and defiance of authority. It doesn't help the average citizen understand the pervasiveness of this type of influence for the newspapers and authorities to cite the murder of a child on the city streets of London without relating the fact that the youth was 16 years old and the member of a violent gang who was stabbed to death by rival gang members.
India is the most violent country on the face of the earth, if one counts only the number of murders that take place there each year. More than 36,000 people are murdered there annually. In the absence of large numbers of privately owned firearms, the causes must lie elsewhere; in the pervading culture, or in ethnic strife.
Other cultures with low crime rates, such as Switzerland and Iceland, have widely varying rates of gun ownership. The absence of violent crime must, by process of elimination, lie with other factors; cultural and geographic isolation, or having a small and homogenous population.
But in the modern world, gun control has become the placebo for the treatment of the problem of violent crime. That problem will never be brought under control as long as its real causes are not understood and addressed, and the firearms booger bear is routinely trotted out to explain it.
