You can scoff at England's view on weapons all you want.
I believe this has been discussed before.
http://forums.hitechcreations.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=183162&referrerid=5405 In the US, the urban poor, typically minorities (and not necessarily racial minorities), have frequently turned to crime to catch up the the mainstream wealth in our "classless" society. In the European immigration days, you had the Italian, Irish and even Jewish Gangs that morphed into the Mafia during the previous bloody, violent insanely profitable drug war (Prohabition). Today you have black and hispanic gangs taking part in our newer, bloody and insanely profitable war on drugs. Get away from the inner city gangland fueled thug culture and the threat from murderous violent crime is virtually nil, even in areas where the percentage of legal gun ownership is extremely high. Even in those urban crap holes, if you are not a gangbanger or a wannabe thug you have little real homicide threat.
95 percent of the US firearm crime occurs in just 5 counties in the country. Each of those counties contains a NYC, LA or Chicago, etc.
Lets look at the top 5 cities from both england and the US in terms of population:
England
London 7,172,091
Birmingham 970,892
Liverpool 469,017
Leeds 443,247
Sheffield 439,866
US
New York 8,213,839
Los Angeles 3,845,541
Chicago 2,842,518
Houston 2,076,189
Philadelphia 1,463,281
England is largely a homogeneous, rural society, that for most of it's history has had a relatively unified "common" population and a fairly rigid class structure that was, largely, accepted by all. But that is changing more towards the multicultural population model found in the US, with groups that don't seem to want to just sit back and be Oiks. From the linked thread:
The same disparity can be seen in the UK. While the country as a whole has a low rate of murder, there are areas where the murder rate is high. In Glasgow, Scotland, the murder rate is 5.9 per 100,000 (cite). In London, by contrast, it's 2.1 per 100,000 (cite). In the Manchester metro area, it's 10 per 100,000. And in the Manchester neighborhoods of Moss Side and Longsight, and in the Manchester suburb of Hulme, the murder rate is a monstrous 140 per 100,000 (cite)-- which is considerably worse than Washington, DC, America's most murderous city.
and this
THE number of offences involving firearms in England and Wales has been increasing each year since 1997, according to the Home Office.
Firearms incidents recorded by the police have nearly trebled in eight years.
Provisional figures released last month showed that firearms offences had increased by 5 per cent on last year, to a total of 11,160. There were 4,903 such offences in 1997.
The possession of handguns was banned in Britain that year after the Dunblane massacre. Yet the illegal ownership of handguns is believed to be higher than it has ever been, with nearly 300,000 illegal guns estimated to be in circulation.
The increase in gun crime is linked to gang activity and the illegal drugs trade.
But Chris Fox, the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, said: “This year has seen a fall in the number of fatalities from 70 to 60, with the use of shotguns down by 13 per cent and the use of handguns down by 8 per cent.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/articl...1878913,00.html
