Crime is certainly going up in London, and I also think the British handgun ban has gone too far.
The old British system was you had to have a licence, which you could get if you belonged to a gun club. With a licence, you could buy just about any handgun, as long as it didn't have a burst or automatic fire mode, ie 1 bullet per pull of trigger was ok.
The new British system, brought in after Dunblane, is it's almost impossible to have a handgun (handguns are now classified along with fully automatic weapons)
However, crime in London has got far more to do with a court case involving a murdered black man than the fairly recent all-out handgun ban.
Stephen Lawrence (the aforementioned black man) was murdered by a group of racists in London. The police bungled the investigation, initially treating it as a fight between rival gangs.
His parents brought a private prosecution, which was thrown out for lack of evidence.
There was then a high profile inquiry/witchhunt into the case, which labelled the Met police "institutionally racist" and caused a lot of trouble, with policemen almost afraid to approach young black men in case they recieve a complaint of harrasment.
The result is, street crime in London has soared.
It's not helped by the goverrnment reducing police numbers.
Sorry I got the murder rate figures wrong, it's 6.4 per 100,000 people in the US, 1.4 in England and Wales.
Northern Ireland is relatively peacefull at the moment (it hasn't had a murder rate as high as Washington in the last 30 years) and Scotland is never that bad, so the UK rate as a whole won't be above 1.5
In other words, around 4.5 times higher in the US.
However, that figure is distorted because of domestic murders, which make up around 70% of all murders in the UK.
The chance of being murdered by a stranger in the UK is less than a tenth that of the US, and as I said, only 38 people were murdered during robberies in the UK in 1998, the last year I have seen figures for. (all robberies etc, not just the chance with a gun)
As regards London, the murder rate there is 2.9 per 100,000 people, compared to New York, which is much safer than it was, at 8.6, and Washington, 49.5