UK has higher violent crime rate than USA?

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UK's murder rate and gun crime rate may still be lower than the US rates, but it is in spite of gun control, not because of it. Violent crime against the person overall is higher in UK than in the US according to claims by the UN (hardly a tool of the NRA). And US murder and violent crime are trending down despite or because of relaxing restrictions on guns and promotion of self defense as a right.
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Absolutely correct, it's to do with the country, nothing to do with the gun laws, they have done nothing to stop gun crime.
 
Culture has more to do with crime statistics than the avalability of tools.

Take Japan for example. Gun control advocates like to point out that Japan has a very low murder rate because no one has a gun. Japan also has a very low rate of rape but it is not because the men there are not "armed", it is because of the culture.
 
"Absolutely correct, it's to do with the country, nothing to do with the gun laws, they have done nothing to stop gun crime"

Correct. Gun crime skyrocketed well after the ban. Your average Eastern European wholesale heroin trafficker really doesn't care much about quaint little 'gun laws'. If you don't care about little things like the law, finding firearms in the UK is very easy indeed.

In North London there has been a rolling turf war between Turks and Albanians to control the wholesale heroin trade. They frequently use fully automatic military hardware they ship over with the drugs. And the cops? They stay out of the way and watch the camera footage after the fact. Can you blame them?
 
Tottenham locals and a cop I knew in Totenham who said they called out S019 5 times a day some days. :eek:
 
With respect mate, people aint shooting full auto anything in Tottenham. Not saying there isnt crime, not saying there isnt shootings either.

But a lot of handguns are converted blank firers, the kids pay as much for 6 bullets as for the gun :eek:
 
Guns aren't required for violent crime, although the crooks in England who want guns don't seem to have any problem getting them. The level of violent crime in England and other "gun free zones" designed to keep everyone safe, are usually higher than in places where more people have guns. Remember an armed society is a polite society according to Heinlein, and he was more right than wrong.
 
I personally think that if say, only even one if fifty people in the UK had firearms for defense against crime, the rates would be far lower.
 
As far as the last point of the quote I used, yes, gun crime is rising here, but I dont think it's because hand guns were banned. It's just because there is more crime, more immigrants, more gangs etc etc.
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throdgrain, I think you're not taking this line of thinking far enough. Yes, culture does have alot to do with it, but if you're a criminal looking for a victim which is a more appealing victim to you: the victim that might pull a gun on you or the victim that has no readily avaliable means of lethal force? If I were planning to mug someone, it'd be the person without the gun.

In the UK where gun ownership is virtually non-existent, criminals have the pick of the litter. They can do as they please without much fear of loss of limb or life. In the US, there are nearly 100 million privately owned handguns. Assuming that one person would own two to three handguns, that means there are at least 33-50 million people in the US who have a handgun to carry for personal defense in a nation of 350 million that has just as many problems with illegal immigrant violence, gang violence, and more hot weather (which is statistically proven to increase the rate of violent crime) here in the US than there is in the UK.

When you're a criminal looking at mugging someone and the odds are 1:7 to 1:10 on catching that guy packing an FNX-40, you start to reconsider your options. You begin looking at gun free areas, taking advantage of the night hours, and being stealthy in your execution of the crime.

The US also still has very "Old West" roots in most of its interior, the Mid-West we call it. I grew up in western Missouri in a town of 1000. When I was a kid, I can remember the city Police & County Sheriff carrying their personal guns in the car which generally consisted of 38 revolvers, Model 97 Winchesters, and several lever action Marlin & Winchester rifles in a town that looked unchanged minus modern infrastructure since 1870. It was a very Old West town for sure. They also had an Old West view of home defense and personal defense in public: shoot to kill. In the 15yrs I lived there, there were only two shootings in the whole county. One was a murder suicide and the other was a son (kid that I had went to school with too) killed his father.

When you consider the number of people who live in the Mid-West and grew up in areas like that along with high rates of handgun ownership, its easy to see why with new "shall-issue" laws that crime rates are trending down. Criminals are just as likely to get shot as the victims they intend to violate.
 
When you're a criminal looking at mugging someone and the odds are 1:7 to 1:10 on catching that guy packing an FNX-40
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Unfortunately the odds are not nearly that high. The states with the highest % of the population licensed to carry concealed only have about 1 in 16 or so adults licensed. Then you have to account for the number of people who are licensed that do not carry at all, or do not carry at/to/from work, or only carry on rare occasion when they are going 'somewhere dangerous', etc. Then you have places off limits, states with low permit numbers, counties in may issue states that basically don't issue, etc. No way in hell that the odds are anywhere near 1/10. Maybe 1/100, and that's in the states with a lo of people carrying.

PS: Your state (my former state) of IN is in the top 3 for % of the population licensed. Most don't have carry laws half as good as IN.

Also, if you are worried about your victim carrying you can watch them for signs and tells or you can go after a group that is far less statistically likely to be carrying...young people, minorities, esp blacks, women, etc don't seem to get licensed at nearly the average rate
 
Well, its kinda hard to get a state by state or city by city breakdown out of NRA-ILA (all I could find on a quick search http://www.nraila.org/Issues/FactSheets/Read.aspx?id=206&issue=007). But, the point is, you don't know who will or won't be able to pull a handgun on you if you try to rob them and the chances of someone pulling a handgun on you as a victim trying to defend themselves in the US are far higher than they are in the UK.
 
Owen Sparks mentioned:

Take Japan for example. Gun control advocates like to point out that Japan has a very low murder rate because no one has a gun. Japan also has a very low rate of rape but it is not because the men there are not "armed", it is because of the culture.
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David Kopel, in a paper entitled "Japanese Gun Control" pointed this out:

(Forgive the word-wrapping problem.)

VII. Suicide
The Japanese experience does not seem to support the hypothesis than fewer guns means fewer
suicides. While the Japanese gun suicide rate is one-fiftieth of America's, the overall suicide rate is
nearly twice as high as America's. Teenage suicide is 30 per cent more frequent in Japan than
America. Every day in Japan, two Japanese under 20 years old kill themselves.
Japan also suffers from double or multiple suicides, shinju. Parents bent on suicide take their
children with them, at the rate of one per day, in oyako-shinju. In fact, 17 per cent of all Japanese
officially defined as homicide victims are children killed by suicidal parents. One reason that the
official Japanese homicide rate is so low is that if a Japanese woman slits her children's throats and then kills herself, police statistics sometimes record it as a family suicide, rather than a sensational murder. Thus, Japan's tight family structures, which keep the overall crime rate low, are not unalloyed blessings.

Copyright © 1993 Asia Pacific Law Review, City Polytechnic of Hong Kong; David B. Kopel. Originally published as 2 ASIA
PAC. L. REV. 26-52 (1993). Permission for WWW use at this cite generously granted by the author.

(Boldfacing mine.)
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This is on page 12 of 23 in the PDF file located at:

http://www.constitution.org/2ll/2ndschol/64kjgc.pdf

In addition, I am told, but cannot verify at this point, that many suicides in Japan are with the use of pesticides.

Terry, 230RN
 
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Ole Humpback said:
But, the point is, you don't know who will or won't be able to pull a handgun on you if you try to rob them and the chances of someone pulling a handgun on you as a victim trying to defend themselves in the US are far higher than they are in the UK.
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That's isn't necessarily as relevant compared to other cultural factors, especially given the ineffectiveness of the death penalty in deterring crime. You may be overestimating the role that fear of possible negative consequences carries.
 
230RN that Japanese Gun Control paper mad for some very interesting and informative reading. Glad I don't live in that stepfordish type society, just a little to robotic for me
 
Thanks, Spartan Gladiator:

230RN that Japanese Gun Control paper made for some very interesting and informative reading. Glad I don't live in that stepfordish type society, just a little too robotic for me
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David Kopel deserves the credit, of course. He is one of the [STRIKE]unsung[/STRIKE] little-sung heroes of the RKBA movement, since his work is largely legal-technical as opposed to -shall we say --rantish. You will note his generous permission to cite in that selection. (I must apologize for deleting the reference numbers in that quotation for the sake of readability. There were 134 references in that paper!)

He's contributed detailed and well-researched "friend of the court" briefs to just about every major RKBA court case and has published extensively on the Second Amendment in the legal journals.

A search on his name will amaze you. I do not know him, have never met him, I'm not a member of the Independence Institute, and although this post sounds like a "puff piece," it is simply because I believe in giving credit where credit is due --in other words, "singing" where "singing" is deserved.

Terry, 230RN
 
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Home Office Research Study 298 "Gun crime: the market in and use of illegal firearms", Dec 2006

The study included prison interviews with 80 gun offenders.

...One individual, a drug dealer, reported having been arrested in possession of seven firearms, including a submachine gun, a MAC-10 submachine pistol.... another offender referred to ‘imitation Uzis’ being illegally converted in large numbers by a father and son team.... five offenders had been caught with automatic weapons, in all cases related to violent conflict. These were a Sterling submachine gun, two Uzi submachine guns, and two MAC-10 and one MAC-11 submachine pistols.... ...one offender who had been caught with a MAC-10 claimed that he was locked into an arms race with his adversaries who also had MAC-10s... ...The costs mentioned for automatic weapons included £4,000 for a Sterling submachine gun, £2,500 for an unidentified ‘machine gun’, £800 to £2,000 for a MAC-10, £950 to £2,000 for an Uzi and £3,000 for a MAC-11....
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JohnBT mate, that second one is a replica :)

Thats the classic Daily Fail I was on about earlier, they do a whole piece about the story, say it's a replica in one sentance, then carry on as if it wasnt, regardless.
 
How about the rest of the links on the google search I did? Are they all replicas? I don't think so. Of course I didn't read all 18,000,000 hits on my "london machine gun" google search.

Here's a good one. A 9mm Agram sub-machine gun, made in Croatia, was used in broad daylight and a 16-year-old girl was killed in a pizza shop.

http://londoniscool.com/mad-men-on-the-streets-of-london-with-machine-guns

It was the 7th time the gun had been used that they know about. The two perps got 32 years.
 
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