England: Violent Crime

[trigger 0]

Seeing i think you are referring to me..i didn't call all gun owners idiots but i'm calling you one idiot.

.CHOP WOOD COLLECT WATER.

[juanesky 0]

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I think you'll find the poster was making a point that it is now impossible to own either a semi automatic like a Baretta 92fs[whatever that is] or a revolver as far as handguns go,its single shot only for handguns and as far as shotguns go its two shots only here the uk.

Lmao, you have no clue of what you just said there do you? keep the joke and mantra of ignorance coming man...you are definitely a good poster child of gun control lol

"According to some of the conservatives here, it sounds like it's fine to beat your wide - as long as she had it coming." -Billvon

[Skyrad 0]

Doh! Think I miss read

When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

[juanesky 0]

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Seeing i think you are referring to me..i didn't call all gun owners idiots but i'm calling you one idiot.

And that is your brilliant way of defending your anti-gun stand based on fear, rather to base your point on knowledge and actual facts?

Edited to add: You can keep insulting me all you want, I hardly think Billvon will mind at all if you don't follow the rules with me...

"According to some of the conservatives here, it sounds like it's fine to beat your wide - as long as she had it coming." -Billvon

[normiss 622]

snap!
I hate when they get themselves banned when they are just starting to show minimal signs of entertainment!

[trigger 0]

Youll love this,i've found a new cause to champion
http://www.rense.com/general62/gns.htm">
damn i screwed up the clicky thing.

.CHOP WOOD COLLECT WATER.

[Stumpy 256]

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Don't you love it how many britts cry when this happens, but have no trouble, and I mean zero issue trying mock the US at every chance they have, using the "we are culturaly superior card"

Hmmm. Personally you will notice i don't have any problems with the gun laws (or lack of) in the states. If i lived there i would probably own one myself. In the UK however its different. We don't want them or need them.
If there was a want and/ or a need, enough people would write to their MP's/ start stories in the media etc etc etc and it would become an issue in the public eye. right now it really isn't.
As for the culturally superior card?? You said it, not me.

Never try to eat more than you can lift

[christelsabine 1]

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.....

trying mock the US at every chance they have, using the "we are culturaly superior card"

Ooopsy? When and where?? (Low self-esteem comes to mind, sorry: Is that yours, Juanesky ?)

And now let's talk a bit about the cultural superior card. Would love to hear your personal opinion on that first.

dudeist skydiver # 3105

[wmw999 2,121]

I thought I'd come add some fuel to the fire, so that people can call me both stupid and smart (where else but SC can that happen )

Anyway, I did some independent (and VERY high-level) looking around.

Notes:
1. correlation does not mean causation. But it often does indicate that something is going on, and should be investigated
2. Figures (all 2005/2006) are from DOJ for USA, the Home Office Statistical Bulletin for the UK, and the Scottish Executive for Scotland. Note that the UK figures include imitation guns in their numbers. I don't know about the US numbers.
3. The definition of "gun crime" in each that I can tell seems to be reasonably consistent.
4. Source for populations is Wikipedia. Not the best, but the fastest, and certainly good enough for this comparison.
5. One additional note is that while the DOJ number is the one shown for "gun crime," there is another number for nonfatal gun crimes that's higher. But I'd rather go with the more conservative number.

Country                 #incidents      population      rate

US                         368,178      300,000,000      .12%

England & Wales             22,896       53,000,000      .04% 

Scotland                     1,068        5,100,000      .02%

There are a lot more notes that can be made on the data. But no one would read them. Statistics are only as good as the data and assumptions underlying them. Which is why we can disagree.

But based on this data, I'd have to say that in 2005, the gun crime rate was lower in Great Britain.

Wendy W.

There is nothing more dangerous than breaking a basic safety rule and getting away with it. It removes fear of the consequences and builds false confidence. (tbrown)

[kallend 1,623]

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But based on this data, I'd have to say that in 2005, the gun crime rate was lower in Great Britain.

Wendy W.

Ah - but if you divide by the population^2 then the US looks better.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[normiss 622]

now WHY do you have to go and take all the fun out of winding up the Brits???
-oh- and those that want to insult as well...


geez...all high and mighty and shit....

[birdlike 0]

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I think you'll find the poster was making a point that it is now impossible to own either a semi automatic like a Baretta 92fs[whatever that is] or a revolver as far as handguns go,its single shot only for handguns and as far as shotguns go its two shots only here the uk.

Exactly. I used the Beretta 92FS because it's an EXTREMELY popular handgun. And being a handgun, I knew that the person to whom I responded didn't have a chance in hell of acquiring one--LEGALLY--in the U.K. as a civilian. (Probably not real easy to get one as a cop, either, but that's neither here nor there in this discussion.)

People want to chirp in about how "guns aren't illegal" because someone could still jump through a few thousand legal hoops (including opening his home up to police inspection) just to own a single shot rifle or double-barreled small-gauge shotgun. That just proves my point, though: if your so-called "right" to obtain guns is that strictured, it's just about nonexistent, for all intents and purposes.

And even if you could buy that Beretta, you'd be required to keep it locked in a bolted-down safe, unloaded, with ammo locked in a different safe; and if you did happen to have time to get all that stuff together to use the gun to repel a home invasion robbery/assault/rape/whatever, you'd face charges, and cops demanding to know why you didn't just run out the back door of your own home screaming into the phone for help.

Spirits fly on dangerous missions
Imaginations on fire

[rushmc 18]

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I countered with an invitation to look up how many deaths or injuries were prevented by the use of a weapon

Sure.. this I understand... but the poster I replied to had stated that a gun ban does not change the crime figures + or - .... and wanted a different reason for not having guns.... your comparison goes back to the crime/incident prevention figures

I made a simple (but not quite acurate) point, to make a point. Most data indicates, but does not directly confim, that removing arms from a population coresponds with an increase in violent crime. Read John Lott if you are curious to this theory

It appears I may have mis-spoke about the stats.
From the Harvard Law Bullletin


Lawyers, Guns and Money
This time, the Supreme Court may have to decide what the Second Amendment means. But how much will really change?
By Elaine McArdle

Michelle Thompson “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
U.S. Constitution, Amendment II

Earlier this year, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit struck down the District of Columbia’s stringent gun-control regulations, ruling squarely that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms.

In the cultural and legal battle over gun control, the decision was the proverbial shot heard ’round the world.

The ruling—in Parker v. District of Columbia—marked the first time a gun law has been found unconstitutional based on the Second Amendment, and it set up a direct conflict among the circuits. Nine federal appeals courts around the nation have adopted the view that the amendment guarantees only the collective right of organized state militias to bear arms, not an individual’s right. (A 5th Circuit panel found that individuals have gun rights but upheld the regulation in question, so both sides claim that ruling as a victory.)

In May, when the full D.C. Circuit Court refused to grant a rehearing en banc, the stage seemed set for a showdown in the Supreme Court, which has thus far managed to dodge the question of whether the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to bear arms.

According to HLS Professor Mark Tushnet, author of “Out of Range: Why the Constitution Can’t End the Battle Over Guns” (Oxford University Press, 2007), earlier petitions were cluttered by issues that allowed the Court to decline review or avoid the Second Amendment question. But Parker “is more straightforward,” Tushnet says, and the Court will have a tougher time avoiding the issue.

If Parker is the long-awaited “clean” case, one reason may be that proponents of the individual rights-view of the Second Amendment—including the National Rifle Association, which filed an amicus brief in the case—have learned from earlier defeats, and crafted strategies to maximize the chances of Supreme Court review. For one thing, it is a civil case, not a criminal one, and the six plaintiffs, in the words of NRA President Sandra Froman ’74, are “ordinary people whose lives are impacted by not having the right to protect themselves.” They include a woman who lives in a high-crime area and has been threatened by drug dealers, a gay man assaulted because of his sexual orientation and a special police officer for the Federal Judicial Center.

In addition, the laws challenged in Parker are among the most stringent in the nation: Handguns cannot be registered in the district; those registered before a 1976 ban cannot be carried from one room to another without a license; and any firearm in a home must be kept unloaded and either locked or disassembled.

Also important, says Tushnet, is the fact that because Parker emanates from the District of Columbia, where only federal law applies, it doesn’t involve the overlaying question of whether the Second Amendment applies to a state by way of the 14th Amendment—a question that clouded an earlier case involving one city’s complete ban on handgun possession. He adds that a number of states urged the Court not to take that case, and the solicitor general did the same in another one.

Pro-gun activists like Froman are confident that the Court will hear an appeal by the district in Parker, and they say that they couldn’t have gotten this far without help from an unlikely quarter: liberal law professors. In the past 20 years, several prominent legal scholars known for liberal views, including Professor Laurence Tribe ’66, have come to believe that the Second Amendment supports the individual-rights view. In the 2000 edition of his treatise “American Constitutional Law,” Tribe broke from the 1978 and 1988 editions by endorsing that view. Other liberal professors, including Akhil Reed Amar at Yale Law School and Sanford Levinson at the University of Texas at Austin, agree.

“My conclusion came as something of a surprise to me, and an unwelcome surprise,” Tribe said in a recent New York Times interview. “I have always supported as a matter of policy very comprehensive gun control.”

Froman says the fact that Tribe and others reversed their interpretation in recent years has had enormous influence. Indeed, the majority opinion in Parker, written by Judge Laurence H. Silberman ’61, referred specifically to Tribe’s revised conclusion.

The 27 words of the Second Amendment may be the most hotly contested in the Constitution. Gun-control advocates and opponents read its tortured syntax entirely differently. Each side resorts to what Tushnet calls “a simplified version of constitutional analysis” to support its viewpoint, looking solely at the wording of the amendment and what the language meant in 1791 rather than at whether society has changed in the meantime and what judicial precedents offer guidance. In “virtually no other area in constitutional law” is analysis done that way, he says, although he’s not sure why.

“There’s very little guidance on what the actual meaning of the Second Amendment is,” says Froman, a Tucson lawyer who was interviewed by the Bulletin when she returned to HLS in early April to speak on a panel. “The courts have talked a lot about the Second Amendment but have always been nibbling around the periphery. There’s never really been ‘Let’s explain and elaborate on what it means.’”

For Anthony A. Williams ’87, who served as mayor of the District of Columbia from 1999 until earlier this year and vigorously enforced the district’s gun laws during his tenure, the meaning of the amendment is unambiguous, no matter what interpretive theory is used. “Let’s take [Justice Antonin] Scalia’s approach,” he says. “I think the framers’ intent was to see to it that [through] militias, states as sovereign entities had a right to arm themselves. To me, it’s not about individuals—it’s about groups.”

But Froman firmly reaches the opposite conclusion: “A lot of people say that the prefatory clause of the Second Amendment—the words ‘A well regulated militia …’— limits the active clause pertaining to bearing arms. They want to say that means you can only exercise the right to keep and bear arms as part of a militia, meaning as part of the National Guard, forgetting that the National Guard didn’t exist then.”

“Remember,” Froman adds, “the Second Amendment guarantees a right—it does not confer a right. It’s God-given. It’s natural. The right of self-survival is a basic instinct of any organism.” The Constitution “acknowledges that.”

Tushnet believes that if the Court grants certiorari, it will ultimately overturn the decision of the D.C. panel. “My gut feeling is that there are not five votes to say the individual-rights position is correct,” he says. “[Justice Anthony] Kennedy comes from a segment of the Republican Party that is not rabidly pro-gun rights and indeed probably is sympathetic to hunters but not terribly sympathetic to handgun owners. Then the standard liberals will probably say ‘collective rights.’”

But Tribe is less confident of that prediction. Should the case reach the Supreme Court, he told The New York Times, “there’s a really quite decent chance that it will be affirmed.”

If that happens, Tushnet says, it is unlikely to end all gun regulation, because the Court would probably tailor its decision narrowly to reach consensus. The three-judge panel in Parker struck down only D.C.’s tight laws. “Once you recognize [gun ownership] as an individual right, then the work shifts to figuring out what type of regulation is permissible,” he says.

Tushnet says the gun-control debate is an intractable one in which neither side will move, and a constitutional “answer” from the Supreme Court will be something of a nonstarter. Like the arguments over abortion and stem-cell research, he says, the argument over guns is in truth another battle in the culture wars and cannot be solved by constitutional analysis because neither side can be persuaded.

No gun-control strategy with any chance of surviving the political process would have a significant effect on overall gun violence or crime, Tushnet believes. To say so publicly would be the boldest and most honest stand that a major politician or candidate could take, he adds.

The tragic shootings on the campus of Virginia Tech seem to have changed no one’s position: “People responded to it in exactly the way you would expect,” Tushnet says. Supporters of gun control sought stricter laws and better enforcement, and the NRA advocated that teachers and others be armed to protect themselves.

Activists on both sides bear out that observation. Williams believes that the district’s gun laws were lowering the human and financial costs of gun-related violence. “When I started as mayor, we had well over 200 homicides a year,” he says. “We brought that down to below 160, so we made serious inroads in reducing violent crime; but still, in many neighborhoods, the situation is horrific.”

Says Froman: “Statistically, the parts of the country with the greatest number of firearms have the lowest rates of violent crime with guns. It’s easy to understand why. Let’s say there were 30 people in this room, and this was a state that allowed people to carry concealed weapons for self-defense, and a criminal walked in. At least half the people in the room would draw down on the criminal. That would be the end of it.”

Froman had nothing to do with guns until, some 25 years ago, someone tried to break into her Los Angeles home. “I was terrified,” she says. “It was a real epiphany for me, for someone who had never been a victim of crime, who never thought I needed to protect myself.” The next day, she walked into a gun shop to purchase a weapon. She has been a staunch gun advocate ever since.

Does Froman ever worry about repercussions, given that she’s at the center of such a heated issue? “I live in a very rural area, at the end of a long driveway,” she says. “People ask me, ‘Don’t you get scared?’ I say, ‘Are you kidding? I have a clear shot all the way to the road.’”

See also:
Armed with the facts



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http://www.law.harvard.edu/alumni/bulletin/2007/summer/feature_3.php

"America will never be destroyed from the outside,
if we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

[Kennedy 0]

Wendy, once again I have to wonder why people are all THAT worried about what tool/weapon was used in an assault, robbery, murder, etc. Would someone rather be robbed with a knife than a gun? Does being killed by a hammer make you any less dead? And while you're comparing gun crime numbers across borders, it would stand to reason that availability of guns will have some influence on the number of gun crimes, but it is important to compare the overall number of violent crimes across borders as well. That tends to be a far more relevant number when discussing the prevalence and probability of crime.

And while we're talking about the illegal ways guns are used in the USA, I sometimes find it interesting to include how guns are used legally here in the states. That would include generating billions to travel and transportation industries in revenue due to travelling for hunting, competition, and other events, as well as the money spent on guns and ammo, and accessories, but I have to admit my favorite is mentioning just how many times guns are used to stop a crime.*

* - that would be somewhere between eight hundred thousand and 3.6 million times every year, with the best scientific study coming up with 2.14 million per year.

read before flaming
http://www.gunsandcrime.org/dgufreq.html
http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html
http://www.guncite.com/kleckandgertztable1.html
http://www.saf.org/journal/11Kleck.pdf

witty subliminal message
Guard your honor, let your reputation fall where it will, and outlast the bastards.
1*

[JohnRich 4]

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Original news story:

An extra two million violent crimes a year are committed in Britain than previously thought because of a bizarre distortion in the Government's flagship crime figures, it was claimed yesterday.

The poll caps the number of times a victim can be targeted by an offender at five incidents a year...

And then along comes this new story:

A corner shop run by an Asian couple has been attacked 200 times in the past decade by thieves and robbers using guns, knives and CS spray...

"It is outrageous but sadly not surprising that small businesses are failing to report nearly half of crimes..."

Source: Telegraph

Let's see, they've been attacked 200 times in 10 years, so that's 20 times per year on average. But the Crime Survey caps crime reports from victims at a maximum of five per year. So that's 15 crimes per year going unreported in the British Crime Survey, just from this one shop.

Yeah, that makes for accurate statistical reporting...

I'm sorry Mr. and Mrs. Kumar, but after that 5th attack, you really weren't attacked any further. You were not spit upon, not sprayed with CS gas, not threatened with a sword, and your nose was not broken. Got that? Those don't count! So let's not hear any more police reports from you.