London Teenager Dies

It is from the British government. You can see a report on it here. Essentially, the homicide rate in Britain has been creeping up for 50 years, despite increasingly strict gun laws. But don't worry, I'm sure you can find a way to rationalize that in your head.

They are a failed attempt according the above data, and, worse, they strip individuals of their inherent right to defend themselves, making them entirely dependent on the state for their protection.

The rest of your post is just anecdotes. How many times do I have to say that the US crime rate has ALWAYS been higher than the UK crime rate, before and after the UK's gun laws? It ALWAYS was. There are many factors why that might be so, but a 1997 gun law is NOT one of them. It cannot be one of them because the UK's crime rate was lower in 1858 too, when any child in Britain could buy a gun at the local store.

 

Then how come the homicide rate in Britain has gone up over the past 50 years, even as the gun laws have become ever more strict?

It's not "the people's" place to decide; it's the place of each individual person to decide for himself. You have no more right to take your neighbor's gun than you have to take his more-dangerous car or any of his other property.

Even if just a single person in all of Britain wanted a gun, it would be his right as a sovereign individual to have it.

So you're saying it was the British peoples' decision to construct the most oppressive surveillance state in the Western world and to hand ever more of your sovereignty over to an remote elite in Brussels? If so, I guess British people are just really, really stupid and I feel sorry for the small minority of Britons who actually want individual liberty and privacy, not just rule of the majority.

 

But it doesn't keep the murder numbers down, as proven by the fact that the murder rates stay the same--or even go up--after strict gun laws are imposed. What more proof do you need? What stronger proof could there be that gun control does not keep the numbers down than the data showing that it does not keep the numbers down.

Gun control advocates try to skirt this by comparing country to country (cherry picking which countries they compare, of course) to show that some countries with stricter gun laws has fewer murders than countries without them. But this is fallacious because a lower murder rate may be due to any number of factors. A much more reliable indicator is whether or not the murder rate tends to suddenly decline after a jurisdiction passes a stricter gun law. And the fact is that it doesn't.

 

What if the main satellite of Earth turned to green cheese?

 

So your just going to hand wave it away as not possible and therefore irrelevant. Well, that's convenient. Except that democratic majorities frequently vote to strip rights from minorities.

 

There was ALREADY only minuscule gun death problem in the UK - theior gun control laws were intended to KEEP it small.

Passing a law in gun-laden jurisdictions poorly AND slowly because you have your existing stock of guns, AND you have the fact that, in the USA, its a pretty quick trip anywhere to stock up on guns.

But the reality is that gun murder rates depend on guns, and it is simply tougher to kill people with anything else as quickly, conveniently and as effectively. People who have never tried to kill with a knife usually have NO idea that it is quite a bit more difficult to do than with a gun, especially at a distance.

We can look at a city like New York, which has a murder rate of 6.4/100,000, HALF that of places like Dallas and Houston, places where we would imagine the free use of guns for "law-abiding" citizens should have stopped such crimes as murder (self-defense is not listed as "murder")!

 

Which it DIDN'T. Here's the graph again:



If anything, it looks like there's an inverse relationship to the one you are claiming: the tighter the gun laws, the more the murders.

There you go comparing jurisdictions again. That's apples and oranges. Dallas isn't New York, and, in comparing them, there a million different factors other than a gun law to consider. The only thing I'm interested in is the murder rate across time, before the gun laws and after them. Here's another graph for you:




See any evidence there that gun laws reduce murder rates? What about here?:

What about here?:

 

Interesting - I note none of your links are to well respected non-biased websites.

I could easily counter with this website that claims a direct correlation between percentage of households owning guns and deaths
http://www.gun-control-network.org/GF01.htm



So, who is right?

 

All those statistics come from the governments of those respective countries The murder rates across time aren't particularly controversial. Go grab me a graph you like charting the homicide rate in your country. I will bet you it won't correlate well with gun laws.

Again with the country by country comparison?? That's all you have apparently, despite the fact that it's apples and oranges. Nonetheless, the graph you posted, despite looking at many different countries, is particularly flawed because it only takes into account firearm deaths, rather than homicides. It doesn't even factor out firearm deaths that were caused by acts of self-defense. Homicides in general are what concerned with, for what good are gun laws if they don't reduce murders as a whole. Here is a graph looking at that data:



Since you want to know sources, it comes from this blog post. The blog post got the data from this article published in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy . The authors of that article got the gun ownership data from 2003 Small Arms Survey of the the Graduate Institute, an academic institution established by the League of Nations, and the homicide data from the 2001-2004 "Homicide in Canada" reports published by Canada's national statistics agency (which also include data of foreign countries).

 

Because guns are not the only way of killing. They are simply the easiest. The point of gun control is to make it harder to kill (particularly in numbers) than it would be without gun control. The question is not whether murders have gone up (there are many social factors at play in that), but whether they would have gone up further if guns had been more widely available. The only way to establish that is by looking at other societies where there aren't gun controls, and where guns are much more widely available in society (and the USA is an obvious example to use for comparison).

Are there more murders overall by population in the USA? Yes.
Are there more murders overall by population carried out using guns in the USA? Yes.
Are there more mass murder 'massacres' and 'killing sprees' carried out in the USA? Yes.

The figures aren't slightly diffeent, they are massively different. Of course, other social factors can be cited, but the main one is that there aren't, and have never been (before or after gun control laws), the same levels of gun ownership in the two countries. The gun laws in the UK were created to keep gun numbers in society relatively low, not to 'disarm the population', since they largely weren't armed anyway (apart from those using guns for hunting, vermin control and sports, who still have their guns anyway). While they haven't reduced murder overall, they have been undounbtably been pretty successful in keeping the numbers of firearm 'killing sprees' to a minimum, and I think most people would argue that they have also been successful in keeping the rise in murders down below where they could have been (if people readily had easy access to guns) as other social factors have pushed the figures up up.

Of course, the US situation would be different, as I have already said, because the guns are already there. gun control in the US, unlike the UK, would actually be 'disarming the population'.

There we have to go back to ideological basics, on which we clearly don't seem to agree. I believe in freedom for the individual, but only up to a point where his exercise of freedom unduly threatens the freedom of other individuals. Absolute and unrestricted freedom for everyone means nothing but constant conflict in society, as individuals use their freedom to challenge and threaten the freedom of each other, and the inevitable result of that will always be that the 'strongest' (in some way) will group together and sieze power, destrying the freedom of everyone else. I do not believe in that kind of society - freedom should be for everyone, and protected for everyone, not just for those who manage to impose their will over everyone else. It is the role of society to ensure that liberty and justice are protected for all.

It should be his right as a free individual to own a gun if he has a genuine reason for doing so which is not related to threatening the freedom and well being (and lives) of others. With the exception of the hand gun ban (which, as I have said, I do not support), that is the case under UK law. If he wants to use it for sporting, hunting or vermin control, and has no known mental or behavioural issues which would mean a gun in his hands would endanger other people in society (and agrees to keep his guns safely in a secure locked cabinet so that others can't get their hands on them), he can get a gun licence and own guns.

 

The answer is no. You cannot obtain a license to carry any kind of handgun in the UK. http://www.marplerifleandpistolclub.org.uk/general/gunlaw.htm

 

Oppressive for whom? As far as I can tell the total absence of any call for a repeal of the gun laws, no press in support, no parliamentary lobbying would suggest that nobody feels even remotely oppressed. In fact it never crops up in conversation, and nobody gives guns a second thought. Gun crime is still, thankfully, a relatively rare phenomenon in Britain and any shootings will make headline news in the national press. In America I'd suggest they barely merit a mention because they're so frequent.

 

Your conclusion is so idiotic that I can't even bring myself to respond to it adequately

 

Well plenty actually. Guns play a role in plenty of other crimes and not much in crime prevention at least when in the hands of ordinary folk. Then there are the accidents when they go off accidentally which in my mind includes when little Peter gets his hands on one and shoots his annoying big sister even though I know this would count as murder for you. Then there are suicides but maybe you think thats a plus.

 

wait a minute, you guys should be on the same team, i don't get it

 

No, it is as lame as your OP claiming that restrictive laws don't stop murders.

Restrictive laws do prevent crimes, also. There is no way to measure or count them, it is just common sense. If there had been some restrictions, maybe the perpetrator wouldn't have had the gun.

Well, hopefully you or your kids won't end up shooting yourselves. And, the chances that you will ever need it are so miniscule, be sure to keep it safe, away from small children.

 

That is absurd. Democracy is what freed slaves, why would a democracy go backwards and vote something they are against? Maybe your eRepublic would vote to legalize slavery, in fact, some Republicans have suggested getting rid of Civil Rights - that would certainly amount to slavery to many.

 

Just because murder rates go up or down doesn't prove that restrictive laws don't help keep gun deaths down. People can be murdered without the use of a gun. The OP's insinuation that gun law advocates claim that it reduces all types of murders is a wash. I've never heard that claim being made. It may reduce gun caused deaths, because if a nut is kept from acquiring a gun, it most certainly will prevent him from shooting anyone - but, that's not to say that the nut will not turn to using a knife. And, of course, the laws have to be enforced in order to work. We know that many gun sales people ignore the laws.

I don't know where you got that info. I've read where gun deaths have gone down.

In fact, gun crime, like all crime across the US (and the UK, for that matter), is going down - you can see how much in the graph above.

The figures show that California had the highest number of gun murders last year - 1,257, which is 69% of all murders that year and equivalent to 3.37 per 100,000 people in the state. Big as that figure is, it's still down by 8% on the previous year.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/jan/10/gun-crime-us-state

I'm not a gun control advocate. I was just merely pointing out to the OP that her assumption that gun control advocates claim that gun control keeps "all murders" down was a figment of her imagination, just like allowing anyone to carry a gun does not prevent some nut from shooting and killing a bunch of people, like what we witnessed in Arizona this past summer.

 

You suggest that it must be other factors that cause the crime rate to go after when gun laws are tightened, yet the differential between the US and UK crime rate must be due to guns (both before and after the gun laws). This seems like an odd double standard, especially when I just posted a graph showing that gun ownership doesn't correlate well the to the murder rate. Here it is again:



Indeed, if anything there's a reverse correlation, just as there's a correlation between stricter gun laws and rising crime on all these graphs. Here's another one of those:

Everyone has a right to his own person and property and no one else's. That's the point. It's the gun control advocates that are trying to group together, seize power, and impose their will on others. Like I keep saying to deaf ears, every gun law is enforced with guns.

What about self-defense, then? Isn't that also a genuine reason for owning a weapon that doesn't threaten the freedom of others? And why should he be compelled to lock them up? Am I to be compelled to chain down my butcher knives? And who gets to determine "mental and behavioral issues"? My guess is that it is, ironically, the same institution that owns millions of guns and hundreds of nukes.

 

A parent's worse nightmare. Prayers for the family.

On a lighter note:

 

You assert this, but you present no data. I have presented plenty of data showing that, if anything, there is a reverse correlation between gun ownership and crime. Present me data demonstrating your assertion other than the singular data point that crime in the US is higher than in the UK, which was the case before the gun laws and may be due to a thousand factors.

Until then, it's just a unproven dogma the guns increase crime, increase deaths, or anything else, as shown by your telling phrase "in my mind."

 

Stuck on partisanship, eh? Are you suggesting that a majority could never, would never vote to strip rights from the minority? It happens all the time. In fact it happens today, in every democracy in the world. In the United States, for example, hundreds of thousands are locked in cages for the victimless crime of plant ownership. When California allowed for direct democratic vote to partially overturn this horror, the majority voted to keep throwing drug addicts in cages.

Democratic vote is a double-edged sword because the majority can just as easily vote to take away my rights as it can vote to protect them. Two people mugging one person (democracy) is no better than one person mugging two people (oligarchy).

But if all the murderers just take to using knives, so that the total number of murders stays the same, what difference does it make? You're more content if 1000 people a year a murdered with knives rather than guns. Furthermore, the gun rights claim is also that gun ownership helps keep crime down by helping people to defend themselves. The nastiest thing about gun control is not that it's ineffective; it's that it undermines peoples' ability to defend themselves, leaving them sitting ducks, entirely dependent on the highly unreliable state for the protection, the same state that used its guns to take their guns. It thus tends to increase crime, as well as increase the potential for the state to become tyrannical by removing yet another check on its power.

If gun crime is going down in the US, with its widespread gun ownership, that only buttresses the gun rights position. But, again, are you interested in decreasing the murder rate or only in shifting to a different kind of murder?

If they're not making that very claim but only claiming that gun laws cause the murderers to use knives instead, the position is all the more ridiculous.

 

It is like that in every city.

 

I'm surprised you have any cops at all, with a restriction like that.