Would this be "US" if we were to ban guns?

[schnellfeuer]

I think I'd hold on to mine and see what happened awhile first.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=13149819&method=full&siteid=50143

[Allah Akbar]

1. The US is already like that WITH guns

Try 100 times worse without.

[jody]

2. The article has to be wrong, Scary Brady and Diane Feinstein have

repeatedly told us how civilized society is in England. We've been told that UK citizens don't need arms to protect themselves because the police will do that job.

Could it be that Scary and Diane are wrong?

I wonder how many victims cited in the article would win a suit against law enforcement for dereliction of duty?

Those who sweat and toil for their daily bread are constantly threatened by criminals on one side who ignore the law to steal, and corporations on the other side that make the laws authorizing their crimes.

[Township75]

3. Definetly. Did you see this from the article?

They offered some examples of crime in England after the gun ban:

BOYFRIEND KILLED BY GUNMAN IN CLUB

Laverne Shirfield, 31, of London

MY partner, Norman Lindsey, died in a nightclub trying to save others. A man had pulled out a gun and was about to shoot - Norman stepped in to stop him.

The police never contacted me and, even though I'm the mother of his children, I learned of it the next day from the TV. Since then, it has been up to me to phone the police to check on any progress.

At the start, there was a whole team working on it but three or four years ago I heard just one guy was dealing with it - which doesn't seem right at all.

In England there are no handguns, and there is no right to carry, and this still happens?

Everyone knows that when law abiding citizens are disarmed, so are the criminals, and then we can all sing and dance and run through flower beds in the summer time thanks to the safe utopia offered only through gun conficscation..err, gun control.

Hey, if Rosie O'Donnell supports it, it has to be right.

[iverglas]

15. more amazement

"In England there are no handguns, and there is no right
to carry, and this still happens?"

One wonders where some people get their ... information. "In England there are no handguns, ..." indeed. Oh dear, was I mistaking sarcasm for a statement of fact? I guess the reason for that would be that I don't see any sarcasm. Since nobody ever said that in England there were no handguns.

What doesn't pass for humour in some quarters ...

In the US there is no "right" to shoplift ... and yet dang, shoplifting still happens.

It truly is amazing, isn't it?

.

[solinvictus]

4. UK

I would have stashed my guns and taken chances. 25% of citizens are victims? That is probably a statistic that approaches Third World crime rates.

[MrBenchley]

5. I see the gun nuts are still lying about Britain

As we've seen before, crime is high FOR Britain...it's almost reached the level seen in Alabama.

[Walter_Bowman]

6. Keep lying...

...you're more likely to get robbed in London than in Moscow, for f___sake!

[MrBenchley]

7. Peddle it to someone dumb enough to buy it (n/t)

[MrBenchley]

8. For the record

In Britain, an estimated 4,384 burglaries and robberies and 2,694 violent crimes in 2002.

http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/crimeew0203.html

In Alabama, about 46,000 burglaries and robberies and 21,000 violent crimes in 2000.

http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/alcrime.htm

More than ten times as many people in Great Britain than there are in Alabama, by the way...

http://elt.britcoun.org.pl/s_fco.htm

[demsrule4life]

9. I like the disaster center page

Just wished they broke them down by county. I would guess the 50% of those crimes are in the Birmingham and Mobile areas.

[MrBenchley]

10. Wow

Crimes where there actually ARE people....who'd a thunk it?

Who was the "enthusiast" on here in another thread who opined that if only we could eliminate all the opinions of city dwellers (who make up the vast majority of Americans) we could find out "what most Americans thought about guns?"

[iverglas]

14. imagine

Alabama has big cities.

... Unlike Great Britain. Lordy, lordy.

Hell, England even has a Birmingham. Population 1,013,431, I see (ranking third in size behind London and Glasgow.) Population of Birmingham, Alabama? 242,820 (metropolitan area population 849,194) in the 2000 census (largest city in Alabama).

In 1994, I was in London with my mother. We wanted to go visit the house where her father (who immigrated to Canada as a child) was born. I asked the concièrge at the hotel for directions, since our London A-Z didn't quite go far enough ... into the dreaded East End.

When he heard where we were going, he got very solicitous and advised us that if we insisted on going there, we should be careful to keep our eyes open.

We took the tube eastward, walked a couple of blocks down a pleasant High Road (main street) full of local small businesses and shoppers, and found the house, one of a row of late 19th century houses just like thousands of other rows all over London and everywhere else in the country. We knocked on the door, explained our mission to the householder -- taking pictures of his house because my grandfather was born there (in the hope of a glimpse inside) -- and he exclaimed Your father was born here! You must come in for tea!

We did, and sat with the extended Sri Lankan family now living in the house while the grandmother sewed and the daughter ironed, and had tea and orange juice. We still exchange christmas cards.

We then wandered those sunny, calm East End streets for blocks, visiting the shops and library and churchyard and passing by and chatting with all sorts of people. Those are the operative words, of course -- all sorts. Immigrants; lots of them.

When we checked out, I did get the concièrge to admit that this is what his advice was based on -- all those immigrants -- and I did call him a racist. And I explained that his East End looked a whole lot less threatening to me than my own Canadian urban neighbourhood (in a city of under a million) most of the time. (Perhaps you can imagine how threatening I actually find my neighbourhood, even though it's one of the city's "bad" ones.)

We even spent a few nights in the dreaded North London -- Stoke-Newington itself -- visiting a Euro-prominent solicitor (lawyer) old friend of mine who lived there. And a late night and early morning in an NHS hospital there, the place where you find all the riff-raff of society (since those who can afford it go elsewhere, and had been taking unkindly for some time to paying the costs for medical care for the riff-raff) -- yup, immigrants. Several of them donated change when I didn't have any, so that I could buy cold pop from the vending machine, since the hospital ER had no ice to put on my mother's injured head. She had been attacked ... by one of those bloody uneven paving stones that litter the urban landscape and trip unsuspecting tourists.

Now ... when I spent a week in Chicago in 1984, I spent one evening of it standing on the blood-soaked lawn outside my friend's apartment waiting for the police and ambulance to arrive for the man lying there whose head had been bashed in by a baseball bat in an apparent drug-feud related assault. And the next night, on the way home from a party I'd left early, my Chicagoan friend was mugged.

Ah, Canadians abroad. We have such fun.

But the Brits, they really do have such a low crime rate when compared to the US.

And who knows, if the US got out of the selling firearms abroad without regard to who is buying them business, the Brits might even have a lower crime rate.

Anyhow, I'm just so entertained when people with no clue presume to say things about things they have no clue about.

.

(mistaken word fixed)

[Walter_Bowman]

11. Read the UN report, would you? (ny)

--

[MrBenchley]

12. Would that be where the corrupt gun industrry

got pResident Turd to torpedo the agreement to cut down the trade in small arms?

[Walter_Bowman]

13. No, that's where the UN criminologist wrote

about the "efficiency" of attempts to cut down on legal SALW trading in the UK. :-)

[Spoonman]

16. "For the REAL record"

I decided to verify your numbers, and found you were a "little off" in your post.

In Britain, an estimated 4,384 burglaries and robberies and 2,694 violent crimes in 2002.

http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs2/hosb703.pdf

2002/2003 Edition based on numbers Sept 2001 - Sept 2002

pg. 52
"The number of domestic burglaries in England and Wales was estimated by the BCS to be 974,00 of which 561,000 were burglaries with entry, and 412,00 were attempts."

pg.65
The actual number of burglaries recorded by police was 434,169

Pg. 75
The British Crime Survey (BCS) estimated there were 2,781,00 violent incidents experience by adults in England and Wales, based on incidents reported to the survey


There were 991,800 violent crimes (i.e. violence against a person, sexual offences and robberies) recorded by police


Here are some other quotes, let's all see if we can guess where they came from.

Gee, do you think John Lott might be totally full of crap?

Lott's a pseudoscientist paid by the gun industry to lie. As one real scientist said, "He doesn't prove there are more guns, he lies about there being less crime.....'

there are the outright lies promulgated by the RKBA crowd....

What a pantload

Do you think an honest industry would have to hire a nutcase like John Lott to peddle phony statistics....

folks who distort and lie, as gun nuts do almost reflexively.

Do shoot off a flare if any gun nut gets near a fact.

that's why the RKBA crowd have to lie.

If you think other people are dumb enough to fall for it, rotsa ruck peddling it.

Not even close to true.

Which sounds better; Little Lott or Mini Lott?

[Walter_Bowman]

17. Neither.

Lott was wrong (if at all) with one survey). Benchley, to use his own words, spins so fast he left the groun long ago.

[MrBenchley]

18. Oops...

Should have read the whole document instead of downloading the excel table....

So tell us, spoon, how much would the crime rate in Britain need to increase to reach the level in tiny Alabama?

"Gee, do you think John Lott might be totally full of crap?
Lott's a pseudoscientist paid by the gun industry to lie. As one real scientist said, "He doesn't prove there are more guns, he lies about there being less crime.....'
there are the outright lies promulgated by the RKBA crowd....
What a pantload
Do you think an honest industry would have to hire a nutcase like John Lott to peddle phony statistics...."
Gee, still trying to peddle Mary Rosh's horsecrap?

[Walter_Bowman]

19. So why is it that

Before the UK had any gun control, they had almost no crime?

You should read some independent crime victimization report, like the one by the Netherlands government.

[iverglas]

20. what *you* should do

would include learning some sociology, economics and history.

Just for starters.

"Before the UK had any gun control, they had almost no crime?"

Man, forgive me for plagiarizing, but what a godawful pantload that one is.

As you may have seen me report above, in 1994 I was warned away from a part of London, England (what the hotel concièrge actually told my mum and me was to keep tight hold of our purses, while in the East End) because of the perceived crime problem there. That warning would have been given pretty much any time in the preceding few decades ... and in the preceding century, I doubt that even I would have wandered off into, oh, Whitechapel. When did "gun control" come to the UK?

Crime rates almost universally parallel socioeconomic conditions. (Perceptions of the incidence of crime are also affected by changes in those conditions. Victimization reports, an informed person might suggest, are affected by perceptions of the incidence of crime. And that is just one tiny reason why self-reporting about anything is not always a reliable indicator of reality.) Unless you can rule out changes in those socioeconomic conditions as significant contributing factors in any increase in crime rates, you should really not be making so much noise.

Of course, before you go claiming that restrictions on legal access to firearms **causes** an increase in crime rates ('zat what you're saying?), you might want to just take a daily dose of common sense for a few weeks, or maybe try offering some rational description of the causal mechanism at work, or even just look in a mirror and try to avoid bursting into spontaneous combustion from the embarrassment of saying such ... silly ... things.

.

[Walter_Bowman]

22. When did "gun control" come to the UK?

1920, IIRC.
And no, the answer to the question: "Have you been a victim of crime?" has nothing to do with "perceptions". Either you have been a victim or you haven't.

Grab a fact on your way out.

[iverglas]

27. oh, no, of course not

"the answer to the question: 'Have you been a victim of crime?'
has nothing to do with 'perceptions'. Either you have been a victim
or you haven't."

Yah sir.

The truthfulness and accuracy and completeness of anyone's statement about anything must always be taken as given. I mean, either he's married or he's not; and if he says he's not, then he's not, right?

No one has EVER lied in response to a survey.

No one has EVER given a less than accurate response out of a desire to skew the survey results.

Heavens to betsy, what a thought!

And no one's desire to skew a survey's results might arise out of a desire to influence public events. No, no one would ever think of claiming to have been a victim of a crime (multiple crimes?) because s/he wanted his/her government to get tough on criminals. Noooo. And no one's desire to do that would ever be affected by the public discourse about crime in his/her society -- by his/her perception of a phenomenon. No again.

And no one would ever look at something that happened and be more likely to perceive him/herself as a "victim of crime" if the prevailing atmosphere were something like "crime rates rising! people not safe in their homes! murder and mayhem everywhere!" Of course not.

"Either you have been a victim or you haven't". Even if it were really quite that simple, it really just isn't determinative of whether you say you have been a victim, is it now?

Oh, never mind. I don't doubt that someone will say it is.

Self-reporting IS NOT a foolproof measurement of anything. Surely even the dimmest might recognize that when there is no way to verify what is reported, any conclusions drawn from it must be very qualified, specifically by any factors that might influence the accuracy of the reports or the reporting itself. Surely.

"When did 'gun control" come to the UK?'
1920, IIRC"

Damn. Here I thought I was being told that increases in reported crime in the last very few years were attributable to it. I must be missing something again.

Perhaps the spare part I'm missing is one of those wing-nut things ...

.

[Walter_Bowman]

36. British crime rate was rising

with almost every major gun law, your point?

[iverglas]

30. a little something for you on "perceptions"

I know, it's just Canadian crap, so you can ignore it. But in your efforts to learn a little sociology and all that, you can always do your own research.

www.sgc.gc.ca/publications/corrections/pdf/FearOfCrime_e.pdf
Google's cached html version

The general finding from opinion surveys conducted in several countries over the past few decades is that most people believe that crime rates are rising, regardless of actual trends.

For example, in 1994, a national survey found that over two-thirds (68%) of Canadians believed that crime rates had increased over the previous five years. In reality, crime statistics in 1994 showed a 5% decline, the third consecutive drop in police-recorded crime.

With respect to violent crime, the contrast between public perception and reality was even more striking. In 1994 the violent crime rate declined by the largest margin since 1962, when the UCR began. Despite this, almost half the polled public thought that there had been a 'great increase' in violent crime and a further 43% believed that there had been a moderate increase.

This perception of increasing crime rates appears to be changing, perhaps in response to the official crime statistics that have been declining now for eight consecutive years.

Hmm, here's an example that might work for you:

www.mnplan.state.mn.us/pdf/cjc-trbl.pdf
Google's cached html version

Although the National Crime Victimization Survey has consistently shown that males have a higher rate of being victims of violent crime than females, the Minnesota Crime Survey found virtually the same rate for males and females -- 10 percent of all respondents.

While females were less likely to be victims of assaults with weapons and property crime, they were more likely to report being hit, beaten, raped, forced into unwanted sex or attacked in some other way.

I shall rhetorically ask whether women in Minnesota really are victimized at such a higher rate than women elsewhere in the US ... or whether there might just be some perception factor, or under/over-reporting factor, at work here ... .

Of course, it's also worth reading that article, and all sorts of others to the same effect, for anyone who actually didn't know, or would like to disregard, how much crime is committed by family members, acquaintances, persons known to the victim, and all that sort of thing. I.e.: a whole lot. And I'm damned if I can figure out how firearms control laws might be seen as contributing to much of that crime.

I sure can see, on the other hand, how that fact -- that a whopping great chunk of the crimes that people are victims of are committed by people known to them, even intimately connected with them, coupled with social attitudes about what constitutes "crime" and what behaviours should be publicly reported as "crimes", might very well affect people's perception of their victimization status, and reporting of their victimization status on surveys.

.

(html fixed)

[Walter_Bowman]

38. I generally agree, except ONE point

the acquaintance/relative statistics are nonsense, as they include murders between criminals (drug-related, generally).

[iverglas]

39. you need to learn to use a modicum of moderation

"the acquaintance/relative statistics are nonsense,
as they include murders between criminals (drug-related, generally)."

Do you imagine that this "inclusion" negates the instances in which the crimes (these figures were NOT only for murders) are committed by spouse against spouse, child against parent, etc. etc.?

Really. The figures are not "nonsense". And if you'd bothered to look at them, you'd have seen that they were broken down into family, "person known to", and so on.

And, in my submission, the difference between victimization rates reported by women in Minnesota and victimization rates reported by women US-wide -- look at the types of crimes in issue -- are very probably attributed to differences in perception of the nature of the incident and differences in the choice about whether to report the incident as a "crime" in a victimization survey.

Like I said, though, feel free to do your own research. Preferably before speaking, if what you're going to say is as meaningless, and exhibits such ignorance even of what was put before your eyes, as this was and did.

.

[Spoonman]

21. Oops....

is right, you should have read it all the same as I did.

So tell us, spoon, how much would the crime rate in Britain need to increase to reach the level in tiny Alabama?

It's already higher, what you can't do math?

Gee, still trying to peddle Mary Rosh's horsecrap?

Never have, never will. I don't need to peddle his horsecrap to support my position.

Just pointing out a perfect example of the old saying "that's the pot calling the kettle black".

And yet another one "two peas in a pod"

Or how about "birds of a feather, flock together"

[MrBenchley]

23. Gee, spoon

Perhaps I don't have as much time to waste as you do...some of us actually think instead of grabbing NRA talking points.

[Spoonman]

24. Perhaps

you should "waste" some more time thinking.
Instead of grabbing anti-RKBA talking points without verifying them and becoming, what you criticize so adamantly.

[MrBenchley]

25. Or perhaps I'll just go on pointing out

the distortions and lies in the RKBA position.

For example, there's the fact that the BCS you're referencing is a survey that assumes roughly one in four crimes in Britain is never reported to the cops.

And why aren't they reported to the cops? From the report: "For most crimes the main reason for not reporting was that the incident was too trivial, there was no loss or victims believed the police could not do much about it (69% for all comparable crime), followed by the incident being considered a private matter and dealt with by the victim (28% of comparable crime)."

You might also note that murder in Britain is so rare that the report doesn't break it out...there were fewer than 1,000 murders. If Alabama were the size of Great Britain and its population were killing each other at the same rate they do with guns now, there'd be more than 4,000 murders.

[Spoonman]

26. And perhaps

I'll ask who you are to call attention to distortions and lies....post #18.
I guess if there is any distortion and lying you can spot it.

[MrBenchley]

28. Feel free, spoon

"I'll ask who you are"
Gee, why not ask your fellow RKBA "enthusaists"...they're over at another site bragging about creating fake identities.

[Spoonman]

31. I'll be glad

to tell you pal.
I'm the person who doesn't make idle threats when challenged.
I'm the person who will admit I'm wrong when I am.
I'm the person that doesn't need to "create" an identity.
I'm the person who will say exactly what I mean to say without the threatening hidden innuendoes.

So take your little "innuendoe" and do whatever you wish to do with it.

I deal with bigger men than you every day.

I get the sense that you feel threatened some how.

[MrBenchley]

33. Not me, spoon

But then I'm not the one pushing RKBA rubbish....

[Spoonman]

34. Rubbish

by any name still stinks!

[MrBenchley]

37. Yup, RKBA or "NRA talking points"

it's still hooey.

[demsrule4life]

29. Why do you pick on Alabama so much?

Think they rank number six for most crimes. Now if you want to talk about how many of these no driving idiots kill themselves in cars I believe they rank as the third highest state in the nation. And that is what scares me the most about living here, and tornados, but that is a different story.

[MrBenchley]

32. Picked it at random

Other than being a backward bunghole where liberal ideas are rarely even uttered aloud, I got nothing against Alabama.

Want to compare another state, be my guest...

[demsrule4life]

35. I would'nt call it to backwords

I live near Huntsville, prob one of the biggest concentrations of rocket scientists and engineers the country.