Hi
Here is an example of "anarchy" in a British city of 750,000 people:
... snip ...
The guns weren't there, partly for cultural reasons, and partly because the gun control laws already were strict compared to the US.
Yup. In Indinapolis, Indiana, a city of 800,000, we had 107 murders last year.
It's the wild, wild, west, here, for sure.
However, the 100,000 licensed firearms carriers in the state have a lower overall crime incidence than the general public, and there's been less than 1,000 licenses revoked, and we lose our licenses fairly easily. Indiana holds gun carriers to a somewhat higher standard, and the gun carriers meet that standard or they lose their licenses.
What I'm trying to say is that, over here, almost all crime is committed by criminals. How many of those 566 gun-related serious or fatal injuries involving guns were committed by persons otherwise in compliance with the law?
You guys have always been saner than us. Is it that much of a surprise to see that you're saner about killing each other off?
I'll try to clarify my point in the first sentence:
I read your point as implying that there was a choice between a mass killing of 10 people, or 10 individual killings.
The lack af availability of firearms in the UK seems to prevent mass killings with guns, individual murders are a different tyope of killing.
The gun-toting wierdo is a differet type of person to the gun-toting criminal, or indeed the gun-owning citizen.
On the subject of gun massacres, the fact that there aren't other types of civilian massacres seems to suggest that the availability of guns and their ease of use enables massacres to take place that otherwise wouldn't.
Thanks for the clarification. What I was asking about was the perception of one death being less painful to the families of the bereaved than another death, and if a death on the front page was more tragic than another death that doesn't get off of page 3 and the obituaries.
Before 1965, I could buy rifles with a check through the mail. In 1966, an ex-Marine with a brain tumor and some rifles climbed the Texas Tower and invented a new kind of wrongdoing.
If guns were the problem, why were there no tragedies of that sort before.
When I was in high school (grades 9 through 12), about half of the school were farm kids, driving their parents pickup truck to school. Virtually ALL the trucks had gun racks, and the racks held guns. Most of them were loaded, and ammunition for all of them was under the seat. People carried pistols and revolves in their glove compartments, as well, and everybody, and I mean
really everybody carried a knife.
If simple exposure to firearms and knives were causative, why were there so few stabbings and school massacres back before 1969?
You guys have had two mass killings since the crime model was introduced. That gives you a 20 year mean time between occurrences. Your two happened 9 years apart, so I split the difference and project a 15 year mean time between occurrences.
You guys won't know until 2011 if your measures have even slowed it down.
...and on the subject of
non-gun massacres: No one's done one successfully yet, so there's no model to copy. Every one of these, "walk into where people are defenseless and shoot them," crimes is a copy of the original model, right?
What can I say. There's probably an American, right now, thinking up some new way to make other people's lives miserable.
Ammunition is also hard to get hold of in the UK.
I used to shoot at school, and the empty cartridge cases had to be accounted for, let alone any actual live rounds.
I've heard about this form of control before. A friend who lived in Africa for some time said that the government of the country where he lived used it with some success. Furthermore, the ammunition is the bit that's fairly hard to make in the whole, "If I can't buy a gun, I'll
MAKE one," model.
I'm not sure how it would wash in the States, though. A lot of serious shooters go through 200 rounds a week, so being forced to buy 5 or 10 rounds at a time would definitely be seen as a hardship.
These are fundamentally different. These might make the potential victim more vulnerable, but it is the potential victim's actions and free choice that affects these examples. Easy access to guns make it easier for the perpetrator.
Easily available ricin would make poisioning easier, however ricin is controlled; why should you not ban easy-to-access groceries and office supplies because they make shoplifting easier?
All of these types of crimes have a victim and a perpetrator.
Potential victim more vulnerable = Easier for the Perpetrator
Why do you suppose that your elderly are being targeted by thugs. What happens of the victim's actions and free choice happen to include carrying a handgun?
82,500 crimes PREVENTED over here with handguns.
Even at that, these massacre-minded...
animals who simply happen to walk on their hind legs and eat with cutlery... cherry-pick helpless targets. The pick on children and people in, "Gun Free," zones (which means that the law-abiding people in that zone don't have guns: The jackassulants don't
CARE about the law and take in guns anyhow).
About stuff being controlled: Recreational pharmaceuticals a controlled, too, right? What success has Britain had, legislating those out of existence? The US has had no success at all. It's pretty obvious to me that a country where drugs are flowing through the borders to supply the desire can not successfully ban illegal guns anyhow.
...and we don't ban easy access to groceries and office supplies because that's not the model we use to sell them. It's all about what your customers (or, say
citizens) will stand for.
Depart from the model too much and you're out of business.
I really admire you guys' efforts to make yourselves more civilized. I think you left the bad guys out of the calculation, though, and as they say, the Devil's in the details.
