I get so tired of people moving the goal posts. Every time you talk to someone from a country which has banned guns, you always hear this argument (or a version of it):
As guns are banned here, we don’t face that reality. Although there is some gun violence in the UK, however, it is very rare.
But does that really pass the smell test? They always put the “gun” qualifier on the front of it. Taking away the guns from the equation doesn’t stop the violent criminals from being violent. It just makes the potential victims defenseless.
The violent crime rate in the UK is 9,360 per 100,000. The United States has a violent crime rate of 381 per 100,000. This means that you are nearly 25 times more likely to be a victim of a violent crime in England or Wales than you are to be one in the United States.
What about homicides, though? It’s impossible to compare the homicide rates of the US to other nations, mostly because definitions of homicide differ between the US and other countries. In the United States, there are three ways to die: Natural causes, homicide, suicide. If there is a death that wasn’t natural causes or a suicide, then it is a homicide. For the US, that comes out to about 7.8 homicides per 100,000 people.
Other nations don’t do that. In Australia, a death isn’t a homicide unless someone is arrested and charged with the killing. So if the killer commits suicide or is shot by law enforcement, the people that he killed are not considered to be homicide victims. This means that we can’t directly compare Australia’s reported homicide rate to the US, because the methodology is different.
In the UK, a killing isn’t a homicide until the crown court has ruled it to be a homicide. There is a substantial legal process to determine cause of death in suspected homicides, and the court must complete that process. If the court doesn’t find that there is compelling evidence that one person killed another, it isn’t a homicide. Since 1967, homicide figures for England and Wales have been adjusted to exclude any cases which do not result in conviction, or where the person is not prosecuted.
In short, the outlawing of guns doesn’t stop violent crime. There is no evidence that it stops people from killing each other, either.
16 Comments
joe · December 27, 2023 at 5:31 am
supposedly we’ve had 600+ “mass” shootings this year… I’m to lazy at the moment to look all of them up but I bet a large majority of them weren’t mass shootings until they changed the definition of mass shooting a couple years ago… if I remember correctly it’s now 2 or more… so if you killed your spouse in a murder suicide that’s now a mass shooting… all to skew the numbers to push the anti-gun crap
tb · January 7, 2024 at 11:18 pm
joe,
Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shooting as single incident where 4 or more are shot or killed, not including the shooter(s). By that metric, there were 656 in 2023.
https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/
Here’s the list of what they counted:
https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting?year=2023
summary of jan-nov (screencaps from Devon Tracey who does a monthly recap on who’s doing all these shootings):
https://twitter.com/itslolright/status/1744210776947056706
Spoiler: you’re not going to be surprised.
Joe Blow · December 27, 2023 at 7:37 am
They lie about everything?!?! I mean, EVERY THING.
Economic statistics are pure bullshit, meant to further an agenda. Both sides do it, it’s not something unique to one party.
We all saw the election and what happened, and these people get up in front of the camera and call it an insurrection, in the most serious of tones.
When you fail to call them out on that lie initially, you gave them the foundation for the rest of their arguments.
If you look at how the left operates, it’s the same with every one of the issue’s we’re facing. It starts out with an innocent enough white-lie that’s kinda sorta a half-truth, so, well, it’s not really worth fighthing over with this blue-haired harpy, so, whatever man….
Climate change
Gender Benders
J6
… Just a little white sorta lie, you can’t REALLY dis-prove so much as debate your opinion on the position. Then build your entire campaign on top of that lie that was never dis-proven.
– Climate change circa 1990 – it’s getting warmer, man’s fault, CO2…
Well…. Yeah, but.. man, this is tough, fuckit, whatever, go plant some tree’s, I don’t care. I’m not going to argue with you, it’s not worth it.
– Climate change 2023 – your car is illegal and we must cull livestock herds.
– J6 on J6 – This is a little crazy, we need to stop this, we’re a peaceful America, something has to be done, but we can’t devolve into Anarchy.
– J6 after J6 – PEARL HARBOR HAS NOTHING ON THE TERROR WE BRAVELY FACED DOWN!!!!
Today men and women are rotting in a jail cell with lawful convictions for what? Walking between the velvet ropes that the capital police force ushered them between in the viewing galleries. Because the notion that what happened on that day wasn’t “Mostly Peaceful Riots”… ahh yes, the classic that started it all.
Nobody got called out for that lie, and now we have St. Floyd of Fentanyl.
TODAY, you FINALLY have a few people and politicians pushing back, the media does their thing, and most of us just blithely go along because it’s easier, and our sportsball team has a new coach starting next week, there’s this high school kid they just signed who’s an absolute phenom….
But it’s all built on a foundation of lies, everything the left does. The trick is to defeat the lie out of the gate! If you let them build on top of the lie, you are now fighting the original lie, and all the lie’s built on top of it! If J6 wasn’t an insurrection, why are there people in jail? It’s like arguing with a 2-year old. Which is what these people are – they are the toddler that threw a tantrum in the cereal aisle and got their lucky charms instead of an ass whooping. Now they vote and pay taxes.
Don W Curton · December 27, 2023 at 9:52 am
“The violent crime rate in the UK is 9,360 per 100,000. The United States has a violent crime rate of 381 per 100,000.”
Any intelligent person would theorize that the legal possession of firearms is a net positive if the US crime rate is that much lower than the UK, regardless of how you count homicides.
Pete · December 27, 2023 at 12:12 pm
Plus all of the gun control in the UK simply means Muslims with knives or machetes always win the fight. And when things really get sporty, I suspect the Brits will be stunned at the hardware that comes out of hiding in the mosque basements.
Anonymous · December 27, 2023 at 6:14 pm
I saw a movie once where only government employees had guns, it was Schindler’s List. Anyone who wants to cut off their own penis to prevent others raping is campaigning for a Darwin award. Once you know that about them, you shouldn’t take their moral values or policy ideas seriously; they’re an evolutionary dead end.
Miguel GFZ · December 27, 2023 at 6:36 pm
And don’t forget that the UK’s Home Office is not disagreeable to fudge numbers by outright “reclassifying” suspicious deaths as accidents.
https://gunfreezone.net/i-dont-want-to-imply-that-the-brit-government-is-lying/
Anonymous · December 28, 2023 at 10:43 pm
It’s not that they are lying. It’s that they simply have a different way of classifying deaths. In the US, we have “manner of death” classification. Manner classification is a medical classification used for public health purposes (e.g. so you can look up stats at the CDC). Currently, there are five classifications nationally recognized: Accident, Suicide, Homicide, Natural, and Undetermined. In the past, and in a few jurisdiction, there are others, such as “Misadventure,” “Therapeutic Misadventure”, “Act of War” etc, though these have all but disappeared. The classifications are based on the basis of policy in local jurisdictions, though most try to follow the guidance of the National Association of Medical Examiners guidelines document (which is currently undergoing revision). There is generally good concordance between jurisdictions, but differences exist. For instance, some jurisdictions classify drunk driving deaths as “Homicide,” while most others classify it as “Accident.”. Jurisdictions that have lay Coroners tend to have lower classification rates of “Suicide” than jurisdictions with physician Medical Examiners, often because of local politics.
The key here is that manner of death classification is *not* a legal classification, but is a public health one,and does not represent a legal determination.
In contrast, there is no such thing as “Manner of Death” on UK death certificates. In the UK, a death isn’t classified as a “Homicide” unless is is adjudicated as such by a court of law. It is a legal determination and has different rules. Some estimates suggest that if the UK classified deaths the same way the US did, the homicide rate would be roughly twice what is reported for that country.
Reader · December 27, 2023 at 7:05 pm
Therr is no UK anymore only pUKistan
Burnt Toast · December 27, 2023 at 10:20 pm
“The violent crime rate in the UK is 9,360 per 100,000. The United States has a violent crime rate of 381 per 100,000.”
A better metric would be Gunshot Fatalitiues :: Legal Guns in Private Ownership
Or better yet ’rounds of ammo sold to private indiduals per year’.
The objective safety of devices is relative to the number of those devices in use, not the population at large.
Divemedic · December 28, 2023 at 6:44 am
You aren’t going to get those stats from the UK.
jc · December 28, 2023 at 1:40 am
Stats on infant mortality are like that too. US rates look horrible, until one realizes that only the USA includes preemies and newborns. The UK considers dead 2 day old babies as ‘stillborn’. NHS is a death farm.
Divemedic · December 28, 2023 at 6:48 am
That’s been done here at sector ocho before. The UK considers any child who dies within 30 days of birth to be stillborn.
Bobby Nations · December 28, 2023 at 12:59 pm
“The violent crime rate in the UK is 9,360 per 100,000.”
I think that that number includes property crimes as well. Looking at just the violent crime rates reported on that site for England, Wales, and Scotland, I arrive at a little over 3,300 violent crimes per 100,000 people*. That’s still almost an order of magnitude more than the US though, which is mind-blowing in and of itself. I mean, you’re looking at South Chicago, Downtown Detroit levels of crime across the three coutntries as a whole. Yikes!
*Note, for this number I had to exclude Northern Ireland and the various off-shore islands such as Guernsey, etc. which are technically a part of the UK but I can’t find any crime data for them. No matter as they are quite small population wise.
Jonathan · December 29, 2023 at 3:51 pm
While I haven’t been there, I know people who have spent time in London recently who say you can hear gunshots in the distance every night.
neomunitor · December 30, 2023 at 7:58 am
I lived in London for two years back in the early 2000’s. Most violent place I have I ever been, and I worked in New Orleans every day for 19 years. London wasn’t deadly like New Orleans, but the level of casual street violence and pub violence was incomprehensible to me. Shit like that would have bodies stacked all over the place in the US because it would have escalated to guns in a heartbeat. There’s truth to the saying that an armed society is a polite society. Over there people didn’t hesitate to throw a punch over nothing at all, and the alcohol abuse was staggering.
Comments are closed.