That is the bottom line in the latest annual figures for England and Wales. Things are better not worse - mainly because Labour banned handguns in 1997 - before that there were 358 gun deaths a year in the UK. The latest shooting spree is a statistical anomoly. Cameron is a disgusting liar when he claims youth anarchy - of course he is supported by the faithful Tory press feeding us a daily diet of doom and gloom. The real spin in this country is those who spin against Labour and that is the majority of our media. Don't believe the hype!
Now let's ban imitation weapons that can be converted to fire ammunition. Let's ban less lethal weapons like airguns and we can have an even safer society.
London's homicide rate is a third of New York and we are safer than New Zealand when it comes to gun deaths. This country is predominantly one of the safest places to walk the streets and London is one of the safest cities.
Thank you for those figures, it really is quite remarkable that gun deaths are so low. Of course the press aren't interested in making the achievements of a government clear to people, only failings, so any wonder people are so suspicious of politics.
ReplyDeleteInteresting post. It's good to see some facts as to murders by guns - given the tone of some of the media coverage - it made it sound like gun crime was increasing rapidly when, in fact, as you point out, it hasn't been.
ReplyDeleteNeil - long time reader, first time poster (It's the first time we've blogged on the same thing you see)
ReplyDeleteOkay, so gun crimes may still be a rarity (thankfully), but they still tell us alot about our society. Come read my analysis at my blog. It'll be interesting to hear your thoughts.
Robert :)
Neil:
ReplyDeleteDo these figures for "gun deaths" include suicides? It wasn't clear from the article.
It is obvious that reducing the number of legally-owned guns will reduce the number of suicides with a gun (nobody goes to the effort of obtaining an illegal gun just to kill themselves - they'll take pills, or jump off or in front of something instead).
It would also be interesting to see a breakdown of killings, woundings and assaults with a gun into scumbag-on-scumbag and scumbag-on-innocent categories. A spate of drug dealers shooting each other is rather different in character from a spate of murder/robberies of "normal" people.
The advantage of using gun deaths rather than 'gun incidents', is it is comparing like with like.
ReplyDelete'Gun incidents' are affected by levels of reporting and also include legal guns like imitation and air/paint guns etc that are less lethal. Also more police increase the likelyhood are reporting.
The figures are for homicides (I should have made that clear). I suppose under your definition Billy Cox was a 'scumbag', personally I think all such deaths are horrific.
Perhaps I should have made myself clearer. Whether Billy Cox was a scumbag or not doesn't affect the illegality of killing him, but the scumbag question does affect the public experience of crime.
ReplyDeleteIf crimes are routinely committed against ordinary law-abiding members of the public, people will think that crime levels are high.
If you take exactly the same crime rate, only it's all crimes committed by drug dealers against other drug dealers, for example, ordinary people will think there's almost no crime.
They'd be right, too - in the second case, the risk of an ordinary person being the victim of a crime is much lower. Raw crime rates tell nothing like the whole story.
{The figures are for homicides (I should have made that clear). }
ReplyDeleteYou are a liar or perhaps a "disgusting liar" asyou prefer to phrase it. The 358 figure you give for gun deaths prior to 1997 is not for homicides but for all gun related deaths. Your use of that figure to compare with the homicide figures of today is simply dishonest.
Furthermore the figure is from 1995, the 1996 figure had already fallen to 254, the 1995 total was anomolously high, and the fal since then began before the ban on legally owned guns took place.
Total gun deaths in the UK:
1994- 341
1995- 358
1996- 254
1997- 201
1998- 203
1999- 210
2000- 204
2001- 167
2002- 169
2003- 163
http://www.gun-control-network.org/GF07.htm
Homicides are down from 77 to 49 in England and Wales over the last year and there were 358 gun deaths in 1995 before the handgun ban in 1996 (that was extended by Labour to become a total ban including .22 handguns as well).
ReplyDeleteWhere have I lied? This is stated in the first few lines of the post. Like I said I should have made clear the first figure was homicides not gun deaths (although I was unsure of this), but all the figures have shown significant falls since the ban. There is no deceit.