# "Wouldn't you feel safer with a gun"



## KenpoTex (Sep 11, 2007)

Great article from a Brit. newspaper

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From The Times
September 8, 2007
Wouldnt you feel safer with a gun?
British attitudes are supercilious and misguided
Richard Munday

Despite the recent spate of shootings on our streets, we pride ourselves on our strict gun laws. Every time an American gunman goes on a killing spree, we shake our heads in righteous disbelief at our poor benighted colonial cousins. Why is it, even after the Virginia Tech massacre, that Americans still resist calls for more gun controls?

The short answer is that gun controls do not work: they are indeed generally perverse in their effects. Virginia Tech, where 32 students were shot in April, had a strict gun ban policy and only last year successfully resisted a legal challenge that would have allowed the carrying of licensed defensive weapons on campus. It is with a measure of bitter irony that we recall Thomas Jefferson, founder of the University of Virginia, recording the words of Cesare Beccaria: Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.

One might contrast the Virginia Tech massacre with the assault on Virginias Appalachian Law School in 2002, where three lives were lost before a student fetched a pistol from his car and apprehended the gunman.

Virginia Tech reinforced the lesson that gun controls are obeyed only by the law-abiding. New York has banned pistols since 1911, and its fellow murder capitals, Washington DC and Chicago, have similar bans. One can draw a map of the US, showing the inverse relationship of the strictness of its gun laws, and levels of violence: all the way down to Vermont, with no gun laws at all, and the lowest level of armed violence (one thirteenth that of Britain).

Americas disenchantment with gun control is based on experience: whereas in the 1960s and 1970s armed crime rose in the face of more restrictive gun laws (in much of the US, it was illegal to possess a firearm away from the home or workplace), over the past 20 years all violent crime has dropped dramatically, in lockstep with the spread of laws allowing the carrying of concealed weapons by law-abiding citizens. Florida set this trend in 1987, and within five years the states that had followed its example showed an 8 per cent reduction in murders, 7 per cent reduction in aggravated assaults, and 5 per cent reduction in rapes. Today 40 states have such laws, and by 2004 the US Bureau of Justice reported that firearms-related crime has plummeted.

In Britain, however, the image of violent America remains unassailably entrenched. Never mind the findings of the International Crime Victims Survey (published by the Home Office in 2003), indicating that we now suffer three times the level of violent crime committed in the United States; never mind the doubling of handgun crime in Britain over the past decade, since we banned pistols outright and confiscated all the legal ones.

We are so self-congratulatory about our officially disarmed society, and so dismissive of colonial rednecks, that we have forgotten that within living memory British citizens could buy any gun  rifle, pistol, or machinegun  without any licence. When Dr Watson walked the streets of London with a revolver in his pocket, he was a perfectly ordinary Victorian or Edwardian. Charlotte Bront&#65533; recalled that her curate father fastened his watch and pocketed his pistol every morning when he got dressed; Beatrix Potter remarked on a Yorkshire country hotel where only one of the eight or nine guests was not carrying a revolver; in 1909, policemen in Tottenham borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by (and were joined by other armed citizens) when they set off in pursuit of two anarchists unwise enough to attempt an armed robbery. We now are shocked that so many ordinary people should have been carrying guns in the street; the Edwardians were shocked rather by the idea of an armed robbery.

If armed crime in London in the years before the First World War amounted to less than 2 per cent of that we suffer today, it was not simply because society then was more stable. Edwardian Britain was rocked by a series of massive strikes in which lives were lost and troops deployed, and suffragette incendiaries, anarchist bombers, Fenians, and the spectre of a revolutionary general strike made Britain then arguably a much more turbulent place than it is today. In that unstable society the impact of the widespread carrying of arms was not inflammatory, it was deterrent of violence.

As late as 1951, self-defence was the justification of three quarters of all applications for pistol licences. And in the years 1946-51 armed robbery, the most significant measure of gun crime, ran at less than two dozen incidents a year in London; today, in our disarmed society, we suffer as many every week.

Gun controls disarm only the law-abiding, and leave predators with a freer hand. Nearly two and a half million people now fall victim to crimes of violence in Britain every year, more than four every minute: crimes that may devastate lives. It is perhaps a privilege of those who have never had to confront violence to disparage the power to resist.

Richard Munday is editor and co-author of Guns & Violence: the Debate Before Lord Cullen

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link to original article: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article2409817.ece


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## Dave Leverich (Sep 11, 2007)

Amazing article!


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## bydand (Sep 11, 2007)

Wow, a lot of facts I'll have to look up.  I knew about the numbers of violent crimes correlated to the areas with the tightest gun control laws because I did a presentation years ago and used a US map with an overlay to graphically show the numbers.  I know that most times anti-gunners use actual numbers to show how much more violent the US is compared to other more "civilized" countries and not percentages of population.  Good read, thanks for posting it.


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## Brian R. VanCise (Sep 11, 2007)

Nice read and thanks for posting it.


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## Ceicei (Sep 11, 2007)

Thank you.


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## Andy Moynihan (Sep 11, 2007)

Now if only someone would tell the New York Times.

Not that they would listen.


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## Cruentus (Sep 11, 2007)

Holy Crap! Nice article!!


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## Sukerkin (Sep 11, 2007)

It is good to see an article in a quality paper (the Times has been one of the best regarded for a long time) that reinforces what I've been arguing for a long time.

Also, It appears that I've been unknowingly echoing Jefferson when I've been spouting off about how disarming the population only harms the law-abiding.  I've often used the phrase that barbarian societies used to be very polite (low crime) as you tend to watch what you say and do when the man you insult is likely to bury an axe in your skull!

Altho' I'm in broad agreement, one thing I'd like to see along with the 'crime' stats is the numbers for gun-related injuries and deaths.  After all, if having an armed populous deters violent crime only at the expense of inflated accidental/avoidable deaths then it becomes much less of a clear cut issue.


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## Steel Tiger (Sep 11, 2007)

It is an interesting article but slightly misleading in some respects, which is not surprising given the author wishes to make his point clearly.

I think the actual deterrent to crime in pre WWI London was the vast number of very visible police constables.  At one stage during the Edwardian period there was a police constable stationed at every city block.  That's a lot of very visible police.  After the war the number dropped significantly because so many constables lost their lives during the conflict and they were never replaced.

Interesting statistics throughout.  I'm not surprised that heavy gun control is not an effective deterrent.  It has always seemed to me to be a politicians view of what the population wants done, rather than what the population actually wants.


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## KenpoTex (Sep 11, 2007)

Sukerkin said:


> It is good to see an article in a quality paper (the Times has been one of the best regarded for a long time) that reinforces what I've been arguing for a long time.
> 
> Also, It appears that I've been unknowingly echoing Jefferson when I've been spouting off about how disarming the population only harms the law-abiding. I've often used the phrase that barbarian societies used to be very polite (low crime) as you tend to watch what you say and do when the man you insult is likely to bury an axe in your skull!
> 
> Altho' I'm in broad agreement, one thing I'd like to see along with the 'crime' stats is the numbers for gun-related injuries and deaths. After all, if having an armed populous deters violent crime only at the expense of inflated accidental/avoidable deaths then it becomes much less of a clear cut issue.


I don't know where you'd look for stats from England, but in the US, the number of accidental deaths due to firearms is extrememly low, much lower than the number of deaths caused by car accidents, fires, drowning, etc.


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## Sukerkin (Sep 11, 2007)

Firearms accidents 'pre-ban' in England were very low indeed.  I know that 'news' reporting was a much different affair in those days but I don't ever recall any being in the headlines.  

I'm from a country town and a poor (financially) background, so, in common with a lot of my contempories, it was normal to go hunting 'for the table' on the weekend.  Okay we're only talking rabbits and pigeons here but that still meant that there were quite a number of .22LR's and 12-gauges/410's roaming the hills on a Sunday .  We managed to not shoot each other because a serious attitude of mind was inculcated into us when it came to firearms use (e.g. my first 'job' as a pre-teen was shooting vermin for a local farmer).

Air-rifles used to be a much bigger 'threat as they were regularly mis-used by teenagers because they were not seen as 'real' weapons - I remember having my hair parted whilst sitting on the sofa in a mates living room one school dinner-time because he was posing around with his new air-gun !

Anyhow, nostalgia rambling there, sorry.

Where my question in my previous post came from was from, of all things, a Bill Hicks comment where he adversely compared the deaths from (all) shootings in the States to those in Britain.  I'm guessing from what you say, *Tex*, that that shows that you shouldn't draw on a comedian as a source of statistical opinion :lol:.

I can't say that I'm all that surprised.  After all, a Gun is instantly seen as something dangerous and an object to be treated carefully, whereas going for a swim is generally seen as 'safe' and thus, ironically, carelessness can invert the threat level.


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## Andy Moynihan (Sep 11, 2007)

Exactly--Knowing that something is dangerous makes it less so to the ones who know.


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## K31 (Sep 13, 2007)

I remember being in a lecture of a local police firearms instructor in the late 70's who said that the reason there was little gun crime in England was that the police and the criminals had an understanding. 

He gave as an example, the shooting of a policeman there that was followed the next by the anonymous delivery of a dead criminal to the police departments front steps.

Perhaps the influx of aliens, and the more common carrying by the police themselves have added to the escalation.


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## tellner (Sep 21, 2007)

There's a lot of reasons that the social contract has broken down in the UK. A big part of it is economic. Industry left a couple decades ago. Nothing came to fill the gap. There's a rising divide between rich and poor and a declining middle class. Economic mobility is less than it was a generation ago. The social safety net is getting patchy. According to recent polls Britons feel pretty darned disenfranchised. These are all Bad Things(tm) from the standpoint of social stability. Immigration isn't necessarily a bad thing. But when a significant fraction of the immigrants have no intention of becoming part of the local culture (cf. "Londinistan", the BBC report on second and third generation immigrants who refuse to learn any English, and their series on "The Polish Plumber") it becomes a problem.

All of these lead to a broken social contract, disrespect for the law as a concept, alcoholism and violence. These feed on each other.

It's hard to stop the cycle once it gets started. And since the economic interests of the ruling class and the badly-misnamed Labor Party are served by stagnant wages and social control nobody really tries. Instead, they concentrate on further restrictions and surveillance on everyone else, neurotic attempts to control what they can even if it does nothing useful and more onerous restrictions on those who bother to comply.

Hence, we get the Home Office telling police departments to ignore burglary and sexual assault and give out ASBOs to what would have been serious felons in years past. At the same time the (useless, worthless) surveillance cameras, mandatory DNA testing, detention without trial and similar give people a feeling that something is being done. Guns and knives are easy targets. They're bad. They're criminal. They're scary. Bans and candlelight marches make people feel good. 

I'm afraid that the problems are structural. The solutions will have to be as well. They will involve giving people a rational reason to hope, a real stake in the system, and a country where things are getting better rather than decaying under a regime of upbeat propaganda.

In short it will require wisdom, hard work and things the neo-liberal Chicago-school doctrine finds abhorrent. We can only pray that it will happen some day.


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## Sukerkin (Sep 21, 2007)

Well spoken, *Tellner*!  Not utterly in line with the OT but definitely relevant.

I can concur that most of the ordinary people of a 'certain age' would not find much to diagree with there.

Our society is disintegrating right now and I don't see a way for it to stop other than a period of isolationism to allow us to reintegrate ourselves a a nation rather than a cheek-by-jowl, non-mixing, hodgepodge of different races and cultures.  That is damaging in an of itself and the cure might be worse than the disease.

What to do?  I have no idea as all the obvious answers make things worse.

Like many of my fellows, I'm seriously considering abandoning ship to be honest.  Once my missus and I are legally married (embarssingly 'common law' at present) I shall be giving full scrutiny to emigration.


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