Please to explain for the hard of understanding...

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by Big Sarge

Hmm. It looks like Great Britain in 2010 had a 776 per 100,000 violent crime rate. During the same time, the US had a 403 per 100,000 violent crime rate. I guess our violent crime rate is less because criminals know we fight back.

I think that might be to do with how we record violent crime:



How the UK defines violent crime for the purposes of crime figures:

“Violent crime contains a wide range of offences, from minor assaults such as pushing and shoving that result in no physical harm through to serious incidents of wounding and murder. Around a half of violent incidents identified by both BCS and police statistics involve no injury to the victim.” (THOSB – CEW, page 17, paragraph 1.)

How the US defines violent crime for the purposes of crime figures:

In the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, violent crime is composed of four offenses: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Violent crimes are defined in the UCR Program as those offenses which involve force or threat of force.” (FBI – CUS – Violent Crime)

The UK’s approach seems to be a lot more encompassing in scope and adds to its definition of “violent crime” offences which are not matched by its US counterpart. This raises the obvious question of whether UK violent crime rates can be said to be higher simply because things considered “violent crime” in the UK are not so in the US. One example is “assault”, all forms of which are considered “violent” in the UK, whereas in the US only “aggravated” is considered violent. A further example revolves around sexual offences, only “forcible” rape featuring in the US definition, while the UK definition includes rape and any and all forms of sexual assault.

There are also other factors to do with rates of reporting. This page breaks it down very well.

http://dispellingthemythukvsusguns.wordpress.com/


Having gone through the figures with a fine tooth comb, taking into account different reporting methods they conclude:

While it becomes clear that certain types of offenses are marginally higher in the UK than in the US (robbery and knife crime being more likely in the UK by an order of 1.1x and 1.27x respectively) a number of other, more serious offenses, are both marginally and substantially higher in the US. Rape of a female is 1.02x more likely in the US, while theft of a vehicle is 1.29x more likely. More disturbingly, burglary is significantly higher at 1.52x more likely to occur in the US. However, it is at the considerably more, well, violent crimes that America really supersedes England and Wales into its own class. In the United States, you are 6.9x more likely to be the victim of aggravated assault resulting in serious injury than in the UK. You are 4.03x more likely to be murdered than in the UK. And more staggeringly (though not surprising) you are 35.2x more likely to be shot dead in the Unites States than in the UK. Before anybody asks, no, these do not take into account justifiable homicide and other “acceptable shootings”, nor do murders for that matter:


“The UCR Program does not include the following situations in this offense classification: deaths caused by negligence, suicide, or accident; justifiable homicides; and attempts to murder or assaults to murder, which are scored as aggravated assaults.” (FBI – UCS – Violent Crime)

[Urbane Guerrilla]

The "arms race" argument is badly enough flawed that it's no longer a serious item of the discussion in the United States.

An arms race requires the resources of a nation behind it to, ah, fuel the racecar. If there is an arms race in civilian armament, the racers are shuffling along on walkers and invalids' slippers.

What really does seem to spread a particular weapon technology around is familiarity with the works. Percussion arms, a certain generation in the 19th -- widespread with military use of this with the rifle musket. Revolvers, another. Next big shift-over was the bolt-action rifle, mainstay of the medium- and big-game hunter for a lot of decades -- and began its career with military use brought very much home in the Great War. Now in the United States, we've had semiauto pistols serving this Republic's Army since 1911, still got semiauto pistols, and now more and more of the rifles have automatic transmissions and ergonomic handles sticking out of them, and this generation of rifle shooters is going to look upon the 5-round bolt-action rifle like it was a blackpowder musket -- and nostalgia-shooters will go out shooting them. The way I go out and shoot my .58 Hawken. Acre of white smoke after the BAM!

[DanaC]

@ Sarge:

Just to clarify: I don't think those figures mean that Americans are more violent than Brits. I just think that where violence does occur it is more likely to escalate to serious injury or death when people are carrying weapons.

If anything I suspect that at an interpersonal level we may be more violent: I have no evidence to base this on, just a gut feeling, but I suspect that you are more likely to get into a fist fight in the UK than you are in the US. But most such fights are probably unrecorded. I think the probable lack of weapons in any given situation combined with a heavy drinking culture mean that people are more likely to throw a punch in anger here than in the US. Street fights have been a part of British culture for a long time. In the 18th century the British were known for their propensity to settle arguments with a fist fight and everybody just stood around and watched, cheering them on :p I'm not sure we have changed all that much lol. Go into any city centre on a Friday night and you're likely to see a brawl.

You're also, as those figures show, marginally more likely to get knifed or glassed in the UK. Brits like their blades. They are much more a part of our culture than guns.

I also think that, weapons aside, there are other factors at play: it is almost certainly easier to police a smaller nation. Other than London, even our cities are pretty small. Most are comparable to towns in the US. When we talk about a 'no go area' in an inner city we are talking about a tiny area of a few blocks. We're also pretty tightly packed here. We live in very small houses for the most part and don't have much space between us.

But that size differential adds to my reasons for not wanting a proliferation of guns here. It really wouldn't take much for guns to become a major problem with such a small and tightly packed population. Add in the aforementioned drinking culture and I really don't think more guns would be a good thing :P

[Big Sarge]

Dana - You have made some good points and I have truthfully run out of ways to refute them. Guns have and will remain a part of US society, but it does have it's downside.

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by Big Sarge

Dana - You have made some good points and I have truthfully run out of ways to refute them. Guns have and will remain a part of US society, but it does have it's downside.

Thanks And there have been a lot of good points raised against gun control here. Certainly made me think and reconsider my own stance.

I think it does pretty much boil down to two very distinct cultures. neither one is better than the other, but what is appropriate to one is not necessarily appropriate to the other.

I do believe, that America cuold make itself a safer country and decrease the amount of gun deaths by imposing some controls. But I doubt it is either feasible or desirable for America to take the absolute stance against guns that works in the UK. There are too many factors at play - gun ownership has a huge part in your history and your sense of self as a nation, but also in modern culture. Whilst some people dohunt in the UK it is a much more prominent part of US culture - probably plays a big a role in the US as football does in the UK. By which I mean it is, for some communities, a much valued part of growing up and inter generational relationships. Learning to hunt and going hunting with Dad seems to me to have similar elements to the way many British youth take on their dad's football team.

We don't have large tracts of wilderness full of game. There are places where hunting takes place but they are far more the preserve of the landowning elite - a throw back to a much older culture. Alongside that runs a working class culture of hunting which primarily focuses on small game (rabbits) and illegal poaching of landowners game - both of which have largely fallen by the wayside with the advent of mass farming and cheap meat, and with the urbanisation of much of the country.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by Big Sarge

Guns have and will remain a part of US society, but it does have it's downside.

Pizza, probably killing more people than guns, but here to stay until they pry my cold dead fingers from the crust.

[DanaC]

It is an interesting question whether that oppression would come from a government or the armed rabble...

In terms of deadly violence I suspect if it were to be anything it would be the latter. In terms of oppressive legislation and heavyhanded policing that's a different matter. Some wuold argue that there is already a degree of official oppression of muslim minorities in Britain through the application of anti-terror laws - up and including 'trials' of terror suspects in which the suspect and their lawyer are not given access to the evidence against them, and can be subjected to 'control orders' which amount to various forms of house arrest on the basis of those trials.

educated populations have lost their collective mind before.

True. And as I said, the fact that such things haven't happened here for a very long time is no guarantee they will never happen again. There is, has always been, and likely always will be a strand of British society which leans towards white supremacy/anglo-saxon purity. It is of course possible that at some point that could expand out into a larger movement - it has done so before. But for it to turn into a genocide or anything more than an increase in racial tension and sporadic racial violence would require several things to happen. Not least of which would be to move further away from memories of WW2 and nazism.

Personally, I think the chances of racial tension bubbling up into outright pogroms and deadly violence would be increased by the presence of people's militias not lessened.

[Undertoad]

Ah no wait the chart says there are no guns in Syria, as opposed to Iraq where there is one for every two people

No guns in Syria. People there must be dying from malaria or something

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Ah no wait the chart says there are no guns in Syria so the lack of homicides there must be a result of that

No guns in Syria. People there must be dying from malaria or something

Spontaneous human combustion?

[infinite monkey]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Ah no wait the chart says there are no guns in Syria so the lack of homicides there must be a result of that

No guns in Syria. People there must be dying from malaria or something

"I think I could turn and live with the Syrians, they are so placid and self-contain'd"

--Walt Whitless

[Undertoad]

The lowered rate of gun homicides in the US is partly due to hospitals getting much better at preventing people from dying from them due to the amount of practice they get.

true story

[DanaC]

I just realised I made an error on one of those posts. The last time Britain was successfully invaded wasn't 1000 years ago it was 948 years ago.

The lowered rate of gun homicides in the US is partly due to hospitals getting much better at preventing people from dying from them due to the amount of practice they get.

That is really interesting. Many medical advancements are made in warzones - wonder if there's a hidden 'benefit' to the gun injuries in the US in terms of pushing medical responses to them.

Also, forgot to mention this before:

As a descendant of the poorly armed Irish, I'd also call that genocide.

I was going off tfe definition of it I found on a wiki about genocide. They drew a distinction between genocide and ethnic cleansing in that case. I'd always understood it as a genocide before though.

[Gravdigr]

Originally Posted by DanaC

That is really interesting. Many medical advancements are made in warzones - wonder if there's a hidden 'benefit' to the gun injuries in the US in terms of pushing medical responses to them.

I think Israel pretty much leads the world in treatment of traumatic injury, don't they?

Yes/No/Maybe?

[classicman]

There has been some very interesting advancements in TBI in the last decade. Many have been surprisingly in the US. Israel has been doing some really innovative things with vitamins and organics though. Japan also has been active.