Originally posted by: mercanucaribe
Originally posted by: Mookow
Britain banned guns and their gun crime rate went... way the hell up. Banning guns and essentially banning the right to self defense has gotten them up a creek without a paddle, or a boat.
I can quote countries with high gun ownership rates and low gun crime rates. However, it's more to the point if you look at what happens when countries ban guns (the Brits and Aussies are the best examples)... crime rates go up.
EDIT: I'd love to debate this further, but I've got to go to work (bartending). I'll come back to this thread later (though it might not be till Sunday, when I'll be back to a broadband connection).
I want to see statistics that show that their crime rate went up.
People have already linked to articles about Britain's gun crime rates. Specifically, the post right before my post that you quoted contains this little gem:
She said one of the government's main challenges is tackling ``the culture of gun crime.'' She said that though the figures are still rising, the government is ``pleased that the rise is much smaller that it was two years ago.''
Oh, goody, so now it isnt rising quite as fast at as it used to be.
A direct link to another article:
The Centre for Defence Studies at Kings College in London, which carried out the research, said the number of crimes in which a handgun was reported increased from 2,648 in 1997/98 to 3,685 in 1999/2000
Britain banned handguns in 1997.
As for the Aussies, I didnt find much specifically on their gun crime rate preban vs postban. As I am currently on a 36K dial-up connection, I'm going to stop searching. I did find, however,
this (it is not an unbiased source, but skip the rhetoric and read the actual, useful stats):
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USA Today newspaper discovered in 2002 that, "Since Australia's 1996 laws banning most guns and making it a crime to use a gun defensively, armed robberies rose by 51%, unarmed robberies by 37%, assaults by 24% and kidnappings by 43%. While murders fell by 3%, manslaughter rose by 16%."
Given the debates over CCL's in America, that seems topical to both the preventative effects of gun ownership upon crime (ie, what this thread was started by) and the question of "what happened to Aussie crime rates after their gun ban?"
Also from that same link:
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British crime reporting tactics keep murder rates artificially low. "Suppose that three men kill a woman during an argument outside a bar. They are arrested for murder, but because of problems with identification (the main witness is dead), charges are eventually dropped. In American crime statistics, the event counts as a three-person homicide, but in British statistics it counts as nothing at all. 'With such differences in reporting criteria, comparisons of U.S. homicide rates with British homicide rates is a sham,' [a 2000 report from the Inspectorate of Constabulary] concludes."
^--- yeah, that one wasnt a statistic, but it does bear upon the statistics.
Anyway, I'm tired and on a dial up connection. Good night.