What happened to 5x higher violent crime rate?
The figures on your (ridiculous) sources, if they are to be believed, point to "only" a 1.4-2 times higher chance to be robbed/burgled in the UK than the US. Even if this were true, and I accept it's a considerable amount, it's nowhere near the 5x hyperbole that you were spouting previously. I wonder what your next post would contain, if I cared enough to refute your sources again. Would your estimates drop a second time?
The gun lobby source in particular, that one is amusing. It points out alleged fabrications of the statistics in the UK figures, due to political pressures of trying to keep a lid on crime rates for public approval. Yet, in a country like the US, with a much higher murder/rape rate, surely the same pressures apply, and the same abuses can be found. Look into any bureaucracy and you'll find corruption of some kind, especially the "victimless" cooking of statistics. Purely as an example in the opposite direction: in the homicide ratios between the US and UK, the UK figures included those who died in terrorist attacks. The US did not. The gun lobby source then continues with hilariously bad mis-information, which just 2 minutes of reseach for me refuted. Take this gem:
"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."
In direct contridiction to the Home Office report on how homicide is classified in their statistics:
"deaths were initially recorded as homicide, a decrease of two per cent on the previous year. Where the police initially record an offence as homicide it remains classified unless the police or courts decide later that no offence or homicide took place."
Note that the homicide recording isn't based on getting a conviction - but on the police later deciding that what was previously suspected to be a homicide turned out not to be the case.
The page also mentions this:
"England: According to the BBC News, handgun crime in the United Kingdom rose by 40% in the two years after it passed its draconian gun ban in 1997". Which is true, the BBC report mentioned can be found
here. What the page fails to do however is mention the conclusion of the BBC's report, which is that although a new law was introduced, it was badly implemented since it was only targetted at hobbyist/sporting gun communities, instead of targetting the illegal smuggling of weapons. Why is this an important distinction? Because this snippet was introduced in the context of supporting the idea that gun control laws do not work/make you less safe. The BBC report does not condone that conclusion whatsoever; it merely re-iterates the hopefully obvious point that a bad law won't work, whereas a better law with similar aims may well have.
The hilarity continues, with the next table that claims to indicate a higher level of violence in countries with a low level of gun ownership, in comparison to those with high levels of gun ownership. Did you even read this table? I suspect not, because it could be the very definition of selective reading and statistical manipulation that it was so keen to decry only a paragraph before. For a summary: 3 countries are listed as high gun ownership (Switzerland, US, Israel) and 3 with low gun ownership (Denmark, France, Japan). Only 6 countries? What kind of study was this? Well actually, if you follow the source, the study had A LOT more countries, so firstly, what methodology was used to pick those 6? As it turns out: a bad one - but more on that later. What do the statistics actually show? They tally up suicide rate and homicide rate to arrive at a total ({24.1, 19.0, 7.9} for high gun rates vs {27.2, 21.9, 17.3} for low gun rates) for violent crime. Now, lets be totally honest here; when one talks about violent crime, one does not generally include suicide - yes, it is technically a crime in a lot of countries, but it is intellectually dishonest in the extreme to lump it in with violent crime statistics which evoke thoughts and feelings of public safety FROM others. As it turns out, the rate of suicides in most countries vastly overshadowed the homocide rates. So these statistics are really just showing us the comparitive suicide rates of each 6 countries, modified slighlty by the number of homicides. If you were to take the suicides out of the picture and look at actual REAL homicide figures, it's entirely different: { 2.7, 7.4, 1.4 } for high gun control vs { 4.9, 1.1, 0.6 } for low gun control. In the very table of statistics chosen by a gun lobbying group, with specifically chosen countries to slant the figures, it STILL shows that countries with high gun ownership have a higher homicide rate by on average 1.6 higher than those with lower rates of gun ownership.
Pathetic. It gets worse though. I mentioned earlier: just how were those specific countries selected? An honest approach would be to restrict both sides to 1st world industrial ("Western") nations, with the 3 on each side being the top and bottom 3 of the gun ownership per capita spectrum. Was this how the countries were selected in the gun lobby table? Was it hell. For reference, here's a
list of gun ownership per capita. Unfortunately, this list does not include all the countries mentioned in either the source the table is based on, or even the table - but it does show us some interesting information. For a start, check out the country in 6th on guns per capita. France. But...wait. Didn't the gun lobby use France as an example of a country with low gun ownership? Yes...it did. I'm not at all implying that France has a high rate of homicide - it doesn't - but this speaks volumes about the quality of research this "organisation" is releasing. Based on the previosly linked table of guns per capita, the new homicide rates for the top 3 in each would be { US: 7.4, Switzerland: 2.7, France: 1.1 } vs { UK: 0.9, Spain: 0.9, Italy: 1.7 }. An average of 3.73 vs 1.16. Using an honest selection of countries based on the data available, it appears that if you're in a country with high gun control, you're 3 times more likely to die in a homicide.
Oh and look, I got through that whole table crap without once mentioning correlation != causality. Whoops.
Like any good comedy though, this report just gets better towards the end, ramping up into a hilarious, disgusting punchline:
6. Fact: The United States has experienced far fewer TOTAL MURDERS than Europe does over the last 70 years. In trying to claim that gun-free Europe is more peaceful than America, gun control advocates routinely ignore the overwhelming number of murders that have been committed in Europe. "
Really. REALLY. The last 70 years and specifically including the genocides by Hitler and Stalin. I just don't know how to even start with this. This has nothing at all to do with gun control - in fact I would guess that many of the countries that today have strict gun controls either didn't have them, or they were considerably more lax in the 1940s. The genocides of that period in European history has nothing to do with gun control and everything to do with ideology, racism, fascism and patriotism. Using the holocaust as a political point in arguing about gun control is a gross misuse of its continuing example in history of what happens when we let fascists into power. It's crass and immoral. Furthermore, the comparison itself is flawed even outside of this. These statistics deal not in per capita, but total murders. You are aware that Europe throughout the 1940s until today has a much higher population than the US, right? So unadjusted figures are misleading. The claim that Europe has a murder rate 16 times higher than that of the US is a joke. And I'll show you why:
If Europe has had 400,000 deaths per year for 70 years, that means there have been 28,000,000 murders.
The same source lists about 23,000 per year for the US over 70 years, reaching 1,610,000 murders.
We are of course going to exclude the around 21 million people it mentions as being killed in the Holocaust, as well as the 6.5 million killed by Stalin. 27.5 million from 28 million leaves us with 500,000. Now the US has a murder rate that is over 3 times that of the EU. But I'm not done yet. Because throughout this period of history, the EU typically has about 2-4 times the population of the US. Lets be fair and settle on 3 times. So the adjusted figure when you take population into account is roughtly 166,000 murders compared to the population equivalent of 1,610,000 murders. Almost 10 times higher murder rate in the US than EU for the last 70 years.
Is it right to exclude those killed by Stalin and Hitler? I don't know. Maybe even no. But equally, is it right to use the weight of those deaths to skew a debate on gun control? Definitely not. The kind of people you get your information from are not only liars, but immoral bastards too. If I were you, I would hesitate to associate myself with people such as that, as you have just done.