"According to the Sydney-based Institute for Economics and Peace, the U.K. had
933 violent crimes per 100,000 people in 2012, down from 1,255 in 2003. In the
U.S., the figure for 2010 was 399 violent crimes per 100,000 people. Still,
while the U.S. violent-crime rate is less than half Britain’s, its homicide
rate between 2003 and 2011 was almost four times as high."
It would help to have access to reliable statistics but this kind of claim
raises obvious issues as to its reliability: reliable comparisons should be
like-for-like, but nothing in the above makes clear (a) whether the US and UK
are using a comparable definition of "violent crimes" [is 'threatening
behaviour' a "violent crime" in the US?] (b) how reliable is the data gathering
process (given differences in underreporting of crimes or in the
classifications of reports of crimes) (c) how prevalence of "violent crimes"
relates to factors like population density.
These issues are particularly acute within the criminal justice system where
parties [like police and government] may have their own agendas in how they
define and assemble data.
As a rule of thumb, the figures as to "homicides" are likely to be much less
questionable than figures as to "violent crimes" generally, as homicides are
more clearly defined and less subject to underreporting and other forms of
distortion within the societies in question.
The above quotation is inadequate to ground an argument that by having a much
higher homicide rate the US avoids having such a high rate of "violent crime"
generally as that suffered by the UK - an argument that (even if it were
soundly based statistically) might be met with the (moral) argument that
suffering the lower homicide rate is better than suffering the lower rate of
"violent crime" generally.
DL
On Friday, 2 October 2015, 23:30, Lawrence Helm
<lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Here's another interesting article:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-04-24/u-k-gun-curbs-mean-more-violence-yet-fewer-deaths-than-in-u-s-
It includes the following paragraph: "According to the Sydney-based
Institute for Economics and Peace, the U.K. had 933 violent crimes per 100,000
people in 2012, down from 1,255 in 2003. In the U.S., the figure for 2010 was
399 violent crimes per 100,000 people. Still, while the U.S. violent-crime rate
is less than half Britain’s, its homicide rate between 2003 and 2011 was almost
four times as high."
There is a lot more violent crime in the UK but fewer homicides. Perhaps a
lot of bad guys that would be walking around in the UK with guns and
occasionally killing people are now walking around with knives, clubs or small
gangs and since all the innocent civilians over there (with few exceptions) are
unarmed . . . they provide a great feast of victims -- so why kill them and
draw the attention of the bobbies when you can rap them on the head with a
steel pipe and take whatever you want -- and with so much of that going on the
chance of being cot is way lower than if they murdered someone
We are still (in the US) a nation of Emersonian self-reliant people and would
rather, many (if not most) of us, defend ourselves than hire a huge expensive
bureaucracy to control us so that we don't kill to many of each other. The
idea of letting ourselves be robbed or letting someone we love be raped in
order to reduce the homicide rate wouldn't set very well with a lot of us.
And I always wonder about some of these statistics. If you shoot a bad guy
who has broken into your house with the intent to do you or a loved one bodily
harm, does that count as a violent gun-related death? Probably, but I'm not
sure.
Lawrence
On 10/2/2015 1:15 PM, Mike Geary wrote:
What a sad little country we are. What is it that supposedly we value in our
gun "rights"? Obviously not life. Are we all hoping that one day we will have
a chance at shooting the bastards, to know the relief in blowing the
sonsofbitches away? During the Vietnam war I was working (in Memphis, not
Vietnam) with a guy who would talk about joining the Army so that he could get
over there and mow those commie gooks down. He really, truly wanted to kill,
to destroy everything that he didn't understand, that he saw as hostile to his
own very small world. I quit that job and I have no idea if he ever made it to
Vietnam ( but 3 million Vietnamese were killed, so I doubt they needed his
help), but on learning of massacres like this one today in Oregon, I wonder
just how many people out there are cleaning their rifles everyday aching to mow
the bastards down. No virus found in this message.
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