Doesn't that only apply to handguns?
UK guns laws are a big step forward from what they were and from what many other countries have but far from sufficient.
Gun control
- Thread starter ukbob
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Doesn't that only apply to handguns?
UK guns laws are a big step forward from what they were and from what many other countries have but far from sufficient.
Swan off shotguns are the weapon of choice for criminals in films like Lock Stock and 2 Smoking Barrels
Stopping illegal guns when so close to the continent will be a difficult task. Will stiffer penalties for gun possesion stop gang banger types? Probably not much. But at least the deaths aren't of people who vote Tory.
The outright ban applies mainly to handguns and fully and semi-automatic weapons, it's still legal to own hunting rifles, shotguns etc but the controls of the application process make it very difficult to get a certificate and the guns tend to be held at hunting lodges or shooting ranges as domestic lock up procedures would be prohibitively expensive. When the new legislation came in post Dunblaine I know a few gun owners who were so concerned they would essentially be losing their guns into locked up gun clubs that would charge through the nose for the privilege of keeping them there and visiting them occasionally that they moved them over to the continent to gun clubs in France or Spain.
Even the rules on shotguns were overhauled so my mate who had a legitimate clay pigeon range on Ilkley Moor looked like he would not have been allowed to keep the guns he had there due to his history with alcohol and the fact he was a teacher which eventually led to the daft sod shooting himself rather than give up his guns.
I'd say the UK's post Hungerford and Dunblaine reactions and the positive effects on the number of gun related crimes is the proof that the likes of Andrew~ refuse to see when they make stupid comments like, "the aftermath of a mass shooting is not the time to make gun control legislation". At the time when the majority of the public who object to feeling unsafe are behind gun control it's the perfect time to do something to restrict the rights of the vociferous loony minority.
Agree. It is exactly the time to legislate.
@Wibble how is the alternative to a gun two fingers? The reality of having no guns isn't having fewer or no murders or suicides - it's merely fewer suicides and murders by guns. For example your chart up there says Japan, yet they have one of the highest suicide rates in the world.
Most countries can't control guns, simply because as you've noted several times since my last post: bans will only remove guns from ownership by law-abiding citizens, criminals will always be able to get guns. People who want have a strong incentive to get guns will get them.
@Bury Red I never said the majority of gun usage in murders was related to gangs in the US, merely that if you control for that as one of the many contextual factors, the availability of guns has no effect on the overall murder rate, merely the usage of guns. And thanks for explaining to Wibble how difficult acquiring a firearm in the UK is.
Most countries can't control guns, simply because as you've noted several times since my last post: bans will only remove guns from ownership by law-abiding citizens, criminals will always be able to get guns. People who want have a strong incentive to get guns will get them.
@Bury Red I never said the majority of gun usage in murders was related to gangs in the US, merely that if you control for that as one of the many contextual factors, the availability of guns has no effect on the overall murder rate, merely the usage of guns. And thanks for explaining to Wibble how difficult acquiring a firearm in the UK is.
Stopping illegal guns is impossible.
Yes, but it's stupid to use that as a reason not to try. Stopping speeding is impossible too.
Got a nice "facts vs opinions" argument going on here.
It's a pretty good argument for not restricting access for law abiding citizens - same reason people are opposed to drug prohibition.
No it isn't. Just because something is difficult to enforce and won't succeed 100% is a stupid argument for not trying it. How exactly do you define a law-abiding citizen anyway?
actually its a poor argument. The only reason there are no reasonable gun controls is because the NRA is a very strong lobby that controls conservative voters. Gun Control will happen...with demographic changes...so that eventually people who do not care about gun and religion will control congress and gun controls will come into place...which will not be good for gun owners because they could have been part of the solution to having reasonable gun controls.
As for drugs the legalization of harmless drugs like marijuana, will be a good start. Then greater efforts can be directed towards harmful drugs.
It wouldn't work at all. Let's be honest here: most people don't want to own guns. So the only people that will get affected are the small amount of people who want to own guns, leaving the criminals untouched. What's the point. A law-abiding citizen is pretty self-explanatory.
Oh, I'm fairly sure guns will, eventually, be banned in the US. It seems to be the direction that most countries go at one stage or another.
As for your drugs thing, law enforcement can't really do much more than they are doing now (and failing).
Banning weapons wouldn't work at all even though it has in plenty of cases? Why shouldn't a criminal who's been convicted of a crime be allowed to own a gun?
Having any kind of weapon increases your chances of it being used against you. I remember a report about 4 years ago which showed a correlation between people carrying a knife and getting stabbed in London. Complete disarmament is the safest option.
Guns will never be banned. Gun owners..though in a minority are a significant voice. The rural culture is part of what makes up our country. But reasonable gun controls will happen. Its better for gun owners to participate...and the best way would be for them not to abdicate their powers to the profit motivated NRA who are fully owned subsidiary of the gun manufacturers.
I think drug controls will improve. Its a matter of channeling limited funds to target the most dangerous drug trafficking and working down..
In the case of drugs, even if you take down all the South American cartels new suppliers will quickly come along. It's an incredibly big market and one in which high demand makes it worth the risk.
fair point. really the economics of controlling drugs will eventually play out. not sure where we will all end up though.
Yes but in us they add every related death, suicide, accident, murder and even people killed by police officers. When in Europe they don't use the same statistics.
Living as a coward for been afraid to protect himself?
Living as a reasonable human who doesn't want to harm others.
Those stats I used are like for like - the same things are included in each.
Even if they weren't nothing other than more guns = higher death rate. The rate in the US is 40 times higher you are 40 times more likely to be killed by a gun in the US than you are in the UK. Which is a phenomenal difference and the only possible reason for such a huge difference can't be drugs or gangs (as the stats show) which leaves us with one possible cause - guns themselves. A major contributor may be gun culture but that goes hand in hand with widespread gun ownership.
Making drugs legal or decriminalising them has a potential to reduce the harm they cause and the costs they incur. Law and policy is, or should be, about reducing harm not political ideology.
So you don't bother trying to reduce their numbers or usage? You might as well not bother with almost any laws on that basis as people break them all the time.
are not cigarettes and alcohol worse?
That's not the point. The point being there are known psychological problems associated with excessive marijuana usage. It's also addictive (not to everyone obviously). I'm for legalizing it but the pothead crowd* that chimes on about "it's not bad" and "it's not addictive" is blatant bullshit. We'll see it enforced like alcohol (not while on duty/at work, not when operating machinery and vehicles/planes/boats) and cigarettes (in certain places, like an office or restaurant). The US will reap the taxation on it, new companies will make millions from producing and selling, new jobs will be created as a result of the need for farmers, shipping, more medicines, therapy, etc., to help those addicted/suffering health problems.
*The massive abusers of the drug not the novice user or the person that doesn't partake.
agree with that.
You suggested it was skewing the figures in Wibble's table when it really isn't. I'd also ask how you can arrive at the ludicrous conclusion that availability of guns has no correlation with the murder rate?
Put in very simple statistical terms from the UNODC tables:
USA averages 5.4 murders per 100,000 population between 2000 & 2012, 66% of those are committed with firearms
UK averages 1.7 murders per 100,000 population between 2000 & 2012, 2% of those are committed with firearms
The population density in the US is far lower than in the UK, affluence and poverty levels similar, drug and alcohol issues similar so how is it that the US are 3 times more murderous than their British cousins? Is it a coincidence that if you take away the gun deaths our murder rates are similar? The simple fact is that humans fight with each other by nature but most of the time it will come down to harsh words, occasionally blows however if there is a knife to hand the murder risk increases although most people don't have what it would take to stab someone to death, if there is a gun to hand it's impossible to take back that single pull of the trigger hence the much higher murder rate.
Guns don't kill people, people kill people as the NRA spout endlessly. It is an undeniable fact however that people with guns kill more people far more easily and therefore blatantly obvious that removing those guns from public hands is a much needed step forwards.
You've also chosen to misrepresent my explanation to Wibble how hard it is to get a gun in the UK, my explanation of the registration and ownership rules for legal guns shows how the government have used legislation to make it very hard for the common man to own and use a gun which basically keeps legal guns off the streets. I had earlier stated that getting hold of an illegal gun in the UK is not that difficult, if I wanted to I could easily lay my hands on one within 24 hours, I don't want to however and the punishments for doing so are adequate discouragement for all except for a very small minority of hardened nutters.
The death rate from guns overall is much much higher than that though. Murder isn't the only way that guns increase the death rate.
And getting a legal gun is much harder than it used to, not saying much, but getting rifles and shotguns not so much.
Guns of all sorts should be virtually impossible to get.
And getting a legal gun is much harder than it used to, not saying much, but getting rifles and shotguns not so much.
Guns of all sorts should be virtually impossible to get.
Completely agree Wibbs and the removal of guns from society would wipe a large number off the suicide statistics every year simply because as with the fists/knives vs guns argument, hanging, jumping, gassing all allow a lengthy pause for reflection that a twitch fo the trigger finger does not.
I'm just trying to argue things on the guns don't kill people, guns don't increase murder rates BS that NRAndrew~ and his ilk spout. I'm sure he's all for peoples individual right to blow their own brains out so there's no point trying to argue that with him.
Agreed. In Australia is is also a gender/geographic issue. Young men in rural areas have very high suicide rates and the gun is the method of choice just as pills are predominately a female method of choice (and yes pedants, I know women have shot themselves and men have killed themselves with pills). Without their preferred method far fewer would try it at all. Of course restricting rifles in country areas is especially difficult because many farmer do actually shoot feral/pest animals (often unnecessarily but that is a different if related argument).
In Canada we have restricted access to firearms and the suicide by firearm rate has dropped substantially since the mid 1990s when our strict controls were introduced but oddly enough, the rate of suicide has stayed pretty much the same. People who want to die will eventually be successful.
You do make a good point about the pause for reflection and that's why I'm a big supporter of safe storage laws. It may not be successful where suicide is concerned but it definitely protects people from heat of the moment shootings in domestic disputes and keeps the little ones from finding loaded guns and killing accidentally. If the US could implement this they'd see a massive drop in shooting deaths.
The 'drug issues' in the US and UK are not similar at all. The UK has never seen the level of gang violence that has and still occurs in the US, you can't compare them at all.
As for your "I could get a gun in 24 hours thing" - that's the whole point: laws don't stop the availability of guns.
Lastly, I find it interesting people in this thread are trying to suggest guns can't be used for defence; then why does every one who actually needs protection have a gun, or at least an armed detail? Go tell a general in Afghanistan to tell his guard to put their guns away because "a study showed you're more likely to get killed with a gun if you have one". Politicians have armed guards; drug dealers have guns. Seriously, it's like some of you have given up your thinking skills to 'studies'.
EDIT: apologies for the late reply, the Moyes sacking kind of took my motivation to post here :P
Drug usage between the UK and the US is pretty similar, we've got a slightly bigger heroin problem, you've got a slightly bigger meth and crack problem but on the whole the number of junkies per capita is virtually the same. We've got our gang issues too, hell the US can't mention football in a TV programme without bringing up our propensity to riot over a game of soccer. So surely the greater gang violence issue must correlate to some factor other than the incidence of drug usage or existence of gangs. Let me think... could it be the presence of guns?
But the illegality makes most people stop short of getting a gun and the harsh punishment makes it easy to deal with those who choose to circumvent the ownership rules. I'd far rather a society that dealt with someone who had a gun as a criminal immediately rather than wait until he's shot somebody to label him a criminal.
Guns are not a form of defence, they're a means of offence. Defence would be a bullet proof vest, the ability to shoot someone before they shoot you is a recipe for a nation of trigger happy, jumpy gun nuts shooting each other every time a car backfires. It's not us that have given up the ability to think, we just think that things should have moved on since the days of the wild west, and by moving on we wouldn't consider increased accuracy, capacity, ballistic damage and rate of fire as an advancement, we prefer to live in a society where the most you need to fear are a few harsh words and a slap when someone gets a bit heated and not the fecking OK Corral.
@Bury Red There is no comparison whatsoever between the level of gang violence in the UK and the US, I'm surprised you would even try to suggest that. There are more gangs in the US, and more extremely violent gangs in the US, hence more gang violence - guns are an effect of the problem, not the problem itself.
Your 'defence/offence' thing is like calling karate 'offensive'. Self defence doesn't mean taking hits, it can also mean stopping your attacker from hurting you. Anything you do in response to an attack is self-defence, and that can - if appropriate - include shooting the assailant.
Your 'defence/offence' thing is like calling karate 'offensive'. Self defence doesn't mean taking hits, it can also mean stopping your attacker from hurting you. Anything you do in response to an attack is self-defence, and that can - if appropriate - include shooting the assailant.
Anyway, I think we should end the discussion here: you're obviously an intelligent guy who's got their view, and I have mine. No point going around in circles because we both know neither is going to concede their stance at this point.
There is no comparison between the levels of violent death in the gangs nowadays, but that is because there are far fewer guns within the gangs. Something like 65% of all the gun crime within the UK is street gang related. Within London, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Nottingham and Bristol in particular there are very high rates of youth gang membership in the impoverished areas and the related increase in violence, albeit mostly knife related.
I'd hazard a guess that what you know about American gangs is from TV and music, same for me, but just because we're not rapping about it or glamourising it in films and TV in the UK it doesn't mean it's not there and doesn't mean there aren't some extremely dangerous places. Bloodz 'n Krips and Boyz in the Hood it may not be but if anything the wide diversity of gangs operating on the basis of drug territories, sectarianism and race can make for just as nasty an environment and can actually mean there are many more smaller gangs operating in each area as you'll have rival drug gangs of white and mixed race, yardies, skinheads, football crews and then assorted gangs from the immigrant communities that could include triad, eastern European mob related as well as Bangladeshi, Hindi, Sikh, Muslim and Tamil gangs in various areas. Gang violence in the UK didn't start and end with the Krays, we just don't choose to advertise it as a form of entertainment.
It may not be Snoop Doggy Dogging cool but the Dickie Bird Estate in Rochdale, an example I know very well from my youth, actually declared itself an independent police free state at one stage and was pretty much a no go zone for none gang members. My old man was the boss of the fire service and he has some lovely stories of them breaking through steel reinforced doors in the tower blocks to deal with a blaze in a meth lab only to find the occupants had driven 9" nails through the door jams to tear open the arms of anyone breaking in and had removed the floorboards behind the door leaving a 1 storey drop into a pile of broken glass and excrement. I've worked construction sites in Newcastle where the local gang would break off used syringes through the fence boards to snag workers on the other side and where the pikey labourers I took with me refused to go out in an evening after witnessing a guy burying an axe in someones head to settle an argument in the first pub they went in.
Karate is defensive when you're blocking, offensive when you're punching and kicking or even threatening to. Guns are never defensive unless you're planning on shooting your assailant's bullets out of the air or blocking them with the gun itself, they are always an offensive counter measure and always escalate the situation, take off your NRA blinkers.
@Bury Red no one said there is no gang activity in the UK, but the levels are completely different. Quite a lot of what I know about American gangs is from a cousin of mine who lived in Chicago, not from TV. The reason isn't the lack of guns, it's the fortunate circumstance that the UK does not directly border any failed states like Mexico which allows gangs from South America to spread, or (until recently) the kind of ethnic separation you get in the America. More to the point: the United States is the largest drug market by quite some distance. Not to mention they have been at perpetual war since they entered the Second World War, so there's thousands of violent psychopaths produced every year.
Sure, your estate was bad. But it's not South Side Chicago. I've lived in estates in Hackney and Woolwich and they were insane from my perspective, but I'm under no illusions about comparing them to the US. We haven't there, not yet anyway. Hopefully never.
Anyway, like I said, this discussion isn't really going anywhere. So let's just leave it.
Sure, your estate was bad. But it's not South Side Chicago. I've lived in estates in Hackney and Woolwich and they were insane from my perspective, but I'm under no illusions about comparing them to the US. We haven't there, not yet anyway. Hopefully never.
Anyway, like I said, this discussion isn't really going anywhere. So let's just leave it.
It's the factual distortions and flat refusal to listen to hard cold facts that make debating with you impossible Andrew. The US is not the world's largest drug market by quite some distance if you look at it on a per capita basis (source: http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/interactive/2012/jul/02/drug-use-map-world):
UK vs USA
Cannabis - 6.8% vs 14.1%
Ecstacy - 1.4% vs 1.2%
Amphetamines - 1.1% vs 1.8%
Cocaine - 2.2% vs 2.2%
Opiates - 0.8% vs 1.6%
and with the exception of opiates, where that is a whole UK figure, the rates for all the other drugs would increase in the UK if Scotland, Wales, N Ireland and the Isle of Man were included.
So the US is higher in Cannabis which given the legality in many States is hardly unexpected and not a major influence on gang violence. We're very similar for everything else with the exception of opiates where the US figures reflect mainly over the counter opiate abuse by middle aged housewives that have no influence on gang activity whereas most of the opiate abuse in the UK is injected heroin.
I can't dispute the fact that the US does border Mexico, but that's only 4 States with a direct border with the bulk of your gang affected cities being 1000 or more miles to the north of the border. The UK does however have a "minor problem" with one of the parties within the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland which has seen us in a state of virtual civil war for much of the last 100 years with the US helpfully funding and providing arms to the separatists within the Union.
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