A sharp report

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Praise is due to the BBC for allowing the other side of the story for once. It doesn’t equalise their consistent favouring of the criminal over the victim, but here it is, a least this:

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17 Responses to A sharp report

  1. deegee says:
    July 13, 2009 at 5:40 pm

    What is this other side of the story, Ed? Are you advocating the right to bear arms as in the United States.

    On the issue of carrying guns and controlling guns the US and the UK are about as far apart as it is possible to be. I for one am perfectly happy to continue with that situation.

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  2. Paul says:
    July 13, 2009 at 5:47 pm

    Great just so long as you're happy to rely exclusively upon the state for protection then deegee. In my opinion nothing wrong with a law abiding citizen owning a firearm. I covered the debate here:

    http://amodernlibertarian.blogspot.com/2009/05/ban-paintball.html

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  3. Ed T says:
    July 13, 2009 at 6:11 pm

    Deegee – I think the crime debate in the UK is heavily biased, not even acknowledging the real views of the public. I'm not sure if the right to bear arms is one particularly dear to the British public, but it ought to be part of the range of debate. When you see the violent crime that is regularly swept under the carpet until something dramatic happens, it makes one think that ordinary people bearing guns might not be such a bad thing.

    However, there are other topics I'm hotter on. I'm rather partial to the death penalty, for instance.

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  4. qoooze says:
    July 13, 2009 at 11:12 pm

    She looks pretty hot with that gun!

    Trouble is, I'd have a few beers and insist on playing Russian roulette or something. Even if it was an automatic.

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  5. teacher.paris says:
    July 14, 2009 at 3:22 am

    Are there any Brits who are not alcoholics?

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  6. Grant says:
    July 14, 2009 at 7:36 am

    The Swiss seem to do ok,

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  7. Barry says:
    July 14, 2009 at 9:06 am

    I don't want the right to bear arms but I do expect a reasonable measure of protection from the police and the criminal justice system. I also expect some latitude if I genuinely need to use an everyday item such as a hammer for self defence.

    It's a pact. If that pact breaks down, people's views will change. I don't think we're approaching that stage in the UK yet but people certainly feel less secure than they used to.

    The combination of guns and alcohol is certainly a toxic one.

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  8. Richard Lancaster says:
    July 14, 2009 at 2:16 pm

    Grant said…
    The Swiss seem to do ok,

    The Swiss are the Swiss. Assuming that the introduction of similar gun controls in the UK would have the same reception is naive in the extreme. Ah, but I suppose the Brits took on continental drinking habits so well…

    Besides which the Swiss seem to have a rather nasty, if uncommon, problem with messy domestic homicides.

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  9. Yorkshire bastion says:
    July 14, 2009 at 2:22 pm

    The murder rate in Britian is ten times lower than in the US for good reason. Let us keep it that way.

    The Swiss do not do ok – murder and suicide rates there are more than 50% higher than in the UK, most of these are due to firearm deaths.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_murder_rate

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  10. John Stephens says:
    July 14, 2009 at 2:25 pm

    I dread to think the carnage that the Islamofascists would cause in Britian if they had firearms rather than having to make homemade bombs (which they are fairly crap at doing). The Bombay massacres are a case in point.

    Though at least it would give us an excuse to kill the bstards.

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  11. frankos says:
    July 14, 2009 at 3:39 pm

    Are there any Brits who are not alcoholics?

    how very dare you –of course not, it's the only thing that unifies the United Kingdom!

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  12. bernard says:
    July 14, 2009 at 5:33 pm

    Firearms may be banned but there's no difficulty getting a shotgun license if you cite clay pigeon as the reason for wanting one.
    Mind you, living in a tower block in Peckham could be problematical.

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  13. Bob says:
    July 14, 2009 at 10:21 pm

    The murder rate in Britian is ten times lower than in the US for good reason.

    For the good reason that you can't read your own sources. It's about 3x.

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  14. Abdul says:
    July 14, 2009 at 11:37 pm

    Some of the countries with the lowest murder rates are Moslem. Look at how rare murder is in Saudi arabia. This shows how effective Shar'ia law really is!

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  15. frankos says:
    July 15, 2009 at 2:28 pm

    no need to commit murder when the state does it for you–just accuse your wife of adultery and watch the fun as she is beaten to death.

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  16. Anonymous says:
    July 16, 2009 at 5:44 pm

    THis is a little unfair, as Justin Webb always takes time to give the 'other side of the story' on gun control, and explains that many areas of the US of A seem a bit more polite when one knows that being nasty to someone might result in a 'feel lucky, punk?' moment.

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  17. Matt in Exeter says:
    July 19, 2009 at 4:55 pm

    I'm de-lurking here on a topic I know a little about.

    I'm glad to see the Beeb for once reporting neutrally on a gun-related topic… I wonder if we can now get them onto the debacle of the shooting events for the 2012 Olympic games?

    The debate on carrying arms for one's protection is a complex and divisive one and not really suited to discussion in the comments section of a blog. However I feel I must point out that the laws on self-defence in this country are such that owning a can of irritant spray (Mace/pepper spray for example) — just like the police seem happy to issue to every officer for defence — is just as banned as owning a machinegun and carries the same minimum sentence.

    Comparing the murder rates per capita in the UK and US is like comparing the average daily wage in the UK with that in Europe; the US is a patchwork of different legal systems and societies. Comparing the UK murder rate with any particular American state is potentially more useful but again one must be very careful as there are variations in the legal definition of murder internationally. For example what we in the UK describe as 'manslaughter' is recorded elsewhere as murder and this can affect such crime studies. So too can willful misreporting as often happens in countries like Japan, where a ritual suicide after murdering one's entire family is commonly reported as everyone committing suicide. A more useful if long-winded approach is to consider the statistics for many types of crime, especially violent crime, per capita and where possible factor-in unrecorded and/or misrecorded crimes. Such studies tend to show little or no correlation with rates of gun ownership in general or rates of ownership of particular types of gun (e.g. handguns). Violent crime is IMO more connected with any number social attitudes and situations than it is to do with access to any particular tool — people have been killing and maiming for millions of years before even the spear was invented, I see it as a false assumption that murder will/does drop when guns are eliminated from the situation. Guns don't just up and kill people all by themselves any more than a car will drive itself into a crowded shopping centre.

    Oh and as an aside despite what certain groups want you to think guns are not banned in the UK, though most types are heavily restricted — both as to types permitted to be owned/used and for what purposes. Many types of shotguns, as noted by by bernard above, are less restricted than most other guns. Owning any gun intending to use it for self defence — even if it's not carried — is generally illegal… unless one happens to be an Officer of the Crown. Like MPs for instance… or a senior police officer…

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