JOYCE MALCOLM WRITES ON BRITAIN’S EXPERIENCE WITH STRICTER GUN CONTROL, AND MORE CRIME.
In reality, the English approach has not reduced violent crime. Instead it has left law-abiding citizens at the mercy of criminals who are confident that their victims have neither the means nor the legal right to resist them. Imitating this model would be a public safety disaster for the United States.
The illusion that the English government had protected its citizens by disarming them seemed credible because few realized the country had an astonishingly low level of armed crime even before guns were restricted. A government study for the years 1890-92, for example, found only three handgun homicides, an average of one a year, in a population of 30 million. In 1904 there were only four armed robberies in London, then the largest city in the world. A hundred years and many gun laws later, the BBC reported that England’s firearms restrictions “seem to have had little impact in the criminal underworld.” Guns are virtually outlawed, and, as the old slogan predicted, only outlaws have guns. Worse, they are increasingly ready to use them. . .
As Malcolm notes, the gun control movement in England — as in America — is accompanied by an almost pathological hostility to the very idea of self-defense, and an idealization of “professionals” as a source of protection. Read the whole thing.
UPDATE: Some interesting observations on British treatment of the American gun control debate, from Natalie Solent. Summary: it’s all treated as a question of American culture and psychology — there’s no acknowledgment that Americans might have actual reasons for opposing gun control.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Tim Lambert sends this link to figures that seem to say that violent crime in Britain is actually falling. That’s inconsistent with other reports that I’ve read — and the summary indicates that police reports of violent crime are up sharply — but there you are. Anyone have more background on this?
YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Lambert has more on this. In essence, this seems to be another “my stats are better than your stats” argument of the sort that plague criminological discussion. The topic is being discussed at length on an email list that Lambert and I are both on, and, well, people don’t seem to find it as open-and-shut as he makes it sound. Meanwhile there’s this article from The Independent calling Britain the “crime capital of the West” based on victimization studies. And Brit-blogger Steven Chapman offers observations here and here.