Summations Only

Yes, I'm sure it does.Did you notice that it's also 3 years old? If you were really interested in the facts about gun crime in the UK, you would spend a little time doing some real research instead of googling old articles from discredited sources, then cherry picking from within them.I suggest you start with this briefing paper from the House of Commons Library:Just a moment...I'd take particular note of Annex 1 which is titled "Notifiable offences recorded by the police in which firearms were reported to have been used" From 1990 to 2011.You'll see that picking your dates and definitions to make your story work for you is rather vital and the usual trick used by the ignorant and malicious.That table shows all firearm crime from 1990 to 2011. (Remember that the UK brought in a series of firearm legislation during that period and it was after Dunblane killings in 1996 that the major changes happened.)You'll see that from 1990 to 2004 firearm offences more than doubled from 10,000 to 24,000, then halved again to today. A similar pattern was followed by gun related murder - rising steadily from 60 in 1990 to 90 in 2001 then falling steadily back to 60 in 2011.(In fact 60 is now regarded as high - recent previous years had been around 40. So I'm sure that there's a Daily Wail blaring headline shouting "GUN MURDER UP 50%". See how easy it is to mislead?)If you see a "fact" in the Daily Wail - it's generally a good idea to check it before you make yourself look silly.

You are amazing.Like I say, it shows firearm crime rising steadily from 1990 to 2002/3 stabilising in 2003/4 then falling every year since so now it is half what it was at it's peak. That is not the "last few years"Now what else is missing? YES! it's population growth over the same period. More people = more crime. So the fall in firearm crime was not only a fall in absolute terms, but in real terms it was too - it fell whilst the population was growing.And once again, those statistics include everything that had a gun involved - even if it was a licensing issue or a fake gun. So look just at murders using guns again. Falling pretty much every year since 2001/2 - again with a rising population and again not just "the last few years".For your information, the UK Firearm Act was implemented in 1997. Coincidence? Think about what would happen if something that was legal is no longer legal. Perhaps those crimes related to the Act would increase for a while as the police took action and the public got used to it? Maybe? Then you'd expect a decline if if it was working wouldn't you?

The table shows a rise in gun related crime each year from 1990 until 2002/3 (that's thirteen years).After 2002/3 it shows a decrease every year until 2010/11. That's 9 years (inclusive).The figure declines from 22,070 in 2002/3 to 11,227 in 2010/11I'm also being generous - the number actually stabilises in 2001/2 when it hit 22,401. No we don't.We say - several times - that we would actually expect the gun related crime to INCREASE. This is partly inertia as a rise that has been occurring for many years doesn't just stop dead. It takes many years to depopulate the installed base of gun ownership. Gun related crime will obviously also rise after a change in the law because the police implement action against a new crime and people take a while to get used to it. You actually mean 2003/4 There are 6 years between 1997/98 and 2003/4 and, as I said, the numbers stabilised in 2001/2. So let's agree that the crime numbers started to decline 5 or 6 years after the Firearm Act was passed. That's just idiotic. Look at the numbers again. Gun related crime had been rising every year for 14 years - it just carried on going up.
In fact, if you look at table 2, you'll see that gun related crime had been increasing year on year for the last 35 years.We must assume that it would have kept on going up forever (if for no other reason than the population is increasing) unless something happened that could change the situation. That's odd because the entire world knows that except in very special circumstances, the police in the UK are NOT armed. THE GUN RELATED CRIME FIGURES IN THE UK HAVE FALLEN EVERY YEAR SINCE 2003/4. GET THAT INTO YOUR SKULL ANYWAY YOU CAN.People in the UK are half as likely to suffer gun related crime than they were in 2003/4. Prior to that gun crime was rising. Something made it change from a 35 year increase to a year on year decline - now what do you think might have been the cause?
I'm betting it's the introduction and implementation of the 1997 Firearm Act which removed guns from the population - stupid, I know.In 2011 there were 60 murders in the UK using guns.
In the USA it was 11,101. Who's the safest?
(and all this excludes suicides - 19,766 in the US last year)

Firearms were used by burglars on only 151occasions in the UK in 2011. That number has been falling year on year since 2003 (533). I feel pretty safe and getting safer every year - how about you?Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

I see you're dancing around the issue again. Never mind, it looks pretty.In the UK we protect every individual as best we can in all circumstances.Victims of crime have an absolute right to defend themselves and their property and may use reasonable force to do so. Reasonable force may include killing the robber with a weapon. And to make sure that everybody really understands that, we've just (unnecessarily) changed the law to say it explicitly.There is an assumption in UK law that the victim of crime always has the benefit of the doubt and it's highly, highly unusual for a victim to be charged with an offence whilst protecting himself or his property.It's even less usual to be found guilty if a case actually gets as far as to trial (do you think juries think any differently about this that you or I do?).And in the extremely rare occasions where a victim has blatantly committed a crime himself and ultimately been found guilty by a jury, the penalty is usually a suspended sentence. ie he walks out of court.You're exaggerating as usual.

Try to concentrate, just for a moment and stop deliberately misinterpreting what you are told. You're a clever guy, get a grip of yourself.In the UK we try to protect everyone as best we can all the time. That includes criminals.That does NOT mean that a criminal has a right to 'safety' when 'invading' a home. It does not mean that they are protected from violence - even extreme, fatal violence if the invade a home.The law is clear on this - a person can defend himself and his property using all reasonable force. If he fears for his life he is allowed to take a life - it's that simple.

Well I have no idea about burglary stats, never having looked for them before, but I see that in the USA in 2009, there were an estimated 2,199,125 burglaries according to the FBI
Burglary - Crime in the United States 2009In the UK last year there were 453,000
Crime statistics for England & Wales: what's happening to each offence? | News | theguardian.com [I have excluded attempted burglary from the UK numbers as they also seem to be excluded from the US numbers]The UK population is about 63m, the US population is about 310m. So if we pro-rata by population, based on UK numbers the US burglary rate should be453,000*310/63=2.2mor roughly what it actually is.Maybe we should look at households as they are what are burgled, not people.US household units in 2011 132m
UK households in 2011 26mSo 453,000*132/26= 2.3mor roughly what it actually is.So where do your numbers come from?

So your hypothesis is that because the UK population isn't armed, burglars don't concern themselves with whether anyone is home or not. Well that's interesting, considering this obvious fact: Burglary of Single-family Houses | ASU Center for Problem-Oriented Policing | ASUOk so we've established that burglary rates are identical between countries and I've shown you my workings.I can't find numbers on occupied burglary in the UK but the FBI tell us that it happens in 60% of all burglaries in the USA.
http://www.homesecurityresearch.com/home_burglary_facts.phpI'd be amazed if it was much different in the UK - but you presumably do so can you share please.

Haha.........did I hear a cock crow?Ok, I'll just have to trawl back through 35 pages of posts to find your source I guess - I'm intrigued to understand how our UK burglars are so care free. Thanks for the effort.

The website quotes the source as But i agree it would be nice to see the actual data, so I'll keep looking. Meanwhile, if you actually want to play this game, you could also produce your sources.Btw. Your OECD graphs are interesting but don't, of course tell us anything about guns. They also omit suicides by guns which is a large number in the USA.As you didn't provide a link to that graph I looked it up for you.Assault Death Rates in America: Some Follow-Up - kieranhealy.orgThe source is a blogger who doesn't do any work in the area but nevertheless his number are quite interesting. He has updated his numbers since the latest shooting.
We can only hope that as the world civilises it gets less violent - even though the US is miles ahead of everybody else in the violence game.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

I'm extremely sceptical about all claims made that contradict personal experience, but I am totally open to having my mind changed by the facts.For example, I agree that 60% occupied burgalry figure just feels wrong - I don't think even American criminals are that stupid. (Don't you guys regulate the claims made in adverts?).So I kept searching and I have now found a paper from the US DoJ that puts the number at 28%. So now UK burglars only have to burgle 112% of homes when occupied.A problem is that in the US if a burglary of an occupied house resulted in violence it wasn't collated as a burglary, it was called an assault, so I'm betting that whatever numbers have come up with a factor of four difference between us is not comparing like with like.http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/ascii/vdhb.txtBtw - 12% of homes burgled while someone was home faced a burglar with a gun.

So you have the chicken and you have the egg. This is why our police are not armed - it stops, or at least slows, the escallation. An assault during a burglary would be charged as an aggravated burglary, not an assault - a much more serious offence - starting point 10 years.http://www.cps.gov.uk/...ntencing_manual/aggravated_burgleryUnless it ended in murder or rape of course.

Everybody has beliefs that they have learned from their own experience and it's quite hard to shift them - and so it should be. If it was different, people would be in a daze of indecision about the simplest of things.One way that people's minds are changed is by hearing people with real knowledge speak rationally about it. There are some people here that have changed my mind - or at least made me think in a different way about things. They are the people that Ive learned to trust and respect through their arguments over time.Sadly you're not amongst them because you have consistently posted the most ludicrous, nonsensical, un-evidenced bollox I've heard for a very long time. They will argue that quite rightly - because sadly statistics can, and often are, used to lie and correlation most definitely is not causation. As you are very well aware, being a practitioner of the bent art.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Well I've spent a happy hour or ten, trawling for information on occupied burglary in the UK and I expect the only authoritative source is the the Home Office's Statistics that come from two sourcesThe British Crime Survey
The Police Recorded Crime Datahttp://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/.../user-guide-crime-statisticsThis is enormous and complex but there is a downloadable spreadsheet which attempts to breakdown the components each crime by interviewing victims of it.So in spreadsheet 1.8 of the burglary section we have:Someone at home 59
At home and unaware 26
At home and aware but did not see offender(s) 6
At home and aware and did see offender(s) 27
No one at home 41It's an extremely small sample so it may not be much use to us - but if it happens to be representative, 59% of UK burglaries are occupied at the time.That feels too high to me but I have no other data.So far then we have the USA and UK having equal burglary rates but with the US having 28% occupied and the UK with 59%. A factor of two not 4.I can not tell whether the data from the two countries can be compared like this because I don't know enough about how burglary is classified and counted in each country.

Well they're entitled to their opinion, but not their guns - this democracy voted against them.If they want to play with guns they know which country would love to have them.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.