Whew! It's a good thing too ... stopping all that senseless accidental shootings from law abiding citizens. Many the criminal will take the hint. Oh wait ... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/5712573...
I reckon we could have a fucking boring argument about it though. I've seen it done, it looks easy.
For the UK: 0.38 to 0.46
Source (and more sources): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-re...
In Northern Ireland (where as far as I'm aware the gun law is the same) it's 6.82.
It's interesting that England and Wales features in 7th lowest spot for death rate whereas Northern Ireland is 7th highest.
So in NI we're talking about just over 1,000 deaths against E/W combined, about 200. Hence the separate treatment.
It isn't, a lot more people in NI own firearms.
I've bemoaned the difficulty in finding reliable, research-quality statistical data like this for a long time. I've even tried to raise capital to for a start-up to do this. No luck.
And, the UK's low firearms death rates predate the firearms laws, which largely occurred post-WWI to stop a communist takeover.
Note the US' firearms death rate isn't uniform. For example, most of the peninsula's is better than the UK's best, but East Palo Alto, which has exactly the same laws (and lower firearms ownership than Palo Alto), is horrendously worse.
Parts of the US are third-world, with all that that entails. Gun control won't change that.
If you know of a specific reference I'll be very pleased to read it.
You do have to convert the raw numbers into per-capita rates.
Deal with accordingly.
(This is definitely one of the debates to avoid here because it is very polarizing, however, for the record we have a pretty good firearms record in the UK)
At least; that is my impression from the cases I see.
Tbh I'm not really giving an opinion on the actual issue, my orginal reply was supposed to "show up" the fallacy of the gp.
The relationships between guns, crime and their banning is way too complex for me to have an opinion on :p
How do they get "caught carrying weapons" without a search to find said weapons? (Terry v Ohio explains some of this, but note that Terry lets police search you even if you're not carrying.)
If our goal is to catch drug dealers, we could just let cops search based on hunches. After all, those hunches are fairly accurate.
> At least; that is my impression from the cases I see.
And those cases are representative of what?