In the UK, yes we really believe this.
What about someone who enters a business, gas station, whatever, one day and starts executing people on the spot? Is a cell phone really your best tool?
Maybe you are not capable of protecting yourself or not ready to deal with that yet but if I put myself in that situation and was also not capable or ready to protect myself then I would hope that an upstanding citizen next to me or in the same situation as me was prepared to stop the threat.
In a lot of situation where you can be seriously injured or killed in seconds by an evil person I really can't think of any possible way that the police can help me. Keep in mind that most criminals are surprisingly smart enough to not commit a crime with a uniformed police offer standing next to them and unfortunately you will not always have the police standing next to you.
UK residents are simply not afraid of being shot, because there are so few firearms. Armed robberies (with guns and with other weapons) do happen and as I understand it the generally accepted procedure is that you give the robber the material goods that he wants and then he goes away.
Violent physical attacks do take place too, of course, though (without looking at the statistics) I would estimate they happen far less frequently than the US. Even when such crimes cause outrage, civilian gun ownership is never suggested as a means of reducing the crime rate.
Public policy in the UK is far more focused on reducing the number of attempts at violent crime than it is focused on giving individual citizens the ability to defend themselves from such crimes at the moment they take place.
I wouldn't say "never".
In particular, are you suggesting that this organisation has any sort of substantial following? If you make your claim explicit I can disabuse you of any misconceptions you maybe carrying.
In particular, are you suggesting that this organisation has any sort of substantial following?
I have no idea, but that's hardly the point. If they had even one member, it shows that private gun ownership is, indeed, sometimes suggested.
"Swann noted that in the UK, there are 2,034 violent crimes per 100,000 people. By contrast, there are 466 violent crimes per 100,000 here in America." - http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2013/01/10/fox-af...
(I couldn't find a list of countries on Wikipedia sorted by violent crime, only by intentional homicide, so this is the best source I could cite in the time available for making this comment)
Edit to add: I believe that abandoning fear of negative outcomes is the solution to many of our problems, not tightening the reins on society to try to prevent negative outcomes.
- "common assault" (includes slapping, spitting at, pushing)
- threats of violence
- domestic/marital violence
- physical abuse
i.e. not just "stranger" violence and physical situations where people are not injured.
My guess, for the US statistics to be so low, they may not include similar crimes. Many countries only include so-called "serious" assaults in their stats.
Also, UK figures usually include all reported crimes, whether investigated and/or proven, or not.
Perhaps because they're more concerned with getting stabbed! I see that some British doctors are calling for kitchen knife control:
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/british-doctors-cal...
"the generally accepted procedure is that you give the robber the material goods that he wants and then he goes away."
How do you instruct your wife or children to respond to rapists or pedophiles? Indeed, how would you respond?
People in the UK are simply not so scared of rape or paedophilia that they want to wield the power of life or death over everyone they meet.
The thing about giving everyone a gun is that it makes every crime that much more likely to be fatal. In Canada, for example, if I break into your house for your TV and you catch me, we're sort of at an impasse. Maybe I have a knife or a hard-to-get, illegal gun, but more than likely I hadn't thought it out. I'll run away, you'll call the cops.
Compare to the US, where I'd get a gun before I break into your house, because why not, they're everywhere. Now I want some crack, break into your house, get startled and shoot you. Or you shoot me. By introducing guns into what would have been a non-violent crime, you've significantly increased the risk of injury or death for all parties.
This is not to say that it's impossible to get an illegal gun if you think it might be beneficial; as in your 'holding up a convenience store' example. But why would I cap a bunch of random bystanders, and turn my potential armed robbery charge into first-degree murder? If I do have an illegal gun, and I know everyone else is unlikely to be armed, I hold all the power. The gun is merely a tool to keep people in line, I don't have to shoot anyone to achieve my goal. If I think everyone has a concealed carry, suddenly the situation is fraught with peril for everyone.
Gun control in the US is some terrible, bad-faith arms race where everyone 'needs' to defend themselves against these random, nun-toting boogey men.
1. One would argue that mass shootings are this sort of irrational behaviour. However, they tend to involve legally purchased guns, and they represent a very small proportion of gun-related deaths.
They were later caught by police and found to be over 6 feet tall with baseball bats, crowbars and a history of violent crime. Had I gotten up that night and walked into something unexpected I would prefer to have something to help me through the situation... Just my opinion though.
To me, a gun will help level the playing field. I have some empty hand combat skills but I surely wouldn't bet my life that I could take on 3 large men armed with baseball bats who didn't want to get caught and were clearly displaying reckless disregard for other people.
I just really don't think bad people are some imaginary "boogey men".
- Your house is broken into. Not really a routine occurrence.
- The people breaking in don't have guns. If any of them had a gun, and you had a gun, now it's a proper disaster.
So you're weighing all the risks of easy, legal gun-ownership ( lower barriers to shooting sprees, accidental discharges ) against being in this precise scenario, which happened to you one time. Further:
- I'm going to take it on your word that 'history of violent crime' means beating up random homeowners. I can only imagine in the business of housebreaking and fencing stolen goods you probably have some extra-judicial problem solving, which might involve beating up other people you've had criminal dealings with. This is quite different from murdering suburban homeowners in cold blood.
- Further, of course they had crowbars, they were housebreaking. The police didn't catch them at your house, so you can't really confirm the number or the kit they had at the time, just how many people the cops nabbed later.
The really telling thing is your comment about hand-to-hand combat. Why the hell are you looking for a fight, anyways? Is punching a random burglar going to help your odds of getting out safely? This is the really perverse american attitude, that it's not sufficient that you avoid bodily harm, but you need to dominate and punish the intruder yourself, because they've wronged you. If you're open to appeasement or trying to get away quietly, you save yourself significant risk of injury.
No, no it's not. Homeowners defend themselves against home intruders all the time with guns. Google is your friend.
To add at least one anecdotal data point, my home was burgled a couple of weeks before Christmas by a group of armed burglars.
FWIW, It happened tn the UK, specifically in Liverpool, in Kensington ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kensington,_Liverpool ), where a friend lived while doing his PhD.
Forunately he was not in and the door of his room was locked (he shared the house with other guys). The burglar took lots of valuable stuff from the rooms that were unlocked (so it was not someone of the friends).
If not, maybe you lot should reconsider your irrational fear of guns.
FWIW, the USA is much larger than England, and some of our rural areas are very rural, so it's hardly an apples to apples comparison... but just to illustrate a bit: I was a 911 dispatcher for a while some years ago. The county I dispatched for was one of the larger ones (by square mileage) in NC, and mostly rural. Law enforcement was provided by the county sheriff's department, as well as town police forces from the 9 or 10 incorporated towns which were large enough to have their own police force.
On an average night shift, there would be 4 sheriff's deputies plus a sargeant on patrol. That's 5 people, plus the one or two town cops from each town. Now this is to cover a county where driving all the way from one end to the other, north/south down Highway 17, would take about an hour, and crossing the county east/west along Highway 211 could take a good 45 minutes.
So what do you think the response time for a cop was, if you dialed 911 at 3:00am and happened to live out near the Brunswick/Columbus county line? Well, if the "area 3" deputy happened to have been on an earlier call that took him down towards Southport, you were looking at probably 45 minutes. What if he was actively tied up on another call? Now you have to ask somebody from another district to respond, or get one of the town officers to respond. And they're even further away.
Interestingly enough, even in big cities with much greater population density and more police officers, you still can't (except by blind chance) expect a particularly fast response time for a cop. Certainly not fast enough if someone with ill intentions is creeping around outside your home.
The simple truth is, the idea of police responding to a life threatening emergency, and arriving in time to stop it before anyone is harmed, is a myth. Police exist to A. act as a deterrent, and B. respond after the fact and attempt to locate the perpetrators.
In any case, what "police exist" to do depends very much on the jurisdiction they serve in. The situation outside the US is very different from the one inside the US. Please bear that in mind before asserting that your interlocutor has an "irrational fear of guns".
Perhaps, but I bet you'll be hard pressed to find any jurisdiction (in reality) where police actually serve to respond to - and stop - in progress crimes on a routine basis. And I guess you'd be even harder pressed to find one of those where they actually live up to that standard.
Please bear that in mind before asserting that your interlocutor has an "irrational fear of guns".
I'm generalizing, of course, which is somewhat intellectually lazy, but in the absence of other evidence, it's a reasonable shortcut in the conversation. My experience has been that when someone identifies themselves as being from the UK, and takes a largely "anti gun" position, they usually have some pretty whacked out beliefs about guns and gun ownership. If that's not the case here, you have my apologies.