Naive? With all of the statements and opinion in my post, you think I am posting from a position of no experience or sound logic, to the point of being infantile?
I live in the UK. I've been mugged. We don't carry guns. I've never been threatened with, shot at or even *heard* a gunshot in a city. There hasn't been a shooting in my city for a long time - especially not a fatal one (well, there was a suicide a few weeks back - an older gentleman who had lost everything in the recession shot himself on a park bench with, iirc, an old revolver). IE, no-one carries firearms and virtually no-one is mugged by a person carrying a firearm (and in fact, in most cases it's a replica/toy firearm used for psychological effect). Since I've experience of this system, how is that naivety (clue, the deffinition of naive is to be lacking of experience)?
When most people rob you, they are after either your money, or your possessions they can sell on to obtain money. Hurting the owners of the house/person they are mugging is usually a long way down the list. They carry weaponry (in this country knives) to threaten you into compliance, and to use on you if you try anything funny - but they don't *want* to hurt you (otherwise mugging wouldn't exist, they'd just kill you and loot your corpse).
Even if the gun is of little help in a lot of mugging situations, the fact someone may be carrying a gun means the lawbreaker *has* to carry one for his own saftey, or piece of mind - the psychological effect of having a firearm is undeniable (just look at everyone saying they feel safe because of it. A robber with a firearm feels protected against potential victims with firearms).
If their intended victims had no normal legal access to firearms *then* the mugger would not have a need for a firearm - a kitchen knife is sufficient to quell most peoples' thoughts of resistance. It's psychologically harder to kill someone with a knife, especially so when someone is only after your phone, watch and cash in your wallet.
No mugger would "pick off" unarmed citizens. They are not out to kill, they want your possessions. Often, most mugging-related-deaths occur where either the victim refused to comply and started to cause a scene, forcing the muggers' hand, or the mugger felt the victim was a credible threat (ie, armed).
So no, it's not a contradiction.
Perhaps people with guns have thwarted muggers in the past, but then so have people unarmed altogether. I just feel that guns for personal safety *shouldn't* be an issue (after all, if no-one has a gun to shoot at you then you don't need to shoot back; and before you say it I
know serious criminals will still carry firearms, but then they're not targetting random people down backalleys), and if the US had tighter regulation and enforcement then it *wouldn't* be an issue (increasing border control/co-ordination with neighbours to tighten the net against incoming illegal firearms, as well as tough penalties for merely owning/carrying an aforementioned illegal weapon), and that you would see a net fall in firearms-related deaths (hommicide, suicide and accidental).
++EDIT++
Yes, there was a rise in armed crime in 2005/6, when that data is from. However, there is not a rise in *fatalitise/discharge of firearms* since the murder rate has fallen, despite the rate of muggings (armed or otherwise) rising. (the Guardian source supports the Times source with this hypothesis,
Home Office statisticians said the main increase had been in incidents in which guns had been used to threaten but no one had been hurt.
So therefore we have solid evidence that fatalities are low, and the firearms aren't being *used* unlike in the States where the firearm-related fatalities are still high.
The number of gun-related deaths went down from 55 to 49 in the year to September 2007. Incidents involving serious injury also fell, by 16%.
The BBC article is 6 years old, and that peak has fallen again after an anti-gun campaign. And it's still ONLY ~800 incidents of firearms *offenses* in the year, not *fatalities* (the US has well over this number, even when worked out on a per capita basis).
Home Office minister Hazel Blears said: "The risk of a fatal shooting in England and Wales is still one of the lowest in the world."
I wonder why that is, since we have strict regulation on access to firearms - when, after all, criminals still have guns and target unarmed citizens (which there are millions of)?
In fact, the BBC article even proved a point I was making earlier about whether such measures that we have in the UK could physically be applied in the states:
"We can only tackle it effectively by measures to reduce the supply of illegal weapons and a demand fuelled by a macho, glamorised gun culture," he said.
- thus backing up my point of moral/cultural relativism and differentiation. But that still doesn't mean reducing access to weapons such as handguns is a bad idea, as the other sources prove.
The Digg article is from 2 years ago and it's source is a .404 error, so I won't comment on that. However, it's still a sumamry of firearms *offensives* not *fatalities* and it's a
which, if you look at figures for the States, is very low indeed (and is comparable to Canada, Australia and other European nations, as previoulsy evidenced by
cleverlymadeup.
So I thank you for a refreshing list of sources that make my points for me. Here's a summary:
The sources are very old, and are regarding a small percentage increase (1-10%) that doesn't even go into triple figures, and that's for total firearms offensives and not merely fatalities. Compare this to the data previously found by other posters regarding the United States and you will see that there is a far lower rate of guncrime per head of population.
If that isn't due to regulation (and we are having/had an expansion of ghetto culture here in the UK over the past decade and yet still don't have the levels of crime to similar areas in the States), why is that?
++EDIT 2++
As to your A-D list, I'd say a combination of A and D (to give the populace the ability to overthrow a tyranical or unjust government...as stated in the same bit of the constitution that the Right to Bear Arms is in..you know, all that stuff about being part of an armed militia to ensure the government respects the people).
I don't think they were worried about crime rates (unless you count attacks by British, native American, French, any other random roving party as an act of "crime" and not "war") when everything was being written down.
