Chris

Where to begin ....

For starters, if you want to compare the UK and the USA, bald percentages are useless. They take no account of starting points and they don’t allow for differing definitions of ‘gun crime’. The simpler and clearer way of doing it would be to take a simple, comparable metric -e.g. people criminally injured or killed by firearms - and then compare those statistics per 100,000 of population.

Second, a number of the gun crimes in your list feature firearms that may be legally bought and owned in the UK. If you’re wanting to compare the UK and the USA, you have to compare like with like. Pick something that’s legal in the USA but banned here and determine whether there’s a statistically significant difference in the number of people criminally killed or wounded by those items, again, per 100,000 of the population. That way, you may begin to determine whether the ban makes a difference.

Third, in any case your list is a collection of headlines that you’ve managed to Google up in the time available to you when making your post. Neither the size of the list nor the severity of the incidents on it have any useful statistical value. What they do have is shock value, which lends some superficial credibility to your argument.

Fourth, the claim of a 20% upswing in lethal firearms ‘fired’ since 2012 is problematic. Why 2012? There was no significant change in legislation that year, except for exemptions granted to allow certain Olympic events to function. Pistols except .22 calibre were banned by the Major government after Dunblane and the rest were banned by Blair a couple of years later. Without having read into it, I suspect we would find that 2012 either corresponds to some police budgeting or staffing issue, or else it might have been a historic low point. Either way, I’d bet that the year was chosen for political reasons, to maximise the apparent severity of the problem. A 20% increase on a historic low, for example, sounds awful but without proper historical context may be highly misleading.

Finally - and assuming the 20% statistic is useful at face value - we still know nothing of causality. The figure is very carefully presented as shots fired, not guns in circulation. The author appears to suggest that guns already in circulation are being used more often, not that more guns are getting into the country. There are various reasons why shots fired may increase but the most likely scenario I can see is that criminals are emboldened by the belief that they can get away with it. As the average British citizen is unarmed, this can only be due to perception of police resources, and not the likelihood of a potential victim firing back, which would be a factor in the USA.