[Chloé Palmas]

Yeah, as in give them a valid reason for wanting it.

I meant Den didn't have to justify his right to have it.

Originally Posted by 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.

Okay so the crimes are technically defined as different terms, so yeah we can look at raw numbers, yes.

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.

How do you prove a negative, though? The M4 is not banned in the UK, but the fact that it hasn't been used in a mass shooting in the UK is hardly indicative proof that the UK made the right call in not banning the weapon.

The AR 15 is banned in the UK but not in the US but it hardly proves that banning it in the UK has meant that there are no mass atrocities in the UK involving that gun, because banning it was the correct thing to do.

Conversely double barrel shotguns are legal in the UK. Moat used one, killed a person and injured a couple more a few years ago. Makes zero difference as to whether the weapon is banned.

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.

Actually, partly true. After post 6 (let them kill each other) kind of posts I figured that I might need to dumb it down, some. Couldn't think of much worse than the Sun. I figured someone may accuse me of bias in the Sun (leaning right) so I had to find the same story (article) in the Guardian.

I didn't google the ones that I knew about anyway - Moss Side wasn't too far from where I grew up so when I heard about it the other weekend I thought "yup, another success in Britain's gun ban". As for the rest - some remind me of you because you are just north of Watford - a lot of them (Kingsbury / Queensbury etc) are very close to you (locality wise / other side of Stanmore). Thanks to the irritating "Google trending" options that you can't disable on older phones every time you tap the app on a 6.0 or older phone, you get the latest sensationalist stuff from there.

I.e. gun crime stories. It is not so much that I use a google search of stuff as much as the sensationalist headlines are much more in tune with gun control.

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.

See why I hate Redwood now? Had it not been for his nonsense Major may yet have survived 97. Granted Blair was romping to a landslide anyway but instead of letting the *******s win, the *******s gave us a weapons ban instead. Everything other than .22 were banned and then Blair came along, banned the rest and what happened in 2010? Derrick Bird killed 12 people with .22 rifle.

We can look into the 2012 stats when we get a bit more time, yes - for now this is kind of a rushed reply (and it might show lol).

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.

That is something that I was going to say at the end of post 37 ; the one difference is that Americans generally will be armed enough to fire back.

This likely does warrant a longer response that I don't have the time for now (was going to reply later on this week / next) but a lot of the discussion here is different from the way it started off with "let them kill each other / here come the NRA". Plus it went from philosophy to empirical statistics, which will likely take some time to get into further / with some depth.