The British Example
Let us not forget that not only does Michael Moore advocate emulating Britain’s disaster of a healthcare system, he’s also in favor of their gun control policies, which are equally successful.
America’s disenchantment with “gun control” is based on experience: whereas in the 1960s and 1970s armed crime rose in the face of more restrictive gun laws (in much of the US, it was illegal to possess a firearm away from the home or workplace), over the past 20 years all violent crime has dropped dramatically, in lockstep with the spread of laws allowing the carrying of concealed weapons by law-abiding citizens. Florida set this trend in 1987, and within five years the states that had followed its example showed an 8 per cent reduction in murders, 7 per cent reduction in aggravated assaults, and 5 per cent reduction in rapes. Today 40 states have such laws, and by 2004 the US Bureau of Justice reported that “firearms-related crime has plummeted”.
In Britain, however, the image of violent America remains unassailably entrenched. Never mind the findings of the International Crime Victims Survey (published by the Home Office in 2003), indicating that we now suffer three times the level of violent crime committed in the United States; never mind the doubling of handgun crime in Britain over the past decade, since we banned pistols outright and confiscated all the legal ones.
We are so self-congratulatory about our officially disarmed society, and so dismissive of colonial rednecks, that we have forgotten that within living memory British citizens could buy any gun – rifle, pistol, or machinegun – without any licence. When Dr Watson walked the streets of London with a revolver in his pocket, he was a perfectly ordinary Victorian or Edwardian. Charlotte Brontë recalled that her curate father fastened his watch and pocketed his pistol every morning when he got dressed; Beatrix Potter remarked on a Yorkshire country hotel where only one of the eight or nine guests was not carrying a revolver; in 1909, policemen in Tottenham borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by (and were joined by other armed citizens) when they set off in pursuit of two anarchists unwise enough to attempt an armed robbery. We now are shocked that so many ordinary people should have been carrying guns in the street; the Edwardians were shocked rather by the idea of an armed robbery.
If armed crime in London in the years before the First World War amounted to less than 2 per cent of that we suffer today, it was not simply because society then was more stable. Edwardian Britain was rocked by a series of massive strikes in which lives were lost and troops deployed, and suffragette incendiaries, anarchist bombers, Fenians, and the spectre of a revolutionary general strike made Britain then arguably a much more turbulent place than it is today. In that unstable society the impact of the widespread carrying of arms was not inflammatory, it was deterrent of violence.
Okay, okay, so they live in a police state where the government videotapes everything that citizens do. And not only aren’t they able to own firearms, there is no legitimate legal right to self-defense in the UK. And they have higher rates of crime than we do.
But their healthcare is FREE! (Even though you might have to wait a year or so to get it.)
Comments
Oh! I guess if something isn’t happening to you personally, then it’s not happening at all!
That’s pure genius right there.
Apologies if I went off on one JimK, but you’ve got to see it from my point of view - it seems every time something appears in the news about the UK (or europe in general) you take it to slag off the whole of the UK, and as a patriotic chap it gets on my tits. (as I’m sure you can understand!)
You post something about how Britain is shit, you’re going to get a rise out of me, thats a bit how it works!!! I get into work on a monday morning, Log onto Moorewatch and see a post slagging off my country, and I took the bait - surely you can sympathise?
Anyway - to address the post directly and rationally, again I don’t see how making handguns legal would help reduce crime. I’ll go out on a limb and say that even if handguns were legal you wouldn’t have an armed population because it’s not something the average urban citizen wants. I have absolutely no data to back this up however, just anecdotal evidence from a guy living in London.
@ilovecress.
You can imagine, then, the coverage of every little negative event in the US by European press can get a wee bit tiresome for an American Ex-pat married to a forign national and living in the country of their spouse’s origin.
The press in the country I live in now tends to fill up their international coverage with stories from the US, not just the important stuff that could have an effect on Europe or the world in general, but crap that makes some people believe certain stereotypes about Americans.
There are similar events that happen domestically, but those are forgotten when a teenager abandons her 2 hour old infant in New Jersey.
Camkrisand - absolutely. Are you saying this type of reporting is lazy, biassed, and intended to falsely skew the facts to fit a pre detemined idea? hehe ;-)
(can open, worms everywhere...)
ilovecress, surely you realize that you and your fellow Britains were trained to think that way? Asfter all this article starts with the fact that in very recent memory, Britains carried small handguns as a matter of course and were NOT wilding in the streets. People were EXPECTED to defend themselves. In may UK jurisdictions it is now ILLEGAL to defend yourself...or it’s de facto illegal, as you, the victim, will often be charged with a crime because you defended yourself against a scum intent on doing you harm.
Since you were trained...you can be untrained. At the VERY least it should be acceptable socially, morally and LEGALLY to defend yourself. That would be a good start for the UK. Not prosecuting people who defend themselves. Forget handguns for now. Just start with THAT.
I get into work on a monday morning, Log onto Moorewatch and see a post slagging off my country
Wow, that happened a whole one morning? Imagine waking up almost every morning to read yet another foreign country slagging your country.
Perhaps that’s a can of worms you don’t want to open, ilovecress…
There are, of course, problems with using statistics as evidence. Let me remind you of a famous saying: “There are three ways to not tell the truth: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” What you must do is ask yourself some questions: who did the study that came up with the statistics, what exactly are the statistics measuring, who was asked, how were they asked, and compared with what? If one believes in the truth of statistics (and there are many such), then how does one explain that the same Presidential candidate can be 20 points ahead and 5 points behind his opponent in the polls at the same time? After all, both polls are “statistics”. What you must be examine, if you wish to use statistics as evidence, are the above questions.
...Finally, you need to examine statistics to determine what are the comparisons being drawn and are they relevant and valid. For example, say your topic is gun control. You could find statistics on murder rates with handguns per capita in New York City, London and Tokyo. Such statistics would show much higher rates in New York than the other two cities. It would therefore appear that gun control is a good idea since guns are controlled in London and Tokyo. However, such statistics must be suspect, not because they are wrong (more people are indeed murdered with handguns in New York City than in London or Tokyo), but because they don’t tell the whole story.
For instance, New York has an extremely stringent weapons control law (the Sullivan Act). Since this is the case, what happens to the argument that control laws work? There must be something else influencing the murder rate.
What about the culture? The United States is unlike any other country on Earth. Its society has a tradition of independence and self-sufficiency, where if you have a problem it is normal for you to take care of it yourself, even if you can’t. It is also a country that used to be called “the melting-pot” but is now known as the “mosaic”, with New York City a patchwork of often conflicting cultures, languages, customs and attitudes. Add in the traditions of the old West and “gunslinging” becomes an apparently viable option to solve problems. Japan, on the other hand, is an extremely homogenous and traditional culture, with little in the way of overt class or cultural conflict. England is also very traditional with far less cultural conflict (any country that feels no necessity to arm their police does not have a tradition of individual use of force to solve problems). However, now as England is becoming more culturally and ethnically diverse, there is a rising incidence of violence and use of guns.
From the above it is clear that any statistics on murder rates says nothing about the efficacy of gun control laws, but rather about the cultural and/or societal factors that make such laws ineffective. If you wish statistics to serve as evidence for a gun control law, find something else.
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~taflinge/evistats.html
Wow, that happened a whole one morning? Imagine waking up almost every morning to read yet another foreign country slagging your country.
Perhaps that’s a can of worms you don’t want to open, ilovecress…
HA!!! I couldn’t have said it better myself. It seems we Americans can’t FART without you Brits telling us What’s wrong with us, how we got that way and what we should do to fix it.
Not ripping on you, I’m just saying “Welcome to our world!”
pjwarez
I’m not saying that doesn’t happen, just explaining why a chap that loves his country gets on the defensive when someone slags his country off - just as you guys do.
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Yawn. No, you’re totally right. I got mugged twice just this morning, and I live in fear of the next time gangbangers break into my house and rape my girlfriend.