Unintended Consequences... Gun Control

Lets just start in 1980.

We had three. The last was a shotgun spree by a man travelling around in a car, shooting selected targets.

In Hungerford, no-one had ever prepared for such an emergency. Dunblane was our first and only school shootout. Armed response units (created in response to such issues) would never have allowed Hungerford to reach the levels it did. Moreover, whereas it is possible to reduce such crimes, it is seldom possible to eliminate anything completely.

But lets get things in perspective. In the same period, the US has had 62 such incidents. Even accounting for a larger population, this is still 13 X the UK rate.

25 of these have occurred since 2005. This is quite an escalation, and it would be interesting to look into the causes of it.

75% of all guns used were legally purchased. These mostly included high-powered handguns with high capacity clips and high powered rifles with magazines. Those involving revolvers or shotguns which need frequent reloading were far less lethal.

12 involved schools and 19 were workplace killings. Malls, churches and cinemas were involved - anywhere where people are contained and en-masse.

And here's the real killer: Not a single one of these incidents was successfully stopped by an armed citizen.

In most cases they committed suicide or waited to be apprehended.

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OK, so you want to simply ignore mass shootings as a "statistical blip." However this "blip" has a massively disproportionate effect on the families and communities where they occur. Few other lethal crimes affect children, for instance, or are so hard to defend against. If US airlines wrote accidents off as a "statistical blip" you would be outraged.

But if you just take overall gun deaths into account, there is a very close correlation between ownership and overall homicides, just look at this:

http://www.businessinsider.com/shooting-gun-laws-2012-12

In fact mass killings fit the same profile. You have far more than any other developed nation.

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Or you point to higher rates of violent crime in the UK.

Leaving different recording methods aside, the implication that a higher crime rate is somehow related to lack of guns is a bit of a leap. The UK reports more than many other Euro countries which also have few guns, so where is the connection?

You could just as easily say that a lack of guns has made this "violent behaviour" a lot less lethal than it would have been, given that we still have a much lower overall murder rate than the US, or conversely that in the US, removing guns would reduce the murder rate disproportionately given that 67% of all murders involve firearms.

However the methods for recording most crimes are impossible to compare because (for violent offences for instance) standards of reporting are not consistent. In the UK, the vast majority of violent crimes in the UK involve no injury or minor injury. In the US there is no standard method for collating the statistics across US states. Surveys (as opposed to records) in the US indicate a much higher level of assaults than the FBI reports might indicate. Perhaps people just don't report them?

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Personally, it's not my problem. However I do have some close relatives living in the US with kids in schools there.

But the proposals that gun controls will make no difference, or that guns are effective at preventing other crimes, or even more absurdly, state sponsored tyranny (where was the uprising over Homeland Security?) have no credible evidence to back them up.

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The process of observation changes that which is observed, hence you cannot photograph reality.