On Sat, 27 May 2000, Martin Ling wrote:
> On Sat, May 27, 2000 at 10:45:03PM +0100, scerir@libero.it wrote:
> > The England and Canada murder rates were already low before their gun
> > control laws were passed.
> > Thus, their restrictive laws cannot be much credited with lowering their
> > crime rates.
> > Murder rates in England, Canada, and Japan have risen since passing their
> > gun control laws.
> > I have read that In England the gun crime rate is up 10.9% after the gun
> > control law.
> > I do not say (like ancient latins): ³post hoc, propter hoc²
> > But this strange relation looks like the prey-predator pattern (Volterraıs
> > equations, Rashevskyıs patterns).
>
> I would be interested to see the sources of these statistics, before
> this is (inevitably) discussed further.
He *is* correct; I may be able to dig some sources up if I have the time.
England has a much higher gun crime rate now than it did at the turn of
the last century when firearms were virtually unregulated and very popular
there. U.S. "gun culture" is largely derivative of that of the UK,
although the UK seems to have forgotten it over the last century.
In fact, this is probably the most consistent long-term statistic across
all populations. For any given population, the level of private
gun ownership has an inverse relationship to violent crime rates. While no
one can really account for differences in the absolute rates between
different populations, that increased private gun ownership decreases
violent crime is not seriously contested. Even though there are lots of
theories as to why these differences in populations exist, I find it
rather foolish that so many people spend time attacking the validity of
the one correlation in this issue that has a very substantial basis.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
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