From: Michael S. Lorrey (retroman@turbont.net)
Date: Sat May 27 2000 - 17:12:49 MDT
"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).
>
And property crime rates are up, even higher than the preexisting rates
that are far higher than US rates (as are Australian rates since their
gun bans.
While its instructive that there is a measured 2% drop in crime for each
1% of the population that carries concealed weapons, at least when
comparing various US jurisdictions, the mere fact that violent crime is
so much lower in the UK and elsewhere than in the US is to be considered
more a matter of percentage of the population made up of low income
minorities. Most crime here in the US is, in fact, minority on minority
and poor on poor, and the US is some 30% or more made up of minority
populations. Now, as minority economic results improve, the crime rates
in those communities is decreaseing (whether this is strictly economic
or a result of the population aging, which would also result in greater
stability and earning power, is cause for speculation). The UK's
population is only 7% minority, according to recent postings, and is
crime is starting to be a serious issue there.
I think some of Orwell's writing dating back to the late 1930's is
instructive as to this phenomenon. At the time, he noted that there was
a gradual increase in the number of east european jewish refugees in
england. Now the traditional British politeness mandates that everyone
politely wait in line to get on the bus or train, where the SOP in
eastern europe was for the whole crowd to push and shove for the door,
pell mell. When the number of eastern refugees was low, they were only a
small percentage of the people waiting for the bus, so it was not
difficult to assimilate them into the idea of waiting in line, but when
there came large numbers of refugees, this british system broke down and
chaos resulted.
I think in order to have an effect on crime, some percentage of the
minority population of a society must be assimilable and upwardly mobile
if that society is to retain a goodly amount of liberties in the hands
of the people, while more stratified societies can get away with more,
though in the long run risk either internal instability, or must engage
in warfare to mask this instability and use up those who would be the
players in such a civil conflict. This is noted in that although many
european countries boast of low violent crime rates, they are at far
higher risk of engaging in widespread warfare, such that in the last
century, at least 30-40 million people died due to violence in europe
during wars there (WWI, WWII, Spanish Civil War, Chechoslovakian and
Hugarian Purges, Greek Civil War), while less in North America, less
than 2 million people have died from violent crime during the same
period, yet most europeans look at North America as a far more violent
place.
Mike Lorrey
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