Why More Americans Want to Own Guns

[Ben Davis]

Yeah, easy. The main firearms act in England was in 1968, and the second important one was in 1988.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_policy_in_the_United_Kingdom



Here is a chart with the UK homicide rate, you see a small but steady increase post 68, which was probably mostly due to a younger population and similarly 1988 homicide continues to rise. You don't see a real drop until recent years, when the homicide rate has dropped significantly in most developed countries and dramatically in the US despite the abundance of guns. What you don't see is any correlation between gun control and a drop in the murder rate. I'd love to see that evidence, but it's never presented. If banning guns really reduced murder, we'd see that evidence clear as day and every anti-gun person would be able to point to it. Instead the claim is just made that gun laws work without having to be backed up by evidence for some reason.

https://fullfact.org/news/has-murder-rat...abolished/

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Hi Cap'n,

Not true, I'm afraid. The 1920 act was the real game-changer, allowing the government to control the arms trade and remove guns from circulation after WWI. All the 1968 act did was combine all previous acts (1903, 1920 & 1938) with only minor changes. But although the UK has one of the lowest gun death rates in the world, that's primarily because we've had strict & well enforced gun control for so long (~100 years) that we no longer have any mainstream culture of gun ownership, neither are there any environmental pressures (like in the US) that increase propensity to own guns according to region.

If you want evidence of the effectiveness of enacting gun controls, you need look no further than Australia. Since the 1996 changes in law, deaths by guns have dropped by nearly 70%. It's very simple: if you want to reduce deaths by firearms, improve controls and restrict availability. The most dramatic stat is that prior to 1996, there were 13 mass shootings in a 17 year period; since 1996, there have been none.

Now, that doesn't mean that murder rates will necessarily decrease; that's a misdirection because there are many different ways to murder other than guns and there are so many sociological factors involved that no one seriously thinks that the 'golden bullet' solution to reducing murder rates is gun control. We have to measure what's causal: guns are a primary cause of gun-related deaths.

Consequently, I'm in favour of strict gun controls.