All Hail the Second Amendment

[Fidel_Castronaut]

Just to add, a lot of the assault statistics are skewed by violence on a night out on Fridays and Saturdays (I found figures a while back based on police areas in various English and welsh counties that saw 'violent crime' escalate massively on Fridays and Saturdays).

That is an issue that revolves around issues with the so-called 'drink culture' that exists in some areas around the country (I dispute this idea to a degree but it certainly is a problem in some areas)

Also, the figures (If I can find them, which I will attempt to do) would show violent crimes heavily centralised in some of the poorer inner city areas and in popular 'drinking' areas throughout various cities.

I think you'll agree, the last thing you want to do is add a gun to a scenario like that.

Assault-while-drunk is assault nevertheless, lots of things escalate during happy hour (lets not forget ufo sightings), lol. As far as I was aware, poorer inner city areas are uniformly more violent just about anywhere they care to track the stats on those lines. That's not skewing, that's cultural and statistical parity.

In any case, waving a gun around drunk is as bad an idea as driving drunk and for the very same reasons, won't get any disagreement from me on that count.

I agree, it is assault nevertheless, but the context of that assault is what I'm getting at. In the US, as a layman on US social convention and society per se, the issue appears to be a combination of poor social welfare structures combined with generally very easy access to guns and ammunition. This, I contend, is a problem across the board, whereas in the UK, its very much a localized issue in some (but not all) city wards and only on certain nights.

Making gun ownership illegal in the UK context is very much a logical decision as the types of assault are not the types of assault where having a gun would make any sense (one wold be more likely to be convicted of murdering someone in the crossfire).

There's also the issue of who is perpetrating these crimes,. I don't have stats to back it up, but I'm willing to bet that the overwhelming vast majority of recorded 'assaults' in the UK are committed by the same people and in the same locales. This links down to a re-offending rate that is pretty poor (50% in some cases), which again,Mather than use the word skews, creates an impression of the UK being violent when really, it isn't. Is actually pretty peaceful, and you'll rarely if ever be a victim of crime (from personal experience, I was born in one of the poorest east London constituencies [hackney], lived in some of the poorest areas of England's second city [Birmingham], which is where I still live, and have never been a victim of crime except for one burglary. Now this is just anecdote of course, but as far as I can recollect, none of my friends or acquaintances have been a victim of assault either, although I could be wrong).

On the note of the OP, I have never understood why introducing a gun to the situation would automatically make everything safer.