THIS debate definitely does not belong here. Seriously, even if humankind ever does sort out the essentially intractable problem of governmental control over the carrying of lethal weapons by the citizenry, I am willing to bet everything I own that we won't be sorting it out here on Hacker News.
I reckon we could have a fucking boring argument about it though. I've seen it done, it looks easy.
You'll find similar differences between the "feet and fists" death rate. What are the "feet" control laws?
And, the UK's low firearms death rates predate the firearms laws, which largely occurred post-WWI to stop a communist takeover.
Note the US' firearms death rate isn't uniform. For example, most of the peninsula's is better than the UK's best, but East Palo Alto, which has exactly the same laws (and lower firearms ownership than Palo Alto), is horrendously worse.
Parts of the US are third-world, with all that that entails. Gun control won't change that.
OK, but a) Northern Ireland has been in a state of at best hevy terrorist activity and at worst borderline civil war in some areas for a good part of the last 40 years, and b) Relative populations:
England: 51.5m
Wales: 3m
Northern Ireland: 1.5m
So in NI we're talking about just over 1,000 deaths against E/W combined, about 200. Hence the separate treatment.
The stats in this table are terribly out of date. I'm not criticizing your post, just pointing it out. Also odd the authors of this article chose to publish 2 numbers for the U.S. I interpret them for corresponding to 2004/1993, which means there was a significant difference between those two years, not the rate is between those numbers.
I've bemoaned the difficulty in finding reliable, research-quality statistical data like this for a long time. I've even tried to raise capital to for a start-up to do this. No luck.
Counterpoint; anyone not in uniform and carrying a gun = criminal.
Deal with accordingly.
(This is definitely one of the debates to avoid here because it is very polarizing, however, for the record we have a pretty good firearms record in the UK)
I'm not sure why you were downvoted. What you say is absolutely correct. In the UK it's easy for law enforcement to find certain types of criminal simply because they are in posession of firearms.
Random anecdote; for some (I suppose obvious) reason a surprising number of drug dealers are caught because they are caught carrying weapons - which leads to searches, which leads to the drugs.
At least; that is my impression from the cases I see.
> Random anecdote; for some (I suppose obvious) reason a surprising number of drug dealers are caught because they are caught carrying weapons - which leads to searches, which leads to the drugs.
How do they get "caught carrying weapons" without a search to find said weapons? (Terry v Ohio explains some of this, but note that Terry lets police search you even if you're not carrying.)
If our goal is to catch drug dealers, we could just let cops search based on hunches. After all, those hunches are fairly accurate.
> At least; that is my impression from the cases I see.
I should say that banning guns because guns are a good way to detect general crime seems like a flawed move to me. What I support is banning guns as a good way to detect gun crime.
Whew! It's a good thing too ... stopping all that senseless accidental shootings from law abiding citizens. Many the criminal will take the hint. Oh wait ... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/5712573...