Oh, okay. The original reference made it sound like there used to be a lot of gun ownership in England, and now there was less because of stricter gun laws, and that because of that the crime rate had soared. My husband spent several years living in England, and I have done some reading about crime in that culture, and that certainly doesn't make me an expert, but the situation is much more complex than the conclusions the article attempts to draw. In other words, crime is going up in England for a whole bunch of reasons, but whether the citizens have or do not have guns isn't really very much related to it. So you cannot conclude that if they did have more guns, crime would go down, which seems to be what your article is concluding.
The British police on street patrol weren't even armed until very recently. When some of them started carrying weapons, it was a huge deal in the press, in fact. But crime in England has increased because of factors such social unrest due to a huge number of somewhat unassimilated former colonials living in conditions that breed crime, the assault on England by the IRA and other terrorist groups over the past forty years or so, and probably most importantly, the invasion by highly sophisticated drug gangs, who are heavily armed. This drug invasion is so new to the British Isles that I can still remember the headlines in the European press when the first drug gang shooting happened in Ireland. And of course now there are international terrorists in England as well. So there is definitely a crime wave. But every individual Englishman could be armed to the teeth and it would not have prevented these broad crime trends from occurring.
In fact, when you consider that there is a huge problem with public drunkenness, even among teenagers, having everyone armed might really raise the crime rate as they shot each other up over imagined slights and such. |
