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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: quehubo who wrote (36683)	4/22/2007 2:18:12 PM
From: Dale Baker	Respond to of 541978

In a society where only criminals have guns then you can assume a house wont be protected by an armed homeowner. But many fewer non-criminals would die from firearms for each gun that is not in that society. And in societies with strict gun control, only a small minority of criminals will actually get and use guns, so the odds of the unarmed homeowner being killed by a bad guy drop dramatically. The actual body count that we know from the US data just doesn't add up, that having more and more guns makes society safer. More people die when more guns are around. Sacrificing innocents to make the armed homeowner feel safer is a poor public policy choice. The UK has less than 100,000 handguns according to this data, in a country of more than 60 million people, and gun deaths are very few. Firearms Certificates In England and Wales at the end of 2001 there were 119,560 firearm certificates on issue covering 301,000 firearms (nearly three quarters are rifles), and 577,171 shotgun certificates covering 1,307,576 shotguns. With the exception of the number of firearms covered, all these figures are lower than the previous years. One percent and just over one and a half percent, respectively, of applications for new firearm and shotgun certificates made during 2001 were refused. In Scotland at the end of 2003 there were 26,605 firearm certificates (an increase of 1 percent on 2002) on issue covering the possession of 60,440 firearms (a decrease of 0.3 percent), and 52,421 shotgun certificates (an increase of 1 percent) covering 125,395 shotguns (an increase of 2.3 percent). For both firearm and shotgun certificates new applications were down on 2002. Firearm Certificates by Alan Gray. Chapter 9 in Crime in England and Wales, 2001/2002: Supplementary Volume. January 2003. Firearms Certificates Statistics, Scotland, 2003. Scottish Executive Statistical Bulletin. May 2004 Gun Crime in Great Britain The official figures for gun crime in England and Wales in 2002/03 were announced in January 2004. There were a total of 24,070 firearm offences of which 57% (13,822) involved air weapons, the highest number of offences ever. The largest increase in offences was seen with imitation firearms for which there was an annual increase of 46% to 1815 offences. The latest gun crime figures from Scotland show a total of 970 offences in which a firearm was alleged to have been used in 2003, a reduction of over 9% from 2002. A large proportion of the offences (43 percent) involved air weapons, and 37 percent were committed with unidentified weapons (the latter figure has increased significantly in recent years since Strathclyde (after 2001) and Lothian and Borders (after 2002) stopped making assumptions about what type of weapon was used even if it had not been identified - it was usually assumed that this was an air weapon for statistical returns and this is still likely to be the case). Handguns were involved in 29 offences, the lowest number since 1990. No handgun was used in any offence which caused injury or death.