Fact: Every Year guns are used over 80X more often to protect a life that to take one. Man, are you a sucker......is that a Gary Kleck fact, ie grabbing a gun cause a raccoon rattled your garbage can..???
Fact: There are 2,034 Violent Crimes per 100K people in the UK vs 466 violent crimes per 100K people in the USA. With guns???
Rather than swoon over data you like, maybe you should do some fact checking........
What Swann either doesn’t know, or simply doesn’t bother to tell his viewers, is that the definitions for “violent crime” are very different in the US and Britain, and the methodologies of the two statistics he cites are also different. (He probably simply doesn’t realize this: it appears that he lifted his data wholesale from a story in the Daily Mail, without checking it–something you might expect a fact checker to have done.) First, it should be noted that the figures Swann gives are out of date: in 2010, according to the FBI, the reported rate of violent crime in the US was 403 incidents per 100,000 people–the 466 figure comes from 2007. Second, and more importantly, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports defines a “violent crime” as one of four specific offenses: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. The British Home Office, by contrast, has a substantially different definition of violent crime. The British definition includes all “crimes against the person,” including simple assaults, all robberies, and all “sexual offenses,” as opposed to the FBI, which only counts aggravated assaults and “forcible rapes.” When you look at how this changes the meaning of “violent crime,” it becomes clear how misleading it is to compare rates of violent crime in the US and the UK. You’re simply comparing two different sets of crimes. In 2009/10, for instance (annual data is from September to September), British police recorded 871,712 crimes against persons, 54,509 sexual offenses, and 75,101 robberies in England and Wales. Based on the 2010 population of 55.6 million, this gives a staggeringly high violent crime rate of 1,797 offenses per 100,00 people. But of the 871,000 crimes against the person, less than half (401,000) involved any actual injury. The remainder were mostly crimes like simple assault without injury, harassment, “possession of an article with a blade or point,” and causing “public fear, alarm, or distress.” And of the 54,000 sexual offenses, only a quarter (15,000) were rapes. This makes it abundantly clear that the naive comparison of crime rates either wildly overstates the amount of violence in the UK or wildly understates it in the US. With guns?????
America has a much higher murder rate than other OECD countries, including Great Britain.
Fact: Every Year guns are used over 80X more often to protect a life that to take one.
There are 16,000 suicides, how did guns protect those victims....??
sites.nationalacademies.org
It shows that the US death rate from violence was a little over 6.47 per 100,000. In the UK the death rate from violence is 1.14 per 100,000. So that is about 5/6 times higher.
So, assuming that both of these reports are based on sound methodology - and there has to be a lot of error in these data, but assuming both are fairly accurate - and remembering that this are descriptive data, no inferences being drawn here, does one conclude:
Individuals are more likely to experience violent crime in the UK, but fatalities from violent crime are much higher in the US?
Fact: Gun murders are committed most often by people who would have illegal guns. When a crime is committed, every gun is illegal..... |
