Another voice from England

J

Jffal

New member
Jeff here -
I belong to a mailing list concerned with horror fiction. We have been discussing the very real horror that occurred in Colorado. A list member from England who we will call Cat weighed in with an interesting viewpoint.With her permission, I reproduced her comments below (and left her misspellings in - I didn't want to do any editing of the posting's content). The supposedly sparse violence in the UK, Canada and Japan is often contrasted with comparable tragedies in America by anti-gunners to shame us. Maybe we are not recieving all of the story. Crime appears to be prevalent in Canada, the violence and the Yakuza influence is spreading in Japan (according to an ominous 4/25/99 Philadelphia Inquirer article) and as for England...

Cat -
"America, Hell Britain's just as bad." Reply to: HORROR@LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU

"America has the death penalty, stronger sentences but also stricter controls on people owning guns. In BVritain it is very difficult to get a gun permit, there are few places for open air shooting ranges (Not texas plains etc!!) and sentences for gun crimes are terribly leniant (sp?).
Last weekend a car drove down a street in Bristol firing automatic weapons out of the windows. 7 people stood at a busstop were mown down.
Over the weekend two nail bombs exploded in Londons ethnic regions. The first was aimed at Black people and the second at Bangladesh community. No-one has admitted liability and the police seem to have drawn a dead end (no pun intended)
Yesterday Jill Dando was killed by a single gun shot to the head in a proffessional style killing. She was a presenter on Crime watch -kind of Englands most wanted! It seems to be a revenge killing for someone she helped send down.
Does tragic news like this get to America I wondered. Just a thought, that we hear of your tradgedys but do you hear and moun ours?? "
Just a thought!
 
Also the manner in which the British and Americans record crime statistics are quite different. The British classify crimes according to their disposition *after* the criminal trial is complete. Given that Britian's court system is quite lenient compared to the US this final disposition very often indicates a much lesser crime than the one committed, or of course no crime if there was a mistrial or insufficient evidence.

In the US the FBI Uniform Crime Report classifies crimes according the the opinion of the police officer on the scene *before* any trial takes place. Police officers, not wanting to diminish any possibility of prosecution at the greatest possible level, will classify according to the most serious crime *possible* even if it isn't exactly well supported by the evidence. The result is the two sets of stats are simply not comparable, although they are compared all the time.

In Japan "Sepuku" or committing suicide for honorable reasons is hardly viewed as a crime. It's not unusual for a man as the head of the household to kill himself his wife and all his children for honorable reasons. These are all considered suicides not homicides and suicides. Japan has almost twice as many suicides as the US.

One researcher did an interesting study where he postulated that violence and violent death in all cultures are substantially the same. If you consider *all* forms all societies come out to about the same rate per person. The type of violence can differ between society though. In Japan violent death occurs almost exclusively as suicides (although beatings of others are common), the US has a greater mix of homicide and suicide, and Europe falls somewhere in between.
 
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