Firing Blanks on British Crime Rates

[Oatka]

". . . the estimable New York Times"? Surely he jests!
http://www.newswatch.org/May%20stories/Firing%20Blanks%20052600.htm

Firing Blanks on British Crime Rates

Contrary to The New York Times, crime is worse in Britain

by Iain Murray, Senior Analyst, The Statistical Assessment Service

May 26, 2000

"America is a more violent place than Britain, because it has guns," is a pretty common statement. It is also a complete fallacy. Even the estimable New York Times falls victim to it, most recently in an article about an English victim of burglary shooting the burglar dead on his property and being sentenced to life imprisonment as a result ("A Rural Intruder’s Slaying Unsettles England,"May 24).

"In general," asserts the Times, "crime rates in Britain are much lower than they are in the United States, a phenomenon largely attributed to the strict laws that ban handguns ... and strictly regulate who can have a gun and under what circumstances." The statement is quite simply incorrect. A recent joint study by America’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) and Britain’s Cambridge University shows that crime rates are higher in Britain than the United States for robbery, assault, burglary and motor vehicle theft – in other words, all the major crimes apart from rape (where the figures on both sides of the Atlantic are notoriously unreliable) and murder. Crime rates in Britain have also grown since the study’s time period, while they have declined over here. Gun control in Britain has also become much stricter.

Linking low crime rates to strict gun control therefore seems like a non-starter. The only area in which the cause and effect relationship of guns and crime seems to hold true is in the realm of murder, but even America’s non-gun murder rate is much higher than Britain’s, indicating that something else may be afoot.

The BJS/Cambridge study suggests that the reason for the disparities lies in the fact that the risk of a criminal being punished for his or her crime has been alling in Britain while it has been rising in the USA.

A belief that Britain is less crime-ridden than America is still common on both sides of the Atlantic, and gun control is also often cited as the reason. But, as so often, popular wisdom is just plain wrong on this issue.

Iain Murray is a Senior Analyst with The Statistical Assessment Service, a sister organization to NewsWatch. He is also a British citizen.

All articles are copyright of www.NewsWatch.org

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The New World Order has a Third Reich odor.

 

[Monkeyleg]

Oatka, some time back I spent a day gathering stats to compare the US and Great Britain.
Our 1997 all-weapon homicide rate was roughly
8 per 100,000 while Britains all-weapon rate was 1.7 per 100,000. Our non-gun homicide rate (fists, knives, bats, etc) was 3.5 per 100,000--still double the Brits all-weapons homicide rate. Obviously there's more to what's going on in this country than the "easy accessibility of guns."

Dick

 

[Tamara]

I read the Brit sportbike mags religiously. It seems that every editor, columnist, and letter writer in them has had a bike stolen, most of them more than once.

In 14 years around bikes, only one personal acquaintance has lost a bike to theft, and I don't personally know anyone who's had a car stolen. Also, the one time I experienced an attempted carjacking, I am convinced that my Glock 23 was the reason I was able to keep both my 924S and my good health.

Unscientific? Very. But it still seems to indicate something...

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"..but never ever Fear. Fear is for the enemy. Fear and Bullets."
10mm: It's not the size of the Dawg in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog!

[This message has been edited by Tamara (edited May 27, 2000).]

 

[Mike H]

A lot has been said about the restrictions now placed on the ownership of guns in the UK. The point is that even before the bans there were very few handguns in Britain and even fewer rifles, only shotguns proliferate.

Crime rate comparisons are difficult to pin down but I'll add this. US cities are real blackspots for crime that subvert the overall national figures. In the UK, the only city with a significant crime problem is London with Manchester as a maybe for drug shootings. In London this mostly takes the form of street crime and has been shown to stem from the tide of immigrants and drop outs that head for the capital's rich pickings.

If these figures show one thing, to me it is that American citizens like killing each other more than their ex-rulers, whether it be with guns, knives or gangbanger strength halitosis.

Mike H

 

[jeffer]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Monkeyleg:
Obviously there's more to what's going on in this country than the "easy accessibility of guns."[/quote]
Wonder what the population ratio is, US compared to Britian.
The population of the United States in 1998--269,816,000
The population of the United Kingdom est.2k--59,511,464
I’ll assume the population in the US went up between 1998 and
now. If you’ll notice the slight difference in numbers (210,304,536) one
can guess that the US would have a higher rate of just about every thing.





[This message has been edited by jeffer (edited May 28, 2000).]

 

[Art Eatman]

Whoa, Jeffer: Think a minute. "Rate", remember? Sure, the US total is higher. No argument. But "rate" is per-hundred-thousand, in most statistics of this sort. It does not matter as to the comparative size of the populations.

It takes some doing, but the Center for Disease Control has all manner of charts showing the numbers on deaths, broken down by cause, age group, ethnic group, etc.

Another spot to browse is http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/Cius_98/98crime/98cius07.pdf which give some Feebie numbers.

Regards, Art

 

[Monkeyleg]

Mike, your point about cities is a very good one. Here in Wisconsin, 98% of all homicides in the state occur in an area on the north side of Milwaukee that is approximately 10 zip codes in size. Why? Cause that's where the drugs and gangs are.

Dick

 

[madkiwi]

For more info on British crime, compared to the US, everything you could possibly want to know is here. You will find that for most crime, the rates in the UK are higher, and are climbing!

Comparing 1981 crime rates from victim surveys to rates for 1995 (the latest year that U.S. and English surveys have in common), the rate of victimization from --

robbery rose 81% in England (4.2 per 1,000 population rising to 7.6), but fell 28% in the United States (7.4 dropping to 5.3) (figure 1)

assault rose 53% in England (13.1 rising to 20.0), but declined 27% in the United States (12.0 dropping to 8.8) (figure 2)

burglary doubled in England (40.9 per 1,000 households rising to 82.9), but was cut in half in the United States (105.9 declining to 47.5) (figure 3)

motor vehicle theft rose 51% in England (15.6 rising to 23.6), but stayed virtually unchanged in the United States (10.6 in 1981, 10.8 in 1995) (figure 4).
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/html/cjusew96/contents.htm

Madkiwi

[This message has been edited by madkiwi (edited May 28, 2000).]

 

[The Lone Ranger]

I wrote an article about this some time back; the story is about 18 months old. Basically the most common mistake is directly compare homicide statistics. One might expect this to be straight forward but it isn't.

For a start compare England & Wales with Scotland. A straight comparison would indicate that Scotland apparently has a homicide rate twice that of England & Wales. Does this indicate that Scotland is somehow a more violent place than the rest of the mainland UK? Not at all. Scotland has its own justice system that is founded upon different principles - the difference in the two statistics is simply due to the way they are compiled and slight differences in the law.

It gets worse try and compare England & Wales with say France. Well France lumps murder & attempted murder together in the same statistic. The figure for England & Wales only includes those cases where a CONVICTION was obtained for murder, manslaughter or infanticide. So a comparison of raw statistics is misleading because of the way the two separate statistics are compiled.

Now back to the US and England & Wales. The US figure stems from the FBI Uniform Crime Report. The FBI is responsible for compiling the statistics and no matter what the results of any subsequent legal ruling - eg suicide, justifiable homicide etc.

Remember what goes to compile the British figure, at best it can be considered a conservative estimate of homicide. Similarly the FBI UCR can only be considered a gross estimate. One exagerates the problem, the other seeks to understate the problem. It is likely that the difference between the US and the UK is not as marked as some gun control proponents would have us believe.

Quite simply the method for compiling the homicide statistics in the UK stems from a policy change in the Home Office in 1965. The then Home Secretary was a passionate oppponent of the death penalty and sort to alter the statistics to understate homicide. The death penalty was finally abolished in 1965.

Comparison of statistics is fraught with difficulty, you have to understand the differences in their compilation to make any meaningful comparsion and cross-national comparisons is particularly difficult. Good for a sound bite though and difficult to rebutt. Look how long its taken me to explain the difference. Hardly a counter argument that fits into a sound bite.

You can look up the original article on my web site.
http://members.aol.com/gunbancon/Main.html

Look under the Lies, Damn Lies, and Government Statistics.

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"Quemadmoeum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est."
("A sword is never a killer, it's a tool in the killer's hands.") -
Lucius Annaeus Seneca "the Younger" (ca. 4 BC-65 AD).