1628: Team Cheater

[Jonny Face]

Originally Posted by John Walker

SSAA - Evaluating Britain’s handgun ban

Anyone who didn't want to read the article: it definitively shows that after handguns were banned, there was an increase in robberies, robberies with firearms, homicides, and overall violent crimes involving firearms.
Correlation doesn't imply causation, you say? Here's a correlation the UK DIDN'T see: a reduction in violent crime including gun crime after the gun ban.

The UK's handgun ban didn't prevent the Cumbria shooting which killed 12 (not including the psycho) and injured 11. Instead of an "assault weapon" he used a .22lr and a shotgun. Is the handgun ban responsible for reducing the number of mass shootings (which btw make up the overwhelming MINORITY of all shootings)? It would be absurd to say it did since prior to the Dunblane Massacre which prompted the handgun ban, there had been ONE mass shooting- the Hungerford massacre. Something which occurs infrequently like mass shootings (in the UK anyways) can be seemingly banished by anything from gun bans to prayer in school and for a time it would seem to work... until disaster struck again. The question is should we use the same knee jerk response which didn't lower the UK's relatively low murder rate, and expect it to work for our higher murder rate? Fuck no.

Yeah, because a link from a pro-firearm site isn't going to be biased at all mate

A lot of things can contribute to gun crime rates. Rising Crime in the UK had more to do with poverty than anything else; there is always a direct link between crime and deprivation. In any case, gun crime in the UK is now lower than ever, according to this link:

Gun Facts

Also, do you know how many gun-related massacres we have had since Dunblane? None that I can think of.

By the way if you are going to say "correlation doesn't imply causation" and than attempt to prove your point using a correlation, that makes about as much sense as saying "Im not racist, but I don't like black people".

Does arming your citizens help prevent gun crime? The following statistics are taken from the 1986 National Institute of Justice survey. This was a survey of convicted felons, asking their feelings on the average citizen being armed.

"more than a third of the felons questioned said they worried with some regularity about being shot by victims, but roughly 40 percent said they never considered the possibility; while 39 percent said that at least once they'd decided not to go through with a crime because they believed the person they'd targeted was armed, nearly 25 percent insisted they were actually drawn to the challenge of confronting an armed victim"