Ed Huntress wrote:

Odd..I think you are the poor bloke whom seems to be suffering from
disinformation underload.

snip

What Mark is referring to is that all of your statistics are selected to
distract attention from the fundamental, underlying facts, such as our
relative gun crime rates. For example, the gun homicide rate in the US is
roughly 24 times that of the UK.

Their total gun crime rate is around 23 per hundred thousand. Ours is 127
per hundred thousand. And theirs includes air guns and imitation guns, which
make up 1/2 of their total. Our statistics do not. Making an honest
comparison, our rate of crimes committed with guns is 11 times greater than
theirs, if you exclude toys and air guns from both.

What's the comparison between UK and USA homicides overall, guns,
knives, baseball/cricket bats and anything else?

So you (actually, the gun nutz sites you cut and paste from, plus the
selected statistics from the BBC that you try to cook into a larger story)
have spun up this big ball of cotton candy that completely ignores the fact
that their rates of gun crime are so low that the phenomena you're
measuring -- the effects of gun control laws -- are based on relative rates
that are so different that you can't even relate them, statistically.

"Confirmation bias" is a psychological phenomenon by which you select only
facts that support your preconceived beliefs. Mark has it right: that
describes you, Gunner, in spades. When it comes to guns, you're the
equivalent of a religious nut.

The UK does have a problem with crimes committed guns, but, compared to
ours, it's a walk in the park. Before you can learn anything from the
current statistics you first have to recognize that, overall, we have a
problem that's 11 times larger than theirs.

And gun ownership is how much bigger here? A lot more that 11x?

Oh, and by the way, you need to catch up with your statistics. Their gun
crime problem is going DOWN, not up -- just like ours. And probably for the
same reason. They have fewer unwanted kids who are now of crime-committing
age. According to your friends who wrote _Freakonomics_, abortion rights
have been the biggest single factor correlated to crime reductions.

That was an interesting book. I've heard there was a sequel out, have
you read it?

David