On Sun, 19 Jul 2015 14:09:57 +0700, John B. Slocomb
wrote:

On Sat, 18 Jul 2015 11:21:07 -0400, Ed Huntress
wrote:

snip


While statistically you may be correct, I'm not that sure about the
relationship between gun availability and crime. For example, I read
that while criminals in England rarely used firearms in, say the '50's
- the Great Train Robbers were armed with clubs - while today, even
with more stringent firearm laws in the country, armed criminals are
more common. to the extent that arming the police seems to becoming a
more popular idea.

Yeah, they're having a hell of a wave of murders with guns in the UK.
Their rate is all the way up to 0.26/100,000. The rate for the US is
40 times higher.

They're just going to hell in a handbasket...

The point, or course, was that even with stringent gun laws the number
of armed criminals in the British Isles is increasing. What was it in
England, Scotland and Wales, say 20 - 30 years ago compared to the
present?

It's meaningless. When the numbers are so vanishingly small, even a
slight perturbation in the numbers causes a disproportionate change in
the percentages.


And, of course, in Northern Ireland where possession of a firearm
likely ensured a very unpleasant visit to the police station, at a
minimum, gun crimes were sky high for a while :-)

But as I previously mentioned, they banned alcoholic beverages in the
U.S. and that automatically stopped drinking in the entire country.
Right?

There's no connection.




Third, the reaction has been to switch the focus, and the sales of
guns, from long guns to handguns, and the most popular long guns right
now are fairly useless military-style rifles that shoot pipsqueek,
military-derived cartridges. They're focused on killing people as much
as a .40 cal. pistol is.

(grin) But I used to shoot paper targets with a .45 cal. pistol :-)

So do I. Now, the fantasy "tactical" guns, and "defense" type guns,
dominate sales. They didn't then.

Well, they had pocket pistols :-)

But I remember the first time I saw the specifications for one of the
modern pistols. My immediate thought was, "gee, it can't be very
accurate". A plastic pistol with a 4 inch barrel?



So the whole interest, culture, focus, and categories of gun sales has
devolved from hunting and target shooting to people-killing fantasies,
defensive paranoia, and fear. It's pretty ugly..