Reply to post: Re: Wasn't stupid.

Web prank horror: Man shot dead while pretending to rob someone at knife-point for a YouTube video

rg287

Re: Wasn't stupid.

And there would have been far more if they wern't banned. What's your point?

Ignoring the poster's rhetoric, there's no actual evidence to support your statement.

The UK has the lowest rate of gun ownership in Europe. We do not have the lowest rates of homicide.

As we saw following the prohibitions in 1997, once you have a reasonably stringent licensing regime, the white- and black-markets diverge entirely.

Gun crime was rising prior to 1997 and continued to rise at basically the same rate after the handgun prohibition (because 99% of gun crime was black-market smuggled guns, which were entirely unaffected by legal guns being prohibited). It wasn't until 2004 that Operation Trident kicked in (i.e. actually enforcing laws) and gun crime fell - through the disruption of organised criminal groups.

Gun crime in the UK goes up and down entirely in sync with efficacy of enforcement - it has never correlated to rates of lawful gun ownership. Right now it's quite high - because of austerity cuts to Policing since 2010. Even now when there are millions of legal shotguns in circulation which could be stolen and sawn down, criminals find it easier to manufacture their own.

The inconvenient fact is that we could re-align ourselves with our European neighbours (and the Isle of Man, Northern Ireland & Channel Islands) and allow target shooters to own pistols (for target shooting, in the auspices of Approved Clubs) and our crime rates would not move.

The US doesn't have high rates of gun crime because they have lots of guns. They have lots of violent crime because they're a second-world society where people are bankrupted by hospital bills. That manifests as gun crime because they have no meaningful licensing.

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