Why US-UK crime rates is apples to oranges

[Scouse]

Far more than tuppence worth that, Pond. Spot on.

[Webleymkv]

The gun ban in the UK was as a result of the Dunblane mass shooting. It was a move to reduce firearms deaths, not crime as a whole.

In that respect it appears to have worked... The only other mass shooting since, over a decade later was in Cumbria, 2010

The goal of reducing firearm deaths or mass shootings specifically seems very odd to me. I'd think that the goal would be to reduce all deaths or mass murder rather than only those involving firearms. If the goal of the British gun control laws were to prevent mass murders, then they failed as there have been other mass murders in the UK since 1997, though most of them such as the 7 July 2005 bombings did not involve firearms.

As is the case with the U.S., the more effective solution for the U.K. would have been to address the underlying causes for mass murders rather than the tools used to commit them (in the case of the U.K., most mass murders seem to be acts of terrorism).

[MLeake]

Governments worldwide love sideshows. Gun control in the US, the US as Great Satan in Iran, or the Palestinian plight in Saudi Arabia - all of these are useful tools for diverting the attention of the masses away from governmental creep and stagnating economies.

[Pond, James Pond]

The goal of reducing firearm deaths or mass shootings specifically seems very odd to me.

Odd? How?
I've never heard of any government launching a policy to counter all deaths, or all crimes: that is next to impossible. There are initiatives to reduce road deaths, then there are policies to reduce gun deaths, then there are action plans to reduce drug use. There is never a universal policy for them all.

There were mass shootings, so they banned guns:
I don't agree with the solution they choose because it struck me as a knee-jerk reactionism, but aiming for a reduction in or elimination of mass shootings hardly strikes me as odd.

...they failed as there have been other mass murders in the UK since 1997, though most of them such as the 7 July 2005 bombings did not involve firearms.
As is the case with the U.S., the more effective solution for the U.K. would have been to address the underlying causes for mass murders rather than the tools used to commit them (in the case of the U.K., most mass murders seem to be acts of terrorism).

As you said yourself, most if not all mass-killings have been terrorist related.
Unless you propose putting the attacks of 9/11 in the same category as Sandy Hook, Aurora and Columbine etc, then that is a inaccurate assertion IMO.

Hence I have to re-assert that, in the case of the UK, mass-killings have seemingly dropped dramatically with only one incident in Cumbria a couple of years back...

Having said all that we are, again, going back to a UK-US comparison which has little or no benefit in the current political climate on your side of the Atlantic.

[tulsamal]

It seems to me to still be a case of self-reassurance: the social issues, culture, demographics, relative disposalable income, population density, etc are sufficiently different to make a direct comparison of crime rates, taking gun rights as the main variable, as being an exercise in futility.

Got to agree and restate something several have already mentioned. My Major and Masters degrees are both in Political Science. If you do any academic work in the whole "gun control" field, you are quickly trained that you can't easily compare one country to another. There are just too many differences. So academic work in this area tries to study one country at a time.

When this was all brought up on the CNN talk show, this is what the pro-gun person should have pointed out. Rather than comparing absolute numbers of murders, you have to look at the per capita ones. Even more importantly, you need to look at how those numbers have changed over time. If somebody wants to argue that British gun control is responsible for a lower number of murders there, they have to include what the numbers were like for the ten years before the gun control came into effect. If the numbers were the same before the law... how can they make a cause and effect argument?

The US is a very large and very diverse nation. And we vary a tremendous amount just within our own borders. I live in a very rural county in NE Oklahoma. I have my CCW and carry whenever I go out but the reality is that this county very, very rarely has a murder. We might go ten years or more between them. But Tulsa County has had 8 murders in the first 9 days of the year. (Not usually that bad. Average is only 49 a year. Half as many as OKC.)

Considering how we are and our history, IMO you could physically eliminate every gun by some kind of magic spell and our murder rate would perk along about the same. Drug dealers will fight and kill to protect their turf. So will gangs. Some people will continue to kill others over money or women. There ARE things we can do to moderate some of this violence but doing away with guns won't fix it. Especially if we don't have that magic spell and we can only get rid of the ones the law abiding own!

Gregg