Joyce Lee Malcolm has written about this extensively, but the facts are that the UK has the highest per-capita violent crime rates in the "developed world" (UN data) since 1993.
One cannot separate the prospects of acting in self-defense and being jailed for it, but the UK has done all it can to deny the means to the law-abiding for self-defense, with firearms, handguns particularly, being just part of the banned items. Yet, as elsewhere in Europe, gun crime is accelerating and guns are freely available to criminals. And they on an island.
Fixing the moral and ethical environment is just part of the problem. Depriving anyone of the effective means of self-defense abrogates their right as a human being to live other than by tooth and claw.
No sir, the European gun controls don't "work", except to makes criminality a safer profession. the "shall issue" experience in the US affirms this.
The question is not whether crime levels are tolerable, or less here than there. The question is how low can crime rates be driven. The law-abiding are not the problem. Stop treating them as if they are.
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