The Washington Post is all sanctimonius and proud of themselves. Anthony Faiola has penned a piece discussing British gun control measures since 1997, and this blog post enumerates some key takeaway points from the article. Read either one, or read both just to be sure to capture everything the Post wants you to know. It’s a veritible wet dream for statists, with at least a starting point for a laundry list of the onerous controls with which the government can saddle its subjects.
It’s a proud day indeed, when the British make the Washington Post as the paragon of peaceful civilization with their tyranny. I’m certain that the editors were giddy over the prospect of assisting the proposed gun control measures currently before the Senate. However, the list of benefits doesn’t really include very much except a reduction in so-called “mass shootings.” It doesn’t go beyond this cursory analysis to the underbelly of crime in the U.K.
Listen to a different take written before this breathless piece at the Post:
When it comes to the question of violent crime, the British are fairly smug. Why? Because, well, there’s less of it in Britain than in America. Bunch of cowboys over there, right?
Wrong. Per the Daily Mail:
Britain’s violent crime record is worse than any other country in the European union, it has been revealed.
Official crime figures show the UK also has a worse rate for all types of violence than the U.S. and even South Africa – widely considered one of the world’s most dangerous countries.
The Tories said Labour had presided over a decade of spiralling violence.
In the decade following the party’s election in 1997, the number of recorded violent attacks soared by 77 per cent to 1.158million – or more than two every minute.
According to the Mail, Britons suffer 1,158,957 violent crimes per year, which works out at 2,034 per 100,000 residents. By contrast the number in notoriously violent South Africa is 1,609 per 100,000.
The U.S., meanwhile, has a rate of 466 crimes per 100,000 residents, which is lower than France’s, at 504; Finland’s, at 738; Sweden’s, at 1123; and Canada’s at 935.
As a result of both the different ways in which these statistics are collected and of varying definitions of “violent crime,” there will naturally be some discrepancies between countries. Enough to account for a 5:1 difference between Britain and the United States, though? I rather think not.
You see, it’s easy when you queue the case up based on your own predispositions and biases. If you want to see the effectiveness of gun control, you consider the single metric that shows it to be effective. Otherwise, you look at all of the other data too – but only if you’re an objective journalist.
I have long claimed that there isn’t any validity in the strict comparison of numbers between countries. The U.S. has a non-existent Southern border (to every President in the past several decades, America is an idea rather than a place, and the Democrats want the votes while the business owners want the cheap labor – cheap until taxes and medical costs come due). We have gangs, and at least some of those gangs exist as a testament to the highly interracial nature of our population. There are all sorts of specifics to consider when discussing the metrics of U.S. crime.
But you don’t have to trot out excuses when the case is so easy. The British crime metrics don’t demonstrate what the Washington Post wants it to. Pity. Wasted ink.
