We do have house breaking in the UK but our courts follow the principle of reasonable force. Let the punishment fit the crime, shooting somebody doesn't seem proportionate to me
We do have house breaking in the UK but our courts follow the principle of reasonable force. Let the punishment fit the crime, shooting somebody doesn't seem proportionate to me
We do still have home invasions with various intent. What's usually ignored in the conversation is that defensive uses of guns actually do stop crimes, usually without a shot fired.
The Justice Dept. has the lowest estimate for defensive uses at about 100,000 times per year. Seventeen other studies have an average closer to 2M times per year. The methods for arriving at those numbers vary, but even in the middle range, defensive use looks to be more common than criminal use.
I'm not surprised by that. The American concept is that we have a natural right to self defense, from all sources of violence, and that citizen's are the first one responsible for their safety.
It's not that we "love" guns. It's that we love those around us and want to be ready to respond to an immediate and dire threat.
We have way too much crime. Agreed. That's a more complicated thing than just the tool that's used to commit the crime. The FBI says guns are used in only 7.9% of violent crime.
Clearly there's a deeper issue at play when you consider the 92.1% left.
There's a fairly consistent trend, but a lot of different studies with high variation in their estimate. The Justice Dept. number is one of the lowest studies. It's an incredibly challenging thing to study, since it relies on self-reporting. They already estimate that huge numbers of violent crime victims never report it. What if you avoided a violent crime by being armed? Are you going to bother with the police report?
We do have house breaking in the UK but our courts follow the principle of reasonable force. Let the punishment fit the crime, shooting somebody doesn't seem proportionate to me
Tell that to the Americans.
We do still have home invasions with various intent. What's usually ignored in the conversation is that defensive uses of guns actually do stop crimes, usually without a shot fired.
The Justice Dept. has the lowest estimate for defensive uses at about 100,000 times per year. Seventeen other studies have an average closer to 2M times per year. The methods for arriving at those numbers vary, but even in the middle range, defensive use looks to be more common than criminal use.
I'm not surprised by that. The American concept is that we have a natural right to self defense, from all sources of violence, and that citizen's are the first one responsible for their safety.
It's not that we "love" guns. It's that we love those around us and want to be ready to respond to an immediate and dire threat.
We have way too much crime. Agreed. That's a more complicated thing than just the tool that's used to commit the crime. The FBI says guns are used in only 7.9% of violent crime.
Clearly there's a deeper issue at play when you consider the 92.1% left.
Last I checked it was 800,000 defensive uses of firearms per year on average. Of course it does vary a lot year to year.
There's a fairly consistent trend, but a lot of different studies with high variation in their estimate. The Justice Dept. number is one of the lowest studies. It's an incredibly challenging thing to study, since it relies on self-reporting. They already estimate that huge numbers of violent crime victims never report it. What if you avoided a violent crime by being armed? Are you going to bother with the police report?