The Overwhelming Failure of Gun Control in England

England has worst crime rate in world

By David Bamber, Home Affairs Correspondent
Last Updated: 1:05am GMT 01/12/2002

Criminologists believe that a note of caution needs to be introduced into analysis of the data, because of the different ways in which UN member countries record crimes.

Real Crime, Fake Justice
Theodore Dalrymple

For the last 40 years, government policy in Britain, de facto if not always de jure, has been to render the British population virtually defenseless against criminals and criminality. Almost alone of British government policies, this one has been supremely effective: no Briton nowadays goes many hours without wondering how to avoid being victimized by a criminal intent on theft, burglary, or violence.

An unholy alliance between politicians and bureaucrats who want to keep prison costs to a minimum, and liberal intellectuals who pretend to see in crime a natural and understandable response to social injustice, which it would be a further injustice to punish, has engendered a prolonged and so far unfinished experiment in leniency that has debased the quality of life of millions of people, especially the poor. Every day in our newspapers we read of the absurd and dangerous leniency of the criminal-justice system. On April 21, for example, even the Observer (one of the bastions of British liberalism responsible for the present situation) gave prominence to the official report into the case of Anthony Rice, who strangled and then stabbed Naomi Bryant to death.

Rice, it turned out, had been assaulting women since 1972. He had been convicted for assaulting or raping a total of 15 women before murdering Naomi Bryant, and it is a fair supposition that he had assaulted or raped many more who did not go to the police. In 1982, he grabbed a woman by the throat, held a knife to her, and raped her. Five years later, while out of prison on home leave, he grabbed a woman, pushed her into a garden, held a knife to her, and raped her for an hour. Receiving a life sentence, he was transferred to an open prison in 2002 and then released two years later on parole as a low-risk parolee. He received housing in a hostel for ex-prisoners in a village whose inhabitants had been told, to gain their acquiescence, that none of the residents there was violent; five months after his arrival, he murdered Naomi Bryant. In pronouncing another life sentence on him, the judge ordered that he should serve at least 25 years: in other words, even now the law has not quite thrown away the key.

Only five days later, the papers reported that 1,023 prisoners of foreign origin had been released from British prisons between 1999 and 2006 without having been deported. Among them were 5 killers, 7 kidnappers, 9 rapists and 39 other sex offenders, 4 arsonists, 41 burglars, 52 thieves, 93 robbers, and 204 drug offenders. Of the 1,023 prisoners, only 106 had since been traced. The Home Office, responsible for both prisons and immigration, still doesn't know how many of the killers, arsonists, rapists, and kidnappers are at large; but it admits that most of them will never be found, at least until they are caught after committing another offense. Although these revelations forced the Home Secretary to resign, in fact the foreign criminals had been treated only as British criminals are treated. At least we can truly say that we do not discriminate in our leniency.

Scandal has followed scandal. A short time later, we learned that prisoners had been absconding from one open prison, Leyhill, at a rate of two a week for three years?-323 in total since 1999, among them 22 murderers. This outrage came to light only when a senior policeman in the area of Leyhill told a member of Parliament that there had been a crime wave in the vicinity of the prison. The member of Parliament demanded the figures in the House of Commons; otherwise they would have remained secret.

None of these revelations, however, would have surprised a man called David Fraser, who has just published a book entitled A Land Fit for Criminals?-the land in question being Great Britain, of course. Far from being mistakes?-for mistakes repeated so often cease to be mere mistakes?-all these occurrences are in full compliance with general policy in Britain with regard to crime and criminality.

Fraser was a probation officer for more than a quarter of a century. He began to doubt the value of his work in terms of preventing crime and therefore protecting the public, but he at first assumed that, as a comparatively lowly official in the criminal-justice system, he was too mired in the grainy everyday detail to see the bigger picture. He assumed also that those in charge not only knew what they were doing but had the public interest at heart.

Eventually, however, the penny dropped. Fraser's lack of success in effecting any change in the criminals under his supervision, and thus in reducing the number of crimes that they subsequently committed, to the great misery of the general public, was not his failure alone but was general throughout the system. Even worse, he discovered that the bureaucrats who ran the system, and their political masters, did not care about this failure, at least from the point of view of its impact on public safety; careerist to the core, they were only concerned that the public should not become aware of the catastrophe. To this end, they indulged in obfuscation, statistical legerdemain, and outright lies in order to prevent the calamity that public knowledge of the truth would represent for them and their careers.

The collective intellectual dishonesty of those who worked in the system so outraged Fraser?-and the Kafkaesque world in which he found himself, where nothing was called by its real name and language tended more to conceal meaning than to convey it, so exasperated him?-that, though not a man apt to obtrude upon the public, he determined to write a book. It took him two and a half years to do so, based on 20 years of research, and it is clear from the very first page that he wrote it from a burning need to expose and exorcise the lies and evasions with which he lived for so long, lies and evasions that helped in a few decades transform a law-abiding country with a reputation for civility into the country with the highest crime rate in the Western world, with an ever-present undercurrent of violence in daily life. Like Luther, Fraser could not but speak out. And, as events unfolded, his book has had a publishing history that is additionally revealing of the state of Britain today.

By example after example (repetition being necessary to establish that he has not just alighted on an isolated case of absurdity that might be found in any large-scale enterprise), Fraser demonstrates the unscrupulous lengths to which both bureaucrats and governments have gone to disguise from the public the effect of their policies and decisions, carried out with an almost sadistic indifference to the welfare of common people.

He shows that liberal intellectuals and their bureaucratic allies have left no stone unturned to ensure that the law-abiding should be left as defenseless as possible against the predations of criminals, from the emasculation of the police to the devising of punishments that do not punish and the propagation of sophistry by experts to mislead and confuse the public about what is happening in society, confusion rendering the public helpless in the face of the experimentation perpetrated upon it.

The police, Fraser shows, are like a nearly defeated occupying colonial force that, while mayhem reigns everywhere else, has retreated to safe enclaves, there to shuffle paper and produce bogus information to propitiate their political masters. Their first line of defense is to refuse to record half the crime that comes to their attention, which itself is less than half the crime committed. Then they refuse to investigate recorded crime, or to arrest the culprits even when it is easy to do so and the evidence against them is overwhelming, because the prosecuting authorities will either decline to prosecute, or else the resultant sentence will be so trivial as to make the whole procedure (at least 19 forms to fill in after a single arrest) pointless.

In any case, the authorities want the police to use a sanction known as the caution?-a mere verbal warning. Indeed, as Fraser points out, the Home Office even reprimanded the West Midlands Police Force for bringing too many apprehended offenders to court, instead of merely giving them a caution. In the official version, only minor crimes are dealt with in this fashion: but as Fraser points out, in the year 2000 alone, 600 cases of robbery, 4,300 cases of car theft, 6,600 offenses of burglary, 13,400 offenses against public order, 35,400 cases of violence against the person, and 67,600 cases of other kinds of theft were dealt with in this fashion?-in effect, letting these 127,900 offenders off scot-free. When one considers that the police clear-up rate of all crimes in Britain is scarcely more than one in 20 (and even that figure is based upon official deception), the liberal intellectual claim, repeated ad nauseam in the press and on the air, that the British criminal-justice system is primitively retributive is absurd.

At every point in the system, Fraser shows, deception reigns. When a judge sentences a criminal to three years' imprisonment, he knows perfectly well (as does the press that reports it) that in the vast majority of cases the criminal in question will serve 18 months at the very most, because he is entitled automatically, as of right, to a suspension of half his sentence. Moreover, under a scheme of early release, increasingly used, prisoners serve considerably less than half their sentence. They may be tagged electronically under a system of home curfew, intended to give the public an assurance that they are being monitored: but the electronic tag stays on for less than 12 hours daily, giving criminals plenty of opportunity to follow their careers. Even when the criminals remove their tags (and it is known that thousands are removed or vandalized every year) or fail to abide by other conditions of their early release, those who are supposedly monitoring them do nothing whatever, for fear of spoiling the statistics of the system's success. When the Home Office tried the tagging system with young criminals, 73 percent of them were reconvicted within three months. The authorities nevertheless decided to extend the scheme. The failure of the British state to take its responsibilities seriously could not be more clearly expressed.

Fraser draws attention to the deeply corrupt system in Britain under which a criminal, once caught, may ask for other offenses that he has committed to be "taken into consideration." (Criminals call these offenses T.I.C.s.) This practice may be in the interests of both the criminal and the police, but not in those of the long-suffering public. The court will sentence the criminal to further prison terms that run concurrently, not consecutively, to that imposed for the index offense: in other words, he will in effect serve the same sentence for 50 burglaries as for one burglary, and he can never again face charges for the 49 burglaries that have been "taken into consideration." Meanwhile, the police can preen themselves that they have "solved" 50 crimes for the price of one.

One Probation Service smokescreen that Fraser knows from personal experience is to measure its own effectiveness by the proportion of criminals who complete their probation in compliance with court orders?-a procedural outcome that has no significance whatever for the safety of the public. Such criminals come under the direct observation of probation officers only one hour a week at the very most. What they do the other 167 hours of the week the probation officers cannot possibly know. Unless one takes the preposterous view that such criminals are incapable of telling lies about their activities to their probation officers, mere attendance at the probation office is no guarantee whatever that they are now leading law-abiding lives.

But even if completion of probation orders were accepted as a surrogate measure of success in preventing re-offending, the Probation Service's figures have long been completely corrupt?-and for a very obvious reason. Until 1997, the probation officers themselves decided when noncompliance with their directions was so egregious that they "breached" the criminals under their supervision and returned them to the courts because of such noncompliance. Since their own effectiveness was measured by the proportion of probation orders "successfully" completed, they had a very powerful motive for disregarding the noncompliance of criminals. In such circumstances, all activity became strictly pro forma, with no purpose external to itself.

While the government put an end to this particular statistical legerdemain, probation orders still go into the statistics as "successfully completed" if they reach their official termination date?-even in many cases if the offender gets arrested for committing further offenses before that date. Only in this way can the Home Office claim that between 70 and 80 percent of probation orders are "successfully completed."

In their effort to prove the liberal orthodoxy that prison does not work, criminologists, government officials, and journalists have routinely used the lower reconviction rates of those sentenced to probation and other forms of noncustodial punishment (the word "punishment" in these circumstances being used very loosely) than those imprisoned. But if the aim is to protect the law-abiding, a comparison of reconviction rates of those imprisoned and those put on probation is irrelevant. What counts is the re-offending rate?-a point so obvious that it is shameful that Fraser should have not only to make it but to hammer it home repeatedly, for the politicians, academics, and journalistic hangers-on have completely obscured it.

By definition, a man in prison can commit no crimes (except against fellow prisoners and prison staff). But what of those out in the world on probation? Of 1,000 male criminals on probation, Fraser makes clear, about 600 will be reconvicted at least once within the two years that the Home Office follows them up for statistical purposes. The rate of detection in Britain of all crimes being about 5 percent, those 1,000 criminals will actually have committed not 600, but at least 12,000 crimes (assuming them to have been averagely competent criminals chased by averagely incompetent police). Even this is not quite all. Since there are, in fact, about 150,000 people on probation in Britain, it means that at least 1.8 million crimes?-more than an eighth of the nation's total?-must be committed annually by people on probation, within the very purview of the criminal-justice system, or very shortly after they have been on probation. While some of these crimes might be "victimless," or at least impersonal, research has shown that these criminals inflict untold misery upon the British population: misery that they would not have been able to inflict had they been in prison for a year instead of on probation.

To compare the reconviction rates of ex-prisoners and people on probation as an argument against prison is not only irrelevant from the point of view of public safety but is also logically absurd. Of course the imprisoned will have higher reconviction rates once they get out of jail?-not because prison failed to reform them, but because it is the most hardened, incorrigible, and recidivist criminals who go to prison. Again, this point is so obvious that it is shameful that anyone should have to point it out; yet politicians and others continue to use the reconviction rates as if they were a proper basis for deciding policy.

Relentless for hundreds of pages, Fraser provides examples of how the British government and its bloated and totally ineffectual bureaucratic apparatus, through moral and intellectual frivolity as well as plain incompetence, has failed in its elementary and sole inescapable duty: to protect the lives and property of the citizenry. He exposes the absurd prejudice that has become a virtually unassailable orthodoxy among the intellectual and political elite: that we have too many prisoners in Britain, as if there were an ideal number of prisoners, derived from a purely abstract principle, at which, independent of the number of crimes committed, we should aim. He describes in full detail the moral and intellectual corruption of the British criminal-justice system, from police decisions not to record crimes or to charge wrongdoers, to the absurdly light sentences given after conviction and the administrative means by which prisoners end up serving less than half their time, irrespective of their dangerousness or the likelihood that they will re-offend.

According to Fraser, at the heart of the British idiocy is the condescending and totally unrealistic idea?-which, however, provides employment opportunities for armies of apparatchiks, as well as being psychologically gratifying?-that burglars, thieves, and robbers are not conscious malefactors who calculate their chances of getting away with it, but people in the grip of something rather like a mental disease, whose thoughts, feelings, and decision-making processes need to be restructured. The whole criminal-justice system ought therefore to act in a therapeutic or medical, rather than a punitive and deterrent, fashion. Burglars do not know, poor things, that householders are upset by housebreaking, and so we must educate and inform them on this point; and we must also seek to persuade them of something that all their experience so far has taught them to be false, namely that crime does not pay.

All in all, Fraser's book is a searing and unanswerable (or at least so far unanswered) indictment of the British criminal-justice system, and therefore of the British state. As Fraser pointed out to me, the failure of the state to protect the lives and property of its citizens, and to take seriously its duty in this regard, creates a politically dangerous situation, for it puts the very legitimacy of the state itself at risk. The potential consequences are incalculable, for the failure might bring the rule of law itself into disrepute and give an opportunity to the brutal and the authoritarian.

You might have thought that any publisher would gratefully accept a book so urgent in its message, so transparently the product of a burning need to communicate obvious but uncomfortable truths of such public interest, conveyed in such a way that anyone of reasonable intelligence might understand them. Any publisher, you would think, would feel fortunate to have such a manuscript land on his desk. But you would be wrong, at least as far as Britain is concerned.

So uncongenial was Fraser's message to all right-thinking Britons that 60 publishers to whom he sent the book turned it down. In a country that publishes more than 10,000 books monthly, not many of which are imperishable masterpieces, there was no room for it or for what it said, though it would take no great acumen to see its commercial possibilities in a country crowded with crime victims. So great was the pressure of the orthodoxy now weighing on the minds of the British intelligentsia that Fraser might as well have gone to Mecca and said that there is no God and that Mohammed was not His prophet. Of course, no publisher actually told him that what he said was unacceptable or unsayable in public: his book merely did not "fit the list" of any publisher. He was the victim of British publishing's equivalent of Mafia omerta.

Fortunately, he did not give up, as he sometimes thought of doing. The 61st publisher to whom he sent the book accepted it. I mean no disrespect to her judgment when I say that it was her personal situation that distinguished her from her fellow publishers: for her husband's son by a previous marriage had not long before been murdered in the street, stabbed by a drug-dealing Jamaican immigrant, aged 20, who had not been deported despite his criminal record but instead allowed to stay in the country as if he were a national treasure to be at all costs cherished and nurtured. Indeed, in court, his lawyer presented him as an unemployed painter and decorator, the victim of racial prejudice (a mitigating circumstance, of course), a view that the prosecution did not challenge, even though the killer had somehow managed alchemically to transmute his unemployment benefits into a new convertible costing some $54,000.

The maternal grandmother of the murdered boy, who had never been ill in her life, died of a heart attack a week after his death, and so the funeral was a double one. It is difficult to resist the conclusion that the killer killed not one but two people. He received a sentence of eight years?-which, in effect, will be four or five years.

I asked the publisher the impossible question of whether she would have published the book if someone close to her had not had such firsthand experience of the frivolous leniency of the British criminal-justice system. She said she thought so: but what is beyond dispute is that the murder made her publication of the book a certainty.

A Land Fit for Criminals has sold well and has been very widely discussed, though not by the most important liberal newspapers, which would find the whole subject in bad taste. But the book's publishing history demonstrates how close we have come to an almost totalitarian uniformity of the sayable, imposed informally by right-thinking people in the name of humanity, but in utter disregard for the truth and the reality of their fellow citizens' lives. Better that they, the right-thinking, should feel pleased with their own rectitude and broadmindedness, than that millions should be freed of their fear of robbery and violence, as in crime-ridden, pre-Giuliani New York. Too bad Fraser's voice had to be heard over someone's dead body.

The Scottish Executive has taken steps to seek powers from Westminster over firearms legislation.
[...]
"Firearms control is an issue which affects every community across the country and one the UK Government has retained a close focus on in recent months," he said.

"It is self-evident to say it is in everyone's interests to have effective legislation governing the circulation and use of weapons such as airguns in order to safeguard the public

Headmaster's killer to get new identity

By Tom Harper, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 1:42am BST 26/08/2007

The government is preparing to give the killer of headmaster Philip Lawrence a new identity.

Learco Chindamo: Secret identity will cost millions
Learco Chindamo: Secret identity will cost millions

Under the plans, Learco Chindamo, 26, and his close family will be given new names and moved to an address away from London, where he grew up and where his mother, stepfather and brothers still live.

They would then be provided with 24 hour police protection via a panic button.

The media may also be barred from reporting details of Chindamo's new identity, what he does or where he lives. The cost to the taxpayer during the rest of Chindamo's life would run to millions of pounds.

The revelation will reignite the anger which erupted last week when a bid to deport Chindamo to Italy, where he was born, was rejected. Ironically, the Ministry of Justice, which is to appeal against that decision, would ultimately find itself responsible for ensuring the Chindamos' safety.

Mr Lawrence's widow, Frances, reacted angrily to the proposal, pointing out that the cost would dwarf the sum her family received from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority following her husband's murder.
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"I think that ordinary people will be outraged to hear that he will be afforded 24-hour police protection," she said.

Chindamo, who was jailed for life when only 15 in 1995 for knifing Mr Lawrence to death outside St George's school in Maida Vale, west London, has served 12 years in prison. He has applied for parole and could be released as early as January.

Past recipients of the type of protection under consideration include Mary Bell, who served 12 years for the murder of two young children in Newcastle in the Sixties.

Others are Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, the killers of Liverpool toddler Jamie Bulger, and Maxine Carr, the girlfriend of Soham murderer Ian Huntley.

When Carr was awarded lifelong anonymity in 2005, the Home Office estimated that it would cost £1 million a year to protect her.

In those cases, the Government decided that the risk of the individuals being attacked by members of the public meant that they required new identities.

A source familiar with Chindamo's case said: "The Government knows what the reaction will be if Chindamo is put into witness protection, which is extremely expensive.

"It is very, very sensitive. If it went wrong and he did something else, the political fall-out would be hugely embarrassing."

Despite claims by the Government that Chindamo was "a genuine and present and sufficiently serious threat to the public", an asylum and immigration tribunal decided that deporting him to Italy, where he lived until the age of six, would breach his right to a "family life".

The Ministry of Justice refused to be drawn on what protection measures might have to be undertaken for Chindamo after his release.

A spokesman said: "It is simply not possible to speculate further about what our future stance would be."

However, Harry Fletcher, assistant general secretary of the National Association of Probation Officers, said: "Due to the high profile nature of the case, it is inevitable that Chindamo will be relocated on release."

Meanwhile, David Davis, the shadow home secretary, criticised the Government's "incompetence" over the way it had handled the matter.

He said: "If the Government had fought a successful -deportation order, the cost would be a fraction of this massive expenditure."

Looney England Again - UK Police Increasingly Used as Thought Police to Enforce Political Correctness

14 year-old-student arrested and taken to police station after requesting move to class with students who speak English

By Hilary White

BRITAIN, July 26, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A few days before his election as pope, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger denounced a growing "dictatorship of relativism." The pope's rhetorical device, however, is increasingly becoming the lived experience of ordinary Britons visited and questioned by police for publicly expressing politically or religiously "incorrect" views.

In October 2006, the Daily Mail reported that a 14-year-old school girl, Codie Stott, was arrested by police and detained in a cell for three hours after she asked to be moved into a group of students who spoke English in class. Stott was denounced to police for "racism" by her teachers at Harrop Fold High School in Worsley, Greater Manchester.

Codie told police that she had been placed in a group of five students who would or could not discuss the class work in English. When she asked to be moved to another group with whom she could communicate, the teacher responded, "It's racist, you're going to get done by the police." A week after the incident she was taken to Swinton police station under arrest. Codie told the Daily Mail, "They told me to take my laces out of my shoes and remove my jewellery, and I had my fingerprints and photograph taken."

In May this year, a shopkeeper in Manchester was threatened with prosecution under the race hate statutes if she did not remove a number of soft toys that some consider racist in origin. Moira Pickering, 62, was told by police to get rid of her stock of traditional English dolls called "gollywogs". Gollywogs, based on a children's literary character created by Florence Kate Upton, have been a staple of British children's toys since the late 19th century.

Pickering told the Daily Mail, "I find sex shops offensive, I find cabbage patch dolls offensive, but I wouldn't report them. Golliwogs have been going for years and I've always sold them. They sell very well. People are far too politically correct they go over the top."

In early April this year, a father of a ten-year-old boy was astounded when two police officers arrived at his Cheshire home to question his son for calling another boy "gay" in an email.

"I could not believe what I was hearing," Alan Rawlinson, aged 41, told media. "They told me they considered it a very serious offence. I thought they were joking at first… [T]his just seemed a huge waste of resources for something so trivial. I am furious about what has happened, it just seems the politically correct brigade are taking over."

"If somebody had called the police about something like this in my day they would have laughed - they certainly wouldn't have sent two officers out. It is completely ridiculous."

Perhaps more ominously, accusations of direct interference by police with the electoral process for ideological reasons are starting to be heard in Britain.

The British National Party, a far right but completely legal political party, is preparing a package of evidence to present to the Electoral Commission alleging that this May, West Midlands police interfered in the Birmingham local election at the behest of opposition parties. The party alleges that the police cooperated with a campaign of intimidation when they visited and questioned each of the 400 people in the Birmingham ridings who signed nomination papers for BNP candidates.

The BNP, a nationalist party opposed to non-ethnically British immigration, has been at pains recently to shed its early association with white supremacists. But its opposition particularly to Muslim, African and Pakistani immigration, and its nationalist anti-EU position, has earned the BNP the status of most politically incorrect, and therefore most publicly vilified party in recent British history.

Some observers have said that the combination of racial tensions and violence springing from mass immigration in densely crowded areas, together with a growing police and media suppression of free speech have created fertile ground for the nationalist party that excludes non-racially British members and is known for its blunt and forceful condemnations of politically correct ideology.

This backlash may explain why the BNP took 20,000 to 30,000 votes in the Birmingham area, despite police questioning their supporters, arrests of BNP party volunteers and organised "anti-fascist" opposition. Last week the BNP moved into fourth place behind the three main parties in a Parliamentary by-election in Sedgefield, County Durham, the riding recently vacated by former Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Note that the English officials themselves use the term "witness protection program", but that nothing in the article even hints that this kid testified against anyone. This program appears to be a Murderers Protection Program of some sort.

• The British Crime Survey (BCS) showed that there were 10.9 million crimes committed against adults living in private households in England and Wales, 8.4 million fewer crimes than in 1995. (Figure 9.1)

• Property crime accounted for the majority (73 per cent) of all offences recorded by the police in 2005/06 in England and Wales. (Table 9.2)

• The total value of all card fraud in the UK in 2005 was £439 million, a decrease of 13 per cent compared with 2004. (Page 117)

• The risk of becoming a victim of crime fell from 40 per cent of the population in 1995 to 23 per cent in 2005/06 in England and Wales, the lowest recorded level since the BCS began. (Page 119)

• In 2004, over four in ten juveniles in England and Wales re-offended within one year of their original conviction. (Page 123)

• Full-time equivalent police officer numbers in England and Wales reached record levels in 2006, with 167,170 officers on 31 March. (Table 9.21)
Latest information on police resources

Published on 11 April 2007 at 8:30 am

British Gun Crime up 242 Percent; Post Says 'Laws Seen As Curbing Attacks'
Photo of Ken Shepherd.
By Ken Shepherd | April 24, 2007 - 13:06 ET

Update below jump with related items from NewsBusters.

This morning, NewsBusters contributing editor Dan Gainor brought this Washington Post article to my attention:

"Britain's Gun Laws Seen as Curbing Attacks"

But the problem is that while anti-gun activists recited those talking points in Post foreign service correspondent Mary Jordan's April 24 story, the empirical evidence shows otherwise.

The number of crimes in which a handgun was used in England and Wales has risen from 299 in 1995 to 1,024 last year. Offenses committed with all types of firearms, including air guns, have also increased.

That's an increase of 725 gun crimes in 11 years, a 242 percent increase. Britain already had strict gun control before the 1996 Dunblane, Scotland, school shooting, and in 1997 both Conservative and Labour governments pushed through fresh gun control legislation banning small caliber handguns.

Jordan did note that gun fatalities are down at just 50 deaths in the U.K. last year from 55 in 1995, yet Jordan carefully inserted a caveat earlier in the same paragraph.

"According to government statistics, the number of people killed by guns has essentially stayed the same, with dips and spikes, as before the 1997 gun control laws went into effect," she wrote.

"Dips and spikes?" Perhaps like the spike in total homicides in England and Wales in the years following the 1997 gun laws? Homicides peaked at over 1,000 in the 2002-3 survey period. The number has since fallen to just above 1997-8 levels.

What about the oft-repeated meme that gun-free Britain is much less violent than the United States? Jordan doesn't raise that meme per se, but neither does she compare apples to apples. Has Britain historically been less violent, more violent, or similarly violent per capita to the United States? Jordan doesn't say.

The better comparison, in fact, is if Britain has become more or less violent since the 1997 gun laws.

The notion that it's become less violent doesn't wash according to data from the British government.

What about "possession of weapons." Surely arrests for illegal weapons is on a downward trend, right?

Wrong.

Related Items:

ABC News Trumpets UK's Handgun Ban

Lou Dobbs Notes Flaws in Gun Control

MSNBC.com Cites Unlabeled Anti-Gun Activist
ABC Poll Finds Twice as Many Blame Culture Over Guns, But 'World News' Spikes It

Howard Fineman to Democrats On Guns: 'You Gonna Do Something Now?!'

Anybody can lie with figures. There was a precipitous drop in overall crime in the US starting around 1995 due to the fact of abortions becoming commonplace 20 years earlier and I'd assume much the same thing happened in England.

Anybody can lie with figures

The Nature of the Problem and Current Trends

In 1996 (the most recent year for which data are available), 34,040 people died from gunfire in the United States. Of these deaths, approximately 54 percent resulted from suicide, 41 percent resulted from homicide, and 3 percent were unintentional (see figure 2). Firearm injuries are the eighth leading cause of death in the United States. In addition, for every fatal shooting, there are roughly three nonfatal shootings.