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[Erkki]

The law only affected handguns, which were used in a small number of crimes however. Why would that law be expected to change the pattern of use of other firearms? Handgun offenses have in fact fallen dramatically.

Except that you didn't even read it! https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/116483/hosb0212.pdf

They were not used in small number - handguns are the most used firearm type and the gun use in homicides remains at 8,5 % or so. Page 77 and 73. "Other firearm offenses" (such as possession) are actually going down year by year. Presumably at least partially because people who cant even keep theirs hidden are losing their guns. Page 76. In England and Wales, handguns still amount for half of the firearm uses in homicides and attempted murders despite them being banned long ago. Page 75.

So yes, indeed, total firearm offenses are going down, handgun offenses are going down(4500 to 3100 per year in 10 years) but the amount of firearms used in homicides remains constant.

[Reelya]

"Other firearm offenses" (such as possession) are actually going down year by year.

So are homicides:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/apr/21/rate-england-wales-2015-rises-11

The murder rate in England and Wales has fallen over the past decade from 16 homicides – which include murders and manslaughters – per million population in 2005 to 10 homicides per million population in 2015.

It increased 11% from 2014 to 2015. Which is a yearly fluctuation. note that the fluctuation is more than twice the total number of handgun murders. Which indicates how relatively small they are in the scheme of things.

Handguns-related offenses fell by about 50% during a similar period. And they were fired in a similar proportion of offenses each year according to the hosb document: 13%. This shows that reductions in actual handgun crime followed the introduction of the handgun ban (obviously with a few years lag, since you gotta actual go out and arrest people to enforce a law). Meanwhile, other guns used in crime basically didn't change (shotguns and rifles: no change after handgun ban). What did increase was the use of imitation guns. But they hardly kill anyone at the best of times. So criminals replaced handguns with fake BB guns.

All gun-related murders did actually fall over the period 2000 - 2011 (hosb report page 70). So did national murders as a whole. But the population actually increased from 59 million in 2000 to 63 million in 2011. So proportionally it fell faster than page 70 indicates.

[Erkki]

"Other firearm offenses" (such as possession) are actually going down year by year.

That's the point. They started going up after they made handguns illegal, due to the crime of possession. They're going down now because there are less handguns in circulation to charge people about.

But still, handguns only account for 5% of homicides in the UK, which is not very many. Banning handguns can only affect that 5%. "Homicides didn't go down after the ban" would be expected. The ban might reduce the long-term homicide rate in the UK by 2% or so, which is way lower than yearly fluctuations.

5% may be not very many but its the same figure as before the bans. And not changing, there is no trend. The ban did nothing but take away law abiding citizens hobby tools and possibly make a small number of suicide attempts not succeed. The gun control already was strict enough.

[Antioch]

Stopping or reducing crime is a secondary effect of gun control. It's always been a secondary effect of gun control. Gun control is about reducing fatalities, crime related or not, and reducing opportunity

oh ok then

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http://next argument?

Well I can see perfectly fine from that graph that violent crime was rapidly increasing before the handgun ban and that after the ban the rate of growth first slowed and then returned to the pre ban rate of increase.

Apart of course from the fact that trying to proof statistical trends from a whopping 5 data points is utter nonsense.

Lets have our own ultra scientific interpretation of these numbers!



It can be CLEARLY shown that the gun ban caused a huge decrease in the rate of crime growth, crime would have been literally of the chart without the ban!


But enough of that silliness.

The full numbers show that the number of homicides has been growing steadily since at least 1961. It peaked in 2005 and is now dropping again. As you can see on page 17 of this report:

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/116483/hosb0212.pdf

[Antioch]

-double-

[Shadowlord]

*sigh*

[Frumple]

If its not about crime and fatalities... Even now after Orlando, absolutely nobody is worried about gun accidents and suicides.

Not... not so much. There is a great number of suicide prevention organizations out there that would disagree with the latter, and so far as I'm aware getting firearms away from those identified as suicidally depressed is pretty common practice and given a fair amount of emphasis, even beyond all the rest involved with that. There is a great number of gun control advocates in the US that would disagree with the former; it's been a substantial chunk of the point behind local advocacy for gun safes and firearm storage regulation of the last few decades. Certainly neither get much news coverage, because, y'know, one side of this issue is throwing a lot more money at it (among other things, of course... suicide in general doesn't get nearly as much attention as it probably should in the US, no doubt in part due to our continuing attempts to stick our fingers in our ears and whistle dixie about mental health issues), but there is a hell of a lot of people that are, in fact, worried about gun accidents and suicides, particularly the latter, and have been for quite a long time.

EDIT: Reelya, I provided very detailed statistics from an official source for England and Wales' homicides and violent crime on page 4 or 5 or something. There is NO CHANGE in gun use % in homicides since the law change, and the total homicide rate is on a rise still.

Doesn't look like it? Not on the total, at least. Homicide rate's been dropping pretty steadily in england and wales since a peak in '02. Both the rate and the raw number have actually been dropping (though the rate more slowly), near as I've been able to tell, and a good chunk of that peak in '02 was actually due to extraordinary events (~ a tenth of; 172 of 1041 were attributed to a single person and recorded in that year). This seems to be the data they're drawing from, if you're like to check something closer to the source. Gun use in % of homicides also seems to be down from a decade ago by a bit, and not spiking as high to boot. This looks to be just about the best summary of data I've found yet, insofar as presentation and ease of use, though I can't speak for the rest of the site in the least.

Actually think the suicide rates data is more interesting, though; both are lower than the earliest point they were both tracked in that data, but total is down significantly more than just firearm. Considering one of the common statements is that reducing firearm access reduces total suicides beyond just lowering gun ones... though the data is a few years out of date, and iirc the UK's having a bit of a suicide spike at the moment. Could be outdated to some degree.

[Shadowlord]

Nowadays in America I'm sure folks can get fentanyl and overdose on that if they want to suicide.

Not as easily as they can get a gun, though.

E:
Speaking of gun violence,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-36550304

[Frumple]

Eh, they can, but overdosing is something approaching notorious for being an unreliable method of suicide. It being one of the preferred methods women kill themselves with in the US is one of the reasons the successful suicide rate for women is somewhere in the ballpark of a third that of males, despite attempts being something like three times higher.

[Erkki]

Doesn't look like it? Not on the total, at least. Homicide rate's been dropping pretty steadily in england and wales since a peak in '02. Both the rate and the raw number have actually been dropping (though the rate more slowly), near as I've been able to tell, and a good chunk of that peak in '02 was actually due to extraordinary events (~ a tenth of; 172 of 1041 were attributed to a single person and recorded in that year). This seems to be the data they're drawing from, if you're like to check something closer to the source. Gun use in % of homicides also seems to be down from a decade ago by a bit, and not spiking as high to boot. This looks to be just about the best summary of data I've found yet, insofar as presentation and ease of use, though I can't speak for the rest of the site in the least.

Actually think the suicide rates data is more interesting, though; both are lower than the earliest point they were both tracked in that data, but total is down significantly more than just firearm. Considering one of the common statements is that reducing firearm access reduces total suicides beyond just lowering gun ones... though the data is a few years out of date, and iirc the UK's having a bit of a suicide spike at the moment. Could be outdated to some degree.

Probably suicides keep going down and gun suicides among them. Its a trend in Europe. Unlike in most of US, one needs a license for gun in the UK so people with guns should on the average be more stable than the average citizen.

Gun use % in homicides is not the same thing as total number of gun homicides. But, it does look that perhaps handgun availability for wrong hands is starting to fall over finally over 10 years after the ban. It did remain constant till 2011 at least. It would be interesting to also see statistics for alcohol in homicides, in case there is, similarly to Finland, alcohol used in 83% of cases and average alcohol blood content of 1,9 promille.  In which case the blame would probably still go to guns, as it does here.

The middle link was useless, it only has figures for all firearm offenses. Your last url's figures for gun homicides with handguns conflict with gov.uk's data, showing lower numbers for every year. For example: gunpolicy.com has single-figure numbers for handgun homicides every year, while gov.uk says 33 fatalities and 116 serious injuries for 2010/2011 alone. Either way, you probably agree that handgun ban achieved next to nothing discounting confiscation of property.

[Frumple]

Yeah, there's something borked up with that last one, now that I look a little closer (I wasn't checking the individual weapon data when I first hit it). Bit of a shame, it was easily the best presented source of data on the UK I've ran into so far, even if the numbers are off. The rest of them, and particularly the governmental sources, could really stand to learn something from that format, heh. And... yeah, that second link was kinda' misaimed; was only for the 2013 data, which didn't include firearm homicides on the site itself, either. The one they were using for older stuff (00-10) was here -- appears pulling from around page 70. Actual data was actually already linked somewhere up thread a bit.

Some degree of underreporting can be sorta' expected, for what it's worth, depending on which set of data's being used; there's basically two sources, same as the US, the official police records and crime survey results, and the official records for both of 'em are often... pretty drastically lower than said survey results. This was a kinda' interesting breakdown that wears its bias on its web address but also clearly sources everything on the page and details how they're making calculations. Haven't gotten around to double-checking them (and probably won't, in all likelihood), but the estimate it makes back in '13, on '11 numbers, for underreporting for the US an' UK between the police records and survey results was ~4.8x and ~2.6x, respectively (the rest of the calcs on the page don't factor that in, though).

[Morrigi]

More in the best interest of the press. Gun manufacturers have a lot to lose, while the press doesn't. The press routinely lies through their teeth about "assault rifles" being used in mass shootings - they're doing it right now.

Are you claiming that he didn't use the Sig Sauer MCX that he used in the shooting in the shooting?

Are you claiming that the Sig Sauer MCX he had was capable of fully-automatic fire?

[chaoticag]

Some people really don't care about whether the gun has a full auto option or not, but whether it more or less has a large magazine capacity, semi-auto capability, and dubious personal use.

[Antioch]

More in the best interest of the press. Gun manufacturers have a lot to lose, while the press doesn't. The press routinely lies through their teeth about "assault rifles" being used in mass shootings - they're doing it right now.

Are you claiming that he didn't use the Sig Sauer MCX that he used in the shooting in the shooting?

Are you claiming that the Sig Sauer MCX he had was capable of fully-automatic fire?

Then what do you call a semi-auto conversion of an assault rifle?

[Morrigi]

A semi-automatic rifle. A rifle is not an assault rifle if it is does not use cartridges of intermediate power or cannot fire more than one bullet per trigger pull.