Why is the UK's violent crime rate almost 10x higher than the US?

[TomHansley]

US Violent Crime Rate: 475 per 100,000 citizens
(Year: 2003 http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/05cius/data/table_01.html )

UK Violent Crime Rate: 4,100 per 100,000 citizens
(Year: 2003 http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs04/rdsolr1804.pdf )

They have a total ban on guns, I thought guns made people violent?!?!?!?

[barbtries]

1. it doesn't make sense to me

look up the murder rate instead. bet we "win" going away.

[TomHansley]

5. Murder Rates from Wikipedia

Muder Rate:

UK: 2.03 per 100,000 in 2002

US: 7.6 per 100,000 in 2002

While the US has 4x the murder rate of the UK, some places like DC (has a handgun ban, 35.8 murders per 100,000) really skew our numbers... Vermont has the least restrictive gun laws in the country (don't even need a permit to conceal carry) and their murder rate is 2.6 per 100,000

[barbtries]

7. that sounds about right

i come from los angeles where people are murdered daily.

[pepperbear]

8. so tom, to what do you attribute this? n/t

[Big Al Mac]

38. The Home Office cooks the books

I'd like to point out that much of the disparity between the UK murder rate and the US murder rate is in how the numbers are arrived at.

In the US if a coroner established that the death of an individual was caused by another individual that death is counted as a homicide (murder).

In the UK the death of an individual is not considered a murder UNTIL someone is CONVICTED of causing the death and if that murderer caused multiple deaths it is counted as ONE murder.
In other words the Home Office doesn't report dead bodies they report convicted killers.

[blowtorchevans]

42. mmm ?

I don't believe that can be correct - do you have link.

[blowtorchevans]

43. I thought so

Here is the link to explain definitions - see para 1.1. Seems to me that this is the opposite of what Big Al wrote

http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs08/hosb0308.pdf

pip-pip

[iverglas]

44. I think

You could have left off the "so".

You thought.

;)

[blowtorchevans]

45. Quite possibly..Ta n/t

[krispos42]

11. Did somebody say "US vs. UK homicide rates?

What a coincidence! I just happen to have a handy-dandy graph here in my wallet.





It even has the ratio of US to UK homicide rates!

[tuvor]

2. Two different groups doing the calculations.

For example, do they both define "violent crime" the same, or differently?

[TomHansley]

3. Here's statistics from another source...

On the east side of the Atlantic, we have the British Home Office and the British Crime Survey for 2005/2006. The UK does not use a calendar-year reporting scheme, but reports on a September-to-September time-frame. (These figures do NOT represent two years' worth of data.) The first problem is that there appear to be two separate figures for the crime rate. If we look at the tables supporting Chapter 5, on Violent Crime, (this is an Excel Workbook) we are told that there was a total of 2,420,000 violent crimes in the time-frame covered by the report. If we take the word of the CIA Factbook the UK had a population of 60,609,153 (July 2006 est.) This gives a rate of violent crime per 100,000 inhabitants as 3992.8. However in Chapter 7, (Table 7a) of the BCS, the total violent crime rate per 1000 inhabitants is listed as 23, which is equivalent to 2300 per 100,000 inhabitants. Even this lower number is an astonishing figure when compared to the US data.

On the west side of the Atlantic we have the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Uniform Crime Report for 2005. (2005 is the last year for which the data are not preliminary.) In table 1, we see that in 2005, the violent crime rate per 100,000 inhabitants was 469.2.

[iverglas]

16. and the source would be?

Feel free to name it.

Oh look. A blog:

http://wheelgun.blogspot.com/2007/01/crime-in-uk-versus-crime-in-us.html

[villager]

4. Only 5 per cent of those crimes involved "more serious violence" against the victim

According to the British report you cite, which I bet was not the case here.

Oh, and you "accidentally" neglected to mention how small the homicide rate was, in the British report.

[TomHansley]

6. I didn't accidently neglect anything...

I posted the murder rates in a post above, was looking through Wikipedia for info.

[villager]

9. well, sure, you posted after my comment went up...

But at least they're there, and at least they're honest.

The statistics, that is. Your commentary afterwards was pure, decontextualized NRA spin.

Meanwhile, here's a good graphic on gun deaths in America:

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/04/21/weekinreview/20070422_MARSH_GRAPHIC.html

[krispos42]

12. Ah, you include suicides

Which have everything to do with violent crime rates, yes?

[SteveM]

13. Hmm. Looks like lipstick (nt)

[villager]

14. I suppose for some people, "erotic" and "violent" are hopelessly fused

n/t

[SteveM]

36. Perhaps, but I never got off to a tube of lip stick (though pink ordnance is funny)nt

[villager]

37. Ah, you get off on bullets instead?

n/t

[SteveM]

39. I prefer lips, entirely different from your "erotic" metaphor.

[villager]

40. One couldn't tell from your conflating bullets with facial adornment, however...

Unless you confuse those lips with targets?

[SteveM]

52. Hmm, well they are targets of a sort. And over the years, my aim has been good!

[villager]

53. And I expect additional gun metaphors fill your bedroom!

n/t

[SteveM]

54. Why metaphors when you have the real deal?

[villager]

55. In the bedroom, eh? Brought to mind during romance? Well I have nothing to add.

And this entire sub-thread now stands starkly exposed/explained/clarified, as we return full circle to the erotic fetishizing of guns by their worshippers.

Good job avoiding talking about the actual gun stats on the chart, btw...

[gorfle]

17. You take suicide out of that picture

And it doesn't look nearly so bleak.

It is my belief that suiciders always find a way.

[Wickerman]

47. Having worked in the field in one capacity or another for around 20 years

and being quite familiar with the research I strongly disagree. There is a reason why suicide, in the business of folks who work with life and death, call it "a long term solution to a short term problem."

[varkam]

10. Being a skeptic and all...

it might have to do with how the different organizations operationalize "violent crime". It seems to me that the British statistics might be including several types of crimes not covered in the US stats, though that is difficult to determine (for example, approximately half of all violent crime in the UK involved "less serious violence with no injury" which could mean simple assault - whereas in the US simple assault doesn't even appear to be tabulated in the stats.

[iverglas]

15. why do people constantly post these falsehoods in the Guns forum?

Here's your first clue.

The UK rate includes common assault -- simple assault, no injuries, the lowest level of assault.

The US rate does not.


Check your UK document. The crime survey data shows that 37% of the "violent crimes" reported were "common assault (no injury)".


The UK figures include "sexual offences". The US figures include only "forcible rape".


8% of the recorded crime figure for violent crimes in the UK is "other violence". Where is that in the US figures?

15% of the recorded crime figure for violent crimes the UK is "harassment". Where is that in the US figures?

5% of the UK survey-reported crime is "snatch theft" as distinct from "robbery". Is that covered by "robbery" in the US figures? Have you attempted to find out?



They have a total ban on guns, I thought guns made people violent?!?!?!?

Would you like my theory about why you would think something like this?

[krispos42]

33. Exactly

Two separate nations, two separate governments, tabulating their data sets to different criteria. That is why I only post homicide stats for comparison; anything else is intellectually dishonest.

Or I look at trends within a country by comparing year-to-year.

[iverglas]

18. oh, by the way

They have a total ban on guns


Where do you get your bizarre ideas?

[iverglas]

19. so what's the answer?

Why are you posting this completely false crap here?

[Name removed]

21. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[iverglas]

22. it's a recurring meme all right

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=118&topic_id=127233&mesg_id=127233

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=118&topic_id=150544&mesg_id=150633

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=118x111093#111186

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=118x149957#150197

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=118&topic_id=145923&mesg_id=146039

Just some random references to it. It rears its head on a pretty much monthly basis hereabouts.




The Adherents of the Repeated Meme visit us frequently ...

[zanne]

20. Here's something fun for you to look at, TomHansley.

[TomHansley]

23. So if guns MURDER people...

Then my car is responsible for me speeding.

I'll have to tell the police officer to write the ticket to my car next time I'm pulled over for speeding.

[zanne]

26. Guns are manufactured for ONLY ONE reason...

To wound and kill. Cars are manufactured for transportation. I stopped taking that silly "car vs gun" argument seriously years ago. You really have no way to disprove the fact that guns kill.

[gorfle]

27. No one disputes the fact that guns kill.

Guns are manufactured for ONLY ONE reason...To wound and kill. Cars are manufactured for transportation. I stopped taking that silly "car vs gun" argument seriously years ago. You really have no way to disprove the fact that guns kill.

No one disputes the fact that guns kill. What is disputed is how frequently they kill. There are some 250 million firearms in this country owned by some 40-80 million firearm owners. Annually, firearms account for some 10,000 homicides. This means that only 0.004% of all firearms are used for homicides every year. This means that only 0.025% to 0.0125% of firearm owners are involved in homicides every year.

That is four one-hundredths of one percent of all firearms, and less than two-tenths of one percent of firearm owners involved in homicides.

Of course guns kill. This is why soldiers carry them. And that, in turn, is why our founding fathers wanted the citizenry of this country to be similarly armed - so that the average citizen could be, and consequently stand up to, soldiers with guns.

[highground]

29. I'm a gun owner

I agree with you 100%!

Ban crime not guns!

[iverglas]

28. so if your statement in the opening post was false

Why did you post it?

[krispos42]

24. Yanno...

I bet there is a very low number of black Iraqis killed every year, too. Doesn't mean Iraq is a garden of peace.

How strong is your message when the only way you can promote it is through either selective or misleading statistics?

[zanne]

25. Nothing will convince you, will it?

Just like the Bush supporters of the war in Iraq, when facts and figures are presented to you, you just turn a blind eye and say "It doesn't matter". Cognitive dissonance.

[krispos42]

31. "Lies, damn lies, and statistics"

You have two problems, Zanne.


One, you have to convince me that strict gun control laws will go a long way towards lowering our crime and homicide rates. Which I don't think anybody has done via simply saying "turn in your guns" or "no more guns can be bought or sold".

Two, you have to convince me that such a result is worth taking away or severely limiting people constitutional rights. I don't buy it when the Republicans take away (or severely restricty) my 1st Amendment rights, or my 4th Amendment rights, or my Fifth Amendment rights, or my Sixth Amenedment rights, or my Eight Amendment rights, or my habeas corpus rights, and I'm sure as not going to buy it when Democrats want to take away (or severely restrict) my Second Amendment rights.



Spouting off about how few people were killed in Britian and Wales by guns is not an effective nor an honest argument when their total homicide rate is at or near historic highs. The express reason I made this damn graph:



is because I got sick and tired from somebody, I think the late billbuckhead, crowing about how only 52 people were killed with handguns in 2006 and how the UK's homicide rate was only 1/3 that of ours.



And the reason I made THIS damn graph:


is because somebody kept making a point that DC's homicide rate in 2006 was lower than the homicide rate when they enacted the handgun ban. More intellectual dishonestly.



Incidently, I noticed you failed to weigh in on this post:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=118&topic_id=170523&mesg_id=170924

after trying to laugh it off.

[iverglas]

34. I've still never figured out

How come it took a decade for the handgun ban in DC to "cause" all those homicides??

Weren't we supposed to be looking for blood in the streets the morning after the assault weapons ban died? And isn't the fact that there wasn't any supposed to be proof of ... something?

If you're not suggesting the handgun ban caused the rise in the homicide rate and the high homicide rate a decade later ... but not the sharp drop in the rate after that ... what are you suggesting?

[krispos42]

35. To an extent, DC follows national trends

DC is also counted statisically as only an urban area, so that kicks the homicide rate much higher than if it was a state. States have suburbs and rural areas that make the state-wide homicide rate lower than just the urban area.

Being only a statistical urban area, DC got hit hard by the drug gangs problem and the crack cocaine problem. Such things also happened in, say, Los Angeles or New York, but those two states have vast non-urban lands and populations to dilute the effects of such activity in their cities.

Regarding the assault-weapons ban, it was a ban on newly-sold rifles with combinations of cosmetic features. Existing, pre-ban rifles were not outlawed or confisctated or anything like that, and some work with a grinder, MIG welder, or a new stock turned defined "assault weapons" into defined "non-assault weapons". BenEzra has a pic of his own AK-47ish rifle he posts regularly that he bought during the Ban.

Behold the California-legal, non-assault-weapon AR-15 semiautomatic rifle:



No protruding pistol grip, no thumbhole grip, no bayonet mount, no grenade-launcher mount, no folding/telescoping stock.



Or, in some cases they removed the conventional push-button magazine release on an AR-15 and replaced it with one that requires a "tool", such as the point of a cartridge, to release. By replacing the magazine release as described, the AR-15 goes from a detachable-magazine rifle to a fixed-magazine rifle, and can have a pistol grip, bayonet lug, etc.

This makes the AR-15 similar to the Lee-Enfield Mark III rifle or SKS rifle, both of which have a "fixed" magazine that are removed for maintenence and cleaning, but not for reloading.

If you're not suggesting the handgun ban caused the rise in the homicide rate and the high homicide rate a decade later ... but not the sharp drop in the rate after that ... what are you suggesting?

[iverglas]

30. eh?

What's selective or misleading there?

Surely nobody imagines that the populations of NZ and the US are equal, for instance -- or that anyone was suggesting they were.

The math is pretty easy.

73 firearms murders in the UK x 5 = 365
184 firearms murders in Canada x 9 = 1656

Those are roughly how many firearms murders there would have been in the US in 2004 if the firearms homicide rate in the US had been equivalent to the rate in the UK or Canada.


And surely you're not joining the chorus of "Eek! Eek! The criminals have seized the streets!" when it comes to violent crime in the UK. You, I believe, know better.

If you're suggesting that the firearms murder rate is not an adequate indication of something ... well, you might want to be having a word with benEzra.

[krispos42]

32. See my reply to Zanne

And if the math is so simple, why is it not mentioned on the poster? Why is it not listed in a per-capita basis?

How about mentioning the fact that the US non-gun homicide rate is about as high as those country's TOTAL homicide rates?

Why is the implication that if guns were severly restricted, all victims of gun violence would not have been killed at all? That 11,000 people a years would still be alive?

[iverglas]

41. has TomHansley left the building?

You seem to have suddenly become rather unconcerned with the dreadful situation in the UK, Tom. Whyzzat?



I wish this place would correct my typos the way my Word does.

[Wickerman]

48. stop being so damn lazy

See that big button in the lower left that says "check spelling?"

Simply press that thing and it will act a lot like like Word. Just one more step. Press the button and decide to, or not, accept the changes it suggests.

Godddammm, you'd think now that it's warming up in the North you wouldn't be so cranky on a Friday.

[Irreverend IX]

49. Or use Firefox...

Which has had a built-in spell-checker for the last several versions.

[Wickerman]

50. true enough

I thought about that, but I didn't want to get too technical.

[iverglas]

51. foreign spellcheckers

No, ta.

I also never acquired the habit of using the one here, because back when I was stubbornly using my antique netscape, javascript would assassinate it every so often, so I kept it turned off. That averted many other problems at the time too, but is no longer reasonable, sigh. So I've been a Firefox proselytizer for a long time now. Gotta love that Adblock. Still don't want its spellchecker. Mine does what I tell it to do.

I fired off an email in haste to a francophone colleague the other day; he wanted accusation of reception, and I was in a hurry. I just typed "ta" and sent. What did I mean by that, he asked. So a few days later I had to spend 10 minutes trying to figure out what somebody in Quebec meant when she called her boss a "tata" and he fired her. Turns out it means "moron". (And this was not part of my French vocabulary already??) I figure my colleague thought I was calling him half a moron ...

Anyhow, the co-vivant has just come up with some newfangled thing that beats Firefox by a mile in the speed category, so that will get downloaded this wknd. Did you know that Monday is Queen Victoria's birthday? It isn't actually. It's the closest Monday to May 24th without going over, and May 24th wasn't her birthday anyhow, it's just the day everybody had fireworks for her birthday. So we still do. I just love our quaint Canadian ways.

And now I have to get back to the thing that was due at 4pm and may be finished by Monday, when it is not a holiday in Quebec. They celebrate St John the Baptist in June instead of Queen Vic in May. Anybody ever worked in XML Editor? If anybody tries to make you, don't.

[Indy Lurker]

46. different countries have different problems

PER CAPITA ROBBERIES

Spain: 12.3265 per 1,000 people
Mexico: 2.02555 per 1,000 people
Portugal: 1.6237 per 1,000 people
United Kingdom: 1.57433 per 1,000 people
Poland: 1.38838 per 1,000 people
United States: 1.38527 per 1,000 people


PER CAPITA BURGLARIES

Australia: 21.7454 per 1,000 people
#3 Denmark: 18.3299 per 1,000 people
#5 Finland: 16.7697 per 1,000 people
#6 New Zealand: 16.2763 per 1,000 people
#7 United Kingdom: 13.8321 per 1,000 people
#8 Poland: 9.46071 per 1,000 people
#9 Canada: 8.94425 per 1,000 people
#13 Switzerland: 8.06303 per 1,000 people
#17 United States: 7.09996 per 1,000 people



PER CAPITA ASSAULTS

United States: 7.56923 per 1,000 people
#7 New Zealand: 7.47881 per 1,000 people
#8 United Kingdom: 7.45959 per 1,000 people
#9 Canada: 7.11834 per 1,000 people
#10 Australia: 7.02459 per 1,000 people
#11 Finland: 5.32644 per 1,000 people


PER CAPITA CAR THEFTS

Australia: 6.92354 per 1,000 people
#2 Denmark: 5.92839 per 1,000 people
#3 United Kingdom: 5.6054 per 1,000 people
#4 New Zealand: 5.45031 per 1,000 people
#5 Norway: 5.08143 per 1,000 people
#6 France: 4.9713 per 1,000 people
#7 Canada: 4.88547 per 1,000 people
#8 Italy: 4.19755 per 1,000 people
#9 United States: 3.8795 per 1,000 people



PER CAPITA RAPES

Australia: 0.777999 per 1,000 people
#5 Canada: 0.733089 per 1,000 people
#9 United States: 0.301318 per 1,000 people



PER CAPITA SUICIDE AGE 15-24

New Zealand: 26.7 per 100,000 people
#2 Finland: 22.8 per 100,000 people
#3 Switzerland: 17.9 per 100,000 people
#4 Canada: 15 per 100,000 people
#5 Austria: 15 per 100,000 people
#6 Australia: 14.6 per 100,000 people
#7 United States: 13.7 per 100,000 people



It's a mistake to try and correlate one country to another.