MikeWM:
Police protect no-one? Tell that to the population of Britain, who widely want to see police ‘back on the beat’.
We have plenty of beat cops too but unless their beat is at your front and back door they can not protect you.
Which proves very little, in my opinion. Few people had handguns in the first place, so the ban affected few people to start with.
So, you now admit that bans are useless and have no effect?
The rise in crime could be due to just about anything, though most likely is due to a increase in rival drug gangs - hardly pleasant, but not overly affecting my life unless I decide to take up drug dealing.
But you are not the only one in the country. It does affect others greatly.
Other factors are in play here too, such as the specific statistics used for crime reporting. By all accounts, serious crime reporting is up whereas actual crime is down. There have also been changes to the ways numbers of incidents have been reported.
Actually you are partly right and partly wrong. British crime is notoriously under-reported to make the country look safer and convince people that their efforts are working. The British media has remained quite critical of authorities for “fiddling” with crime data. Consider some of the headlines:
“Crime figures a sham, say police,”-Ian Henry, The Electronic Telegraph (April 1, 2002).
“Police are accused of fiddling crime data,” -Tim Reid, The Electronic Telegraph (May 4, 2003).
“Police figures under-record offences by 20 percent.” John Steele, The Electronic Telegraph (July 13, 2000).
British police have also criticized the system because of the “widespread manipulation” of crime data:
“Officers said that pressure to convince the public that police were winning the fight against crime had resulted in a long list of ruses to ‘massage’ statistics.”-The Electronic Telegraph (April 1, 2002).
Sgt. Mike Bennett says officers have become increasingly frustrated with the practice of manipulating statistics. “The crime figures are meaningless,” he said. “Police everywhere know exactly what is going on.”
According to The BBC, “Officers said the lower recorded level of crime bore no resemblance to the actual amount of crime being committed.”
One former Scotland Yard officer told The Telegraph of a series of
tricks that rendered crime figures ‘a complete sham.’ A classic example, he said, was where a series of homes in a block flats were burgled and were regularly recorded as one crime.
British crime reporting tactics keep murder rates artificially low too. "Suppose that three men kill a woman during an argument outside a bar. They are arrested for murder, but because of problems with identification (the main witness is dead), charges are eventually dropped. In American crime statistics, the event counts as a three-person homicide, but in British statistics it counts as nothing at all.
How does that show that gun ownership would make that any better?
Because Gun control has a near perfect record of making crime worse and enactment of right-to-carry laws does have a perfect record of causing crime to decrease greatly.
The only case mentioned in that report is the Tony Martin case. I happen to think it unacceptable to shoot an unarmed man in the back with an illegally owned gun, even if that man is a burglar.