Their initial comment: In England almost no-one owns a gun and we have almost no gun crime. I’d say based on that evidnece that not owning a gun is by far the safest course of action.
My initial statement: I visited England less than two months ago, and in the 2 weeks I was there (beautiful, not knocking it), there were three mass-stabbings including one that killed 9 children at a seaside park. Had there been a gun owner present, that would have been stopped — just as over 2 million gun crimes are prevented each year in the U.S. by private gun owners, double the number successfully committed.
Their response: 2 million gun crimes prevented vs 1 million successfully committed (by your stats). How does that compare vs the total mortality rate for stabbings? According to the office for national statistics: 41% of all homicides in England and Wales were knife-related, equating to 244 stabbing deaths out of 590 total homicides. 590 total homicides vs… how many of these million gun crimes you mention are fatal?
I should imagine many of the knife crimes (you seemed to pick a very unusual week to go to England but that’s by the by) were committed against gang members who also had knives. Perhaps if members of the public also routinely carried knives that could have been cut down further as responsible knife wielding members of the public got involved to prevent the crime occurring?
Second point first: Yes if good people at any level step in it reduces crime. But obviously, guns are significantly more effective than a knife if you want to defend yourself or stop a crime. It’s a simple fact that if you don’t have a gun then you have to get into close contact to stop someone and if they have a knife it’s a virtual guarantee that you will get stabbed. We’ve all seen the videos of a dozen British police being held at bay by one man with a knife. Doesn’t happen in the U.S. Guns are a vast improvement in public safety in just that obvious way.
As for the first point, it just reflects that there’s very little knowledge about the state of guns in the U.S. Some clarifying facts:
1. Over half (53%) of deaths by firearm in the U.S. are suicides. Out of 26,000 murders in 2021, 80% were committed with a gun — just under 21,000.
2. The idea that people are dying in ‘mass-shootings’ daily in the U.S. is a myth. If you take the Gun Violence Archive’s definition that a mass shooting involves the shooting of 4 or more people (whether they are killed or not), these incidents accounted for 706 murders in 2021. This comes out to fewer than 150 such evens per year and it’s generally not a good definition since it doesn’t capture the real nature of a mass-shooter event. If, instead, you take the FBI’s definition of ‘active shooter incidents’ that a mass shooting is a situation with one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area (which is probably a better way to define them anyway), these accounted for only 103 murders in 2021.
3. There are almost 400 million registered guns in the U.S. and there are about 80 million registered gun-owners. To put that in context, there are more legally-owned guns than people in the U.S. and there are more legal gun owners in the U.S. than the total population of the U.K. https://bit.ly/47yI4nt
4. Handguns are used in 59% of gun murders, whereas rifles or stupidly dubbed ‘assault rifles’ are used in only 3%. So when people say they only want to ban ‘assault rifles’ to prevent gun deaths, it’s a farce. The objective is always all guns. http://bit.ly/3B46SYh
5. Worldwide, high concentrations of private, legal gun ownership do not correlate positively to increased murders. Higher private ownership of guns can be strongly correlated to lower murder rates. https://thefederalist.com/2018/04/03/gun-control-reduce-murder-lets-run-numbers-across-world/
6. In the U.S. according to the U.S. DOJ in 2016, almost 90% of criminals imprisoned for committing a gun-related crime (meaning the brandishing, pointing, or discharge of a firearm during a crime) did not acquire the gun via legal means. They were either stolen, bought on the street (which means stolen and resold), or gotten at the site of the crime.
These facts, taken together, paint a very different picture as to whether guns, or their legal owners, are the issue underlying gun crime. If it were true, then the presence of more guns in the U.S. than people would mean an instant massacre. Virtually no one in the U.K. owns a gun, but they still account for about 5% of U.K. homicides. There are more gun owners in the U.S. than the total population of the U.K. and if we accept the anti-gun argument that guns are the issue, we should again expect to see a bloodbath. But with a mere 21,000 murders by gun out of 395 million people, the U.S. is ridiculously safe.
As in the case of the U.K. the majority of the crime is not happening in everyday neighborhoods, but in crime dens between gangs and in the impoverished inner city areas, mainly using illegally obtained guns. Legal gun owners on the other hand, are preventing over 2 million gun crimes per year. So on the whole, guns in the U.S. are a public safety miracle, not a hazard, and given data worldwide showing a positive link between legal, private gun ownership and reduction in homicide that would probably be true if the British were free to own firearms as well.