MstrTiger
Posts: 417
Joined: 1/14/2006
From: UK
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quote:
ORIGINAL: stef
quote:
ORIGINAL: MstrTiger
The numbers are irrelevant, you have to look at what they are made up from like I said the ones that reflect a massive rise in gun crime do so because they are based on reported crimes and not actual crimes.
What do you consider to be the difference between 'reported crimes' and 'actual crimes' and if there is a difference, why doesn't the Home Office differentiate between the two in their yearly reports?
quote:
50% of the crimes reported did in fact involve imitation weapons and not real guns.
How does this matter? If the victim of a crime thinks a real gun is being pointed at them, it might as well be a real gun. In the US, use of a replica or an air pistol during the commission of a crime garners the same charge and penalties as if the weapon used were a 'real' firearm. Is it the same there or are your courts more lenient when a criminal is "only kidding?"
Regardless, let's take a look at the Home Office's 'Violent Crime Overview, Homicide and Gun Crime 2004/2005, 2nd edition' for the latest figures. If you'll be so kind as to look at page 81, Table 3.01 'Crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales in which firearms (including air weapons) were reported to have been used, by offense group.' in 1997, the number of gun offenses was 12,410. Compare that to 2004/2005 which lists the number of offenses as 22,789. That's an 83.6 percent increase.
Now then, let's take a look at the numbers without air weapons and replicas included. Please turn to page 83, Table 3.03 'Crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales in which firearms were reported to have been used, by type of principal weapon.' Ignoring the 'Imitation firearm' and 'Unidentified firearm' subtotals (and I'm being overly generous by omitting the latter category as it shows a 119.8% increase,) the total in 1998/1999 comes to 3978. The 2004/2005 total comes to 6169. That's a 55% increase (64.3% with 'Unidentified firearms' included).
I eagerly await your next excuse.
~stef
It matters because the figures you are quoting are based on REPORTED crime and not REAL crime, a reported crime is when someone picks up their phone and calls the police and tells them that have seen someone commit a crime which they then go and file a report on, real crime is when the police go out and actually find that a crime has been committed. I don’t know why the home office does not differentiate between the two though the change was a relatively recent one though the fact remains that they don’t and questioning it is pointless.
The main reason it looks like there is more gun crime than there was is because there are more anti gun laws, most of the increase is made up of people being arrested for things that were not illegal when the earlier figures were recorded. For example say Tony Blair made it illegal for people to eat chocolate and the police went off and arrested all the chocolate eaters, the amount of reported crime would show a massive increase though you cant compare that increase directly with the time before the law was instituted, do you see?
Do I actually need to explain the difference between a criminal having a real gun or a fake one to you? I will try to put it in its simplest terms, a criminal can kill someone with a real gun and they cant with a fake one!!! They can threaten people with a fake gun though the fact that they have to resort to doing that rather then using actual guns shows that they have less real guns to threaten people with, if you look at the imitation firearm totals table 3.03 on page 83 of the violent crime overview you will see that there were 566 offences reported in 1998/1999 and then 3333 in 2004/05 such a massive and steady increase in fake guns year on year shows that criminals are having to resort to using them rather than real guns. If you look at the same table you will also see that reported crime involving real handguns has fallen from 5874 in 2001/02 to 4347 in 2004/05.
In Britain actual crime has fallen by a massive 44% since 1995 you need to keep in mind that in the UK less than 1% of crime is gun related.
< Message edited by MstrTiger -- 6/26/2006 3:59:56 PM >
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