It's pretty much inevitable when trying to debate the rare gun control advocate who still tries to debate (most of them have learned to avoid engaging in debates, since the good guys generally factually and logically peel them like tangerines) that one of their responses will eventually be "Look at the UK! They banned guns, and look at how peaceful they are!"
And it's normal to try to point out that their rate of assaults and "hot" burglaries (break-ins of occupied dwellings) is way, way up.
But there's a grossly underreported statistic out there.
It came up when reading about this grisly and all too common murder in Birmingham:
A 14-year-old has been jailed for at least 16 years for murdering schoolboy Keon Lincoln, who was shot and stabbed outside his home.
The 15-year-old was attacked by a group of youths on Linwood Road, Handsworth, Birmingham, in January.
A judge at Birmingham Crown Court lifted restrictions on naming 14-year-old Yussuf Mustapha who was accused of firing the fatal shot.
Wait.
Back up.
Shot and stabbed?
Did I read that right?
Lord Justice William Davis said Keon's murder had been "carefully planned and executed" using a revolver and a stolen car.
Wow. That's not supposed to happen, is it?
OK, no big surprise - criminals don't obey gun bans, and these lads were no exception.
But in 2nd Amendment advocate Colion Noir followed the fact trail down the rabbit hole on this case - and what he found was...
...well, I'd say "Unexpected", but it really wasn't.
Here's the whole piece:
And the immediate aftermath of the ban was...
...well, it was only "unexpected" if you're completely new to this.
Remember - the UK banned most civilian gun ownership after a school massacre in Dunblane, Scotland, in 1997 that killed a teacher and 16 students.
And once the. hype subsided? According to the left-of-center Guardian in a piece written four years after the ban:
A study commissioned by the Countryside Alliance's Campaign for Shooting found that the number of crimes that involved a handgun increased from 2,648 in 1997/98 to 3,685 in 1999/2000. Their use was the highest since seven years previously when 4,273 crimes involved handguns.
Handguns were outlawed in Britain four years ago following the Dunblane massacre, in which Thomas Hamilton opened fire at a primary school leaving 16 children and their teacher dead. In response to the tragedy, the government passed the 1997 Firearm Act, which banned handguns above .22 calibre and restricted smaller calibre weapons to secure gun clubs. The law resulted in 160,000 handguns being surrendered to the police.
And since then? It's not gotten any better. Note that this information doesn't come from our friends at Bearing Arms, by the way. It comes from a UK Home Office study of gun crime from about ten years ago. And it's not a wonder the media in either country don't talk about the study (I've added emphasis). There were 4,903 gun crimes in the year before the ban - assaults, robberies, homicides, the works. In the years after the ban, that total rose to 10,964
Crimes involving the use of firearms comprise around 0.4 per cent of all recorded offences in England and Wales and have doubled since the mid to late-1990s (Povey and Kaiza, 2006: 81). This increase has occurred against a background of increasingly restrictive legislation and ever more sophisticated public policy responses. At the same time, a small number of high-profile and shocking firearm homicides have raised considerably public concerns about the problem of illegal firearms. Police, politicians and media reports have described the emergence of a criminal ‘gun culture’, particularly in some inner-city areas in England. Relatively little is known, however, about criminal attitudes towards and the market in illegal firearms, limiting the development of policy, policing practice and an understanding of the impact of firearms legislation
In the years since these two reports, the number of gun crimes has stabilized...
...at way above the level before the ban.
Just like every other gun ban.
