Deadly attack in Belgium

[MrJonno]

Getting wasted at the weekend at least if you are young ie 14 to 30 is such an integrated part of British life, the thought of them ever getting hold of firearms is very frightening

[Clinton Huxley]

@Amok - absolutely right. Having more armed people taking potshots in a large crowd like this would have lead to an even higher death toll. The average hoplomaniac seems to think that real life is like a shooting range.

No, he's not, and the average hoplophobe doesn't understand the dynamics of such situations or how those who choose to carry firearms react in emergencies like that. Here's a clue: they don't begin randomly shooting other armed citizens. And the more armed citizens there are in any society, the less likely it is that they will do so accidentally. When the shooting starts, it's pretty damned obvious who the bad guy is. He's the one walking around shooting people at random.

Nope, in real life situations, people will react like they always do, some will stay calm and some will panic. More gun-nuts in the Liege market would have meant more bodies.

[laklak]

Getting wasted at the weekend at least if you are young ie 14 to 30 is such an integrated part of British life, the thought of them ever getting hold of firearms is very frightening

Having lived and gotten royally pissed on both sides of the pond I certainly agree. I saw far, far more violence in British pubs then I've ever seen in the U.S. Actually, far more violence then I've seen in pubs anywhere else in the world. In certain socioeconomic groups a punch up is de rigeur for a weekend piss up (how's that for a P.C. euphemism?). I'd hate to see guns in the hands of people like that. Hell, I hate to see a pint glass in their hands.

Mrs. Lak was a bit nervous about U.S. gun culture when we moved here, but now realizes it's not anything like most outsiders believe. We were talking about it the other night, she was saying that you could never grant the same gun rights to UK citizens, because they haven't been raised around guns the way we have. They'd go nuts, there would be blood in the high street every weekend. She wants her own pistol and concealed carry permit now.

I don't know if armed citizens would have helped or hurt in Liege. I doubt very much that knowing there were armed citizens would have stopped this guy, he was a nutter intent on ending his own life after killing as many as possible.

[Clinton Huxley]

Well, I wouldn't trust most of the UK proletariat with a spoon but I'm not sure Merkins can be trusted either. From the Grauniad:-

In 2010 - the latest year for which detailed statistics are available - there were 12,996 murders in the US. Of those, 8,775 were caused by firearms

.

UK gets about 6-700 murders a year, for comparison.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog ... e-us-state

[MrJonno]

Getting wasted at the weekend at least if you are young ie 14 to 30 is such an integrated part of British life, the thought of them ever getting hold of firearms is very frightening

Having lived and gotten royally pissed on both sides of the pond I certainly agree. I saw far, far more violence in British pubs then I've ever seen in the U.S. Actually, far more violence then I've seen in pubs anywhere else in the world. In certain socioeconomic groups a punch up is de rigeur for a weekend piss up (how's that for a P.C. euphemism?). I'd hate to see guns in the hands of people like that. Hell, I hate to see a pint glass in their hands.

Mrs. Lak was a bit nervous about U.S. gun culture when we moved here, but now realizes it's not anything like most outsiders believe. We were talking about it the other night, she was saying that you could never grant the same gun rights to UK citizens, because they haven't been raised around guns the way we have. They'd go nuts, there would be blood in the high street every weekend. She wants her own pistol and concealed carry permit now.

I don't know if armed citizens would have helped or hurt in Liege. I doubt very much that knowing there were armed citizens would have stopped this guy, he was a nutter intent on ending his own life after killing as many as possible.

Does the US even have the equivalent of town/city pub where people can go whenever they want drink over the driving limit and still go home via public transport/taxies. Also at least from the media American pubs seem to be filled with old people (ie over 30).

I also don't think violence is a problem anywhere in the world where your nearest neighbour is a sheep and the nearest human is a mile away (where I live there are 10's of 1000's of people within a mile)

[laklak]

Does the US even have the equivalent of town/city pub where people can go whenever they want drink over the driving limit and still go home via public transport/taxies. Also at least from the media American pubs seem to be filled with old people (ie over 30).

I also don't think violence is a problem anywhere in the world where your nearest neighbour is a sheep and the nearest human is a mile away (where I live there are 10's of 1000's of people within a mile)

Oh, certainly. Where we are now (Sarasota, Florida) there are pubs scattered all over the city, and public transport is available (though not as prevalent as in the UK). Mrs. Lak and I usually bike to our local. There are probably 30 or so pubs in biking distance. That said, we do bike 11 miles one way to our favorite beach pub. In big cities like New York many people don't regularly drive, many don't own cars. It's pretty much like the UK in the larger cities.

I've often wondered if you exclude gang related violence from our murder statistics how we would compare to the UK. For example, in Sarasota county there were 10 murders in 2011, all but one of which occurred in the Newtown area. Newtown is a gang infested ghetto, and all the murders (including the two British tourists I've posted about before) occurred within a 2 mile radius. One murder occurred on the south end of the county, when someone was robbed at an ATM.

http://sarasota.patch.com/articles/mapp ... -s-murders

Given our population (379,448 in 2011) the rate is 1:37944, or approximately 3 per 100,000. Excluding the gang related murders, it's about 0.3 per 100,000. The second figure is well within UK or European percentages.

[MrJonno]

Need to compare crime in urban and rural areas. It's a fair to compare London to New York or LA , also probably reasonable to compare a small English village with where you live.
You obviously don't get much crime where you don't have many people

[Clinton Huxley]

If you monkey with the stats enough, you can get numbers to support any position. "Ah, but if we exclude oranges and then compare apples to pears..."

Taking MrJonno's point - maybe best comparison would be between areas of equal population density?

[Clinton Huxley]

Used to be that the real fighty louts would be rounded up by the pressgang and sent to the Navy. Now they are left to fester in city centre pubs and cause trouble.

And they call this progress?

[laklak]

The overall murder rate is often used to show how violent and unsafe the U.S. is compared to Europe. But the vast majority of people, like me or (presumably) most people on this forum, don't live in a ghetto. My chances of being murdered in Sarasota (mid sized metro area, comparable to perhaps Huddersfield and Kirklees) are about 0.3 in 100,000. This is because I don't go into the Newtown area, other than to drive through it during the day and then only on a major thoroughfare. I wouldn't go into the side streets at any time, something those two British lads didn't realize to their detriment.

There certainly is a difference in urban and rural crime rates, I think that's true for anywhere. When we lived in the North Carolina mountains we never locked our doors or windows. We do in Sarasota, even though it's probably not necessary given the almost non-existent crime rate in our area. When I lived outside Sowerby Bridge in an old farmhouse on the moors I also didn't lock doors, but when I lived in downtown Halifax I did.

It's very difficult to compare crime rates between countries for a variety of reasons. Crime statistics are reported differently, what is considered an assault in one place may not be considered one in another. For example, in my (admittedly cursory) search, I cannot find homicide figures for Huddersfield. I found all sorts of other statistics, but no homicide statistics. This either means that there have been no murders in Huddersfield, something I know isn't true, or the murders are included in the "violence against persons" category. It's also difficult to compare the areas - Sarasota is the largest city in Sarasota county, as Huddersfield is the largest city in Kirklees. I don't live in Sarasota city, but you really can't tell that if you're there. The city limits are just a sign on the road, you can't tell the difference in city -vs- county just driving through.

[MrJonno]

You also need to start defining what a city is, to me its not somewhere where there is a gap between your house and the next. Cities are about flats/apartment blocks of at least terraced (does that word mean anything to Americans). That to me is where most people in the western world live (at least outside the US)

[Wumbologist]

You also need to start defining what a city is, to me its not somewhere where there is a gap between your house and the next. Cities are about flats/apartment blocks of at least terraced (does that word mean anything to Americans). That to me is where most people in the western world live (at least outside the US)

And you also need to take into account the various cultural, political, and socioeconomic factors that may be at work in the nations being compared. laklak makes an excellent point that, outside of a particular subset of the population in inner city ghettos and the like, the odds of becoming a murder victim drop sharply. It's not that the UK doesn't have gangs, either, and it'd be foolish of me to make that claim. It's simply that American gangs are larger and significantly more violent. From what I've read, it seems that the "Americanized" version of gang culture is beginning to infiltrate into the UK, so maybe in a few years time you can see for yourself what I'm talking about.

[Tyrannical]

"An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life"

So a few useless yobs die the first few years, it's just eugenics in action.

[Clinton Huxley]

Baldly, you are 4 times more likely to be murdered in the USA than in the UK and that ratio has been pretty static for the last 10 years. In both countries, murder rates are declining...maybe Steven Pinker is on to something...

[Audley Strange]

Actually at one point a few years ago, about 2006=7? (somewhere about then) there were more murders in Glasgow per capita than anywhere else in the world for a few months. I remember this because there were 3 within 100 yards of where I stay including one right outside my close entrance. It seemed far fetched to me at the time, but it turned out that a lot of them were drug gang related (there was a power vacuum or something). Doug Stanhope pointed out that the reason we are so violent in the U.K. might be some subconcious confidence in the safety net of free health care.

Britain has had violent gang culture since at least the middle ages and it flares up quite often. I'd suggest that this years riots, which were apparently catalysed by the death of some supposed Gangland figure, was in a sense an orchestrated reaction conducted predominantly by gangleaders and played out by the sort of disadvantaged (not financially bte) greedy ignorant children (defined by mentality as much as age) that populate urban areas where such people are more relevant to the community than politicians.