[the scotsman]

Before everyone starts sneering at the violent Brits and cancelling their holidays to London or Scotland, let me point out one big fact about these figures.

The UK has TWENTY EIGHT violent offences on their various statute books. To take a boat out in dangerous weather against the crew’s wishes is classed as assault against the person in the UK. I kid you not.

The UK therefore has far more violent offences on their books than the United States, and that completely changes any comparison, in fact it arguably renders it useless, certainly wholesale comparisons.

Of course the UK is going to look more violent if it has 2, 3, 4, 6 times the amount of violent offences on the statute books....

Yes, the UK is more violent than it once was, but there are another two facts again missing:

1—Most UK violent crimes are NOT against the person, but property. 2—The UK historically has had a very low rate of crime, minor or serious. Any rise has to be seen in that context.

Famously, LESS people died as a result of the 25 yrs of irish terrorism (IRA, UVF etc) in both NI and the British mainland than were murdered in single US cities like Detroit, NY or Chicago!.

Britain is still a safe country to live in. Common sense will tell you this, as it will that the UK is not ‘far more violent’ than the USA, Canada, France etc. Safer than 1970 or 1990?. No. But neither is it the violent hellhole these distorted figures show.

Let me end with these figures:

The US has a gun crime usage rate FORTY TIMES that of the UK (400,000 vs 10,000 in 2010).

The US has a gun murder rate SIXTEEN times that of the UK (15,000 vs 900).

75% of all serial killers live in the US (not my words, those of Robert Ressler)

The US murder rate is almost THREE times that of the UK (4.2 vs 1.2).

EVEN IF EXTRAPOLATED BY FIVE TO EQUAL BOTH POPULATIONS (300M VS 300M), the US gun crime rate would STILL be EIGHT times higher, and the gun murder rate would still be over THREE TIMES higher than the UK. And the US would still have the vast majority of the serial killers, as British serial killers are a tiny minority.

The rate of people killed by guns in the US is 19.5 times higher than similar high-income countries in the world.

[cripplecreek]

I’m not going to beat up on the Brits.

Remove all the urban areas from the world and the global crime rate will fall to under 10%.

[detective]

I worked in Detroit for many years. I would tell people that the murder rate in Detroit was about 25 times that of Northern Ireland at the peak of the troubles there. People didn't believe me. They saw media stories about killing etc in Northern Ireland and positive developments in Detroit.

However, the murder rate in Detroit was several hundred times higher than most of the other cities in Michigan.

Violent crime in America is limited to certain areas. The vast majority of Americans are honest and law abiding. People who want gun control and other government control ignore the fact that most Americans are not violent.

Chicago has had about 450 children shot so far this year. Chicago has extremely strict gun control probably similar if not stricter than Britain.

No one in government proposes any solutions other than more bureaucracy and more government control of honest law abiding citizens. No one in authority proposes actually cracking down on actual violent criminals.

[Berlin_Freeper]

The UK therefore has far more violent offences on their books than the United States, and that completely changes any comparison, in fact it arguably renders it useless, certainly wholesale comparisons. Of course the UK is going to look more violent if it has 2, 3, 4, 6 times the amount of violent offences on the statute books...

If so, then the multitude of homosexuals in Scotland are driving the numbers up, all kinds of numbers. Yea - cancel that vacation to Scotland!

Gay men in Scotland are nearly eight times more likely to have attempted suicide in the past year

[detective]

FYI

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-25671/Violent-crime-worse-Britain-US.html

[detective]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196941/The-violent-country-Europe-Britain-worse-South-Africa-U-S.html

[Sigurdrifta]

And if the black, male, teenage gun homicide rate were removed from US statistics, our male, teenage gun homicide rate would be about the same as Switzerland’s.

The REAL tragedy is that a lot of those homicides are committed by blacks against their neighbors.

[muawiyah]

All of which is pretty but far from the truth. If you compare Americans of substantially English origin against English of substantially English origin, the Americans are less violent ~ no matter how you categorize it, or how many crimes are on the books.

We can do that ethnicity by ethnicity, right on down through Ibo in Nigeria, and Chinese from Shanghai, or from Canton, or Overseas Chinese.

Then there are the Japanese Americans ~ one criminal in nearly a century!

[GVnana]

Before everyone starts sneering at the violent Brits and cancelling their holidays to London or Scotland, let me point out one big fact about these figures.

No one is sneering. Gasping in astonishment maybe.

.To take a boat out in dangerous weather against the crew’s wishes is classed as assault against the person in the UK.

Well yeah. I would be very surprised to learn that kind of behavior would NOT be a crime in the US.

The UK has TWENTY EIGHT violent offences on their various statute books

So...care to guess how many in the 50 states?

It would make an interesting comparison, but you don't have one.

On the very same page as this article there are links to stories related to the killing of two unarmed cops in Manchester.
The two unarmed police constables killed attending a 'routine incident' have been named by Greater Manchester Chief Constable Sir Peter Fahey as Fiona Bone, 32, and Nicola Hughes, 23 [pictured above]. Sir Peter paid tribute to Miss Hughes, describing her as a 'chatterbox' and a 'great bobby' who was 'always smiling'.

Sir Peter said Miss Bone was a calm, gentle woman, an excellent bobby and had been in the middle of planning her wedding.

One of the country's most wanted men is believed to have lured the two unarmed female constables to their deaths. Dale Cregan is thought to have made a bogus burglary report then attacked the officers, opening fire with a gun and a grenade.

Eyewitnesses said a hail of bullets was fired and a grenade was thrown during the attack in Hattersley, Greater Manchester, shortly before 11am. One of the officers died at the scene. The second was critically injured and died later."

We learn that Cregan is wanted and on the loose for two other murders involving guns and explosives:

Cregan, pictured above, had been the subject of a huge manhunt after the murders of David Short, 46, and his son Mark, 23. A £50,000 reward had been offered for information leading to his arrest.

A one-eyed man is at the centre of a manhunt after a grieving father was brutally executed just weeks after his son was shot dead.

David Short, 47, was gunned down at his terraced home in Clayton, Manchester, after branding as 'cowards' the killers of his 23-year-old son Mark.

There was an explosion at the house caused by a grenade and within minutes there was another grenade attack and shots reportedly fired at a property in Droylsden, east of the city.

The shooting and grenade attacks happened as two men appeared in court charged with Mark's murder. He was blasted to death 10 weeks ago while playing pool with his friends in a crowded pub.

Yesterday his father was shot dead by two masked men just yards from where children were playing in a park.

The gunmen were seen running from the house after neighbours heard shots.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2186664/Dale-Cregan-Manchester-Hunt-eyed-suspect-grieving-father-killed-gangland-hit.html#ixzz2Fi01pu6N

We could talk a lot about the differences between us, but we would be dealing with a lot of impressions and emotions.

My impressions? If this string of crimes had happened in the US, we would be asking "Why?" and "Where did we go wrong?"

I never see that in the discussion of British crimes. I find most Brits to be appallingly apathetic on the subject. It's as if the matter was closed, you have your solutions, and nothing more can be done.

You have unarmed cops shot to death, a young man blown-up inside a pub, and his father shot to death in a home invasion.

Pardon me if I don't look to you for solutions.

[Fido969]

Mexico, Brazil, Columbia and Venezuela have all had more firearms deaths than the US, and all have a fraction of the guns per capita. Switzerland, Serbia, Finland, Cypress, Uruguay and many other countries have high rates of gun ownership, and each has less than 100 firearm murders per year.

The collaltion between gun ownership and gun deaths just isn’t there.

[Sherman Logan]

Your points are all well taken. In my original post, I noted that definitions and categorizations as “violent crime” vary.

I think it would be useful if you are going to compare murder rates between UK and US to use total murder rates rather than gun murder rates. Guns being less widely available, it’s reasonable to expect that the gun murder rate would be higher in US.

But I doubt it makes much difference to the victim whether he’s murdered with a gun or a cricket bat.

[Ken H]

Agree it's a BS article. See my post #23