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Subject: 
Re: More LP S P A M : (was Re: Scary Survey results about the US First Amendment)
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.off-topic.debate
Date: 
Mon, 16 Jul 2001 13:21:21 GMT
Viewed: 
1147 times
  
In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Christopher L. Weeks writes:
In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Scott Arthur writes:

Trouble maker.

Obviously my goal was to tweak you (in a friendly way), but that doesn't • change
the fact that I am also serious.  Since I dug up the statistics published by
the government of the UK that the chance of being violently victimized is • much
greater over there (England and Wales, actually) than it is here, I've been
milking it every time someone makes one of their wisecracks about the US gun
culture.

I expect you mean this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/newsid_810000/810522.stm

It is worth noting that in some areas of the UK tossing a stone at a window
counts as attempted burglary.

Nope.  I hadn't read anything about that.  It sounds like a dumb stance on both
sides.  Here is a snip from a note I posted on another forum in a discussion
in which a Welsh woman was asserting that she was statistically safer than I
was.  Basically, as far as I can tell, she's wrong.  One note: I did the math
wrong in one step, using the population of the entire UK when the study was
only dealing with England and Wales.  So the number v/K number for the UK study
is more like 63 which is 150% of the US statistic.

----------------

I'm having trouble finding perfectly comparable stats.  And nothing I find
culls out Wales from the rest of the UK.  I see that in 1999 there were
3,246,000 violent crimes.  Which is about 55 victimizations per 1000
population.  This comes from the 2000 British Crime Survey.

Document NCJ 167881 from the US Department of Justice suggests that the
complimentary statistic for the entire US is 42 per 1000 in 1996.

They're not from the same year, but it doesn't seem to change
much...except that the same reports suggest that violent crime in the UK is
on the rise while in the US it is on the decline...but I'd ignore that since
they weren't results from the same year.

So it is far from 3 times, but still more.  The gun stats that I compared
show much higher gun related deaths in the US, though the stats didn't seem
to include military action...I wonder how much Irish unrest changes the
stats?  Also, while we have much higher gun death rates than you do, they're
still pretty low.

According to the CDC, 1998 saw 30,708 firearm-related deaths in the entire
US.  17,605 of those were suicides.  I'll call the 12,228 assaults and the
875 accidents that remain a problem.  So out of the roughly 275 million
people in the US, .0000476 of them were killed by guns.


I am not sure you were both comparing like-with-like. But I would be
interested in seeing a more comprehensive comparison. In most developed
countries average crime levels are statistically low. What is important is
fear of crime… that is what affects us most day-to-day. I live in a country
where most feel no need to arm themselves, or protect their home in any real
way. I know nobody who keeps a gun under his or her bed. That said, I heard
a review of this book at the weekend, and it seams the same is not true of
the USA:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0953743837/102-6933089-2592108

Scott A


------------------

Chris



Message is in Reply To:
  Re: More LP S P A M : (was Re: Scary Survey results about the US First Amendment)
 
(...) change (...) much (...) Nope. I hadn't read anything about that. It sounds like a dumb stance on both sides. Here is a snip from a note I posted on another forum in a discussion in which a Welsh woman was asserting that she was statistically (...) (23 years ago, 16-Jul-01, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)

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