Subject:
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Re: More LP S P A M : (was Re: Scary Survey results about the US First Amendment)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Mon, 16 Jul 2001 13:21:21 GMT
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Viewed:
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2717 times
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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
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