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More from Great Britain
"Victims of Crime Trust director Norman Brennan said Britain was quickly gaining a reputation as being one of the most violent countries in the Western world, scarring communities and leaving millions in fear of crime.... "A child is stabbed to death on the streets of Britain every week and knife homicides out number gun homicides by three to one. If these measures were introduced it would greatly reduce knife crime and consequently save lives."
· non-US
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A general question? Does anyone know what is happening in Canada? From what I gather they are sinilar in many respects to the UK in their laws and offical attitudes. Are they seeing the same problem and offical indifference? It would be interesting because of course the US is the source of all problems for them.
Canadian gun laws (though very oppressive by US standards) are not nearly as totalitarian as the UK's. Regular folks in Canada can still own rifles, shotguns, and to a lesser extent, handguns.
I also don't think Canada has gone as far down the "defending yourself/protecting your property makes you a criminal, too" route as the UK has (see the post below about the shopkeeper). From my limited travels in Canada, attitudes tend to vary from province to province (much like the US).
As to recent crime rate comparisons, getting good numbers is very difficult for several reasons:
1) Different legal systems means crimes are not always defined similarly - e.g., the specific acts that define an "assault" may vary between countries
2) Arrest rates are very unreliable because they can reflect enforcement as much as victimization (i.e., double the arrest rate for assault doesn't mean double the assaults, it may just mean the cops are catching a higher percent of the bad guys)
3) Victimization reports made by citizens to police are unreliable because how often people report crime depends both on culture and on how effective the cops are (i.e., the more likely the cops are to catch the bad guys, the more people will report crimes)
If anyone knows a good US v. Canada comparison, I'd love to see it too.
This 1998 DOJ paper is a pretty good comparison of the UK and the US, I wish there was a similar one for Canada.
Yet another reason why folks need to check out http://www.kniferights.org and help get this stuff started before they can get it going over here.
When will you Brits start outlawing Jeep Cherokees and Mercedes saloons?...after all, they are being used to try to kill people, and only by great good luck, or Providence, or incompetent islamic medical education, did they fail to do so in Piccadilly and Glasgow.
I'm overwhelmed by the irony of this item appearing immediately after the one about this.
The problem isn't the guns and knives, you idiots. It's that you punish crime victims, and let the criminals go.