Despite Cumbria, gun crime is falling – a law change is not practical – Telegraph Blogs

Saturday 25 October 2014 | Blog Feed | All feeds

Neil O'Brien



I visited a gun shop in the US years ago. I was amazed that you could buy an Uzi machine-gun over the counter, and I’m glad that we don’t have that in Britain.

The awful events in Cumbria have sparked fresh discussion about guns. But the truth is that the UK is not a society awash in guns or gun violence. The rate of gun homicide per year is less than one in a million people, compared to 39 per million in the US or 495 per million in Guatemala.

In fact other weapons are far more likely to be used to hurt or kill. Weapons were used in about one in five (21%) of violent crimes last year. Knives were used in 7%, glasses or bottles in 5%, hitting implements in 4% and firearms in just 1% of incidents of violence.

Under Labour gun crime went up, and although it has started to fall back in more recent years, it’s still higher than in 1999, as the chart below shows.


I think it is telling which types of guns are being used in acts of violence. Handguns were used in 4,250 offences during 2008/09, while shotguns were used in just 617 offences. This is despite the fact that after Dunblane, legal handgun ownership is effectively banned, so most of the most of handguns being used in crime are illegally owned.

Thankfully the total number of people killed is lower than the number of incidents in which guns are present – tens of fatalities and hundreds of injuries, as the chart below shows.


There is a powerful link between gun deaths and gun ownership rates, which you can see in the chart below.  But this is mainly because in gun-owning countries more people commit suicide using guns. The Swiss, for example have more guns per head than the Americans, but their gun homicide rate is one eighth of the American level.  The Finnish rate is less than a tenth of the American.


So partly it is about culture, and partly about the kinds of guns people have (rifles and shotguns being less likely to be used for violent purposes than handguns).

The UK has had wave after wave of gun control legislation, in 1968, 1988 and 1997. I’m not sure that there is anything more that can be done in this direction.  There are some really important things we can do to reduce gun and knife crime, much of which is related to criminal gangs. But in terms of gun ownership, the only place left to go is really an outright ban on the ownership of all guns, including shotguns, and I don’t think that is practical.

comments powered by Disqus