It is true that the US murder rate is substantially higher than the UK's murder rate. It is also true that a disproportionately large number of US murder victims had prior criminal records or were engaged in crime, though I'm not sure that's enough to entirely justify crunker's claim. The same is probably true in Britain, or anywhere else for that matter. People who are involved with dangerous people or situations are, unsurprisingly, in greater danger of being hurt or killed.
To me, though, the overriding point is that the UK is a vastly more dangerous and violent and unsafe society than the US, despite their draconian efforts at gun control. I feel that it's dishonest to try and skirt that fact by choosing a single class of violent crime (even murder) to focus on while marginalizing the others, especially when murders make up such a tiny fraction of the overall violent crime rate. It's not like rape, armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, etc. are trifling little crimes that don't matter as long the murder rate is down. I'm certainly not saying that British gun control causes the level of violence that exists in the UK, but the UK's case does clearly demonstrate that violent crime is largely decoupled from gun availability, and that the promise of "less guns, less crime" is a bogus one. Whether or not a society has lots of guns will have very little bearing on whether or not it has lots of violent crime. It works the other way, too: Some European countries, such as Switzerland and Finland, have very high rates of gun ownership, but still manage to have very little violent crime. So the idea that high gun ownership rates correlate with high violent crime rates is bogus as well.
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