I did some math this morning to support a combox debate on whether or not banning guns reduces violence. I compared the murder rates in the US and UK, and then the murder-with-gun rates in both countries. The results:
The US murder-with-gun rate is 34x the one in the UK. The overall US murder rate is 3x that of the UK. That means that if you look only at murders that don't use a gun, the UK rate is over 6x the US rate.
Now, dead is dead, but compared to some options, a gun is not the worst way to go. (I still remember vividly a story out of Rwanda of a man describing how a mob forced him to kill his wife -- she was from a different tribe -- with a garden hoe.) But what should I run across a few minutes later but this link on CatholicCaveman to a story from the Daily Mail about one of those non-gun UK murders: a 20-year-old woman or Kurdish origin who was strangled and stamped to death over the course of several hours with her family's approval as an 'honor killing'.
A gun would make this worse how?
The murderers got around 20 years a piece in prison. Call my barbaric, but I can't help thinking that the Britain of Dorothy Sayers' novels had its priorities better sorted out in dealing with these situations with hemp.
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