How many times has someone suggested to you that if we had gun control laws like those in England, we wouldn't have "gun crime."
Now, let's acknowledge first that our non-gun homicide rate is higher than the UK's total homicide rate. That suggests that there's something else going on here, something that we may not fully understand, that impacts the homicide rates in the two nations.
Especially when bad guys in the UK seem to get guns semi-regularly.
In fact, we have a case where the bad guys didn't just have a gun, but a number of firearms stashed away to help them with their drug empire.
Police found a cache of guns hidden under the floorboard at a safe house in Bulwell days after a Nottingham gunman had used one of them to shoot a man four times. A sawn-off shotgun, revolver, pistol, a silencer and ammunition had all been hidden there by Vincent Brown after he fired into the legs and arm of the victim in a seemingly almost motiveless shooting.
Moments earlier, he had been viciously attacked by co-defendant Ti Carr having been lured to the flat by a third criminal called Zeke Dalziel. Then, when the three of them had been arrested and were in prison, they enlisted the help of others on the outside to either threaten or pay the shooting victim to change the statement he had given to the police.
Jailing four of the seven defendants involved in the shooting for a combined total of more than 37 years, Judge Mark Watson said: “Vincent Brown, you used the Mersey Street address to grow cannabis and to store firearms and ammunition. You have demonstrated not only are you prepared to access weapons but prepared to use them.
...
Mr Hallissey said following the shooting Carr and Brown left and went to the safe house where co-defendant Brett Goodman lived, in Mersey Street, Bulwell, where the pistol was wrapped in a towel and placed under a floorboard along with “a cache of weapons” which were later discovered by the police. He said police went to arrest Brown at his partner’s address in St Anns and when he saw them he made off in his van and led officers on a high-speed chase during which he drove at 70mph in a 30mph limit, jumped red lights and, after coming to stop in his VW van, reversed into a police officer who had got out of his car to try and arrest him.
Now, England is a very gun-controlled country. While some people can and do get firearms, they're not common by any stretch of the imagination.
What's more, the UK is an island. While you've got the Chunnel coming into the country from France, most entry points are tightly controlled. Smuggling guns in via plane or boat shouldn't be that easy.
What's more, there are extensive gun control laws throughout Europe, so while guns might flow in through the Chunnel, they're not coming from some pro-gun paradise in the EU. While cities like Chicago love to blame Indiana for their gun issues, England has no such luxury.
The thing people need to understand is that criminals will always find a way to get guns. In Europe, they have a tendency to convert replica firearms into functional ones, but they'd find another way if they had to. If there's a market for firearms, someone is going to provide for that market no matter what the laws are.
UK criminals may be rarer than they are here in the US, but they still get firearms just as easily as ours do. The laws there aren't the reason they have less crime and it's beyond time to stop pretending they are.
