Statistics

Barbara Oakley in today's New York Times, in the context of Virginia Tech --

Consider that Britain’s national experiment with gun-free living is proving to be a disaster, with violent and gun crime rates soaring.

That's a claim that really needs some numbers. Here is the UK Home Office's most recent annual crime statistics publication. It covers up to mid-2006 and earlier years. See Table 2.04. England and Wales had 765 homicides in the 2005/06 year. This was down from the earlier part of the decade. The total of all serious offences had increased sharply and then fallen over a similar period. The main ban on guns was in 1996. So the timing is not right.

Comparable US statistics are not that easy to come by. But here's the FBI report on crime in major cities which covers the first half of 2006. They don't make the addition that easy, but the numbers show about 4,200 murders for that half year, covering cities with a population of about 77 million people. So you don't need to get detailed data on rates to see the difference. Hardly the ingredients of an unfolding British "disaster" on gun crime.

UPDATE: Through the miracle of Google, Prof. Oakley has been in touch to cite her source: this article from Reason magazine. Interestingly, it's from 2002, which clearly corresponds to a particularly bad period in the crime statistics noted above. Here's news of the latest crime figures.