Letters

From the February 2003 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

Jim Whitehead
Via e-mail

First, it is true that the nonviolent crime rate in England is higher than it is in the United States. But the violent crime rate in England is much lower than it is in the U.S. For the gun control hypothesis to be correct we must assume that guns deter certain types of crimes but not others. Since the "free gun" advocates believe that guns are an important part of self-defense it should follow that well-armed citizens are well-protected citizens. The English statistics on violent crimes do not bear this out. Crimes against persons, murder, and rape are much less frequent than in the U.S.

Second, if it is the "gun culture" that explains the disparity in crime, we should expect the relationship between the two countries' relative levels of crime to be basically consistent. Yet this is not the case. Around 1981 the levels of nonviolent crime in the U.S. and England were about the same. Then the levels of nonviolent crime in the U.S. started to rapidly decrease, while the levels remained the same or increased slightly in England.

It so happens that these shifts reflect the relative changes in incarceration rates in the U.S. for nonviolent crimes. In other words, we started throwing our criminals in jail and the British did not.

Mark Liveringhouse
Minneapolis, MN

I have always known the Brits had some eccentrics, but are they all mindless as a hammer?

I am 68-year-old fifth-generation Texan. At the risk of confirming our "Wild West" reputation, I will tell you of a widely known saying that I first heard at an early age on the subject of then illegally carrying a pistol on your person or in your car: "Better to be convicted by 12 than carried by six." This attitude, coupled with the de facto law in Texas that it is legal to shoot anyone who even attempts to forcibly enter your home, especially at night, may have something to do with the fact that nighttime residential burglaries are almost unheard of here. I don't know the crime statistics, but I can remember hearing of only one such in my whole life, and the victim was a decrepit 80-year-old woman who lived alone.

Don Beeth
Friendswood, TX

Thanks for the gripping article --more than enough impetus to read Joyce Malcolm's book.

I was a criminal investigator for the U.S. Air Force in England from 1978 to '84 and developed a number of friends within the various constabularies I dealt with. I was frequently surprised at the paternalism demonstrated by policemen at all levels, constables to chief superintendents. Many had the attitude that the common Englishman with a firearm was someone to mistrust and the police had all the right answers --especially when it came to protecting the citizenry. I put up with all the good-natured (and some not so good-natured) jibes about "the Wild West" and the American "gun nut" culture so popular at that time in the liberal British press.

All of this was occurring at the same time as the Brixton riots and other serious social problems that were more and more often leading to street violence. Those same constables were privately asking me for U.S.-style police night sticks (much bigger than the Bobby's truncheon), small police- issue pepper sprays, and other nonlethal police equipment that even then was illegal in England.

I even frequently arranged for British police officers to receive small arms training available on our military bases at the time.

Almost 20 years later those same, and for the most part retired, officers have a vastly different opinion about the value of an armed citizenry than they expressed a generation ago. I would also suspect there are a lot of people in Britain who are equally fed up with the state's failure to defend them. v

Jim Hogue
Plano, TX

Joyce Malcolm replies: Tim Lambert, Jim Whitehead, and Mark Liveringhouse raise various questions about my statistics, and all believe strict gun controls produce lower levels of violent crime. Lambert insists any decrease in violent crime in England is attributable to strict gun control. To Whitehead, giving people the right to be armed is the road not only to crime but to anarchy. Liveringhouse, doubting all statistics, maintains nonviolent crime may be worse in England, but the violent crime rate is "much lower than it is in the United States." If guns deterred violence, he argues, the reverse would be true.v