Percentage of legal firearms used in crime?

[Chuck]

https://www.gunowners.org/pdf/2014gunfacts.pdf

[Laurie]

Last I read, its introduction was being further postponed. But .... if it's actually happening in 01.01.2017, well we'll have to see how just well Scotland copes with this new piece of bureaucracy it has created. What is does do is (unlike the ROUK) almost guarantee that 90% plus of future reported Scottish 'firearms crimes' will be with illegally owned airguns.

[joe]

It depends at least in part on how you define / classify 'legal firearms crime'. The vast majority of criminal instances refer to minor property damage and reports of anti-social behaviour involving low-power airguns. As they are mostly legally owned, (under-age owners and the new Scottish legislation - if it ever happens - aside) that creates a vast pool of 'firearms crime'.

Also, suicide by FAC/SGC holders using their rifles or shotguns also falls into the category of 'gun crime'. (But strangely, standing on a railway track in front of an approaching train isn't reported as a 'train crime' even though Network Rail works hard to reduce its incidence.)

How can suicide be counted as gun crime since suicide was decriminalised in the 1960s ?

[Swamp Donkey]

Breaking the conditions on fac, im sure humans don't come under "any other legal quarry"

Sent from my mobile using "An application"

[Laurie]

Ask the Home Office. It's presumably a non-natural death caused by shooting, and therefore 'Bad'. The Gun Control Network and others routinely claim that if private ownership of firearms was stopped, there would be far fewer suicides ..... which shows up what we all know that they live on a different planet from most people.

[Laurie]

Breaking the conditions on fac, im sure humans don't come under "any other legal quarry"

Ha! Ha! I like that. (Very likely true too.)

[jmc67]

Thanks for the information everyone. I get the feeling once you take into account suicides, and air rifle (or pistol) use it really is an extremely tiny number then. Other than the obvious, extremely rare, but high profile incidents such as Raoul Moat, it is probably zero (or practically zero) hence the reluctance to formally disclose it.

[1066]

Chief Inspector Colin Greenwood of the West Yorkshire Constabulary said this about gun control in 1992:

“At first glance, it may seem odd or even perverse to suggest that statutory controls on the private ownership of firearms are irrelevant to the problem of armed crime; yet that is precisely what the evidence shows. Armed crime and violent crime generally are products of ethnic and social factors unrelated to the availability of a particular type of weapon.
The number of firearms required to satisfy the crime market is small, and these are supplied no matter what controls are instituted. Controls have had serious effects on legitimate users of firearms, but there is no case, either in the history of this country or in the experience of other countries in which controls can be shown to have restricted the flow of weapons to criminals, or in any way reduced crime.”
While the number of legal firearms owners in Britain has been declining due to a hostile gun control bureaucracy, crimes involving firearms increased 196% between 1981-1992.

Here's another look at the figures:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/p ... 071702.htm

It's a great pity these balanced studies are so far out of date - I think figures over the last five years or so would be an eye opener and show just how pointless the handgun was.

and although well out of date now, this is a really interesting read:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Firearms-Contr ... 0710074352

[DaveB]

I had seen this quote before, but it is always good to see it.

So refreshing to have somebody like Chief Inspector Greenwood go against the left-wing 'newspeak' version of the truth, by telling the actual truth. In most places that would not be tolerated. The Association of Chiefs of Police in the US, for example, are forever trotting out support for gun control that is at complete odds with the views of their rank and file. Once police (and military officers in peacetime) get above a certain rank, they cease to be soldiers or police - they become instead politicians in uniform, blindly parroting the 'party line'.

Good on him for telling the truth, but I am sure he will have paid for it. Bet his next performance review was less than stellar.

[DaveB]

Here's one fact the liberal anti-gun loft doesn't want bandied about: Since the US instituted mandatory registration of fully-automatic firearms with the Gun Control act of 1934, the number of people killed in the commission of a criminal act with legally held machine guns in the US since that date is: ZERO.