Originally Posted By: quickjoeysmall
'still have' doesn't begin to describe it. shootings doubled in the first 5 years after the 97 ban and have kept rising since.
According to this Gun Crime Report, there was a peak around 2003 and figures have been in decline since (fig 3). The variation seems to depend on ease of importing.

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but the british are STILL convinced bans work and every time a shooting happens in the US they scoff at the US gun laws.
I'm not going to scoff, and I don't approve of the bans we instituted after Dunblane (nor similar tabloid-led legislation over the last 10 years). However, even in 2002 we had only 0.15 gun homicides per 100,000 people, and the USA had 3.98 (fig 6). So pro-rata, the USA has 26 times as many gun-killings as the UK. For whatever reason I think it is working better here than in America. Only around 0.2% of our recorded crime involves guns. It's a different culture. In general when the public encounter the police here, neither side expects the other to be armed.
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