Heads Up ~ Balbus

[Fyrenza]

i was looking around for Weird, Bizarre Political News for my forum, and came across this article:

http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/s/1102685_diners_eat_as_man_stabbed

And Americans are too inured to crime... :rolleyes:

Anyway, that got me to thinking, and i dug this stuff up:

UK population = 60,943,912 (July 2008 est.)

2007 - 2008 Rate of Violent Crime = 3,200.0/100,000

"The British Crime Survey suggests that people's risk of being a victim of any crime currently stands at 22%. The risk for violent crime is 3.2%"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7511807.stm

USA population = 301,621,157

Violent Crime = 1,408,337

2007 Rate of Violent Crime = 466.9/100,000

http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm

{Put THAT in your pipe and smoke it! :p }

Anyway, it occurs to me that now, we can ask Balbus all of the same questions he keeps asking us ~ even quoting WHOLE POSTS from him, and substituting UK for US!

:reddevil: This ought to be interesting!

Oh, yeah! And the first one to act like they understand his answers,

http://i235.photobucket.com/albums/ee57/Fyrenza/UltimateFAIL.jpg

[hippiehillbilly]

we were just discussing your thread.. i would not be surprised if he deletes it..

i as you know have brought this up time and time again (minus those particular statistics,however i did throw others up ),in fact three times in the latest gun thread in reference to the "discussion of societal breakdown" that he kept harping on and he ignored it twice and babbled on without answering it once..

i highly doubt he will reply in any meaningful manner but if he does it should indeed be interesting..

[mamaKCita]

i don't really see the point, outside of pure entertainment, for discussing anything in that forum. i'll just read.

[mamaKCita]

that UK population number doesn't appear to be correct.

[Fyrenza]

Oh, HHB, i'm so sorry ~

i haven't been going into the Politics forum very much, lately,

and, honestly, when you see page after page of Balbus replying to peeps, NOT answering their questions, but instead, continuing to ask his same question, with a little different wording each time, and it gets truly frustrating.

i'm not really doing these posts to be mean to him ~ well, maybe a little :reddevil: ~ but maybe with the tables turned, he'll see how hard it is to try to explain the mores of your society to someone from a completely different culture.

Anyway, i believe i'm done posting in the Politics Forum ~ i'll use your's, where i don't have to worry about threads being moved all around, disappearing posts, the constant CT accusations, etc.

[Fyrenza]

that UK population number doesn't appear to be correct.

It's the latest year that they have stats for ~ 2005.

i think...

brb

Back ~ you were right, Mama! i got the 2007 stats, which seem to be the latest.

Thanx for the "critique!" :rofl:

[Jaitaiyai]

that UK population number doesn't appear to be correct.hahaha...

To OP: Stick that in your pipe and smoke it? :tongue:

Also, 2005 isn't the latest stats. I just googled uk population and found population estimates for mid 2007 and mid 2008.

[hippiehillbilly]

wow everyones quibbling over a whole million people..

61,113,205 (July 2009 est.) https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/print/uk.html

that really does nothing significant towards the data.. i mean they still have what,, around 7 times the violent crime per capita as the U.S.?? or over 4 times according to the second figure..

lol

[Fyrenza]

hahaha...

To OP: Stick that in your pipe and smoke it? :tongue:

Also, 2005 isn't the latest stats. I just googled uk population and found population estimates for mid 2007 and mid 2008.

Hey, Jai ~ i presume you pronounce that like "high?"

:rofl:

i use a bong about 90% of the time!!! LMAO!!!

But yeah ~ it served me right, being so cocky about it, like i was... :o

Anyway, it's up-to-date, now, i just need to go change the other post.

:rofl:

[Jaitaiyai]

Hey, Jai ~ i presume you pronounce that like "high?"


i use a bong about 90% of the time!!! LMAO!!!

But yeah ~ it served me right, being so cocky about it, like i was...

Anyway, it's up-to-date, now, i just need to go change the other post.

haha.. :D

Pronounce Jai like High? Huh?
No sirree ma'am - Jai should rhyme with Hey. :)
The whole username, however, is pronounced differently and that was my bad with spelling it in english. :D

And yeah, I'm not really bothered by the whole violent crime thing. :)

[mamaKCita]

wow everyones quibbling over a whole million people..

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/print/uk.html

that really does nothing significant towards the data.. i mean they still have what,, around 7 times the violent crime per capita as the U.S.?? or over 4 times according to the second figure..

lol

no, she was missing a number.

[mamaKCita]

haha.. :D

Pronounce Jai like High? Huh?
No sirree ma'am - Jai should rhyme with Hey. :)
The whole username, however, is pronounced differently and that was my bad with spelling it in english. :D

And yeah, I'm not really bothered by the whole violent crime thing. :)

well, jai, the whole thing arose outta balbus' dislike and fear of guns and how awful they are and how violent america is and how we're all buying up guns to protect ourselves because clearly we walk around in a state of constant terror and blah blah blah. and in the meantime we don't care about the societal breakdowns leading to violent crime. entirely too stereotypical and assumptive for my taste. i stated again and again, that i think gun ownership is a topic seperate entirely from the conditions leading to poverty and hopelessness. he believes whole heartedly that gun control will fix those problems. i think he's putting the cart before the horse, he thinks i'm a mindless blight on society.

[earthmother]

....he thinks all of us are.....

[Jaitaiyai]

well, jai, the whole thing arose outta balbus' dislike and fear of guns and how awful they are and how violent america is and how we're all buying up guns to protect ourselves because clearly we walk around in a state of constant terror and blah blah blah. and in the meantime we don't care about the societal breakdowns leading to violent crime. entirely too stereotypical and assumptive for my taste. i stated again and again, that i think gun ownership is a topic seperate entirely from the conditions leading to poverty and hopelessness. he believes whole heartedly that gun control will fix those problems. i think he's putting the cart before the horse, he thinks i'm a mindless blight on society.Oh cool, I agree with you there. I don't like guns, people say Britain's a sissy country for it but I don't care. It makes me feel safer. I think Lithium pretty much hit it on the head in the UK forums. Someone was arguing that when Britain had more weapons, it had a lower crime rate.

There are two things wrong with this argument. Firstly, we also used to wear a lot of top hats in this country, and top hat wearing has decreased. Is this a factor in crime rate? No, because correlation does not equal causation.

Second, you need to demonstrate there is such a correlation in the first place. Figures on violent crime going back more than a few decades are hard to come by, but we do have a record of the murder rate over the past century at least (link (http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111.pdf)). In 1900 we were at 9 per million, there was a roughly continual drop until the 1960s to 6 per million, the 1900 rate was reached again in the 1970s, and we're currently at about 14 per million. In other words it has fluctuated a few fractions of a percentage point both up and down over the past more than a hundred years.

These figures show that weapon ownership has no direct correlation to murder rate, since guns had largely been restricted and licensed in this country by about 1920, and there's no reason to think the availability of other weapons has changed very much, I think the knife laws are quite recent, maybe 20 years, during which time violent crime has both risen and fallen.

It is trivially absurd to suggest that crime rates are linked simply to the availability of weaponry. Fluctuations may be linked to a variety of a socioeconomic factors, population pressures, wealth, housing, jobs, gangs, religions, ethnic or cultural differences, social disaffection, plus an underlying level of violent crime which is innate to humans and which will never go away. Ensuring those who commit and will always commit violent crimes don't have access to the most effective way of injuring or killing people is actually rather a good idea.

Rates of violent crime have undoubtedly been much higher than they are today, we have peaks and troughs but generally we are exceptionally safe, certainly when compared to centuries past, times when there was no police force at all and when the country, particularly urban areas, were often lawless. You were far more likely to be a victim of violence, robbery, rape or other criminal activities at almost any other point in history than in the UK today. Yobbery of today is incredibly unlikely to result in you getting injured, in general I'd guess that the incidence of violent crime is on a more or less continual downward trend on a century or more-than-century scale.

As for personal freedom, yes the restriction of weapon ownership is a restriction of your personal freedom, in much the same way the ban on bludgeoning someone to death with a stick is a restriction of your personal freedom. We trade in certain freedoms for the good of wider society, and we hand over authority for the use of violence to accountable bodies like the police. Making offensive weapons less widely available will have an impact of the kinds of violent crimes committed, the loss of the freedom to walk around in a very safe country armed with automatic weapons is a trivial one compared to the benefit in safety we all receive as a result.

Weapon ownership probably has very little to do with the incidence of violent crime, but it does have an impact on the severity of that crime when it happens, it has been shown that gun-related crimes have a far higher mortality and serious injury rate than knife-related crime or crime involving any other weapon. This is how restricting gun ownership particularly impacts on your personal safety, we can be fairly sure in this country that when you're confronted by a criminal he probably won't have a gun and you're therefore quite a lot less likely to die or be seriously injured.

Few weapons are actually "banned" anyway, they are restricted and licensed so that those who need to use them (farmers, sportsmen, hunters etc) can own them if they demonstrate a need and demonstrate that they will be kept securely.


I hope he doesn't mind me copying this.

[mamaKCita]

lithium's a smart guy.