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London’s Murder Rate Surpasses NYC
Saw this story on The Daily Wire:
Both cities have roughly the same population; in the month of February, 15 people were murdered in London, whereas NYC recorded 14 homicide deaths, reports The London Times.
London is set to outpace NYC’s murder rate for March as well. “By late last night there had been 22 killings in the capital, according to the Metropolitan police, against 21 in the US city,” notes the Times. Eight of those murdered in March happened in a span of just seven days.
Since 2014, excluding victims of terrorism, the number of London murders has risen by a stunning 38%.
It’s stunning, that London has suddenly become such a violent city. If only there where a technology, that a citizen could carry for self-protection, that would keep a knife-wielding attacker at bay…
Old joke, You know what the medical term is for someone who attempts armed robbery with a knife in the United States?
Gunshot victim.
Published in Guns, Policing
A lot of the illegal guns in Soviet Russia were once legal military weapons. So, yes.
Edit: In addition to military weapons, weapons assigned to party members in positions of government responsibility.
This is embarrassing. We used to excel in so many areas, in which we are now falling behind.
If the stats remain this close, maybe Trump can truly MAGA by shooting a few people in Times Square. Not only will he lose no supporters, but he’ll put New York back on top, where it belongs.
The problem is bigger than just London. Since the wave of draconian gun restrictions put in place after the massacre of schoolchildren in Dunblane in 1996, and the increasing number of legal prosecutions of homeowners for trying to defend themselves, violent crime in Britain has increased significantly.
I would have thought that about liquor too, yet we passed an amendment to do that. Granted it was repealed. But it would be harder to make your own guns unlike booze. How easy is it to sneak guns across the border? Probably harder than drugs but not impossible.
Since my prior comment was done from memory based on some research I did a few years ago, I went back to look at the updated data and it is more complex than I remembered. In the immediate years after Dunblane the UK murder rate soared by 50% despite the new restrictions. However, since then it has steadily declined overall. The longer term data on violent crime is all over the place and hard for me to figure out.
This article from The Guardian in 2017 describes the more recent increase in violent crime across the UK.
There is another factor at play here – New York City’s continued decline in murders. When Bill de Blasio took office in 2014 many of us thought we would likely see an increase in crime given the additional restrictions he was placing on the police. However, we were wrong. The decline, in both murders and overall crime, that began in the early 1990s has continued.
From 2014 to 2016 murders ranged from 328 to 352 (compared to 2,245 at the peak in 1990) and last year plunged to 290. All of these figures are the lowest number of murders in NYC since figures began to be reported in 1960. Data also exists for 1928 to 1934 and the 290 of 2017 is lower than any of those years.
Right. Which of course makes sense—but it also makes people uncomfortable to admit to, so it all has to be folded into “America has a gun violence problem” instead of “America has a problem with welfare-dependency, with attendant fatherlessness, boredom, idleness and inadequate policing, all of which are particularly prevalent in, though not exclusive to, inner-city black communities.”
@drbastiat Via Mark Steyn, Diversity unto Death:
“Cultural stereotypes endure years past their sell-by date: New Yorkers still think of London as peaceable and civilized in comparison with their own city, whereas Londoners think of New York as Death Wish.”
A little further on, commenting on the March homicide rate:
“Meanwhile, The Daily Mail lets us know the names of the dead:
What a positively Dickensian roll-call. Of the three names a Londoner might have had at the time of, say, Darkest Hour, Lewis Blackman was a black man stabbed to death by six teenagers; Hannah Leonard was a middle-aged Irish lady also stabbed to death, by a couple from Kilburn; and Mark Smith apparently met his end at the hands of a woman “of no fixed abode”. At least eighty-five per cent of that grim toll would have been wholly unknown to pre-multicultural London, because neither perpetrators nor victims would have been residents of the United Kingdom.”
This is terrible news. But it’s not over. I am sure the NY can rally and whack a few more people and take the top spot again!
Slightly dated, but interesting tangential data:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/jul/04/riot-defendants-court-sentencing
What do you conclude from this, Zafar?
I had a conversation about this with my husband this evening; he asked what conclusion I drew from the statistical correlation between a large population of Muslims in a city and increases in violent crime. “Couldn’t you say the same thing about black Americans?” he asked.
To which I said “sure. Of course. And then the question is…why? There are a few possible answers. One is that black Americans, or Muslim Britons, are somehow genetically predisposed to violence. This is, however, belied by the fact that there have been periods in American history in which black Americans commited crimes at lower rates than whites, not to mention that—prior to 1965—the black crime rate was decreasing and approaching equivalence with the white crime rate. Then, after 1965, black crime rates began to rise again.
Not to mention that “Muslim” is not a race. So if a large number of Muslims in an area = higher crime rates, there have to be other explanations. One might be….welfare dependency, and attendant pathologies (fatherlessness, indolence, boredom, lack of meaning and purpose, trained victimhood). Another might be simply that old conflicts (and PTSD) immigrated along with the newcomers and did not have a chance to heal. It could also be age-related; are there more men of military age in Muslim (or American Black) communities? It could be a problem of a damaged or dysfunctional culture being concentrated into a geographic area, either because foreigners self-segregate or because welfare-dependent people are being placed together in large public housing projects rather than being dispersed.
Most of these problems (as opposed to “Islamophobia” and “Racism”) are potentially soluble or may at least be ameliorated through changes in public policy.
But there are people who actually want to solve problems. And then there are people who wish merely to position themselves in relation to the problem in whatever attitude reflects most advantageously upon themselves. The latter are, sadly, ascendant.
It could be all these things. Though I think poverty, and where you can afford to live, also comes into it. Migrants, internal and external, often can only afford to live in areas which are less desirable already. Chicken or egg? I fear what ‘feels right’ is a function of how one sees the world rather than cold facts. For all of us.
Which is why the Guardian collecting actual stats is valuable.
They honestly surprised me. My instinct was that no British Asians would have participated in those riots – but apparently some did. Huh.
Not necessarily. Three-D printing is advancing at such a rapid rate, gun theft and gun running might actually decrease once it becomes easier to make one.
People be cray-cray, dear Zafar. They do all sorts of strange, inexplicable things.
Moi aussi. As an educated, non-oppressed, lucky-ducky American woman, there is no reason whatever for me to do stupid or unkind things. And yet, I’ve done ’em; yet another reason I am disinclined to believe that Group X is intrinsically prone to bad behavior. If you plucked me out of my middle-class crib and had me grow up in a single-mother, welfare-dependent home I don’t doubt for a second that I would do whatever, statistically, everyone else in those circumstances does. And if you magically made me into an impoverished Somali boy (by 2019 that’ll be a thing) I would no doubt reflexively loathe Jews, believe women to be inferior and do my best to migrate to Sweden where the streets are paved with gold. And once in Sweden…I would not be any more capable of turning into a full-on Swede within even a lifetime let alone a couple of years than my grandmother was of turning into a full-on American.
Yes, exactly. Geographic concentration means you get a concentration of whatever those so-concentrated have plenty of.
Another paragraph for the Rico Hall of Fame.
Thanks, Kate. A few times, I’ve ruminated to my friends and family that were I born into a culturally anti-Semitic family in 1890, been wounded in the Great War, scrounged for food during the hyperinflation, and seen my families fortunes rebound with National Socialism, I could have been in the crowds shouting full throated approval of Hitler. If, owing to my stellar war record and wounds, I had been assigned to a camp and a twenty-year old Charlotte Rampling were under my command, I could have behaved very immorally.
Some people object passionately, but it’s true. I can look inside myself — a gentlemanly 53 year old dad, weekly churchgoer and American small business owner — and see it’s true.
My godson —age 4—picked up a stick on Easter, pointed it at his doting, gun-avoiding parents and said “this is a gun. BANG.” And another generation of parents learns the horrifying truth; you can no more squelch the fascination of weapons for small boys than you can stop the tides.
I taught my godson his first lesson in gun safety: keep your tiny pink finger outside the trigger guard until you’re ready to fire.
The only large country* in Europe that is safer for women than the United States is Poland.
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-10-safest-countries-in-the-world-for-women-2018-1
Apparently a crime popular that in Europe is confronting someone at their front door. However, such criminals quite often run into someone carrying a loaded gun when this tactic is tried in the United States.
Nineteen murders in London compared to 14 in New York so far this year. That’s a rate of less than 1 murder per 100,000 population per year. That’s a phenomenally low rate. By comparison the overall rate for the US is about 4 per 100,000 per year. For Baltimore it’s 35 per 100,000 per year, the same as it was in Baghdad during the Gulf war, at least until the Golden Dome Mosque was blown up.
Most years the rate in New York City is closer to the national rate, and I’m sure it will catch up to that before the year is out.
In London, carrying a firearm is illegal and very few people do it.
In New York City, carrying a firearm is illegal and few people do it.
It Baltimore, carrying a firearm is illegal and almost everyone does it in some parts of the city.
In Houston carry is legal and the murder rate is low.
The difference, I think, is in who carries and why. The difference is cultural.
Personally, I think the most important one is, “Treat every gun as if it were loaded.”
Well, you jest, but….
This is my Gerber Diesel, with a roughly 2 inch blade that locks.
It made it through British customs, presumably because they didn’t catch it. I had it in my checked luggage when I flew to Germany (I entered Britain by train).
They caught it when I attempted to board the Queen Mary II (again in checked luggage; I wasn’t carrying it). I had to mail it to myself back in the States.
I’m not sure, but maybe customs would not have allowed it either.
I have read that there are people in Britain who advocate for restrictions on knives, including butcher knives. I have read something similar with U.S. emergency room doctors as well.
The ER doctors at my hospital probably want paring knives and those horrible mandolin-slicers banned as well, mostly because I keep showing up with bits of my digits missing…
And it will be even worse for Jews. Europe has had a centuries-to-millennia-old history of tolerating and rationalizing anti-Semitism. Importing more people who share this view will not bode well for Jewish communities anywhere in Europe. It may also turn out that European governments will tolerate violence against Jews as a way of diverting the violence away from the general population or from their governments. It has been done before.
On the bright side, at least nowadays European Jews have other places to go. Still, I’m thoroughly depressed. Time to reread a Haggadah.
Just remember, you can find them in the last place you look.
No, I dont think race is a factor in these crimes – other than their neighborhoods being in close proximity to open air drug markets. Its a the affluent drug users in the suburbs who are slinking into these areas to get their fix that are providing the cash flow that finances these dis-organized crime groups. (If they where well organized – they’d be less violent)
Shut down these open air drug markets – disperse the narcotics trades to the suburbs – where it will be forced to be discrete.
And by the way, if you are an elderly homeowner in Britain and robbers break into your house in the middle of the night just let them do their work unobstructed or you could end up under arrest for suspicion of murder.
I am baffled when I see stories like this. Why does the UK value the lives of its criminals more than the rest of its citizenry? What kind of property rights do you have if you are not allowed to defend yourself? What is the justification?
I don’t think they would consciously state it this way, but a citizen who is capable of defending himself against criminals might also think he is capable of defending himself against the government. That is bad. And in general, modern governments want to have a monopoly on violence.
Sadiq Khan runs the police force not Theresa May.
Sadiq Khan runs the metropolitan police
On one cruise, my wife had to check her Swiss army knife. No doubt a woman in her 60s could single-handedly hijack a cruise ship with a 1 1/2″ blade . . .
She got it back when we returned.