Anti-gun activists in the United States like to point to the strict gun control in the United Kingdom as a success story, but doing so has always required cherry-picking and otherwise fiddling with the actual crime statistics. Now a new batch of figures provides even clearer evidence that British gun control is far from transforming the island nation into a utopia.
The Guardian reports that a new release from the Office of National Statistics indicates a 10 percent increase in crime reported to police over the last year across England and Wales. There was also an 18 percent increase in violent crime, a 23 percent jump in gun-related crime and a 26 percent spike in homicides.
The ONS said that the crime surge corresponded to greater circulation of the very handguns that are illegal in England and Wales. It’s almost like the career criminals—unlike the defenseless law-abiding citizens—don’t much care about what the law says!
