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Is the incidence of home invasions higher in UK or US?

Started Jan 4, 2013 | Discussions thread
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In reply to DUSTY LENS, Jan 10, 2013

Get real people the life you save might be your own , or maybe your wife's . Maybe you need to vote for the right to bare arms party next time . but then you could be just a little bit dead by the time this happens .

If you can't see that the umbrella example was facetious, well... that was how I took it.

If the implication of your statement was true (that lack of access to effective weaponry had left UK householders subject to criminals who were accordingly MORE likely to rob, kill, rape people in their homes), then our statistics on aggravated burglary etc should be through the roof (for lack of the USA-based possibility that the responsible householder may be at home, awake, alert, sober, not taken by surprise, trained and practised, flat lucky enough to be able to prevail AND had the weapon with which to do so, AND had no ability to otherwise do so).

In fact, burglary rates are similar in the USA and UK (not closely comparable because the UK is much more urbanised, and in any case high and low-income residents are more closely intermixed here).

When people talk about "home invasion" we in the UK should (if this implication was true) be MORE aware of it as a constant threat, and it should go on all the time.

We do have a few such incidents, they are widely reported and we are deeply shocked by them. They form part of our perception of crime and risk just as the same class of incident does in the USA. They have no effect AFAICT on our attitude to guns in particular, firstly because our cultural attitude to guns is different, also because when these incidents happen they are just as likely to occur at the prybar level (without minimising how horrendous that kind of violence is TOO) rather than with firearms. That is partly as a result of the low physical prevalence of guns here and partly as an outcome of our longterm policing and justice toward guns.

However the overall perception of crime is not based on just one, particularly dramatic but rare hazard. The dominant awareness of crime in the UK, is based on the kind of crime most likely to be experienced, which is (as I understand it) misdemeanour rather than felony level in US terms. Certainly lethal-threat violence in the home by an intruder is very low on our radar, and the figures show that this in fact reflects the reality. I was not even certain what the term "home invasion" meant to people, when I first saw this thread. I didn't jump straight to the conclusion that this was about extreme scenarios only.

Perhaps this is hard to believe: but while incidents such as Sandy Hook do bring gun control into news prominence, these are quite low on the list of reasons why (speaking as an outsider, though also concerned for near relatives who are US citizens) it seems to me that there is something SPECIFIC about gun related death/injury vs other causes of the same. A gun IMO facilitates and escalates stuff, that other means do not, precisely because of what the gun is designed to efficiently do.

Look at accidental gun mortality; suicide; police firearms use. Domestic incidents: in the USA, a woman has several times more likelihood of being killed in the home by an intimate partner, when that partner owns a firearm - demographics may explain part of that, but surely not all. Those kinds of issue are IMO more pressing to discuss and try to resolve in a unified way as a nation; than, for example, mass shootings. Can everyone be brought to agree whether all of this is a necessarily accepted consequence of certain interpretations of certain rights; or not.

I truly think that different groups within the USA are talking past each other here, about different things, rather than disputing with each other about the same things. How will they jointly get anything done?

Best to never let the anti gun fanatics get in power , it could be a very hard and long way back to self defense once you have lost it . . ever think of going for the old rubber band slingshot ?

It seems that some people are wondering aloud if the administration should look into introducing specific gun control legislation, democratically, subject to Supreme Court ruling. Perhaps some of them don't think people ought to have guns at all - or only for certain purposes - but that is all a matter of opinion; and laws and constitutions are not about opinion. They are about deciding what to do.

Some other people are talking in an alarmed way about insurrection, conspiracies, doomsday scenarios and such. I have no skin in this game, but it seems to me to be the calm vs the wild here. The pro-gun lobby tries to foster the notion of frothing liberal hysteria but I am just not seeing it; it is just that for some people certain things are held so sacred, that any questioning of them whatsoever gets a hair-trigger reaction.

( I will resist - no I won't - the easy similarity of "sacred" vs "scared" (grin)... also I don't know quite what a bare arms party is, but have never been to one AFAIK - and most of my T-shirts have short sleeves btw)

Good luck, Dusty

ditto - RP

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