A Usenet persona calling itself BCITORGB wrote:

Weiser says:
=================
I would not choose to be one of the twenty five percent of Brits who
are
victimized and traumatized by crime every year....
================

I concur, neither would I.

Then buy a gun, get a concealed carry permit and provide for your own (and
coincidentally your neighbor's) protection. That's what I do. That's what
hundreds of thousands of Americans do, to very beneficial effect.


But, as you well know, crime statistics are not easily compared. What
may be recorded as a "crime" in Britain, may be recorded as a nuisance
in Canada or the USA.

Not when it comes to violent crime in particular, and most property crimes
as well. Crime statistics are quite easily compared and you are grasping at
straws in a vain attempt to bolster your failed argument.

I don't know, and neither do you.

Wrong. I do, in fact, know.

If we're to
talk about "violent crimes" and incidents of "violent crime", then we
need to ensure that we're talking about the same thing in each country.

We are. Go examine how the FBI and Interpol and other government agencies
classify crimes and you will find that they long ago came to agreement about
how to define such crimes in ways that permit direct comparisons between
countries. This is not a new science, they've been doing it for decades.
While the specific statutes and names of some of the crimes change, the
definitions are quite homogenous, precisely to permit such direct
comparisons and exchange of information.

To date, everything that I've read indicates that people much more
knowledgeable and you or I are grappling with these comparisons.

No they're not. An assault upon a person is the same in GB or Canada as it
is here. It consists of the unlawful use of force upon another person. The
sub-sets of unarmed and armed, and the sub-sub sets describing the
particular weapons used, in particular firearms, are the same in the US, GB,
Canada and Australia insofar as international comparisons of violent crime
rates and victimization. While the classification for the purposes of
criminal prosecution and sentencing may be radically different, even within
states in the US, the basic definitions of what constitutes are, with a very
few exceptions, functionally identical in all jurisdictions.

The international police community wasn't born yesterday.

--
Regards,
Scott Weiser

"I love the Internet, I no longer have to depend on
friends, family and co-workers, I can annoy people WORLDWIDE!" TM

© 2005 Scott Weiser