It is coming up to the 30th anniversary of the Dunblane massacre. It’s a difficult read that article, but I wonder if the reason we got legislation so fast was because the local MP and the minister for Scotland both had close connections to the area and the school, and they had both had prior contact with the perpetrator. Perhaps most fundamentally, they went into the gym and saw the children’s bodies before the police had moved them.
Let us also be honest, the UK did not have a US-style gun culture before that. Yes, you could own a gun, but it was not seen as a right. It was just that we had not made it illegal, and if I recall correctly, you still needed a gun license to have one even then. In other words, before the Dunblane Massacre, we were not in the same legal situation as the US, which made outlawing handguns easier after it. Also, while the gun lobby existed, it was nothing like what it is in the US.
What happened is the government did the minimum they felt they could get away with. This tells you something of the outrage and the strength of the campaign.
Let us also be honest, the UK did not have a US-style gun culture before that. Yes, you could own a gun, but it was not seen as a right. It was just that we had not made it illegal, and if I recall correctly, you still needed a gun license to have one even then. In other words, before the Dunblane Massacre, we were not in the same legal situation as the US, which made outlawing handguns easier after it. Also, while the gun lobby existed, it was nothing like what it is in the US.
Before Dunblane, we had Hungerford. The result of the shooting at Hungerford was that center-fire semi-automatic rifles were banned, as well as a general tightening of the rules surrounding firearms ownership.
I didn’t realise, until some very recent googling, that it is still legal for civilians to carry guns (including handguns) in Northern Ireland - and self-defence is an accepted reason for doing so.
In the 1970s, owning and carrying a gun was governed by the 1968 Firearms Act. This is nowhere near the "rights" situation of the US today. This is before Hungerford. Apparently, we started tightening up on Gun ownership and other behaviour around firearms in the 1920s. So, seventy years had passed between when we were last "in line"* with the US stance, and when Dunblane triggered the response, it did.
*"in line" in scare quotes because I do not culturally understand our discourse ever saw it as a right, just something that people did or did not do according to circumstance. It was, in other words, a matter of custom, not law, but not a free-for-all either.
It's all tied up with medieval attitudes to hunting. Peasants were expected to practice archery regularly, in preparation for being drafted whenever the King summoned your lord to fight. But you weren't allowed to use these skills to hunt game. That was the prerogative of the nobility. You weren't even allowed to trap rabbits unless you had permission from the landowner, and guess who was in charge of the court judging you if you got caught? Any bits of land not owned by the nobility (or the Church) would have been royal forests, and you really didn't want to get caught hunting there.
So no, 'hunting to put food on the table' is very much not part of popular British culture. It's been an elite pursuit for centuries, and after the professionalisation of the armed forces most ordinary people would only have learned how to fire a gun if they joined the army.
In the 1970s, owning and carrying a gun was governed by the 1968 Firearms Act. This is nowhere near the "rights" situation of the US today. This is before Hungerford. Apparently, we started tightening up on Gun ownership and other behaviour around firearms in the 1920s. So, seventy years had passed between when we were last "in line"* with the US stance, and when Dunblane triggered the response, it did.
*"in line" in scare quotes because I do not culturally understand our discourse ever saw it as a right, just something that people did or did not do according to circumstance. It was, in other words, a matter of custom, not law, but not a free-for-all either.
The tightening up on gun ownership in the 1920s was a consequence of the Great War, prior to that there weren't very many guns in civil ownership (as @Jane R noted, there was very little need for people to own a gun, and they were quite expensive) but the end of the war saw lots of former soldiers returning to Britain with training to use guns, and quite a few of them with souvenirs. There was a real concern that working men, trained as soldiers with access to guns, could attempt to emulate the revolution in Russia. Gun control, taking a lot of those souvenirs out of circulation was intended to prevent armed revolution.
@Alan Cresswell What you are saying is that while the US saw guns in the hands of the populace as the best defence against the communists, the UK believed it opened the way for Communist armed revolution!
Up to the time of our Civil War/War between the gun ownership was not widespread in early America. Guns were expensive and often unreliable. Even with our militia laws states would keep public armories because private ownership was insufficient. The Civil War changed that. Mass production of firearms caused gun ownership to accelerate after 1865.
In the 1970s, owning and carrying a gun was governed by the 1968 Firearms Act. This is nowhere near the "rights" situation of the US today. This is before Hungerford. Apparently, we started tightening up on Gun ownership and other behaviour around firearms in the 1920s. So, seventy years had passed between when we were last "in line"* with the US stance, and when Dunblane triggered the response, it did.
*"in line" in scare quotes because I do not culturally understand our discourse ever saw it as a right, just something that people did or did not do according to circumstance. It was, in other words, a matter of custom, not law, but not a free-for-all either.
The tightening up on gun ownership in the 1920s was a consequence of the Great War, prior to that there weren't very many guns in civil ownership (as @Jane R noted, there was very little need for people to own a gun, and they were quite expensive) but the end of the war saw lots of former soldiers returning to Britain with training to use guns, and quite a few of them with souvenirs. There was a real concern that working men, trained as soldiers with access to guns, could attempt to emulate the revolution in Russia. Gun control, taking a lot of those souvenirs out of circulation was intended to prevent armed revolution.
I'm sure a lot of Agatha Christies are based on the premise that someone came back from the War with a gun which they just put away in a drawer and forgot about until it became a murder weapon.
Indeed @HelenEva . And going further back, in the Sherlock Holmes stories Dr Watson (as an army medic who had seen service in the Afghan war) has his service revolver and Holmes often asks him to bring it along to any planned confrontation with the villain. It's never presented as illicit, merely that as an ex-army man he has a gun whereas Holmes doesn't, and it's a useful thing to have in the situations that they find themselves in.
.. though as far as I remember, Watson never actually fires his gun. Its presence merely seems to serve as an intensifier in the narrative: showing that this villain-of-the-week is seen as being a particularly nasty piece of work.
I haven’t looked recently but I think the global stats point to this. The percentage number by population of homicides by gun is closely related to the percentage number by population of gun possession.
It’s a kind of exposure to risk finding and, if the stats still bear it out, hardly surprising.
I would caution correlation does not necessarily mean causation. The 2023 Journal of Urban Health study found only a weak link between gun ownership and firearm homicide rates across U.S. states. After adjusting for overall crime levels, the correlation nearly disappeared, suggesting gun prevalence alone does not strongly predict firearm homicide rates.
How often are guns used in crime. In other words what proportion of the overall crime statistics involves crimes where guns are often or routinely used e.g. burglary. I would be interested only in removing the correlation with un-gun related crime. Otherwise the correlation does not imply causation plays in the negative form against your argument.
Let me take this to pieces. The correlation does not imply causation, let us turn not to gun ownership and gun homicide but gun ownership and overall crime level. These are almost certainly related for the findings you are claiming but why?
coincidence?
causational?
third element?
If crime related to guns is a significant portion of the overall crime statistics, then we can hypothesise that the overall crime rate = (crime rate not related to guns) + (crime rate related to guns). If the variation is largely due to the later then we might well expect that adjusting for the overall crime rate would get rid of any effect of gun ownership. Now it might well be that in states with higher gun ownership, guns are more likely to be carried on crimes. Then there is a higher rate of these crimes turning into gun homicides.
The part of the U.S. gun debate that almost never gets airtime is the simplest: most gun deaths aren’t murders — they’re suicides. Quiet, invisible, and rising. Firearm suicides are now at record highs, even as homicides fall. And because guns are so lethal, a moment of crisis becomes a permanent outcome in a way pills or cuts usually don’t.
The patterns are depressingly predictable: rural states with high gun ownership have the highest suicide rates; older white men dominate the numbers; and gun suicide among Black and Hispanic youth is climbing fast. Wyoming’s rate is ten times Massachusetts’. Same country, same Constitution, wildly different results.
So when people insist guns are about “freedom,” it’s worth remembering that for tens of thousands of Americans every year, the gun in the house isn’t protecting them. It’s the thing that kills them.
I am sorry, I realized my edit time was closing fast before I could give a full response @Barnabas62
U.S. gun homicide rates are high mostly because the U.S. has far more guns than any other wealthy nation. The underlying levels of assault, robbery, or conflict aren’t unusually high — what’s different is the lethality. When guns are everywhere, ordinary disputes, domestic violence, and street conflicts turn fatal. Add economic inequality, weak gun regulations, and a steady flow of weapons into high‑risk neighborhoods, and the result is a far higher death rate than peer countries.
Correlation isn’t causation, and that matters because simply pointing to two numbers that move together doesn’t tell us why they move together. If we want to claim causation, we need mechanisms, controls, and alternative explanations ruled out. Otherwise we’re just assuming the conclusion.
There are many factors that have to be examined before we can definitely say guns are the cause of homicides. Poverty, segregation, policing, social networks, illegal markets, and mental health access. Correlation doesn’t isolate which factor is doing the causal work. Without that, we can’t say guns cause the rate — only that they’re part of a complex picture.
I appreciate the causation argument is complex. I haven’t completed my look at the link you’ve provided. But I don’t think it looks at other countries as a control group. The country by country comparison certainly opens up causation questions, since both in terms of percentage ownership and gun control, the US is more relaxed than any other G7 country. I do appeciate the role of the 2nd amendment (and the NRA) in this.
One thing to consider in statistics of declining gun homicides is what is happening to the number of non-fatal shootings. It might be that the decline in fatalities reflects better medical care rather than reduced gun violence.
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What happened is the government did the minimum they felt they could get away with. This tells you something of the outrage and the strength of the campaign.
Before Dunblane, we had Hungerford. The result of the shooting at Hungerford was that center-fire semi-automatic rifles were banned, as well as a general tightening of the rules surrounding firearms ownership.
*"in line" in scare quotes because I do not culturally understand our discourse ever saw it as a right, just something that people did or did not do according to circumstance. It was, in other words, a matter of custom, not law, but not a free-for-all either.
So no, 'hunting to put food on the table' is very much not part of popular British culture. It's been an elite pursuit for centuries, and after the professionalisation of the armed forces most ordinary people would only have learned how to fire a gun if they joined the army.
Talk about a cultural difference
I'm sure a lot of Agatha Christies are based on the premise that someone came back from the War with a gun which they just put away in a drawer and forgot about until it became a murder weapon.
It’s a kind of exposure to risk finding and, if the stats still bear it out, hardly surprising.
If crime related to guns is a significant portion of the overall crime statistics, then we can hypothesise that the overall crime rate = (crime rate not related to guns) + (crime rate related to guns). If the variation is largely due to the later then we might well expect that adjusting for the overall crime rate would get rid of any effect of gun ownership. Now it might well be that in states with higher gun ownership, guns are more likely to be carried on crimes. Then there is a higher rate of these crimes turning into gun homicides.
Fascinating study. Many thanks. It’s worth a decent look before response and I’ll give it that.
I think it does provoke the question. Why are rates so much higher in the US?
The patterns are depressingly predictable: rural states with high gun ownership have the highest suicide rates; older white men dominate the numbers; and gun suicide among Black and Hispanic youth is climbing fast. Wyoming’s rate is ten times Massachusetts’. Same country, same Constitution, wildly different results.
So when people insist guns are about “freedom,” it’s worth remembering that for tens of thousands of Americans every year, the gun in the house isn’t protecting them. It’s the thing that kills them.
For more information: https://publichealth.jhu.edu/center-for-gun-violence-solutions/data/annual-gun-violence-data?utm
BTW, Barnabas, I note with the graph you linked to the homicide rate by guns in the US is declining rather significantly.
U.S. gun homicide rates are high mostly because the U.S. has far more guns than any other wealthy nation. The underlying levels of assault, robbery, or conflict aren’t unusually high — what’s different is the lethality. When guns are everywhere, ordinary disputes, domestic violence, and street conflicts turn fatal. Add economic inequality, weak gun regulations, and a steady flow of weapons into high‑risk neighborhoods, and the result is a far higher death rate than peer countries.
Correlation isn’t causation, and that matters because simply pointing to two numbers that move together doesn’t tell us why they move together. If we want to claim causation, we need mechanisms, controls, and alternative explanations ruled out. Otherwise we’re just assuming the conclusion.
There are many factors that have to be examined before we can definitely say guns are the cause of homicides. Poverty, segregation, policing, social networks, illegal markets, and mental health access. Correlation doesn’t isolate which factor is doing the causal work. Without that, we can’t say guns cause the rate — only that they’re part of a complex picture.
I appreciate the causation argument is complex. I haven’t completed my look at the link you’ve provided. But I don’t think it looks at other countries as a control group. The country by country comparison certainly opens up causation questions, since both in terms of percentage ownership and gun control, the US is more relaxed than any other G7 country. I do appeciate the role of the 2nd amendment (and the NRA) in this.
But I’ll keep on looking at the study you linked.