Reply #43: Not really, and here's why

[slackmaster]

The British homicide rate has always been lower than the US homicide rate.

In 1920 when Britain passed its first gun control legislation, the homicide rate (murder, manslaughter, plus infanticide) for England and Wales was 8.3 per million. It went down slightly over several decades, reaching 6.2 in 1960, but by 1975 it was already back up to 10.3. My source gives a rate of 14.1 per million for 1997.

http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99...

In 1920 the US homicide rate was 6.8 per 100,000. US gun control began in 1934 with the National Firearms Act; it didn't get really serious until 1968 with the Gun Control Act.

The US homicide rate bottomed out in the late 1950s and early '60s at around 4.5, then back up to 9.9 in 1975 and I have a figure of 7.4 for 1997 for comparison with the British rate.

http://www.angelfire.com/rnb/y/homicide.htm#usmu

The US homicide rate has been around 5-7 times the rate for England and Wales throughout the period for which numbers are available. Neither country has seen a precipitous drop that can be clearly associated with the adoption of gun control at any time.



Just eyeballing the graph above, it looks to me like the factors that may have been most important in reducing US homicides were the New Deal in the '30s, World War II which not only put people to work but shipped young men overseas in large numbers, and economic prosperity (I read that as good employment) in the days of the Clinton Administration.