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Earlier in the year I was watching yet another series about a British mob. There were so many murders on the show, I wondered how many actual homicides there ar

Earlier in the year I was watching yet another series about a British mob. There were so many murders on the show, I wondered how many actual homicides there are in the UK every year. Looking it up, there are around 500 homicides each year in England and Wales, and around 30 of them involve guns. In 2023 there were 22 gun deaths total. (For comparison, in the same year the US had 46,700). Now compare that to the number of shows broadcast every day in the UK that have murders. I think a single BBC murder mystery show has more deaths than the entirety of the country, let alone a single Guy Ritchie film. It's not just the news media which warps people's perceptions. I bet the same survey in the UK would be similarly skewed. This has been a thing since forever. I remember in the 80s the complaints about violence in media. That's not going to change. And sensationalist headlines have been part of news since its first inception. What really needs to change is the education system so that people are able to differentiate reality from media, news and video games.

hunterpayne 1y ago
Counterpoint...there were more than 53,000 stabbings in the UK in the same period. I couldn't even find the same stat for the US. When someone wants to be violent, pretty much any heavy or sharp object will do, making things illegal doesn't really change the total amount of violence. You do get less homicides, but more people with life changing injuries. If it wasn't for the UK locking thousands of people up for Facebook memes, this would probably be a convincing argument. Ironic considering Starmer is a human rights lawyer by trade.
- vel0city 1y ago
  From the statistics I've seen, the US has a higher stabbing homicides per capita than the UK. Even then, I'd much rather a family member be stabbed and survive than be shot and killed. You're way more likely to survive a stabbing attack than a gunshot. Gunshots are consistently more lethal than stabbings. And you're extremely less likely to die as a bystander to a stabbing than as a bystander to a shooting. How many school mass stabbings happen in the UK annually? How many school shootings happen in the US every month? We've had around 30 school shootings in the US so far in 2025, and we've only just started the fall semester!
  - hunterpayne 1y ago
    We've had around 30 gun discharges within 4 blocks of a school so far in 2025. That's how they measure what a school shooting is. By the definition of a school shooting you would expect, the real number is low single digits. One of them was the same day Kirk was shot, just one state over. Fun fact, school shootings currently are about 1/10th of what they were in the 90s when I was in school. Look, I don't really care about this issue. It just annoys me that people lie with stats about it. Its the kind of behavior that degrades people's faith in experts, journalism and institutions.
    - vel0city 1y ago
      I made a point to use the number of shootings resulting in injury or fatality. So no, you're wrong. There have been over 90 instances of reported discharges around school grounds so far in 2025. Around 30 resulted in injury or fatality. Which, remember, we're still have a good bit of school for 2025 left. I don't know where you're getting the 90s comparison from. Everywhere I look the statistics show it's worse now than it was then. There was a leak around '92 but it leveled off for a while. https://ballotpedia.org/United_States_school_shootings_and_firearm_incidents,_1990-present https://ballotpedia.org/United_States_school_shootings_and_f... Even then, it's an extremely weak argument to me. You might as well be arguing "we've had lead in the gasoline for decades". It happened in the past as well, so why change it. Maybe we should do something to address the issue instead of just continuing to accept it.
      - hunterpayne 1y ago
        Did those shooting involve someone associated with the school in some way? Because if not, your stats are still ascribing one problem to a completely different problem with different policy solutions. Schools are often on the cheapest land in the area. Where do you think most gun discharges happen? That's right, on or near the cheapest land. That's why counting shootings near the schools yields shockingly high numbers. But if you want to institute good policy that reduces these numbers, mischaracterizing those incidents is a bad way to do it. And on this issue, the track record of those gathering the data is terrible. I'm not pulling these tactics from nowhere, these are all things that specific surveys have done to manipulate the data. And if you do that, you clearly don't care about reducing the number of shootings.

hunterpayne 1y ago

Counterpoint...there were more than 53,000 stabbings in the UK in the same period. I couldn't even find the same stat for the US. When someone wants to be violent, pretty much any heavy or sharp object will do, making things illegal doesn't really change the total amount of violence. You do get less homicides, but more people with life changing injuries. If it wasn't for the UK locking thousands of people up for Facebook memes, this would probably be a convincing argument. Ironic considering Starmer is a human rights lawyer by trade.

vel0city 1y ago
From the statistics I've seen, the US has a higher stabbing homicides per capita than the UK. Even then, I'd much rather a family member be stabbed and survive than be shot and killed. You're way more likely to survive a stabbing attack than a gunshot. Gunshots are consistently more lethal than stabbings. And you're extremely less likely to die as a bystander to a stabbing than as a bystander to a shooting. How many school mass stabbings happen in the UK annually? How many school shootings happen in the US every month? We've had around 30 school shootings in the US so far in 2025, and we've only just started the fall semester!
- hunterpayne 1y ago
  We've had around 30 gun discharges within 4 blocks of a school so far in 2025. That's how they measure what a school shooting is. By the definition of a school shooting you would expect, the real number is low single digits. One of them was the same day Kirk was shot, just one state over. Fun fact, school shootings currently are about 1/10th of what they were in the 90s when I was in school. Look, I don't really care about this issue. It just annoys me that people lie with stats about it. Its the kind of behavior that degrades people's faith in experts, journalism and institutions.
  - vel0city 1y ago
    I made a point to use the number of shootings resulting in injury or fatality. So no, you're wrong. There have been over 90 instances of reported discharges around school grounds so far in 2025. Around 30 resulted in injury or fatality. Which, remember, we're still have a good bit of school for 2025 left. I don't know where you're getting the 90s comparison from. Everywhere I look the statistics show it's worse now than it was then. There was a leak around '92 but it leveled off for a while. https://ballotpedia.org/United_States_school_shootings_and_firearm_incidents,_1990-present https://ballotpedia.org/United_States_school_shootings_and_f... Even then, it's an extremely weak argument to me. You might as well be arguing "we've had lead in the gasoline for decades". It happened in the past as well, so why change it. Maybe we should do something to address the issue instead of just continuing to accept it.
    - hunterpayne 1y ago
      Did those shooting involve someone associated with the school in some way? Because if not, your stats are still ascribing one problem to a completely different problem with different policy solutions. Schools are often on the cheapest land in the area. Where do you think most gun discharges happen? That's right, on or near the cheapest land. That's why counting shootings near the schools yields shockingly high numbers. But if you want to institute good policy that reduces these numbers, mischaracterizing those incidents is a bad way to do it. And on this issue, the track record of those gathering the data is terrible. I'm not pulling these tactics from nowhere, these are all things that specific surveys have done to manipulate the data. And if you do that, you clearly don't care about reducing the number of shootings.