People kill and maim, not guns, knives or glasses

Things are looking a bit grim again. A shooting in the Lace Market, a new DVD to discourage young people from carrying knives and now the revelation that a bar on Broad Street is top of the city’s league (or should that be bottom?) for injuries inflicted with glasses and bottles.

The UK already has some of the strictest gun laws in the world (I’m glad to say) and the Government’s Home Affairs Committee recently reported on knife crime and what should be done about it. Now we have the Nottinghamshire Police suggesting that bars should use plastic glasses instead of glass ones (should be called ‘plastics’ then, I guess…) so as to reduce the potential for injury in the hands of thugs and drunken chavs.

But aren’t they missing the point a bit?  It is people that kill and maim other people. Of course, they may find it easier or more effective if they have access to a gun, knife or a pint glass but if these things weren’t available they’d use chairs, bricks, traffic cones (!!!) or anything else at hand to achieve their sick, sad and violent objectives.

Contents not containers that cause the problems?

If pubs and clubs were more interested in who they allowed in, what their customers did once on the premises and how much alcohol they consumed, than they were about packing in vast numbers of punters to make maximum profit from the drunken morons they serve, there would be much less need to worry about the incidence of ‘glassing’ in such places.

And  if parents and other responsible adults worked together to create an environment where young people didn’t think violence was cool or that they needed to carry a knife for their own protection, we wouldn’t need metal detectors at the entrances to schools and youth clubs.

I’m not against educating young people about the dangers of carrying knives, having tough firearms laws or even the provision of plastic glasses in pubs and clubs but I think the focus should be less on the weapons and more on the people who use them and the circumstances in which they do so. And that means a lot of work, by a lot of people for a long time. Who’s up for it?

A footnote to my recent posts about gun crime in the wake of the Lace Market murder (which received more hits on my blog than any other recent post) is that this now appears to have been a revenge shooting not the random attack that it first seemed.

Tragic shooting death in USA

MSN reports this morning that a two-year-old boy has died after being accidentally shot by his three-year-old sister in California.

 A very sad postscript to my recent blogs on gun crime.

This could only happen in a country where it’s seen as OK to have a loaded handgun under your bed.

God forbid that the UK should ever find itself in such an appalling position.

Gun crime: How bad are things really?

Having got a significant number of hits on yesterday’s post about the recent Lace Market shooting, I thought I’d have a look at where Nottingham now stands in the UK gun crime statistics and how we compare with the rest of the world. The result of both is good news for us Robin Hood-ites.

Nottingham’s recent rate of gun crime (to 2008) is only marginally above the national average – and less than half the rate of Manchester and London. Manchester has made great strides recently in shaking off its ‘Gunchester’ epithet (in the same way that we seem to have shaken off ‘Shottingham’, I hope) with a combination of pro-active policing and community action. The capital, as ever, continues to be top of the pops where gun crime and firearm-related deaths are concerned.

But how bad are things really in this country? Recent statistics seem very hard to come by but, from all the lists I found that indicate where England and Wales are in the league table of gun-related deaths (Scotland and NI are recorded separately for some reason), we are not even in the top 20.

Heading the list of ‘developed’ countries (Gross National Income per capita over $15,000) was the USA (although, in one list, Northern Ireland recorded more gun-related homicides and only came third to the US because of fewer suicides). Countries like Finland, Switzerland, Belgium, France and Austria recorded more people killed with guns per 100,000 people in the population than the UK.

However, even the US figures (around 10 or 11 per 100,000; England and Wales is less than 1 per 100,000) pale into insignificance against figures from some of the ‘developing’ countries:  Brazil – 14 deaths per 100,000; Guatemala – 18; Colombia – 51 and South Africa – 74.

So Nottingham has one of the lowest gun-related homicide rates of major UK cities in a country that has one of the lowest rates in the developed world. This doesn’t mean we should be complacent about even one violent death… but it does keep things in perspective.

Spectre of gun crime returns

The shooting of a man in the Lace Market in the early hours of Monday morning will no doubt have the city’s detractors once again talking about ‘Shottingham’ and suggesting body armour for anyone visiting the city.

But, as the Evening Post article points out, the last fatal shooting in Nottingham was that of a 17-year-old in The Meadows in September 2006 and last year there were only 28 firearms incidents in the city. At the height of gun crime in the city in 2003, there were 51 shootings, resulting in 23 injuries but only four deaths.

I use the word ‘only’ advisedly. This is not in any way to trivialise the deaths of four people; one death or one injury is one too many… but guns now seem to be a feature of life in a modern city and it appears that we have to live and come to terms with this reality, as much as it might dismay us all.  That being the case, the fact that this is the first fatal shooting in the city for three years, suggests that we are a long way away from the bad old days when Nottingham really did seem to be on the way to becoming the East Midlands equivalent of Dodge City.

But offences in which firearms play a part do seem to be on the rise again and so it is up to all of us to be vigilant and to support the police and our fellow citizens wherever we can to remove this blight from our city… or at least to keep it in check.