@jhine: you can’t compare the total school shootings in the UK with ALL of the US. The UK is relatively tiny, many states can fit multiple UK’s. That being said, according to the Ben Kinsella trust, there were 99 children murdered in 1 year by knife in England, most of those in or on the way to school with 738 reported criminal possession incidents. Multiply that by 40 for a size comparison. 4000 children did not die in US schools last year, when counting gun homicides, you get to ~1500 children per year, most of those were not in schools but gang-related. A MORI Survey for the Youth Justice Board found that 29% of Secondary School-children, along with 57% of those excluded admitted to routinely carrying knives. - imagine if 29% of US school children carried guns because they needed it for protection.
@joey: you are the one that said that more guns = more gun crime, so you brought up the issue of proportionality, when pointed out the data, now you agree with me that gun ownership is not correlated? I already pointed out the data on guns and crime rates for other countries is incomplete, which you can see in the total discrepancy between reported and surveyed crime rates, but the UK has some nice knife crime statistics. It also doesn’t line up if you look for reports on teens being arrested with guns in Europe, there are quite a few pretty much every week that make some local headline, yet they are not reflected in any statistic?
