The problem was that the poster was right in at least one respect. My knowledge of gun crime is pretty much an assumption on my part. In fact I am fairly oblivious to the various levels and types of crime taking place in this (or in fact any other) country.

So I decided to do a quick recce to see roughly how our two nations stood when it comes to gun crime. First stop was the CIA world factbook to get some population figures.

I then looked for the crime figures for the UK, which I managed to find at crimereduction.gov. The main gun crime report can be found in the pdf linked at the bottom of the page. Then for the US figures I wandered around the Bureau of Justice website, focussing on the section for gun crime and the attendant figures.

Now I would like to state before I put up the table that this is by no means a scientific and statistically sound study. It is simply a quick check to gain a more accurate gauge of gun crime in the US and UK.

	US	UK
Population	290 million (2003)	60 million (2003)
Gun-related Homicides	10,808 (2002)	81 (2002)
Serious Gun Injuries	39,400 (1997)	572 (2002)

The statistics tell us that there are roughly 1.35 gun related homicides per million in the UK and roughly 37.3 per million in the US. This would suggest that you are around 27 times more likely to be killed by a gun in the US.

The figures relating to serious gun related injuries is a lot closer. Unfortunately the best figures I could find for the US (albeit a quick search) were for 1997. Given that the figures for US gun related homicide were reduced in the same period, allowances should be made for the possible reduction in injuries. The UK suffered around 9.5 serious gun injuries per million, with the US figures put at around 135.9 per million. Given these numbers, this means that you would be around 14 times more likely to suffer from serious gunshot wounds.

Once again I would like to make the disclaimer that this is only a very simplistic analysis and would fail any serious testing (I can think of about half a dozen holes already). Still, as a general indicator it does seem to back up my impressions of the relative comparisons of gun crime in the US and the UK.

However, don't forget that this also only looks at one specific segment of crime and you may find that there is a corresponding disproportion of other violent crimes in British society (ie coming from the people who can't get their grubby mitts on guns!).

I think that may have to be an article for another day...