It's not irrelevant as a large number of firearms were unlicensed. There were a ton of old service guns lying in peoples attics completely unregistered. It takes time to enforce a law.
It's not irrelevant as a large number of firearms were unlicensed. There were a ton of old service guns lying in peoples attics completely unregistered. It takes time to enforce a law.
As far as handguns that were in active use - i.e. the ones relevant to this conversation - they had to be (and were) handed over to police within the year iirc. It was done quickly and efficiently.
The licensing laws are and were very strict. Anybody who had a handgun was required to have a licence for it, for which good character references and criminal record background checks were (and are) required, and they had to renew it every year. They also had to be an active member of a gun club (the only place you were allowed to use a handgun), and that membership was also reviewed every year.
So it's difficult to imagine how banning handguns would have much of an effect on handgun crime in the first place, unless you want to argue that licenced gun owners were committing crime and getting away with it, which I don't.
But still, I'm willing to be convinced with evidence. A graph that doesn't show gun crime increasing after a ban would be a good place to start.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox
The chart is very clearly downward, with a couple of upward slopes in the middle. If you cherry pick the evidence like that crimeresearch.org link does, you'll get the upward slope. If you look at the data as a whole, you get the long term downward trend. This is pretty much the definition of Simpson's Paradox. The downward trend is the correct one.
Another interpretation of the data, also just a theory but no less valid, is that handguns rose in popularity as the weapon of choice within gangs, and the police responded by targeting gun crime. Again, I wouldn't want to state it as fact, but it would be a useful starting point for additional research.
The reason frankly why I would need so much convincing that banning hand guns had any effect gun crime rates in the UK is because I just don't think there were enough gun owners to be statistically significant in the first place. Handgun shooting was a niche sport - a very niche sport.
As for cherry picking: right back atcha. But even that doesn't work for the Ireland, Jamaica, DC, and Chicago graphs.
As for Ireland and Jamaica, the increase in homicides are very explainable given the Troubles and rise of Carribean drug trafficking in the 70s.
Here's another graph showing the same thing, and another one below showing a correlation in the reduction of gun crime to an increase of policing resources.
http://crimeresearch.org/2013/12/murder-and-homicide-rates-b...
This is irrelevant. All licence holders were required to hand their weapons in to the police directly after the ban and the guns were counted in.