(UK) Horden shootings: killer held six gun licences

[Euromutt]

20. Can we say "post hoc ergo propter hoc"?

There are very, very few editorial cartoonists who possess sufficient insight to produce cartoons that actually make a valid point. Mr. Adcock is not one of them.

I'll trot out the usual objections:
1) The American non-firearm homicide rate is higher than the overall homicide rate in most western European countries.
Even if you could magically make all firearms disappear from the US overnight, and even if there were no "method substitution" (i.e. if homicides that would otherwise be committed using firearms were not committed at all, rather than by other means such as blades, bludgeons, "personal force" etc.), the U.S. homicide rate would still be higher than that of most western European countries.
2) The lower homicide rates, by firearm or otherwise, in Europe predate European gun control laws. In most European countries, gun control laws weren't imposed until in the immediate aftermath of World War I and (more importantly) the Russian and German revolutions. These laws weren't intended to curb violent crime, but to forestall armed revolts by disgruntled (former) military personnel with (legitimate) grievances against their respective governments.
3) European suicide rates aren't notably lower than American ones. Europeans hang themselves or jump in front of passenger trains instead of shooting themselves; they wind up just as dead (and traumatize the engineer to boot). One could readily reverse the cartoon with "train-related deaths."

Just take a look at Britain. The London Metropolitan Police Service has, for quite a few years now, been operating Trident, a task force assigned to dealing with gun violence perpetrated by blacks (be they of Afro-Caribbean descent, African or whatnot) on other blacks. Not entirely coincidentally, a sizable chunk of American gun violence is similarly "black on black," notably in places like Detroit, Baltimore and Oakland. One aspect in which the U.S. differs from western European countries is that, where European countries shunted African slaves to their (Central and South) American and Caribbean colonies, the U.S. brought them right into their own territory. As a result, whereas the U.S. had to deal with an influx of former slaves spreading across the country after the Civil War, European countries didn't have that problem until decolonization almost a century later, combined with bringing in "guest laborers" from Turkey and North Africa (and Yugoslavia). In short, the United States simply has a century's head start on western Europe in fostering an ethnically based socio-economic underclass of darker-skinned individuals who are unable to identify with the lands of their ancestors, but are treated as outsiders by their "host" societies. Not coincidentally, gun crimes have been on the rise, notably with perpetrators of foreign descent, in European countries for the past twenty years. In particular, the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s created a supply of weapons and thugs willing and able to use them, who happily placed themselves in the service of those operating the pipeline of Taliban-encouraged heroin from Afghanistan westward.

Lest anyone accuse me of racism, my point is not that there's something inherently criminal about non-whites; it's that individuals who are members of a socio-economic underclass and seek to escape it are practically forced to do so by resorting to criminal activity. They don't do it because they're bad, they do it because they're poor (though the industry turns them bad fairly quickly).