The Defence Brief

The tweet from Charlie Kirk I came across a screenshot of a Twitter post while on Facebook this morning. The original post now has 11,000 retweets and 23,000 likes on Twitter. As you can see from the picture somebody called Charlie Kirk, who is a right-wing American commentator, claims that there are 933 violent crimes in the UK per 100,000 people. This is more than double the rate he claims for the USA where he says there are only 399 violent crimes per 100,000 people. The UK doesn’t feel that violent to me, so is it true? We’re all gonna die According to the FBI, in 2016 there were 1,248,185 violent crimes committed across the whole of the USA. That is an increase of 4.1% on the 2015 figure but still represented only 386.3 violent crimes per 100,000 people . So, Mr Kirk appears to be slightly overestimating the violent crime in the USA. I should say that I am using the 2016 figures as those are the latest available on the FBI website, so maybe he has slightly differe...

Semi automatic rifles for sale at a gun show in Texas So, the USA has a problem with guns. Or, to be more accurate, America loves guns but has a problem with them being used to kill innocent people, often en masse. There are literally millions of guns in the USA and while people, including me, regularly suggest an Australian-style buy-back of weapons and an outright ban the reality is that is unlikely to happen, if for no other reason than it will cost the government an absolute fortune – the Australian buy-back took around 650,000 weapons off the streets but an equivalent in the US would require something like 60,000,000 guns to be bought and if they cost an average of $500, which seems reasonable having checked out the Texas Gun Trader website for the prices of second-hand weapons, that would cost $30,000,000,000… which is a lot. What then can be done about the problems of mass shootings in the short term? I think the answer is, probably, not very much. But, I do wonder ...