Justin Webb's America

Guns and crime

• Justin Webb
• 25 Mar 08, 01:57 PM GMT

Sorry to be a touch intermittent with the posting this week - quick pre-Pennsylvania holiday in Colorado.

This report I find mystifying - and, I have to report, so do other Brits I have met here on the slopes. Talking to a chap originally from south London but living now in New Jersey, we agreed (before seeing this piece) that one of the great pleasures of living in the US is that the underlying sense of low-level violence and nastiness so much in evidence in big English cities - and in small market towns as well - just does not exist here, or to be more precise does not exist outside certain areas. Most Americans can avoid it. In the UK, you cannot.

I note that the number of handguns in circulation is one of the reasons the US scores relatively badly in the Jane's Country Risk assessment: but, if you look at the detailed evidence provided in the DC case, there is certainly a case to be made that the kind of crime that affects the UK so badly - burglaries where someone is in their home - is simply less common in the US. Have the Jane's people got it wrong?

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