A few years ago I saw a splendid program on the BBC in which a learned professor used various charts and data to prove that, contrary to popular opinion, world poverty is not as bad as it used to be. Factfulness is a book in a similar vein.

 
I came across the review of it in SF Crowsnest. It’s written by Geoff Willmetts, the esteemed editor of that organ, and I thought it was worth sharing. It’s shared quite well on Crowsnest which has zillions of followers but every little helps. In the age of doom and gloom and Trump, it’s good to look at the stats, reflect, and get a more balanced picture. Here’s the review.

Mister Trumps latest statement – made to his backers in the NRA – gives the impression that knife crime in Britain is worse than gun crime in America. I knew this wasn’t true but decided to check the facts. (True facts, not Trump facts).

A BBC report shows that there were 37,400 knife crime incidents in England and Wales in 2017, which is bad. But only 2% of these were homicide or attempted homicide. That would be about 748 deaths.

My next source was Time magazine. In the U.S.A. in 2016 there were 38,000 gun related deaths. It’s about the same number of crimes but all of these resulted in death.

There is a difference in population of course. The U.S.A. has 325 million, the UK 65 million which, rather neatly, is about a fifth of America’s. Multiply our 748 knife deaths by five to account for the difference and we have 3,740. That’s still a long way off the 38,000 deaths in the U.S.A. alas. In fact, per head of population, they have ten times as many deaths from gun crime as we have from knife crime (3,740 vs 38,000).

The simple fact is that it’s a lot easier to kill someone with a gun than a knife, hence the old saying about bringing a knife to a gun fight. It is also easier to kill many people with a gun. Here’s the Guardian on that.

Enough. This is no way to spend a sunny Saturday morning but I just wanted to reassure myself Trump wasn’t right. It didn’t seem likely.

 

 

I used to be just an ordinary bloke.

Now I’m a stereotypical unreconstructed white heterosexual cisgender male member of the oppressive patriarchal knobocracy and feel a bit guilty all the time.

As Joe Walsh sang ‘everybody’s so different, I haven’t changed.’