The London Telegraph runs a story in its Sunday edition that reports murder rates skyrocketing in London, primarily fueled by firearms, even though guns have been banned in the UK:

The murder rate in London has doubled in 12 months to reach one of its highest levels ever, according to the most recent Home Office statistics, which have been leaked to the Telegraph.

In the final three months of last year there were 61 murders in the capital, compared with just 31 in the same quarter, the previous year. The figure is the highest total for the last three months of any year, according to the Metropolitan Police's published figures. In the final three months of 2000, for example, there were only 40 murders, while in the same period of 2001 and 2002 there were 43 and 31 respectively.

Police blame drive-by shootings between gangs fighting turf wars over drug sales, as well as so-called "honour killings". But the real story is that the UK's ban on gun ownership has had an opposite effect than expected. Instead of gun crime decreasing as guns are taken out of the hands of the general public, gun crime is instead exploding as guns remain exclusively in the hands of the criminals. While you may or may not be able to argue that the crime rate would be lower if guns were legalized, no one can argue that banning guns lowers gun crime or prevents deaths from guns. London's example exposes that argument as a complete canard.

UPDATE FOR THE ANTAGONIST: Going back to my post of December 2, 2003, The Fraser Institute in Canada also concluded that gun-control laws in various Commonwealth countries had been "expensive failures":

In England and Wales:

Both Conservative and Labour governments have introduced restrictive firearms laws over the past 20 years; all handguns were banned in 1997.

Yet in the 1990s alone, the homicide rate jumped 50 percent, going from 10 per million in 1990 to 15 per million in 2000. While not yet as high as the US, in 2002 gun crime in England and Wales increased by 35 percent. This is the fourth consecutive year that gun crime has increased.

In Australia:

While violent crime is decreasing in the United States, it is increasing in Australia. Over the past six years, the overall rate of violent crime in Australia has been on the rise -- for example, armed robberies have jumped 166 percent nationwide.

The confiscation and destruction of legally owned firearms has cost Australian taxpayers at least $500 million. The cost of the police services bureaucracy, including the costly infrastructure of the gun registration system, has increased by $200 million since 1997.

In Canada:

Over the past decade, the rate of violent crime in Canada has increased while in the United States the violent crime rate has plummeted. The homicide rate is dropping faster in the US than in Canada.

The Canadian experiment with firearm registration is becoming a farce says Mauser. The effort to register all firearms, which was originally claimed to cost only $2 million, has now been estimated by the Auditor General to top $1 billion. The final costs are unknown but, if the costs of enforcement are included, the total could easily reach $3 billion.

In order to really parse the data, you will need to download the complete study, which is available here in PDF format.

Some of the charts are in the Extended Entry section for those who want to take a look.

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