[VulcanRider]

Originally posted by shamrock_uk: ...how many lives have been saved in the UK because guns haven't been available for crimes of passion - I think luvian has a point here...

I don't think so. Private handgun ownership was banned in England in 1997.

From Dan Rather reports on increase in English crime rate dated Nov 2002:

ON A JUNE evening two years ago, Dan Rather made many stiff British upper lips quiver by reporting that England had a crime problem and that, apart from murder, "theirs is worse than ours." The response was swift and sharp. "Have a Nice Daydream," The Mirror, a London daily, shot back... But sandwiched between the article's battery of official denials...The Mirror conceded that the CBS anchorman was correct. Except for murder and rape, it admitted, "Britain has overtaken the US for all major crimes."

... The illusion that the English government had protected its citizens by disarming them seemed credible because few realized the country had an astonishingly low level of armed crime even before guns were restricted. A government study for the years 1890-92, for example, found only three handgun homicides, an average of one a year, in a population of 30 million. In 1904 there were only four armed robberies in London, then the largest city in the world. A hundred years and many gun laws later, the BBC reported that England's firearms restrictions "seem to have had little impact in the criminal underworld." Guns are virtually outlawed, and, as the old slogan predicted, only outlaws have guns. Worse, they are increasingly ready to use them.

Nearly five centuries of growing civility ended in 1954. Violent crime has been climbing ever since. Last December, London's Evening Standard reported that armed crime, with banned handguns the weapon of choice, was "rocketing." In the two years following the 1997 handgun ban, the use of handguns in crime rose by 40 percent, and the upward trend has continued. From April to November 2001, the number of people robbed at gunpoint in London rose 53 percent....


From Crime Statistics for England and Wales

This chart " 'Violence against the person' - Long-term national recorded crime trend" shows reported crimes rising steadily from 500,000 in 1998-99, to 990,000 in 2003-04. It doesn't look like banning firearms is helping, unless you're a criminal.