U.K. Navy Makes Smarter Decision Than U.S. Navy

The U.K.'s Navy, unlike the U.S. Navy, understands that building more 1980s era concept destroyers no longer makes sense. They've been paying attention to the Ukraine War in the Black Sea in which traditional surface combatants are being felled by drones. 

The U.S. hasn't been and instead is working on a "Trump-class Battleship" which is precisely the wrong direction, and more Arleigh Burke class destroyers.

Navy to build drone-equipped warships instead of replacing ageing destroyers

PA Media

Plans to replace ageing warships will be scrapped in favour of building at least six new modern "hybrid" vessels equipped to deploy drones as part of the UK's upcoming defence strategy.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) said the new vessels would be more suited to the "pace and nature of modern warfare", and a better investment than a "small number of large expensive ships".

Defence Secretary Dan Jarvis said the new equipment would be "designed and built for the increasing threats we face".

Outgoing Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has committed to publishing the long-delayed defence investment plan (DIP) before the Nato summit in Turkey on 7 July after months of talks over how to fund it.

The MoD had been exploring options to replace the Type 45, the Navy's fleet of destroyers, with the Type 83, a concept vessel which was at an early design phase.

Instead, investment will now go towards six new Common Combat Vessels, which the department said would be capable of "coordinating uncrewed systems in the air, on the surface and under the sea to deliver more resilient air defence".

It said the change in approach would extend "the Navy's reach, resilience and firepower without a proportional increase in crew or cost".

From the BBC. 

Brexit Did A Lot Of Economic Harm

I've said it before, but it remains true that while there is not one right answer for the policies that democracies should adopt, there are many objectively wrong decisions that democracies can make.

Brexit harmed the British economy more than anticipated. Trade barriers hurt the countries erecting them.

This paper examines the impact of the UK’s decision to leave the European Union (Brexit) in 2016. Using almost a decade of data since the referendum, we combine simulations based on macro data with estimates derived from micro data collected through our Decision Maker Panel survey. These estimates suggest that by 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, with the impact accumulating gradually over time. We estimate that investment was reduced by between 12% and 18%, employment by 3% to 4% and productivity by 3% to 4%. These large negative impacts reflect a combination of elevated uncertainty, reduced demand, diverted management time, and increased misallocation of resources from a protracted Brexit process. 

Comparing these with contemporary forecasts – providing a rare macro example to complement the burgeoning micro-literature of social science predictions – shows that these forecasts were accurate over a 5-year horizon, but they underestimated the impact over a decade.

From this NBER paper.

Marriage Has Grown Less Popular In England And Wales

DNA Evidence Probably Identifies Jack The Ripper

More than a dozen suspects who could have been Jack the Ripper, one of the earliest well known serial killers, have been seriously considered. 

A police investigation into a series of eleven brutal murders committed in Whitechapel and Spitalfields between 1888 and 1891 was unable to connect all the killings conclusively to the murders of 1888. Five victims—Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly—are known as the "canonical five" and their murders between 31 August and 9 November 1888 are often considered the most likely to be linked. The murders were never solved.

Several other murders, less definitively connected to this spree than the "canonical five" also occurred in the vicinity before the man who is now clearly the prime suspect was committed to an insane asylum.

But, DNA evidence has tipped the balance and arguably cracked this cold case case and linked the killings to one of the top suspects.

A Polish barber by the name of Aaron Kosminski was a suspect at the time of the five murders in Whitechapel, east London, in 1888. . . . A bloodstained shawl said to have been found on the body of one of the victims – which was purchased at auction in 2007 by author and Ripper researcher Russell Edwards – was recently found to have the DNA of both the victim and Kosminski. In October, the Daily Mail revealed that Mr Edwards had uncovered new evidence of Kosminski’s links to the highly secretive Freemasons which may have motivated his sadistic killings and shielded him from law enforcement, ensuring he was locked away in an asylum, where he eventually died. . . . Aaron Kosminski was a Polish immigrant who worked as a barber upon moving to London. He was only a young man when he embarked on his killing spree – 23 years old to be exact. To uncover the killer’s identity, Kosminski’s oldest brother’s great-great-granddaughter actually helped Edwards. She provided a DNA sample that was able to be matched with that of the shawl. . . . When the original inquest was held on October 4, 1888, a verdict of ‘wilful murder’ was returned. But police were still hunting for the serial killer at the time.

From here.

While the DNA match isn't ironclad, it apparently relied on mtDNA which isn't as useful at definitively fingering a suspect as autosomal DNA, it also corroborates other evidence against him which was stronger than the evidence against of any of the other leading suspects, even without DNA evidence. He was formally diagnosed at the asylum with paranoid schizophrenia. 

On 12 July 1890, Kosminski was placed in Mile End Old Town workhouse due to his worsening mental illness, with his brother Woolf certifying the entry, and was released three days later. On 4 February 1891, he was returned to the workhouse, possibly by the police, and on 7 February, he was transferred to Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum. A witness to the certification of his entry, recorded as Jacob Cohen, gave some basic background information and stated that Kosminski had threatened his sister with a knife. It is unclear whether this meant Kosminski's sister or Cohen's. Kosminski remained at the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum for the next three years until he was admitted on 19 April 1894 to Leavesden Asylum. Case notes indicate that Kosminski had been ill since at least 1885. His insanity took the form of auditory hallucinations, a paranoid fear of being fed by other people that drove him to pick up and eat food dropped as litter, and a refusal to wash or bathe. 

The cause of his insanity was recorded as "self-abuse", which is thought to be a euphemism for masturbation. His poor diet seems to have kept him in an emaciated state for years; his low weight was recorded in the asylum case notes. By February 1919, he weighed just 96 pounds (44 kg). He died the following month, aged 53.

While the evidence that Kosminski was Jack the Ripper might not meet modern standards of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, in a case that is 130 years old occurring at the dawn of modern policing, there is enough evidence that is is very likely that he was the Ripper, and he is far more likely to have been the killer than any of the other leading suspects.

U.K. To Regulate Many Online Forums Out Of Existence

I don't like the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and this is worse.

This, from Techcrunch, seems like a good summary of a bad situation facing this blog: Death Of A Forum: How The UK's Online Safety Act Is Killing Communities.

This blog is just that: my personal blog, with comments.

Over the past two decades a lively community has evolved in the discussion threads. However, the Online Safety Act threatens to impose impossible hurdles on the continuation of open fora in the UK. The intent is officially to protect adults and children from illegal content, but ... there's no lower threshold on scale. A blog with comments is subject to exactly as much regulatory oversight as Facebook. It applies to all fora that enable people in the UK (that would be me) to communicate with other people in the UK (that's a whole bunch of you), so I can't avoid the restrictions by moving to a hosting provider in the US. Nor am I terribly keen on filing the huge amounts of paperwork necessary to identify myself as the Trust and Safety officer of an organization and arrange for commercial age verification services (that I can't in any event integrate with this ancient blogging platform). And the penalties for infractions are the same—fines of up to £18M (which is a gigantic multiple of my gross worth).

And it comes into effect on March 15th.

Accordingly ...

The blog will continue to exist.

However the comment threads may be closed for good after March 14th.

(I don't know for sure yet. It's very late in the day but the ICO may see sanity and provide some sort of sanity clause for hobbyist sites.) 

. . . 

Update: According to this in-depth article about the Act there appears to be a limited exemption for "limited functionality services" that covers blog comments—"but it may not include them if users can reply to each other - this is unclear". Ofcom are expected to clarify their regulations in January, so we can live in hope for a little longer. 

Also: "The OSA puts obligations on the service provider, so if you host a community on a platform such as Discord or WhatsApp, the OSA doesn't directly affect you." (So I may be able to open a forum on Discord instead.) 

Also: my quick first pass risk assessment per Ofcom guidelines is that this blog is, to put it mildly, at low risk for priority illegal content, if only because it doesn't provide most of the types of communication channel Ofcom is concerned with (eg. generating and hosting video and images, enabling direct 1:1 private communication between users).

From Sci-Fi author Charlie Stross's blog.

The British Navy Did A Lot To End Slavery

 

English Crime Rates

 
From here.

The peak is right around the same time as the U.S. peak, which casts doubt on U.S. specific explanations for the trend.

Fraud and computer misuse account for a majority of crime incidents in England and Wales.

That Time When Golf Was A Crime

James IV King of Scotland Born March 17, 1473 banned what sport activity in Scotland?

In 1491, James IV reaffirmed a ban on golf that had started in 1457 when James II banned golf and football to preserve the skills of archery. The ban was lifted in 1502 with the signing of the Treaty of Perpetual Peace between England and Scotland. James soon became a golfer himself and made the first recorded purchase of golf equipment, a set of golf clubs from a bow-maker in Perth [not the one in Australia which didn't exist yet].

From Mike Gardinier on Facebook.

Medieval Oxford Was Dangerous

Steven Pinker is generally correct that society has grown progressively less violent over time.

The research suggests that Oxford’s student population was by far the most lethally violent social or professional group in any of the three cities.

The team behind the Medieval Murder Maps – a digital resource that plots crime scenes based on translated investigations from 700-year-old coroners’ inquests – estimate the per capita homicide rate in Oxford to have been 4-5 times higher than late medieval London or York.

Among Oxford perpetrators with a known background, 75% were identified by the coroner as “clericus”, as were 72% of all Oxford’s homicide victims. During this period, clericus is most likely to refer to a student or member of the early university.

“A medieval university city such as Oxford had a deadly mix of conditions,” said Prof Manuel Eisner, murder map investigator and Director of Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology.

“Oxford students were all male and typically aged between fourteen and twenty-one, the peak for violence and risk-taking. These were young men freed from tight controls of family, parish or guild, and thrust into an environment full of weapons, with ample access to alehouses and sex workers.

Consider the source as this is from the University of Cambridge.

It also, in my mind, supports the case for removing the secrecy from the juvenile justice system. By all means, we should not give legal effect to stale criminal convictions or juvenile offenses, but we should also be informed by them, especially when it comes to estimating recidivism risk. Age eighteen is right in the middle of the peak age range for criminal conduct. Young men do "age out" of criminal activity, but this happens in their 30s or early 40s. The most powerful predictor of repeat criminality is how early, how often, and how intensely offenders committed crimes as juveniles. Further, secrecy encourages institutional rot because its flaws are not exposed to public inspection.

Home Ownership Reduces Crime In The U.K.

Increased home ownership reduces property crime.

“Right to Buy” (RTB), a large-scale natural experiment whereby incumbent tenants in public housing could buy properties at heavily-subsidised prices, increased the UK homeownership rate by over 10 percentage points between its 1980 introduction and the 1990s. This paper studies the impact of this reform on crime by leveraging exogenous variation in eligibility for the policy. Results show that RTB generated significant property crime reductions. Behavioural changes of incumbent tenants and renovation of public properties were the main drivers of this crime reduction. This is evidence of a novel means by which subsidised homeownership and housing policy can reduce criminality.

Richard Disney, John Gathergood, Stephen Machin, Matteo Sandi, "Does Homeownership Reduce Crime? A Radical Housing Reform from the UK" The Economic Journal uead040 (June 5, 2023) https://doi.org/10.1093/ej/uead040

Jury Trials in England And Wales And The United States

In England and Wales, jury trials are available in moderately serious felony cases tried in the Crown Courts, and in cases involving defamation, fraud, false imprisonment and malicious prosecution brought in either the King's Bench High Court or in County Court.

In 2022, England and Wales had about 26,303 criminal jury trials in Crown Court, and about 10 civil jury trials (out of something on the order of 400 or fewer cases filed that year in cases where jury trials are available). Jury trials in England and Wales are by juries of twelve in Crown Court criminal cases and High Court civil cases, and by juries of eight in County Court civil cases where there is a right to a jury trial (probably not more than one every year or two).

In the U.S. felony jury trials are generally to juries of twelve jurors, but lesser criminal charges and civil cases sometimes, but not always, have smaller juries, depending on the jurisdiction involved and the nature of the case.

On a per capita basis, as of 2022, England and Wales has about three times as many felony jury trials as the U.S. does (at both the state and local and at the federal level combined), and about three hundred times fewer civil jury trials than the U.S., again at the state and local and at the federal level combined. The higher rate of felony jury trials in England and Wales largely reflects a lower rate of guilty pleas and plea bargaining there.

Jury trials in England and Wales are conducted by barristers for both the prosecution or plaintiff, and for the defense (except in rare cases of self-represented parties). Solicitors in England and Wales don't conduct jury trials, nor do they conduct bench trials in the higher courts.

Less than 1.5% of criminal jury trials in the U.S. are conducted in federal court. About 7.5% of civil jury trials in the U.S. are conducted in federal court. Trials of civil cases with small amounts in controversy are overwhelmingly conducted via bench trials in state and local courts of limited jurisdiction. These low stakes bench trials are vastly more common than state or federal civil jury trials.

About two-thirds of U.S. civil jury trials are in personal injury cases, about 10% are in termination of parental rights cases, and about 25% are in other civil matters such as civil rights cases, fraud cases, and breach of contract cases. 

Civil jury trials make up about one in six U.S. jury trials (i.e. a little more than 16%), but only about one in 2,600 jury trials in England and Wales.

About half of criminal jury trials conducted in the U.S. are in misdemeanor and traffic cases, while jury trials are not conducted in less serious criminal cases in England and Wales which are handled in the Magistrate's Courts.

Overall, England and Wales actually has about 25% more jury trials per capita than the U.S. does. This largely reflects the fact that a far larger proportion of felony criminal cases in England and Wales go to trial than in the U.S. where felony criminal cases are much more likely to be plea bargained. England and Wales expressly limits the sentencing consequences of going to trial rather than pleading guilty, and also has shorter maximum sentences for comparable crimes in most cases.

In the federal courts and about half of all U.S. states, felonies must be commenced via a grand jury indictment (which is typically a jury of 23 people with 12 votes in favor required to indite). The other half of U.S. states use grand jury indictments primarily in cases involving organized crime or public officials that make up perhaps 1-2% of the total number of prosecutions in those states each year. 

England and Wales no longer has grand juries, although, on some occasions it does convene a coroner's jury when the cause of death of an individual is in doubt and the coroner wants to involve the general public to make the process more transparent. This is also done infrequently in a small number of U.S. states.

The jury trial rate in the U.S. is based upon Colorado state court jury trial statistics for 2022 and national federal court jury trial statistics for 2022.

Colorado had 794 state felony jury trials, 478 state misdemeanor jury trials, and 342 state traffic case jury trials. Colorado had 12 state court felony bench trials, 124 quasi-criminal juvenile delinquency bench trials, 53 state court misdemeanor bench trials, 49 state court traffic bench trials, and 574 quasi-criminal infraction bench trials.

There were also a modest number of municipal court ordinance violation jury trials in Colorado for which good statistics are not compiled on a statewide basis for its 215 some municipal courts (most with very few cases that go to trial, mostly in traffic cases and minor misdemeanor equivalent cases, maximum sentences are capped at one year in jail or fines of up to $1,000 in Colorado's municipal courts). 

Colorado had 248 state court of general jurisdiction civil jury trials (about 75% in personal injury cases), 13 county court (limited jurisdiction up to $25,000 in controversy) civil jury trials, and 32 termination of parental rights case jury trials. Colorado had 233 general jurisdiction court civil bench trials. Colorado has 672 limited jurisdiction court civil bench trials, and 1,572 small claims court civil bench trials.

Nationally, in the United States in the year 2022, there were 1,268 federal court criminal jury trials, 194 federal court criminal bench trials, 1,348 federal court civil jury trials, and 639 federal court civil bench trials.

These statistics on bench trials omit many evidentiary hearings in state and federal court that are similar to bench trials, for example, in domestic relations, probate, and bankruptcy cases.

In a February 24, 2006 post, I looked in more detail at a national sample of U.S. jury trials and at the likelihood of different kinds of cases being resolved with jury trials:

A national sample of civil jury trials breaks down the cases by type. About 78% of civil jury trials are in "tort" cases, most of which involve physical injuries, shown below by type of case (with a percent of the total number of all civil jury trials in that kind of case):

Automobile Accidents 31.98%

Dangerous Premises 16.10% (e.g. slip and fall cases)

Medical Malpractice 11.39%

Intentional Torts 3.64% (e.g. civil damages for assault)

Product Liability 3.06%

Toxic Substances 2.08%

Professional Malpractice 1.52% (other than medical)

Slander and Libel 0.54%

Other Tort or Unknown 7.68%

Civil jury trials making up 19.2% of the total number involve people in contractual relationships with each other. About 10.41% of the total number of civil jury trials involve suits between buyers and sellers, about 2.83% involve employment cases, about 2.68% of the total number of civil jury trials involve fraud, about 1.21% involve leases, about 0.06% involve mortgages, and about 2.04% involve other kinds of contract cases.

About 2.4% of jury trials are in real estate cases, three-quarters of which are suits to determine the fair market value of property seized by eminent domain by a government agency (about half of the rest concern disputes over who owns real estate). About 0.38% were incapable of being classified.

If Colorado is typical of the national pattern (I suspect it isn't that far from the national average) this means that 83% of jury trials are criminal (we know this), 13% of jury trials are in tort cases (about 260), and 4% of jury trials are in other kinds of civil cases (about 83 per year).

So, how often do different kinds of cases go to juries:

* Civil Tort in General Jurisdiction Court 423 per 10,000 cases (based on 6,142 such cases per year and 78% of 334 civil jury trials).

* Felony 150 per 10,000 cases

* Misdemeanor 80 per 10,000 cases

* Traffic 20 per 10,000 cases

* Non-Tort Civil Cases in General Jurisdiction Court 17 per 10,000 cases (excluding domestic, juvenile, mental health and probate cases).

* Civil Cases in Limited Jurisdiction Court 1 per 10,000 cases

The jury trial rate in felony cases also is likely quite different between more serious cases (where the jury trial rate is likely to be higher) and less serious ones (where the jury trial rate is likely to be lower).

According to a post at this blog on May 23, 2011, based upon the Annual Report of the Colorado Supreme Court from 2010, in that year (with some minor editing):

There were 13,860 domestic relations hearings in District Court: 13,487 permanent orders hearings in dissolution of marriage cases, 202 legal separation hearings, and 171 invalidity of marriage hearings. Note that almost every dissolution of marriage or legal separation of invalidity of marriage case where children are involved must be concluded with a hearing, even if the cases are uncontested. So this doesn't necessary capture the full number of active litigations in these cases.

There were 183 mental health hearings in District Court: 49 for involuntary commitment for alcohol treatment, 78 long term certification hearings, and 56 short term certification hearings.

There were 2,729 probate hearings: 430 for combined conservatorships and guardianships, 614 for conservatorships without guardianships, 1,517 for guardianships without conservatorships, 137 for the formal probate of a will, 11 for will contests, and 20 hearings related to trusts. Many of the conservatorship, guardianship and formal probate cases are not genuinely contested but do require in court testimony to establish the faces beyond mere affidavits.

A November 17, 2006 post at this blog noted that 58% of federal court trials are 1-3 days long, 94% of federal trials are no more than 9 days long (typically two weeks), and 98% of federal trials (including a civil cases) are no more than 19 days long (typically four weeks).

How long are federal trials in Colorado?

Criminal

1-3 days - 24

4-9 days - 10

10-19 days - 1

20+ days - 2

Civil

1-3 days - 42

4-9 days - 31

10-19 days - 4

20+ days - 0

Marriage v. Cohabitation In England

This post recaps an answer I provided on marriage v. cohabitation in the U.K. that I made at Law.SE while stripping away parts that are irrelevant in the context of a blog post.

U.K. Law Is Mostly Not Uniform On This Subject

Unless otherwise clearly indicated, I am referring solely to the law of England and Wales. Most laws related to rights incident to marriage are not uniform in the U.K. Instead, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and England and Wales, each have their own separate laws on these subjects, although the differences between them are more differences of detail than of broad conceptual structure at a "forest" level. All references to England below are to England and Wales whether this is expressly stated or not.

Who Is Compared?

The comparison I am making is generally between married people and unmarried cohabitants, as the law that applies between total strangers isn't really analogous in most cases. (Even though it is theoretically possible to have a married couple that never significantly cohabitates.)

While the question is specific to a couple with children, formal rights in relation to the children of a couple are only slightly different in theory. But, as discussed below, the limited size of child support payments make the differences between married couples with and without children in divorce cases, significant anyway because there is a right to property division and spousal maintenance in addition to child support for married couples but not for unmarried couples.

Marriage v. Civil Partnerships In England

In most, if not all, circumstances, couples in a "civil partnership" receive the same legal treatment as married couples in English law, and you may assume that they are mostly equivalent for the purposes described below. England also has same sex marriage, but a significant number of civil partnerships, most entered into between 2004 when they become available and 2013 when same sex marriage was allowed, remain in existence and have not been converted into marriages.

Getting Married And Ending A Marriage

Common Law Marriage v. Formal Marriage

Despite being the source of the doctrine historically, England no longer has "common law marriage". Common law marriage was abolished in England in the Marriage Act (1753), although it wasn't as clearly established as it is now in common law marriage jurisdictions even before then. An unmarried couple can now become a legally married couple in England and Wales only by filling out the proper government forms and presenting them to the proper government officials.

According to the same source, Scotland began formal marriage registration in 1855 (which was previously documents only by the church) and once had four forms of "irregular marriage", three of which were abolished prospectively (i.e. new marriages could not be formed in this way) in 1940, and the last of which was abolished prospectively in 2006. Common law marriage outside of England and Wales, when it did exist elsewhere in the British Commonwealth, was or became closer to the Scots law practice than the historical English practice. Other parts of the British Commonwealth and United Kingdom mostly also abolished common law marriage, but did so later than England did. India, however, has a legal doctrine quite similar to common law marriage today as a legacy of British law, for members of some religions, and Australia, Canada, and Ireland have recognized somewhat similar concepts by statute or local case law innovations. Notably, common law marriage had not been abolished in the American colonies at the time that the United States gained independence in 1776 (although it took a while for the British to diplomatically recognize this political reality).

In the time period from 1753 to 2006, the formalities required to get married were more lax in Scotland than in England, so it was common in that time period for couples for whom the formalities of the English marriage system were inconvenient to travel to Scotland to marry. In addition to the reality of this situation, this is a prominent feature in many fictional novels set in this time period. As a result, there is an ample case law in English and Scottish courts over choice of law issues related to this reality. This case law was referred to regularly in the late 19th century and early 20th century by U.S. courts addressing choice of law issues related to marriage and divorce, particularly in cases involving marriages and divorces entered into in Mexico and the Caribbean in an effort to evade legal restrictions present in the home states of the couples involved.

In most circumstances, however, the law of England and Wales will recognize the validity of a marriage which was legally entered into under the law of the place where the marriage where it was entered into, even if that marriage didn't comply with English law regarding what is necessary to get married.

Terminating A Marriage In England Then And Now

Also, like all other common law jurisdictions (and so far as I know, all other civil law jurisdictions), but unlike the situations in Islamic law, it is impossible in England and Wales to end a validly existing marriage by any means other than the death of a spouse or a court order decreeing that the marriage has been dissolved. Also, if a couple was not validly married, even though there could reasons someone might think that they were validly married, a court can clarify the situation by annulling a putative marriage.

Historically, since England Christianized for the last time (after becoming almost entirely pagan after Anglo-Saxon invasions by the end of the 6th century that had been preceded by partial Christianization). The restoration of Christianity in England began about 600 CE, and had run its course well before the Norman invasion of 1066 CE, which is at the root of the modern English legal system. Divorce was then prohibited in England until the Anglican Church broke away from the Roman Catholic Church in 1532 in the English Reformation.

The first Christian era marriage in England terminated by divorce since long before the Norman invasion in England was in the case of King Henry VIII's marriage to Anne which was terminated in 1552. The next divorce in England took place no earlier than 1670 (although there were a handful of aristocratic annulments in that time period), and divorce was only available by parliamentary decree until 1857 when the Matrimonial Causes Act (1857) was enacted, with just 324 divorces granted by parliament from 1670 to 1857. The same source notes that:

Only four of the 324 cases were brought by women. A husband needed to prove adultery to obtain a divorce. By contrast, a wife was required to prove adultery and some other especially aggravating circumstance to have the same grounds. Over the years, women learned that brutality, rape, desertion and financial chicanery did not count. 

Under the 1857 Act divorce could be granted on the grounds of marital fault, for which adultery by itself sufficed for a man seeking a divorce and adultery by a husband together with cruelty, or rape and/or incest of someone else was required for a wife seeking a judicial divorce. Then according to the same source:

A private members’ bill in 1923 made it easier for women to petition for divorce for adultery – but it still had to be proved. In 1937, the law was changed and divorce was allowed on other grounds, including drunkenness, insanity and desertion, although there was a bar on petitions for the first three years of the marriage.

Divorce remained particularly rare even after judicial divorce was authorized, especially prior to the 1923 reforms in English divorce law:

In the first decade of the 20th century, there was just one divorce for every 450 marriages. . . . it was not until the Divorce Reform Act 1969 that they reached the level we are familiar with today. This legislation marked an important shift not merely because it added further grounds for divorce, on the basis of two years' separation with the other party's consent, or five years' without, but because it removed the concept of ‘matrimonial offences' and hence the idea of divorce as a remedy for the innocent against the guilty. Today, there are just two marriages for every divorce each year.

Finally, starting in April 2022 the divorce regime there became an almost fully no-fault divorce regime. So, basically, either member of a married couple can unilaterally divorce at will, without that five year waiting period required from 1969 to 2021, but with still having the economic consequences discussed below.

Ummarried Couples Compared

Unmarried couples can break up at will, and court intervention is only available to resolve specific disputes over title to specific property, child custody type issues, and child support type issues, which married couples if they broke up would address in a divorce case. If unmarried couples resolve all issues of property division, child custody, and child support by mutual agreement without ever having resorted to court intervention, court involvement in their break up is not required at all. As noted here:

In response to the increase in cohabitation, several legal changes were made in the UK in recent years. In Scotland, the Family Law (Scotland) Act 2006 provides cohabitants with some limited rights. [ed. England does not currently have similar legislation in force.]

In addition, since 2003 in England and Wales, 2002 in Northern Ireland, and 2006 in Scotland, an unmarried father has parental responsibility if he is listed on the birth certificate. . . .

While 49% of cohabiting couples that aren't married or in a civil partnership believe they have rights under a 'common law marriage', common law marriage has no legal standing in England and Wales. Cohabiting couples aren't automatic beneficiaries or have protections regarding non-joint bank accounts, mortgages, tenancies or pensions, unless the other person is explicitly mentioned as a joint account holder or in the terms as a beneficiary, for example in the event of death.

Notable Legal Implications Of Marriage In England and Wales

I'll list only a sampling of the legal incidents of marriage which are now, or have historically been, among the most important (some of which have been repealed but are mentioned because many people are not aware that the historic legal situation is no longer the case):

1. Paternity

Marriage creates a strong legal presumption (which is in some cases rebuttable) that children born to a married woman are children of her husband:

Until officially declared otherwise, a man is deemed to be a child’s legal father if he is married to the mother at the time of the child’s birth[.]

2. Rape

England no longer recognizes an immunity between spouses for rape. Spousal rape is a crime in England just as it would be for non-married cohabitants.

3. Duty of Support

A spouse has a duty to economically support a current spouse (beyond child support), while unmarried cohabitants do not have a duty of support to each other.

If your partner won't support you, you can ask a court to order them to support you.

When it was nearly impossible or at least very difficult to get legally divorced, this right was used in about a dozen cases a year, almost always by women, often in the form of a lawsuit seeking divortium a mensa et thoro ("separation from bed and board") in the canon law courts of the Anglican Church, usually on the basis of adultery or life threatening cruelty and usually with the woman receiving regular spousal maintenance but losing all custody of her children as a result unless there were extenuating circumstances.

These days, most spouses who are not being supported simply get divorced and receive spousal maintenance and a share of marital property (and possibly child support as well), instead, so the right to bring a lawsuit to enforce this right has largely fallen into dessitude and is rarely utilized in practice. The doctrine is mostly used to justify policies in other areas of the law that assume spouses provide economic support for each other (which they usually do even though this right is rarely enforced with lawsuits).

4. Property Rights During Marriage

During a marriage, the property rights of spouses are essentially identical to those of non-spouse cohabitants.

This is as a result of the Married Women's Property Act (1870) which abolished the doctrine of coverture (which treated a husband and wife as a single economic unit managed by the husband) in England and Wales.

During the marriage title to property controls who owns and controls property in England and Wales for the vast majority of purposes for members of the married couple, just as it does for unmarried cohabiting couples, even though title may be disregarded for married couples in a divorce, and in some cases in connection with inheritance rights.

As discussed in Part 9 below, England and Wales does not have a "community property" regime that is effective during the course of a marriage (although it might recognize the "community property" character of property acquired during a marriage while the couple lived in a community property jurisdiction for some purposes.

5. Income Taxation

Marriage has income tax implications in he U.K.:

If you’re married or in a civil partnership

You may be able to claim Marriage Allowance to reduce your partner’s tax if your income is less than the standard Personal Allowance.

6. Government Benefits, Pensions, And Employee Benefits

Marriage is relevant to rights under some government benefit including "welfare", programs, but the details are too numerous to set forth here. Likewise, marital status is frequently relevant to the rules for public and private pension plans, and sometimes for other public and private sector employee benefit plans as well.

One isolated area where cohabitation can confer rights similar to marriage, however, is in English Social Security laws:

Social security law

Living together has been part of the law since the beginning of the modern welfare state in 1948. The term "Living together as husband and wife" was introduced from 4 April 1977 to mean the same as "cohabiting with a man as his wife" which was used before that date. The term is now "living together as a married couple".

To be regarded as "living together as a married couple" or cohabitating, there are various questions to consider. The question of cohabitation should take into consideration all the six questions, and looking at the relationship as a whole.

Additional details on the six factor test for recognition of an unmarried couple for English Social Security benefits purposes can be found here.

7. Court Testimony

Historically, England had a privilege that excluded from evidence in court cases certain testimony from spouses against each other and certain testimony about confidential communications between spouses. This has now been abolished:

The form of privilege, restricting the admissibility into evidence of communications between spouses during a marriage, existed in English law from 1853 until it was abolished in 1968 (for civil cases) and in 1984 (for criminal cases).

The testimonial part of the spousal privilege was mostly abolished in the late 1800s with further clarification through 1984 in certain domestic violence settings.

8. Immigration

Spousal status is relevant to an immigration application when one spouse is a British subject and the other is not:

Also known as a UK marriage visa, a spouse visa allows married partners of UK citizens to immigrate to the UK because they are married to someone who is 'settled in the UK' - i.e. a person who is ordinarily resident in the UK and has no immigration restrictions on how long they can stay in the UK.

9. Rights Upon A Divorce Or Breakup

As a practical matter, differing rights if the couple breaks up are the single most important difference between being a cohabiting unmarried couple with kids and a married couple with kids.

The difference matters because the less affluent member of the couple gets a much better deal upon a break up if the couple is married than if they couple is not married. The strong rights of a less affluent member of a couple primarily matter because this makes it economically safer for a woman in married couple who has kids to sacrifice her own economic prospects to focus on those kids than for a woman who is an unmarried cohabitant. This also matters because the economic incentive for a husband not to divorce a wife who is economically dependent upon him is much stronger than the economic incentive for an unmarried cohabitant boyfriend/father to not break up with an unmarried cohabitant girlfriend/mother.

Upon divorce, a divorced spouse is entitled to share of the couple's property and/or spousal maintenance (a.k.a. alimony) in excess of child support, which are far in excess of the rights of a non-spouse cohabitant, especially in the case of a long marriage in which the couple's wealth has grown during the marriage.

Non-spousal cohabitants who split up divide their property based upon title to property and have no spousal maintenance obligations to each other so only child support (if applicable) is at issue. Child support and custody are still present between unmarried cohabitants or co-parents who have children together.

In the arena of property division, England does not have what in the U.S. is called "community property". 

There is, instead, a distinction between marital property acquired during the marriage and separate property, and England and Wales has an "equitable division" regime rather than one in which there is a fixed percentage right of each spouse, and marital property rights remain inchoate (rather than vested and presenting existing) until death or divorce. If a property settlement is not reached by mutual agreement a court considers factors including:

• Each partner’s individual assets
• Contributions to the marriage or civil partnership, both financially and emotionally
• Time out of the workplace
• Earning capacity
• Standard of living before the break-up
• Requirements such as catering for disabilities
• Length of marriage
• How old you both are

In practice, the fact that a couple has children together also tends to influence what is equitable in a property division.

The presence or absence of spousal maintenance greatly impacts the practical effect of a split up for a couple with children who are married v. a couple with children who are not married. A marital property settlement and spousal maintenance in addition to child support makes life a lot easier for a less affluent ex-spouse than child support alone.

10. Inheritance

Upon death, a surviving spouse has inheritance rights different from and greater than a non-spouse cohabitant, in the estate of the deceased spouse.

Generally speaking, if there is no will, a spouse has significant inheritance rights, while a non-spouse cohabitant does not. There are also legal limitations on the extent to which a spouse can be denied an inheritance even if there is a will.

While in general, a spouse has testamentary freedom to disinherit a spouse in English law (unlike the vqst majority of U.S. and civil law jurisdictions), in England, the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependents) Act (1975) "sets out categories of people that have the legal standing to challenge another person's Will on the basis that they have not been left reasonable financial provision."

Spouses also have greater rights at death than unmarried cohabitants with regard to management of a probate estate of a decedent partner and disposition of a partner's body, at least in the absence of estate planning documents to the contrary.

Transfers to a spouse at death are also exempt from inheritance taxation.

Marital status is also highly relevant in England to the rules for succession to aristocratic titles and for the titles of someone who is married to someone with an aristocratic title. While English law normally makes little or no distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children (which is a function of whether their parents were married), in the area of succession to aristocratic titles and eligibility for titles that imply marriage to someone with an aristocratic title (like the former Queen's Consort), the distinction between married couples and their children, and unmarried couples and their children is very important.

11. Incapacity

Unlike most U.S. jurisdictions, marriage does not, in and of itself, grant strong rights relative to a cohabitating partner, to a role in medical decision making or guardianship proceedings in England.

An adult's "next of kin" is generally their spouse or civil partnership partner, which is not automatic in the case of a cohabitating partner. But, the rights associated with next of kin status are generally limited to notice or information until another basis to be involved in decision-making is established:

As far as the law is concerned next of kin means nothing with the exception of children aged under 18. The next of kin of a child under 18 may be legally entitled to make decisions for or on behalf of the child.

The term usually means your nearest blood relative. In the case of a married couple or a civil partnership it usually means their husband or wife.

Next of kin is a title that can be given, by you, to anyone from your partner to blood relatives and even friends. It is also possible to name more than one person as your next of kin. This is a title that is primarily used in order for emergency services to know who to keep informed about an individual’s condition and treatment.

This means that you have no legal rights as a result of this title. This can create difficulties if you haven’t put additional measures in place to manage your relative or loved one’s affairs. If you do not have any legal rights, you cannot make decisions on their behalf.

Similarly, pretty much anyone can be appointed to be an adult's guardian in England, with no absolute priority for a spouse or a blood family member over a cohabitating partner or any other person expressing interest in the care of an incapacitated person. Marriage is just one factor among many considered in a fairly wholistic manner when deciding between competing applications to serve as someone's guardian.

Cohabitation Post-Divorce By A Formerly Married Couple

A married couple with children that gets divorced and then cohabits post-divorce are not on quite the same footing as a cohabiting couple with children who have never married.

The starting point in such a couple for the rights of the former spouses vis-a-vis each other begins with the divorce decree and any incorporated settlement between the spouses in connection with the divorce. Provisions related to child custody and child support may be modified over time as the children grow and circumstances change. In some unusual but not unheard of circumstances, spousal support duties arising from the prior marriage can be imposed long after the divorce even if spousal support was not immediately imposed at the time of the divorce or was only nominal at that time.

Provisions related to court ordered child custody arrangements, child support, and spousal support normally continue in force until they are spent by the their own terms (e.g. when the children become adults or spousal support established for a fixed time period ends), are modified by a later court order, or the couple remarries.

It is uncommon, but not completely unheard of, for the children of a couple for whom child custody arrangements have been imposed between unmarried coparents or in a divorce at one point, to ever cease to be subject to some sort of court order related to child custody.

Court orders related to children or spousal maintenance cannot normally be adjusted by mutual agreement after a divorce without court intervention.

Remarriage will generally abrogate and cause to become void all provisions in a divorce decree, settlement, or post-divorce court order related to the children, and all provisions with spousal maintenance, while the property ownership and debt obligations of the parties to the remarriage restart from scratch at whatever state they were in immediately prior to the remarriage. Sometimes a remarriage after a divorce legitimatizes the paternity of children born between the marriages.

First Marriages Of A Cohabiting Couple With Children

When a cohabiting couple with children marry, they have all of the incidents of a married couple.

Sometimes, but not always, this will help establish the father's paternity of their children. Court orders related to the custody and child support of their shared children will usually be dissolved (I don't know if any formal legal action is required to do this or not).

Property acquired by the couple prior to marrying while cohabiting will generally be separate property owned by the spouse who was in title to that property prior to getting married.

In a subsequent divorce of that couple, the length of the marriage will not include the full time of their cohabitation, but their cohabitation prior to marriage is a factor which a divorce judge is not prohibited from considering entirely in making an equitable division of marital property and in awarding spousal maintenance.

Zoning Laws Have Seriously Depressed U.K. New Home Construction

A zoning law adopted in 1947 in the U.K. has dramatically reduced the number of new homes built there since then. 

The U.K. is at the bottom of the heap in new housing construction in Europe as a result and this have been gradually and less gradually getting worse since the new zoning law was adopted in 1947. Only Ireland has fared comparably poorly. See also here discussing the same report.

International Polling On The Ukraine War A Year Later And More

Most of the results of a new multinational survey of public opinions about Russia and the Ukraine war are what one would expect. But, the extent to which India and Turkey lean towards Russia was somewhat surprising. 

The view that Russia is seen as stronger in China, India, and Turkey is particularly hard to fathom.

A new survey – of 10 European countries, as well as India, Turkey, China and Russia – released this week by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) found that, despite the challenges of the past year, Europeans remain united in their backing for Ukraine, and in their wanting to see Russia defeated in the conflict.

This is reflected, most notably, by the togetherness of Europeans on the bloc’s energy supply. ECFR’s survey shows that majorities in the surveyed EU-9 support a continued embargo on Russian fuel, despite the real-world harm it is causing in some national economies. 

It is also telling from citizens’ perceptions of Russia, one year on, that upwards of two-thirds of those of the EU-9 (66 percent) and Great Britain (77 percent) see Russia as an “adversary” or “rival” of their country – a position that puts them in line with the US (where 71 percent noted this view). . . . 

In Europe and the US, for instance, the prevailing view among respondents is that Ukraine needs to regain all its territory, even if that means a longer war. The opposite is the case in China, Turkey and India, where most respondents prefer a rapid end to the war, even if that would see Ukraine ceding territory to Russia.

The reputation of Russia, almost a year into the Kremlin’s so-called three-day “special operation”, also varies wildly.

ECFR’s survey found that three quarters of respondents in China (76 percent), India (77 percent) and Turkey (73 percent) now see Russia as stronger, or as strong as it was a year ago.

In some cases, too, the view that Russia is a global “ally” or “partner” of their country is stratospheric – India (80 percent), China (79 percent), Turkey (69 percent) – a stark contrast to the responses of EU-9 and the rest of the West, where Russia is not only viewed as fundamentally weaker, but described as “aggressive” and “untrustworthy” by pluralities.

From Express (a U.K. periodical).

Other developments a year after the start of the Ukraine War include the tightening of U.S. sanctions on Russia and bipartisan expressions of political support for Ukraine from both Democrats and about 50 Republicans in Congress including the U.S. Senate's minority leader.

But, the New York Times reports that the war has allowed Putin to consolidate power and crush liberal and Western influences in Russian society at home, despite the debacle of military outcomes that even the people most downbeat about Russia's military strength wouldn't have guessed could occur.

Guns, Homicides, Suicides, and Drugs

The Big Picture

Gun control and drug policy are two areas where overwhelming empirical evidence shows that liberal policies on these issues would profoundly increase public welfare, and that conservative policies on these issues are deeply misguided and do profound harm without providing meaningful benefits to society. 

The misguided status quo policies in the United States on these issues are also among the most important reasons that U.S. life expectancies are lower than in other developed countries. While the raw numbers of deaths caused by these policies is not extremely high relative to diseases that cause deaths, because they results in deaths of much younger people on average than other leading causes of death, their impact on U.S. life expectancies is outsized.

Weak gun control laws are a root cause of about 75-80% of the homicides and more than half of all suicides in the United States. 

Insufficiently strong gun control laws cause about 30,000 more deaths per year in the United States than it would have if strong gun control laws were in place. 

These preventable deaths take a particularly strong toll on people who are more than one year old and are not yet elderly, who otherwise tend not to die of "natural causes" and are the leading cause of death for children in the United States. These deaths disproportionately kill men and racial and ethnic minorities in the United States, especially black adolescent boys, and young black men. Deaths due to weak gun control laws also disproportionately kill young white men in the South and in rural America.

This is also the reason that the United States leads the world in its number of mass shootings. And, the evidence is overwhelming that widespread gun ownership does not meaningfully mitigate mass shootings that do occur, and does not prevent mass shootings. Instead, it makes them more common.

The criminal justice system does not deter mass shootings. They continue to occur, even though it is widely known that almost every mass shooter (98% of whom are men): (1) commits suicide, (2) dies in the act as law enforcement tries to shop him or arrest him, (3) is convicted of multiple murders and remains in prison for life (or in very rare cases is executed a decade or more later), or (4) is declared insane or incompetent and is involuntarily committed and never walks free again. Almost no mass shooters escape death shortly after or maximal criminal justice system punishments. The clearance rates for these cases is almost perfect. Because of this fact, the only way to reduce the number of mass shootings is to prevent them, and stricter gun control laws are well proven to greatly reduce mass shootings.

Consideration of homicides and suicides alone fails to consider the way that the pervasive threat of armed crime triggers excessive uses of force by law enforcement and the militarization of law enforcement, sometimes resulting in unjustified law enforcement killings, in legally unjustified killings by civilians claiming to be acting in self-defense, in justified law enforcement and self-defense killings that could have been prevented if guns were less widely available, and in riots causing mass property damage, injuries, and sometimes deaths. These circumstances claim hundreds of lives each year and also lead to hundreds of law enforcement deaths of each year.

Of course, this doesn't even begin to consider the harms associated with gun involved crimes such as non-fatal shootings, extortion, robberies, burglaries, and rapes that are committed with firearms. The rates at which these aggravated crimes would be committed would be significantly reduced if strict gun control were in place, although comparative crime rate studies suggest that the reductions would not be nearly as great as the reductions in the rates of homicides.

The evidence is also overwhelming that the widespread availability of armed self-defense does not significantly prevent crimes from taking place, or mitigate the harm associated with crimes. Instead, gun ownership increases the rate at which gun owners and non-gun owners alike are victims of crimes and commit suicide. Armed self-defense and armed defense of others does succeed, at least partially, in a tiny number of cases, but the benefits of armed self-defense in the rare cases where it is used are profoundly overwhelmed by the harms that widespread gun availability facilitates, even to people who are generally law abiding when they buy firearms who purchase them in good faith solely for the purpose of defending themselves, their homes, and their families.

Widely available firearms, by making crimes more serious, also drives mass incarceration in the United States, by turning people who otherwise would have committed less serious crimes into people who commit serious violent crimes. People serving long sentences for violent crimes make up a large share of all prison inmates and would make up a significantly smaller share of prison inmates in a world with strict gun control.

Weak gun control laws in the United States and the prohibition rather than regulation of controlled substances in the United States are also a leading cause of homicides and other gun crimes in Canada, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Strong gun control laws in the United States would save tens of thousands of lives each year elsewhere in the Americas.

The facts that countries with strict gun control laws like the U.K. and Japan have healthy democratic systems, that guns and threats of violence are increasingly being used to thwart the democratic process, and the results of comparative and historical studies of the impact of armed populations on tyranny and the democratic process, all soundly demonstrate that the political theory underlying the Second Amendment is profoundly incorrect as an empirical matter.

Unequivocal evidence clearly shows that the United States, and the Western Hemisphere more generally, would be profoundly better off if the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution were repealed, and the United States then adopted strict national gun control laws along the lines of those current in place in the United Kingdom and Japan.

In short, the Second Amendment is a suicide pact.

A policy towards illegal drugs and unauthorized use of prescription drugs that deals with drugs as a public health problem, rather than treating this as primarily a criminal justice problem would also greatly reduce ever rising number of drug overdose deaths in the United States. It would also profoundly reduce organized crime and gang activity and greatly reduce property crimes committed to fund illegal drug purchases. In the year 2021, 106,699 people in the United States died of drug overdoes (mostly of opiates), and this would be profoundly reduced if the United States instead took a public health approach to the problem. Perhaps 90% of these deaths could be prevented with better drug policies. This has been convincingly demonstrated in places that have shifted fully or partially from a war on drugs criminal justice approach to a public health approach to the problem of substance abuse such as France, Switzerland, and Portugal, and in places that have legalized recreational marijuana. The illegal drug trade that U.S. controlled substance laws facilitate also fuels organized crime worldwide, often making it a powerful rival to the civilian governments of the countries where it is present.

This post addresses many, but not all of the claims above, others of which have been addressed in previous posts at this blog.

Gun Control Laws Compared

The U.S. has the most lax gun control law in the world other than Ethiopia and Yemen (Switzerland is lax, but not as lax as the U.S., Yemen and Ethiopia are also more lax than they seems as Yemen is in the middle of a civil war and Ethiopia is the midst of a lower grade military insurgency).

The U.K. and Japan have the most strict gun control laws in the world, with Japan's regulation of guns being more strict and more effectively enforced, in part because the borders of the U.K. are more open to countries with less strict gun control laws. Japan also might tightly regulates bladed weapons than the U.K. does.

Homicide Rates Compared

How does this affect homicide rates in the respective countries?

The lion's share of the difference in homicide rates between the U.S., U.K., and Japan can be attributed to gun control.

Total Homicide Rates Per 100,000 people:

* U.S.    4.7 (74% involving guns)

* U.K.    1.17 (5% involving guns, i.e. 35 gun homicides per year).

* Japan   1.02 (less than 1% involving guns, i.e. 9 gun deaths including suicides and accidents per year).

Gun Homicide Rate Per 100,000 people:

* U.S.    3.48 (about 58 times as great as the U.K.)

* U.K.:  0.06 (more than 6 times more than Japan)

* Japan: less than 0.01 (more than 348 times less than the U.S.)

The U.S. would have about 11,300 fewer gun homicides per year if it had the U.K. gun homicide rate instead of its own.

More generally (involving slightly different rates due to age adjustments and data from different years):

Non-Gun Homicide Rates Per 100,000 people:

* U.S. 1.22 (21% more than Japan and 10% more than the U.K.)

* U.K. 1.11 (10% more than Japan)

* Japan 1.01

The U.S. would have about 363 fewer non-gun homicides per year (about one less homicide per day, nationwide) if it had the U.K. non-gun homicide rate rather than its own non-gun homicide rate.

Some of the difference in the non-gun homicide rate between the U.S. and the U.K. and Japan (but probably less than 10%), may reflect the inferior health care system of the U.S., which unlike the U.K. and Japan is not universal causing people who need emergency medical care to avoid hospitals.

Some of the difference in the non-gun homicide rate between the U.K. and Japan (but probably not more than 10%) may reflect stricter controls on bladed weapons in Japan than in the U.K.

The fact that the population of Japan is older than the populations of the U.K. and the U.S. may account for some of the difference.

Another factor may  be greater economic inequality and higher poverty rates in the U.K. Economic inequality and poverty are higher in the U.S. than either the U.K. or Japan.

But, all other factors explaining the differences in homicide rates between these countries pale in comparison to gun control.

Mass Shootings Compared

Unsurprisingly, the U.S. also (almost) leads the world in mass shootings:

Mass shootings are a fairly modest share of all murders committed with guns in the United States (about 2.6%):

The Gun Violence Archive, an online database of gun violence incidents in the U.S., defines mass shootings as incidents in which four or more people are shot, even if no one was killed (again excluding the shooters). Using this definition, 513 people died in these incidents in 2020.

But mass shootings have a disproportionate impact on our public sense of security, because they are comparatively random and unpredictable.

There are no mass shooting in Japan, which has a population of about 125 million people.

The U.S. has:

about twenty-five times as many mass shootings per capita as the U.K., 

about twelve times as many as Italy, 

about eight times as many as Australia, 

about five times as many as Germany, 

about three times as many as Canada, 

about two and three-quarters times as many as Austria, 

about two and two-thirds times as many as the Netherlands, 

about two and a half times as many as France, 

one and three-quarters times as many as Belgium, 

about one point six times as many as the Czech Republic, and 

33% more the Switzerland. 

Finland actually has 80% more mass shootings per capita than the U.S., in part due to random variation in a very small number over a twenty-one year period in a country with a small population (and probably involves fewer victims per capita than the U.S.).

Per capita rates are also problematic and not as statistically significant in countries with only one mass shooting during a twenty-one year period when the country has a small population, where random chance at a given rate and "rounding error" type issues come into play.

Gun Suicides

Stricter gun control would also greatly reduce firearm suicides without corresponding increases in suicides from other causes. 

According to the Pew Center:

In 2020, 54% of all gun-related deaths in the U.S. were suicides (24,292), while 43% were murders (19,384), according to the CDC. The remaining gun deaths that year were unintentional (535), involved law enforcement (611) or had undetermined circumstances (400). . . .

Nearly eight-in-ten (79%) U.S. murders in 2020 – 19,384 out of 24,576 – involved a firearm. That marked the highest percentage since at least 1968, the earliest year for which the CDC has online records. A little over half (53%) of all suicides in 2020 – 24,292 out of 45,979 – involved a gun, a percentage that has generally remained stable in recent years. 

As noted by the Kaiser Family Foundation:

Variation in state-level suicide rates is largely driven by rates of suicide by firearm.  

Suicides involving firearms vary from the lowest rate of 1.8 per 100,000 in New Jersey and Massachusetts to a high of 20.9 per 100,000 in Wyoming, representing an absolute difference of 19.1. 

In contrast, the rate of suicide by other means is more stable across states, ranging from a low of 4.6 in Mississippi to a high of 11.4 in South Dakota, representing an absolute difference of 6.8. . . .

More than twice as many suicides by firearm occur in states with the fewest gun laws, relative to states with the most laws. . . .

Taking a look at suicide deaths starting from the date of a handgun purchase and comparing them to people who did not purchase handguns, another study found that people who purchased handguns were more likely to die from suicide by firearm than those who did not–with men 8 times more likely and women 35 times more likely compared to non-owners.

Non-firearm suicides rates are relatively stable across states suggesting that other types of suicides are not more likely in areas where guns are harder to access.

Similarly:

A study by the Harvard School of Public Health of all 50 U.S. states reveals a powerful link between rates of firearm ownership and suicides. Based on a survey of American households conducted in 2002, HSPH Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management Matthew Miller, Research Associate Deborah Azrael, and colleagues at the School’s Injury Control Research Center (ICRC), found that in states where guns were prevalent—as in Wyoming, where 63 percent of households reported owning guns—rates of suicide were higher. The inverse was also true: where gun ownership was less common, suicide rates were also lower. 

Spillover Effects

Stricter gun control laws in the U.S. would also significantly reduce homicide rates in Canada, the Caribbean, and Latin America, where a very significant share of all gun homicides are committed with guns smuggled into those countries illegally from the United States, where guns are easy to obtain. 

For example, according to a July 2022 article, in "Ontario, Canada's most populous province . . . when handguns involved in crimes were traced in 2021, they were overwhelmingly - 85% of the time - found to have come from the United States. . . . 70% of all traced guns used in crimes in Ontario came from the United States, while so far this year the U.S. share has risen to 73%, according to the data from the Ontario police's Firearms Analysis and Tracing Enforcement (FATE) program."

A significant share of homicides in Latin America are also attributable to the trade in illegal drugs involving drug cartels and other forms of organized crime from Latin American to meet U.S. demand, which would be greatly reduced if those drugs were legalized but regulated in the United States.

Taking a global view, the six countries with the highest age-adjusted rates of firearm homicides are:

1. El Salvador
2. Venezuela
3. Guatemala
4. Colombia
5. Honduras
6. Brazil

Research has found high levels of homicides in these countries are associated with drug cartels, the illegal trade in firearms from the US, and firearms flowing to civilians after conflicts end, as summarized in the Global Burden of Disease study.

From here.

Thus, stricter gun control in the United States and more enlightened controlled substances laws in the United States would greatly reduce homicides almost everywhere in the Americas.

As an aside, the linked Global Burden of Disease study concludes that the drug trade and smuggled firearms from the U.S. have a much smaller impact on suicide rates in Latin America than these factors do on homicide rates there. 

There is good reason to think that this is also true in Canada.