For each of the following passages, evaluate the reliability and plausibility of the evidence
presented, and make a judgement as to what conclusions, if any, can be drawn from it.
1 The missing money
Eight-year-olds Jane, Lucy and Sally were playing in the back garden of Jane’s home,
which is in a quiet residential street. When they heard the bell of the ice-cream van,
they ran around to the front, and Mr Black, Jane’s father, gave them money to buy
ice creams. He left his wallet on a table just inside the front door, and went back to
tidying the attic. When he came down an hour later, he found the front door open,
although he was sure he had closed it. The evening newspaper was on the doormat,
and his wallet was where he had left it, but the two £10 notes it had contained were
gone, although his credit cards remained.
The girls all said that they hadn’t been at the front of the house since they bought
the ice creams, and had not seen or heard anyone come to the house. When Lucy
and Sally had gone home, Jane told her father that whilst the girls were playing
hide-and-seek, Lucy had hidden around the side of the house, out of view of the
back garden. Jane said, ‘Lucy could have gone into the house then and taken
the money. I wouldn’t be surprised if she did. She doesn’t get much pocket money,
and once she took some money out of another girl’s purse.’
Mr Black talked to Sally’s mother who asked Sally whether any of the girls had gone
into the house that afternoon. Sally said that Jane had gone into the house through
the side door, saying that she needed to use the bathroom. Sally also said that Lucy
had been out of sight for only a minute or two before they found her. Mr Black
asked his daughter if she had gone indoors. She said she had done so to use the
bathroom next to the side door, but had not gone into the hall, so had not seen
whether the front door was open.
The boy who delivered the newspaper lived a few doors away from Jane’s house. Mr.
Black asked him if he had seen anything suspicious. He said that the door was open
when he arrived, and he just threw the paper onto the doormat, instead of putting it
through the letter box, as he usually did. He claimed that he did not notice the
wallet, and that he had not seen anyone else at the front of the house.
Mr Black decided not to talk to Lucy’s family about the disappearance of the money,
and not to report the apparent theft to the police, because the amount stolen was
relatively small.
2 Do gun laws have an impact on the rate of gun crime?
The following extracts on the topic of gun laws and/or crime are from a number of sources,
as indicated. Consider the reliability and plausibility of each of the sources in turn; then
decide whether you can draw any conclusion, based on all the evidence. An internet search
may help you to make judgements about reliability of the authors.
(i) Below are two extracts from ‘Banning guns has backfired’, written in 2004 by John R.
Lott Jr., a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of a book, The
Bias Against Guns. Various websites report that John Lott has claimed that in 98 per cent
of instances of defensive gun use, the defender merely has to brandish the gun to stop an
attack. Other academic writers dispute this finding.
The government recently reported that gun crime in England and Wales nearly
doubled in the four years from 1998–99 to 2002–03.
Crime was not supposed to rise after handguns were banned in 1997. Yet, since
1996 the serious violent crime rate has soared by 69%: robbery is up by 45% and
murders up by 54%. Before the law, armed robberies had fallen by 50% from 1993
to 1997, but as soon as handguns were banned the robbery rate shot back up, almost
back to their 1993 levels.
The 2000 International Crime Victimization Survey, the last survey done, shows
the violent crime rate in England and Wales was twice the rate in the U.S. When the
new survey for 2004 comes out, that gap will undoubtedly have widened even
further as crimes reported to British police have since soared by 35%, while declining
6% in the U.S.
. . .
Britain is not alone in its experience with banning guns. Australia has also seen its
violent crime rates soar to rates similar to Britain’s after its 1996 Port Arthur gun
control measures. Violent crime rates averaged 32% higher in the six years after the
law was passed (from1997 to 2002) than they did the year before the law in 1995.
The same comparisons for armed robbery rates showed increases of 74%.
During the 1990s, just as Britain and Australia were more severely regulating guns,
the U.S. was greatly liberalizing individuals’ abilities to carry guns. Thirty-seven of
the 50 states now have so-called right-to-carry laws that let law-abiding adults carry
concealed handguns once they pass a criminal background check and pay a fee. Only
half the states require some training, usually around three to five hours’ worth. Yet
crime has fallen even faster in these states than the national average. Overall, the
states that have experienced the fastest growth rates in gun ownership during the
1990s have experienced the biggest drops in murder rates and other violent crimes.
(ii) The following table is from ‘Some facts about guns’, which can be found on the website
for Gun Control Network, an organisation which campaigns for tighter controls on guns
of all kinds.
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