Britain is pining for the gold old days, when armed robbers were much more thoughtful and civilized.

The pattern of offences involving firearms looks more and more like that in America: random, careless shootings have replaced the carefully-planned bank robberies of old. [...]

Roger Matthews, professor of criminology at Middlesex University, says that armed robbery is becoming Americanised, both in the sense that Britain is moving towards late-night convenience store robberies, and also in the sense that anyone can do it. The rise of unskilled robbery -- junkies with guns and no previous experience -- is bad news for shop workers, who are less well trained in dealing with guns than are bank tellers; it is also bad for the police, who tend to find ill-thought-out crimes harder to solve than planned ones.

It's interesting that unskilled junkies don't seem to have much trouble getting a gun in the "gun-free" U.K. I understand that as drug addiction becomes more of a widespread problem, you would expect to see a cooresponding increase in burglaries and armed robberies. After all, junkies have to get their money from somewhere. What I don't understand is why the English consider this to be an "Americanised" problem. To me that seems like a rather bigoted thing to say.