A story in the National Post today caught my attention: here. Unfortunately, violent gun crime in the Toronto area is on the rise, and as today’s article tells, resulted in the brutal killing of a “good neighbour” with a social conscience, so to speak. Once again, however, those in authority and responsible for reigning in gun violence fail to rightfully point the finger for this age old crime — hmmm, murder — at the one responsible for it. Once again, paternal government fails to see that guns do not commit crimes, people do; that if you are looking for the root causes of gun violence, start with the responsibility of those who commit it. The means that are used to carry out a crime are always secondary.
People are responsible for the crimes that they commit, and as some have said, it is what makes one fully human. If liberal democratic government is to serve any purpose, it should be to maintain the dignity of mankind by making individuals responsible for the choices they make. All can look to the good neighbour, tragically slain, and see it for the tragedy that it is because his community, his family, has lost a great force for good. But like wise, all can see in his killer, the tragedy of one overtaken by evil, consumed by himself, a wilful murderer. And furthermore, might I propose that a society that fails to make this distinction, is a doomed society; doomed to further increases in gun violence with worse to come.
A good article on Canada’s reaction to increasing gun violence — the blame guns, thereby, blame America response — was offered by John Lott of National Review Online. Lott writes,
If you have a problem, it’s often easier to blame someone else rather than deal with it. And with Canada’s murder rate rising 12 percent last year and a recent rash of murders by gangs in Toronto and other cities, it’s understandable that Canadian politicians want a scapegoat. That at least was the strategy Canada’s premiers took when they met last Thursday with the new U.S. ambassador to Canada, David Wilkins, and spent much of their time blaming their crime problems on guns smuggled in from the United States.
Of course, there is a minor problem with the attacks on the U.S. Canadians really don’t know what the facts are, and the reason is simple: Despite billions of dollars spent on the Canada’s gun-registration program and the program’s inability to solve crime, the government does not how many crime-guns were seized in Canada, let alone where those guns came from. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police reported in late July that they “cannot know if [the guns] were traceable or where they might have been traced.” Thus, even if smuggled guns were an important problem, the Canadian government doesn’t know if it is worse now than in the past.
Even in Toronto, which keeps loose track of these numbers, Paul Culver, a senior Toronto Crown Attorney, claims that guns from the U.S. are a “small part” of the problem.
There is another more serious difficulty: You don’t have to live next to the United States to see how hard it is to stop criminals from getting guns. The easy part is getting law-abiding citizens to disarm; the hard part is getting the guns from criminals. Drug gangs that are firing guns in places like Toronto seem to have little trouble getting the drugs that they sell and it should not be surprising that they can get the weapons they need as well.
The experiences in the U.K. and Australia, two island nations whose borders are much easier to monitor, should also give Canadian gun controllers some pause. The British government banned handguns in 1997 but recently reported that gun crime in England and Wales nearly doubled in the four years from 1998-99 to 2002-03.
…
With Canada’s reported violent-crime rate of 963 per 100,000 in 2003, a rate about twice the U.S.’s (which is 475), Canada’s politicians are understandably nervous.
Lott spends the rest of this article making the argument that because the U.S. has “liberalised” gun laws, America is now experiencing a record fall in violent crime, while countries with stringent — what I would call, “paternal” — gun laws are experiencing record increases in violent crime.
His argument makes sense on common sense grounds. People know they have a free will, they know they are responsible for the choices they make, good or bad. When government tells people the lie that something else is also responsible for their crime — i.e. positive exposure to guns as a child, the possession of a gun itself — and that more government is needed to solve this grandiose first cause, many start to believe it—those with common sense do not. But it is this “many”, those who want to believe that something magical is to blame for human error, that now facilitate greater evil; or in this case, an increase in gun violence. Innocent suckers fail to demand the means to protect themselves and those they care for, more liberal and legal gun access. Violent suckers are fully aware of this, coming to see guns as further distinguishing themselves from everyone else—especially, their victims. With paternal government and stringent gun laws, it is harder for law abiding citizens to get guns and criminals have more incentive to possess them in their “rage against the machine” than ever before. And might I add, the illegal smuggling of guns becomes more lucrative and wide-spread as government clamps down.
In short, the gun becomes something special, a mark of authority that only criminals and police possess. Communities, by and large, lack the supposed respectability that comes with gun possession, they are but pawns to be intimidated with crime or patted on the head for their good behaviour. Society is no longer responsible for the crime corroding its very structure and stability, the lie is peddled that responsibility lay with an unthinking material object. Government becomes the only response of society towards crime, the criminals a privileged class in rebellion to it.
If the said “good neighbour” was motivated by anything, it was the belief that ordinary people can take a stand in their communities and make a difference. The failure of government to see that this is where good government starts — individual responsibility rather than from what politicians say and their objectifiable scapegoats — leads to the success of criminals in seeing communities as indeed defenseless pawns to be manipulated, to an increase in violence crime.
Might I suggest that “good neighbours” need street cred with criminals, in this case, guns!
Robert McClelland wrote:
Lott’s article is garbage.
Your take on crime is Canada is garbage.
Posted on 26-Aug-05 at 1:40 pm | Permalink
George Freeman wrote:
Anyone with half a brain knows that stats can be fixed, even interpreted in different shades of light. To this extent, stats can’t be read with divine promise; take them for what they are, stats. Stats must be given a rationale, neither of which you nor your cited articles offered. As far as I understand, and understand the people of Toronto understand, violent crime is a growing problem. Apparently, it is giving Canada’s premiers enough angst that they felt it necessary to raise the matter with the U.S. ambassador in Banff.
I have provided a case against stringent gun control, would you mind providing the case for it? It seems to me that Canada’s gun laws lack sufficient rationale to justify such aggressive constricting of the liberty of law abiding citizens to own guns. I’m not saying we don’t need gun laws, I’m saying that our current gun laws are irresponsible. They don’t sufficiently address personal responsibility, they only serve to demonize guns. It seems to me that murder is murder, marginally made easier whether you use a gun or not. I fail to see how pegging responsibility for murder on the weapon rather than the assailant addresses the problem. Guns are part of the problem in Toronto, that is if you consider thrugs to be rational actors reacting to them and to the current gun law regime. But guns are not inherently bad, they can serve the useful purpose of self-defense—so good guys do have a reason to have them. There is also something to be said for stringent regulation growing the black market and making it harder for law abiding citizens to possess guns. It seems to me that stringent gun laws only increase the “status symbol” quality of a gun for a thug—regular people don’t generally possess them under such a regime. If thugs know that regular people don’t generally possess guns, guns they can use to fight back with, then those regular people become easier targets for them—and thugs know this.
Please, show us your stuff Mr. McClelland.
Posted on 26-Aug-05 at 2:45 pm | Permalink
Peter Rempel wrote:
Right on, George. Sign me up for the pitchfork posse. Anything to keep the state out of these affairs.
Posted on 27-Aug-05 at 8:32 am | Permalink
WL Mackenzie wrote:
My wife lobbied in Ottawa for the firearms owners of Canada when Rock was ramming his still born gun laws down parliament’s throat. The things she heard first habd fron deputy ministers and senior bureaucrats should send a chill down the spine of any Canaduan who values civil freedoms.
Back in 98 when the implimentation was stalled, it was admitted the gun laws were not to control crime but to control civilians…to deviously disarm them with a spider’s web of charter violating regualtion and taxation..then when firearms owners numbers were sufficiently low ebnough through people dropping out due to over regulation and costs and criminal indemnity, they will start banning one class of guns at a time …without confiscation….this was the sole purpose of having a registry….the gun registry is a lost leader…a diversion…the real danger is in the licencing…there is a list of every gun owner ( future subversive) in Canada….this is all they need. My wife even saw samples of the letters the justice dept. lawyers were crafting to send to gun owners demanding surrender of their guns in certain classes of firearms.
The purpose for this trance-like liberal drive for covert civilian disarmament lies in the core of utopian global socialism and was enunciated by senataor Carstairs. The new Firearms Act was intended, from the outset, to be integral to the liberal party’s party’s plans to: “socially re-engineer Canada.” As she let slip at Community Legal Education Associations conference in January 1996.
Guns are favored by rural males, western canadian culture and are associated with self-reliance,….independence from the flods of the nanny state’s skirts and are therefore contrary to the Liberal Party’s desire for a feminized and dependent nation.
The secondary motive for registration is simply a crass political calculation that there are more urban female votes to be gained by attacking “masculine” culture (gun culture) than there are liberal rural male votes to be lost. MSM polling of Canadian gun-control supporters during the gun control/registry debate repeatedly showed them to be starkley ignorant of Canada’s existant strict gun-control laws. When pressed to give accountable, accurate answers the main gun registry civilian lobbyists; Heidi Rathjen, Wendy Cukier and Christina DeVilliers (note the feminist-activist content here. note also their funding was federal through back door revenue washing)admitted their main motive for wanting more gun control is not the expectation that the law will make people safer from crime and criminals or mad men like Lepine, but their desire to express in law their antipathy for “the gun culture”(read: male agression and “macho” values).They have all ( including Rock, MacLellan and Chretien) admitted the law will not deter crime or criminals……then they leave the rest blank fo us to speculate on. If 2 billion is being spent not to control crime and criminals then WHAT, exactly, is it accomplishing. Well, I see it as a contingency tool that government has installed to deal with potential civil disobedience to some profound social engineering they have planned in the future.
In short, Canadian gun control is a sort of slow-motion hate crime, perpetrated by the government. The real purpose is to repress a minority whom the government dislikes. The registry is the ultimate tool to pull the pin on ideological ( armed) civilian opposition if it ever comes to this…but just the same Ottawa Liberals fear armed civilians who have not embraced nanny state dependency so they have put this in place.
“
Posted on 28-Aug-05 at 7:58 am | Permalink
George Freeman wrote:
Thanks for your insightful comments.
For rural people, I don’t think guns are necessarily a “culture” nor are they particularly a big deal. Rural people have a use for guns, be it hunting or protecting livestock, not to mention “self-defence”—an under-rated virtue in Canada. I really don’t think ordinary people, be they rural or urban, spend a heck of a lot of time thinking or conversing about guns; they have them, they use them, so what. In contrast, these urban thugs causing the increase in violent crime rates love their guns, guns are very much an ego booster and status symbol for them. And I think there is something to be said for the commonality of guns, as is the case in rural areas, making them less significant and less of a status symbol.
What bugs me the most about Canada’s gun laws is the unthinkingness and lack of nuance that informs them. Now your wife would likely know better than I, but I don’t think the federal government is being particularly vindictive towards law abiding gun owners because they are afraid gun owners are the only ones that can oppose their authority—although this may very well be the case. I think the more persuasive explanation is that, as you mention, the federal Liberals are playing to a certain constituency of illthinking voters and are informed by an illthought roster of ideologically bent academics. And again, as you mention, it is the abdication of individual responsibility in favour of the “nanny” state — what I have called the paternal state, or others would call statism — that is the bias the Liberals are playing towards.
But this is not an irreconcilable problem, just a difficult one to fix. What interested me in this topic in the first place was the “good neighbour” gunned down in Toronto, the explanation by police there that this tragedy was indicative of “gun culture”—little emphasis on the individual thug. So I have here tried to express my frustration that this explanation is thoroughly inadequate.
This “good neighbour” was a hero of sorts; a community leader with a large family, one with a vested interest is living with his family and friends in a safe community. However, what distinguished him as a “good neighbour” was that he possessed the courage to stand-up, on his own two feet, against gang violence and gun related crimes. Admittedly, I don’t know much about his political views and for all I know he might have been beating the drums against “gun culture”, but I have to admit he was indeed a great man! He saw wrongs in the world, knew that no one else would get to the heart of those wrongs, and so decided to lead his community in taking a stand against crime. For this stand he paid with his life!
If you want a solution to the “nanny” state bias, to an expectation of dependency on the state, the reality is that Canada needs more guys like this good neighbour. Canada needs people to wake up to common sense, to stop shirking responsibility, to stop accepting lame vacuous explanations from police forces for the crimes in their communities.
As for gun control being part of this problem, Canada’s stringent approach has made guns far too exceptional. If more ordinary people possessed them, gangs might not be so prolific. Thugs would not get the same status from possessing a gun, and the presence of guns in ordinary homes signals a certain willingness to defend those homes. It seems pretty intuitive that solving crime starts in the community, not with the police—communities are ulimately responsible for their own welfare.
The police in Toronto should be ashamed of how they explained away this tragedy as a result of “guns”, rather than the result of warped individual who had made bad choices in life. Murder is committed by murderers, not their weapons, or tools of the trade!
Posted on 28-Aug-05 at 10:09 am | Permalink
Warwick wrote:
How many criminals can be jailed for $2 billion?
How many Cops can be hired for $2 billion?
How many crimes have been solved or prevented by the gun registry’s use of $2 billion?
How does harassing law abiding people stop criminals?
How does disarming the good people make them safer from the bad people? Especially when the bad people won’t disarm.
The Liberal’s non-solutions are always to spend money, harass the law abiding (even better if they’re rural tories,) create lots of government jobs and accomplish nothing. Afer all, every problem that they actually solved would no longer be able to be used as a campaign promise! For an example: You can’t promise to fix health care if it’s already fixed. So keep it broke and be the perpetual saviors of health. It works great - so long as everything is always broken.
Posted on 28-Aug-05 at 12:50 pm | Permalink
ThePolitic - Canadian Political Weblog » Guns Guns Guns - Liberals Blame Guns For Crimes wrote:
[…] I know, it’s old news now. It shouldn’t be suprising to anyone who understands the difference between guns and the criminals that committ crimes with them, but the Liberals new plan to further restrict (some call “ban”) handguns is born in ignorance and contempt for the evidence. Back in August of this year, George Freeman had a great article on this subject and I encourage everyone it go read it, People are responsible for the crimes that they commit, and as some have said, it is what makes one fully human. If liberal democratic government is to serve any purpose, it should be to maintain the dignity of mankind by making individuals responsible for the choices they make. All can look to the good neighbour, tragically slain, and see it for the tragedy that it is because his community, his family, has lost a great force for good. But like wise, all can see in his killer, the tragedy of one overtaken by evil, consumed by himself, a wilful murderer. And furthermore, might I propose that a society that fails to make this distinction, is a doomed society; doomed to further increases in gun violence with worse to come. […]
Posted on 09-Dec-05 at 9:08 am | Permalink
Gun Control * Pros * or Cons - Chazhound Dog Forum wrote:
[…] http://www.cbc.ca/news/backgro.....msact.html http://www.thepolitic.com/arch.....in-canada/ http://www.justice.gc.ca/en/news/sp/1998/fire.html […]
Posted on 10-Jun-07 at 8:00 pm | Permalink
Caveat Bettor, per Diem wrote:
changed much with gun control laws over the last 2 decades. But as far as the Republican nomination goes, a lot of non-coastal states are gun owner states, and their per capita violent crime rates are generally lower than high gun control states, andsimilarnations to the U.S. I’m not sure, if Rudy ever is able to raise his hand in January and take the oath of office, will he be able to say: … support and defend the Constitution of the United States,
Posted on 24-Aug-07 at 3:39 pm | Permalink