Gun Control Myth – Canada’s Homicide Rate Increases
July 5, 2007 · By Greg Farries
The Fraser Institute’s publication, Hubris in the North, The Canadian Firearms Registry, reports:
Canada’s homicide rate and number of gang-related murders has increased since the federal government’s firearms registry and licensing program was implemented, an indication that the program has failed to improve public safety
Mauser, the report author, found
overall criminal violence and suicide rates have continued their long-term decline with the violent crime rate falling by about four per cent. Yet the homicide rate has actually increased by nine per cent since the registry was implemented. No persuasive link could be found between the firearm registry and these changes.
You can find the report at the Fraser Institute’s website.
sports, love writing violent books, love violent movies. What do YOU think all of that?s been about? Let?s take it further. If I didn?t forgive, if I didn?t see both the eternal nature of the soul … Gun Control Myth – Canada?s Homicide Rate Increases overall criminal violence and suicide rates have continued their long-term decline with the violent crime rate falling by about four per cent. Yet the homicide rate has actually increased by nine per cent since the registry was
Levitt et. al. showed in Freakonomics that the presence or absence of gun control measures does not affect the violent crime rate.
It matters little, because the strength of a registry is not solely in its capability (or lack thereof) to address violent crime. Note that violent crime does not encompass accidents, which ARE dealth with rather handily by making it next to impossible to own or use a restricted weapon without expense and training. I personally have both restricted and non-restricted guns, and I also don’t see the problem with putting up roadblocks between people and guns. The result is that the people who really want to shoot need to follow a pretty strict process, that tends to weed out the impatient.
Besides, the Cons are more than willing to blow MUCH MORE than the cost of a registry on foolish foreign wars and retarded missile defense shields, neither of which will accomplish any of their desired goals – particularly, the stupid BMD. Why waste billions on a gun regsitry that may or may not affect crime rates, when you can blow billions more on a missile shield that sure as sh*t won’t work and that actually exacerbates the military tension in the world? At the very least, the gun registry doesn’t CAUSE people to commit crimes. Can’t say the same for BMD, though.
anon’s comment #1 reminds me of the Chris Rock bit where he argues that guns can be free, but bullets should cost $2,000 each.
The problem with the Fraser Institute study 9and studies like this) is that it doesn’t tell you what might have happened had the gun registry not been in place. Maybe the homicide rate would have been even higher? Or lower. We don’t know. It’s a useless study and doesn’t contribute much to the debate over how to regulate firearms.
The Fraser Institute – a “right wing” think tank. Please, spare me this false report.
“The problem with the Fraser Institute study 9and studies like this) is that it doesn’t tell you what might have happened had the gun registry not been in place.”
Actually, we have a nice little experiment running next door that can tell you EXACTLY what would’ve happened if the LIEberals hadn’t have wasted millions? billions? on this nonsense. Over the 10 years from 1995 to 2005, the Canadian murder rate ROSE by 3%, as did the proportion of homicides committed with firearms (36.6% to 36.8%). At the same time, the US murder rate FELL by more than 31%, and that was while 12 more US states passed CCW laws allowing their citizens to carry guns for self-defence, and the “Bill Clinton Ugly Gun Ban” was allowed to sunset. Not only did the US get a drop in their murder rates, they got it while treating their citizens like responsible citizens, and WITHOUT flushing an unconscionable amount of money down the toilet. The LIEberals spent more than twice on ADVERTISING ALONE (and the requisite kickbacks to the LIEberal party) than they promised would be spent on the ENTIRE program, and the true cost of this white elephant is never going to see the light of day.
Nice bit of spin on the story.
Here’s what the report says, right there on page 1: “it [the gun registry] legislation was not implemented until 1998. Since that time there has been a significant reduction in the number of firearm owners, the number of crimes involving firearms, and the number of firearms-related deaths.”
Then it goes on to say that overall homicides and suicides are up and that gang-related violence is up and uses that to show that the gun registry isn’t working.
Seems to me that if gun control related legislation which is aimed at gun control results in less gun violence, it is a bit illogical to conclude that the registry is not working. Maybe it’s conservative-style logic, I dunno.
Back when we last used the death penalty in 1962 the murder rate was 1.25 or 1.5 per 100,000. Now its up by about 50% to 2. “something” usually. In spite of an aging population which should be pulling it under 1.
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Or was it because the gun registry worked so well back then?
In fact the lives lost because of this are more than our casualties in afghanistan.
In other words, the LIEberal spin on this is “Hey, we don’t CARE how many murders are committed, just so long as they aren’t committed with those nasty old guns”, right? That’s LIEberal logic for you.
Um, no. The position is more along the lines of “this particular solution was targetting this particular problem and it seems to be working”.
It’s like a piece of wait-times legislation that targets hip replacements. If hip replacement wait-times go down but overall wait times for all surgeries continues to rise, would you say that the hip replacement plan didn’t work?
Give your kool-aid drinking head a shake anon.
How can you possibly claim that this nonsense is “working”, when the proportion of homicides committed with firearms is UP, and our nearest neighbour saw a significant DECREASE in their murder rate without any of the nanny-statism that LIEberals are so enamoured of?
Anon:
I’m going to propose something really radical: Maybe there are multiple causes to gun violence. It’s the height of simple mindedness to attribute anything as complicated as violent crime to a single cause. So a simple binational comparison probably doesn’t do it. Nice try, though.
Why would you assume that in something as complex as a society a relatively trivial matter like the registry which is mainly an administrative and financial nuisance to only a small subset of Canadians has any measurable effect on crime or accidents?
“I’m going to propose something really radical: Maybe there are multiple causes to gun violence.”
I don’t doubt that for a second; it explains why the Northwest Territories has a higher murder rate than any American jurisdiction, despite the fact that they’re under the same sort of “gun control” regime as the rest of us. But, since LIEberals have branded “gun control” as one of the hallmarks of “liberalism”, that’s what they keep coming back to. Poverty and drug and alcohol abuse play a MUCH bigger role in murder rates than “gun control” does, and they explain why aboriginal Canadians make up only 3% of the population, yet commit 20% of all Canadian murders. The same factors go into explaining why young black males in the US commit up to HALF of all murders in that country, despite the fact that they couldn’t come close to owning half of all guns in the US even if you were to give each of them THREE guns. When you compare like population to like population between the US and Canada, gun ownership and use DISAPPEARS as any sort of conceivable cause for the US’s higher murder rate; it’s like claiming that the reason Americans beat, stomp, and kick each other to death more often than Canadians do is because “Americans are born with more arms and legs than Canadians are.”
Anon, you are aware that Aboriginals aren’t subject to the same requirements under the firearms law that the Rest Of Canada are? Or did you miss that fact…
I trust that you are also aware that the NWT has a very high aboriginal population… with, as you mention, a high rate of poverty and drug and alcohol abuse. Kind of like the poor areas of Toronto…
“Anon, you are aware that Aboriginals aren’t subject to the same requirements under the firearms law that the Rest Of Canada are?”
More’s the pity, GOM, in a country where everyone is supposed to be treated equally, no? In fact, the LIEberals specifically EXEMPTED certain firearms from their prohibition orders during their last series of laws, specifically because 1)it was the LIEberals themselves that had handed out those firearms to the natives, and 2)they knew that the only response from the natives they were going to get to a prohibition order was going to be along the lines of “Go fuck yourself, white man.”
A lot of yabbering to hide the fact that the Fraser Institute “report” and therefore the original post here are making a fraudulent claim.
The “report” claims that the evidence shows the gun registry doesn’t work. The evidence does not show that at all. If anything, it shows the opposite.
If you had only two choices – is it working or not – and you look objectively at the evidence the Fraser “report” itself provides – gun violence, gun crimes and gun deaths are all down – then the only logical conclusion would be that it is working.
But if we were to take our partisan blinders off, it is probably more accurate to say: (1) there are too many factors influencing the numbers to conclude one way or another, (2) the evidence at least makes it clear that you can’t conclude it is not working, and (3) the Fraser Institute “report” is really more of an opinion piece pushing an ideological agenda than a solid research report trying to initiate honest policy discussion.
Ted, did you even bother to READ this report? It most certainly does NOT “show the registry is working”; the homicide rate is up, and the proportion of those homicides involving firearms is also up. Now, I understand that someone belonging to the same party as Jean (“Trust me, if we’re elected, I will scrap the GST”) Chretien and Allan (“Forget what I promised about C-68 costing only $82 million; if it goes over $150 million, we’ll scrap the program”) Rock would be desperate to make it look like this whole thing HASN’T been a colossal waste of time and money, but reality is another story. AT BEST, both this report and Statistics Canada’s figures show that all Canadians have gotten for their two billion dollars is a slight substitution in the preferred method of committing suicide (ie. pills or hanging, instead of shooting one’s self).
Hard of reading or is it understanding, anon?
A policy that targets gun violence is implemented. Gun violence goes down according to the Fraser Institute “report”. Fraser Institute “reports” this proves the gun registry doesn’t work. Hunh?
Don’t get sucked into the game of “proportionality” statistics when you have the real and hard and absolute numbers right there in front of you. And don’t distract the issue by focusing on suicides. Obviously, they will try to kill themselves however they will; the gun registry was not designed to stop suicides. It was designed to reduce gun violence and deaths.
Who knows if the gun registry contributed to the drop in gun violence. Without more information we can’t really tell. But we can tell that it is absurd, absolutely absurd, to suggest that declining gun violence conclusively proves that the gun registry doesn’t work.
I understand that you’re trying to claim that someone who is killed via any method OTHER than a gun isn’t somehow “quite as dead” as someone who’s killed via a gun; that isn’t the way it is in real life, though, is it? “Gun violence” HASN’T gone down, according to both this report and Statistics Canada. When Rock instituted this scheme, he made all sorts of claims about what it was planned to do, and those claims have all been proven false. It now appears that the only winners in this entire escapade were the advertising execs (who received $200 million in advertising contracts to play this scheme up) and the LIEberal party (who received who knows how much in kickbacks from those same advertising execs). Both the homicide rate and the proportion of homicides committed with firearms have gone UP since your party decided that Canadians are too stupid and dangerous to be trusted with firearms, and it must take a special kind of Kool-Aid to be able to interpret that as some sort of “success”.
[...] has improved public safety…. or read that statement and conclude that gun control legislation doesn’t control gun violence?And when the majority representative governments of Ontario and Québec and other provinces are [...]
it does not matter what weapon you use,a restricted weapon like the one used at dawson college,or a hunting rifle from a rooftop,or a sawddoff shotgun at close range,which is par with a machine gun.as long as people have access to guns it will go on.to have gun control you need to have drug control,guns and drugs flow freely,it is the easiest thing to buy.we need laws that are inforced,politicians bring out laws,that are ignored,like anti-gang laws,the gangs are still all over,and the drugs-guns and all that goes with it. ( no-laws )