Posted on 05/28/2007 2:38:01 AM PDT by Clive
Sometimes I wonder whether Toronto Mayor David Miller actually listens to himself talk.
Probably not.
Nothing original ever issues forth from the man's mouth. Instead, he seems only to function as a funnel for every fashionable theory about "root causes" and social engineering advanced in the past quarter century.
Consider the drivel His Worship has produced since the murder last Wednesday of 15-year-old Jordan Manners at C.W. Jefferys Collegiate Institute, a high school situated in a violence-plagued north Toronto neighbourhood.
Mayor Miller blamed Ottawa for letting law-abiding citizen's own handguns.
Apparently, the problem couldn't be the prevalence of father-absent upbringings in the Jane-Finch area of Toronto, or the glorification of gangsta, drug and gun culture that liberals and social democrats such as Mr. Miller have been loathe to denounce out of a politically correct fear of being called racists.
Nor could it be the every-boy-a-good-boy approach to juvenile crime, also favoured by the Millers of the world, that has eliminated nearly all punishment for young offenders in favour of touchy-feely counselling that hardened young criminals -- such as those who would shoot down a student in the hallway of a high school--just scoff at.
It couldn't be the way courts have hamstrung police investigations or lefty city councils have pared back police budgets and reassigned beat patrol officers to traffic safety campaigns and police- minority relations teams.
Nope. If we follow Mayor Miller's logic, the only reason Jordan Manners is dead is the federal Conservatives' unwillingness to ban handguns.
Well, while, we're at it, why don't we get those nasty Tories to ban drugs, bank robberies and car thefts, too. And murder. Let's get them to ban murder, because murder is bad. And if all it takes to prevent bad things from happening are federal bans on them, well let's just ban lots of stuff--because then all sorts of crime and personal pain will just magically go away.
Oh, right: Ottawa has already banned drugs, murder and robbery. And despite those prohibitions, bad things continue to happen. In spite of laws making it a crime to murder, deal drugs and hold up credit unions, criminals still do it.
It should be obvious to a six-year-old, then, that a handgun ban would never eliminate or even reduce handgun crime in Canada. Handgun murderers in this country typically use illegal weapons, anyway -- so banning the weapons outright would essentially be redundant. Despite this, self-important liberal- left windbags such as David Miller never fail to call for such bans every time a horrific crime presents them with an opportunity to do so.
Their constituencies -- academic theorists, special interest and right organizations, feminists, guilty white liberals and multiculturalists -- disdain guns and lawful gun owners (not our kind, dear). So guns make an easy -- and convenient -- target. If they can turn the blame on guns and lawful gun owners, then they do not have to admit their own social and criminal justice experiments have been a bust.
A 2004 metanalysis by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (hardly a gun-owners' lobby) evaluated more than 250 articles from academic journals, nearly 100 books on gun control and more than 40 government studies from around the world; and found no evidence that gun control or gun bans had reduced gun crime, gun murders or suicides with guns.
A new study by American criminologist Don Kates and Canadian criminologist Gary Mauser (both, admittedly, pro-gun ownership), published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, shows no correlation between civil gun ownership and murder or suicide.
For instance, Kates and Mauser found that Russia, with a relatively low incidence of legal gun ownership (4,000 per 100,000 population) has a murder rate nearly 30 times that of Norway, even though Norwegian civilians own nine times as many guns as Russian civilians.
Since Britain implemented a near-complete ban on civilian handgun ownership a decade ago, handgun possession among criminals has soared by an estimated one million to three million guns, and handgun crime has almost tripled.
The cause of gun crimes such as the Manners murder and Britain's recent rash of similar shootings is a changing culture. And that's the one "root cause" David Miller and his ilk refuse even to talk about.
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He'd fit right in on certain FR dog threads.
Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." -Manuel II Paleologus
Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." -Manuel II Paleologus
Can’t the Provincial Gov’t or the Feds override this moron ? It seemed like the Grits were always butting their noses into everything down to the street level. Why not the Tories to affect some badly needed changes ?
Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." -Manuel II Paleologus
More to the point, I meant with repealing any and all laws to prohibit the ownership of firearms by law-abiding citizens.
Please send me a FReepmail to get on or off this Canada ping list.
Oh, right: Ottawa has already banned drugs, murder and robbery. And despite those prohibitions, bad things continue to happen. In spite of laws making it a crime to murder, deal drugs and hold up credit unions, criminals still do it.
Transparently, passing new laws against things which are already illegal is simply elevating talk above action. Who talks the most, and does the least otherwise? Why, I believe that would be Big Journalism!The elevation of talk over action is easy; nothing is easier than criticizing and second guessing because action always clarifies, and the second guesser has the advantage of seeing results - an advantage which the person who initially acted could only dream of when he made his decision to act.
It is natural for the journalist to second guess, and the natural implication of second guessing would be that the second guesser - who has no track record of ever having taken difficult decisions without full knowledge of the ultimate results, and followed through successfully - would obviously have done better than the person who was actually in charge. And the natural implication of that is that people with big mouths and no experience of actually doing anything should be put in charge.
And where better for such "geniuses" to be given in charge but in the government, where they can control everything! Leftism is simply the drive toward incompetent management, for the foolish separation of responsibility from authority. And leftism is the natural attitude for a journalist to have - and for a journalist to promote with favorable labels on leftist politicians.
There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes to second achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities - all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affection of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from others and from themselves in their own weakness. The rôle is easy; there is none easier, save only the rôle of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds . . .
BTTT
The world is slowly waking up to the fact that liberals have no new ideas to solve problems.
Conservatives use old ideas that have proven to work every time they are tried.
Now, we need leadership to broadcast it from the mountaintop!
-—wisdom from the North-—
bttt
That one is relatively easy. Each child is a wild animal that has to be tamed and civilized. The liberals refuse to believe that, and have set up conditions where the wild predators that they created by funding single parent families are tolerated and when caught, released to prey upon the urban sheep once again.
This is not to say that all single parent families produce predators. But, if there is little cultural support for morality, discipline and achievement, it is singularly hard for young, undisciplined mothers to tame and civilize their children. Even the discipline of survival has been stripped away by government handouts. Fortunately, we have partially learned this lesson and are backing away from the worst excesses of liberalism and the welfare state.
There are no laws prohibiting ownership of firearms by law-abiding citizens.
There are laws banning certain types of firearms, similar to laws in the US.
Where we seem to differ substantially is in the regulations applied to legal firearms.
For example owners of handguns in Canada have more stringent regulations
applied to them than some of their US counterparts.
Registration of firearms is still universal here,
while in the US, only in some jurisdictions.
imho
Well, to be sure, there are illegal handguns smuggled in from the US. There are also legally purchased handguns that suspiciously get “stolen” soon after their owners purchase them. But the problem isn’t guns.
Part of the problem is discussed above, but another part is a culture of denial and a code of silence in those communities. I was listening to the news this morning - the cops made a couple of arrests in the case - and all the comments from people in the community about how “oh, no, it couldn’t be any of those boys, the cops are just looking for a scapegoat”, and that sort of thing. We have successfully managed to reproduce the culture of US inner-city communities in our big cities. It didn’t used to be this way.
That's what happens when you have "handlers" and speech writers script everything you say.
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