Posted on 08/05/2009 10:05:22 AM PDT by neverdem
Is the gun registry a failure or a success? Recent letters have shed little light on the question even though they were stuffed with statistics. It's time to compare competing claims.
Anti-gun zealots claim the registry is working because gun deaths have declined since the long-gun registry began in 2001. The primary problem with this claim is that counting gun deaths is not an appropriate way to measure success. Gun laws should improve public safety, not just reduce one way of killing. Would Canadians be safer if murderers somehow abandoned guns for knives and bombs?
Gun death accounting ignores the problem of "substitution."
Eliminating just one of the many alternative weapons is not likely to reduce murders or suicides. Two examples illustrate this point.
First, in many countries where guns are banned, such as Mexico and the former Soviet Union, the murder rates are more than 10 times greater than in Canada. Second, suicides in Canada involving shootings have dropped over the past few decades, while hangings have increased correspondingly so that there is little net change in overall suicide rate. You decide: Does this make the gun registry a success?
One of the original justifications for the gun registry was that it would protect vulnerable women. Unfortunately, no changes are seen: More domestic murders continue to be committed with kitchen knives than with firearms.
The best measures to use in evaluating the gun registry are murder and suicide rates. The statistics are unequivocal: the gun registry has not had a meaningful impact on either. The homicide rate had fallen impressively before 2001 but has remained relatively stable since.
Due primarily to a booming economy and an aging population, the homicide rate slipped from 2.7 per 100,000 in 1991 to 1.8 in 2000. After the long-gun registry was...
(Excerpt) Read more at 2.canada.com ...
Maybe if we ask criminals nicely to register their guns, they’ll do it?
Or is that a wiener? I do miss Maple Leaf Franks.
BM
Canada and almost all Canadians are ignorant of the fact that no democracy has ever been democratic.. They are all Oligarchys.. i.e. Canada, England, Germany, France, Spain etc..
Whather “successful” or not, the registry has certainly had two ancillary effects which cannot be denied: 1. It has cost the Canadian tax payer a boatload of money to support the additional bureaucracy; and, 2. It has made it much easier for the Canadian government to find gun owners, with the potential for complete confiscation, should the members of that government choose to do so.
At all events, the question is utterly irrelevant as a means of “defending” the anti-gun cause in America, inasmuch as the universal human right to own firearms is not protected in the Canadian constitution, as it most definitely IS protected in the United States Constitution.
The anti-gunners regularly trot out a variety of international comparisons in attempts to bolster their arguments - Canada, England, Great Britain as a whole, Switzerland, Japan. None has any meaning.
You can't ask felons that in the USA, U.S. v. Haynes (1968), and expect to prosecute them.
My understanding is that compliance rates for the long gun registry were in fact quite low. I hope that is the case.
If that is true, then at least THAT part of it was a success!
Any of our Northern FRiends care to comment?
One problem with the gun registry that happened to my husband, regarding a disgruntled employee.
He had to fire a guy who was incompetent—in the government, no less.
Shortly after the police showed up at our door and wanted to search the house for the guns. My husband refused and asked to see the basis for this.
The next day, he called the police and was informed that this employee had sent an untraceable fax from a Kinko’s in Ottawa, and claimed that my husband had unregistered, unlocked guns in the house (neither true) and that he’d “shoot out the window of the car” with the kids in the car while hunting (obviously not true).
My husband told the police that the name on the complaint was phony, but he could tell who it was by the details in the complaint—stories he’d only told this employee, who’d asked my husband about his hunting. And when the police learned the guns were registered, and the complaint was baseless, the issue was dropped.
But it was a stressful few days for him, and us.
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