Absurd. Therefore, if all the guns are pink, we'll be safe.
Safety orange and lime green will be OK, too, I suspect.
No self-respecting psycho crazy'd be seen dead with a lime green .44 magnum.
Posted on 12/11/2002 3:23:41 PM PST by ActionNewsBill
A prominent criminologist has slammed a claim from Industry Minister Allan Rock that the controversial gun registry will save 1,240 lives in a decade.
Mr. Rock -- who introduced the registry when he was justice minister seven years ago -- spent much of last week defending the program and its billion-dollar cost overrun revealed last week by Auditor-General Sheila Fraser.
At one point, he said the registry had saved 300 lives a year. In Vancouver last Friday, he repeated the claim that the registry has had a direct impact on the number of gun-related deaths in Canada.
"You have to ask yourself, what are 1,240 lives worth?" he said when asked about cost overruns at the federal gun registry. He has consistently argued that, while the program needs to be fixed, the registry must be maintained, a position shared by Justice Minister Martin Cauchon.
But criminologists argue the Mr. Rock's defence of the registry is way off base.
"In the case of 300 lives saved a year, that's a totally outrageous claim," said University of Toronto criminologist Philip Stenning. "It's completely unjustified, insupportable."
Mr. Stenning questioned whether the gun registry has saved any lives or resulted in any drop in gun-related crime.
"There's no evidence at all that gun control has had any impact."
Ottawa-based criminologist Matthew Yeager agreed there is no evidence to support Mr. Rock's contention.
In the House of Commons yesterday, Progressive Conservative Leader Joe Clark asked Canadian Alliance MP John Williams, who is also chairman of the Public Accounts committee, to have his committee investigate the cost overruns to the gun registry. Mr. Clark wants Mr. Rock to appear, as well as Health Minister Anne McLellan, who was justice minister from 1997 to 2000, and former finance minister Paul Martin.
Mr. Williams said he will consult today with the Liberal-dominated committee.
Last week, Mr. Rock insisted the furor over the cost overruns should not cloud the fact that the Liberal gun-control program has saved lives.
He first mentioned 300 lives a year, which reflects the drop in firearm-related deaths since 1992, when the Progressive Conservatives brought in their version of gun control.
He later reduced that estimate to 124 a year -- times the 10 years it will take to get the registry fully implemented at a cost of $1-billion. That figure represents the decline in gun-related deaths from 1996 to 1999.
Kwing Hung, a statistician from the Department of Justice's Canadian Firearm Centre, said the federal gun-control measures are likely one of many factors contributing to the drop in the gun-related deaths.
Even proponents of gun control acknowledge that it is too early to pass judgment on the legislation, though they insist it is having an impact.
Wendy Cuckier of the Coalition for Gun Control said it is "premature" for such talk, noting that crime rates fluctuate.
Mr. Stenning says much of the decline in death rates resulted from a drop in suicides using firearms. "Does it matter that people who are committing suicide are not using guns?," he asked.
Gun-related homicides have declined since the early 1990s from 247 in 1992 to 171 last year, according to Statistics Canada. But most of that reduction occurred between 1992 and 1997, before the gun registry was up and running.
Also, I am serving on a federal grand jury, (one day a month for 18 months) and a lot of the cases involve federal gun crimes. Most are open and shut, but a few have been questionable, and I have voted to not indict on those, always being the sole dissenter.
Thanks. Even though I'm not from Canada. Although I do live in the U.P. and people often confuse us with Canadians.
Maybe it's cause we all say "eh?" at the end of each sentence and like hockey.
Free Dominion makes a handy backup site when FR goes down; it uses the same html format so all your links & files don't need stripping, and the members are quite friendly.
Figures don't lie, but liars can figure...
Within this argument, it is assumed that the projected saving of lives is a legitimate reason to remove rights from the individual and give them exclusively to the state. The argument is framed along the lines of "how many lives must be potentially saved to allow for the right of individuals to protect themselves to be removed?"
Remember this:
That an act might save lives, for the benefit of the collective at the expense of the individual, is an eradication of the concept of rights itself, as only individuals themselves have rights, and additionally, only individuals can, by definition, comprise a collective.
Libs Lie About Stats to Support Failing Policies
In a related story, sky determined to be blue...
hold it, hell, she'd probably shoot a journalist.
I keep seeing strange things, like after a format, even though a "dir" will show no files other than system files, when I reinstall win 95, information like username will reappear!
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