Posted on 10/07/2005 11:30:57 AM PDT by neverdem
Most murder guns in Canada are never registered with the Canadian Firearms Centre, according to a new Statistics Canada report.
The new Juristat study - a version of which reported over the summer that Canada's murder rate jumped 12% in 2004 after a three-decade slide - says that registration information on murder guns was "unknown" to police in more than half of homicides reported between 1997 and 2004 where the gun was recovered.
Gun registry opponents say that proves the registry - two years and more than a billion tax dollars later - is a failure.
"First, 65% of firearms homicides involve handguns. We've had a handgun registry for decades, so obviously it didn't work either," said Dennis Young, a researcher in the office of Conservative MP and registry critic Garry Breitkreuz.
"But look at who's actually committing murders. Two-thirds of murderers - and half of their adult victims - already had criminal histories. The federal government decided with the registry to go after law-abiding gun owners, when the people doing the killing are overwhelmingly criminals who'd never think to register their guns. What a waste."
But gun control advocates say the figures actually prove the opposite - that the registry may be driving down murder categories that tend to involve long-barrelled weapons, like spousal homicides.
"There's been a huge drop in domestic violence (since the registry was introduced)," said Wendy Cukier, president of the Toronto-based Coalition for Gun Control.
Spousal homicides did drop for the third consecutive year in 2004; there were 74. But family-related homicides rose from 141 victims to 160 nationwide.
On the other hand, the report says that rifles and shotguns accounted for most firearm homicides before 1990; in 2004, handguns were used in 65% of gun murders.
And the weapon of choice for most murders is still the humble knife. Stabbings accounted for one-third of all killings in 2004 - 205 murders, 63 more than in 2003 and the highest number of stabbing homicides in over a decade. Guns dispatched only a quarter of all homicide victims.
Cukier pointed out that the majority of handguns used to kill in Canada are smuggled up from the States - something the registry wasn't designed to address.
"It's the reason why we need to establish better international protocols on gun trafficking," she said.
Canada reported 622 homicides in 2004, 73 more than the year previous. Edmonton did more than its share to boost that number, racking up 34 murder victims in 2004 to just 22 in 2003.
The West is bucking the national trend away from gang-related murders. The number of gang-related homicides in Alberta almost doubled to 15 in 2004 over 2003.
But nationally, just 71 people died as a result of gang activity across Canada in 2004, down 13 from the year before.
Potential murders will start to play "Hockey"
> What does that mean? Isn't already illegal to take guns across the border? What they need to do is enforce their existing laws.
I'll tell you what it means. Here's a direct translation from Canadian into American:
It's the reason we need to support the U.N.'s gun grabbing effort to take guns away from those horrid freedom loving individualistic self reliant Americans.
Since we have a constitutional amendment that guarantees the right to bear arms, a treaty saying we can't would be worthless. Maybe these Canadians need a lesson in how our government works. They don't seem to be very up on it.
And after this news the gun-grabbing hoplophobes still insist that gun registration works.
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
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