Canada - "Gun legislation a failure, let us count the ways"

http://www.canada.com/saskatoon/starphoenix/columnists/story.html?id=b0597c64-219c-4335-bb33-f0f0060b7ecf

Gun legislation a failure, let us count the ways

Lloyd Litwin
The StarPhoenix

Monday, May 17, 2004

"When you start a diet program, it doesn't matter where you start from or what sociological factors prompted it. What matters is the gains or losses after you start. If the weight goes down you are on the right track. If there is no loss or the weight goes up, then you are doing the wrong thing. If you spend a lot of money for negative results the whole exercise should be scrapped and a different approach should be tried.

...

The rate of decline of gun-related crimes in the U.S. is better than Canada's. It's also much better than in Britain and Australia. Countries where they have banned and confiscated guns are seeing crime rates rise significantly. The U.S. diet is working; ours is not.

...

The political movement happening now is properly called people control. It should be criminal control, but the government has missed the target and set up all these rules to control the law-abiding citizen. When they get around to requiring criminals to register where they live and when they move, under penalty of law, then it will be criminal control, not gun control as it is mistakenly now called.

And finally a profound statement: The constitution was written to protect people from the government, not to protect the government from the people."

like somebody in Saskatchewan needs to investigate emigration. The grass is obviously greener on the other side of that parallel.

Oh look -- it's the Saskatchewan Star Phoenix, one of the lesser stars in the firmament of Conrad Black's Hollinger ex-empire.

And look -- here's Garry Breitkreutz MP (c'mon, we all remember Garry Breitkreutz MP) quoting Lloyd Litwin at our favourite Cdn gun nut site: http://www.sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca/~ab133/Archives/Digests/v04n500-599/v04-n552.txt

Hmm ... there's even a hunter not too impressed with Mr. Litwin's hunting ethics:
http://www.sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca/~ab133/Archives/Digests/v04n300-399/v04-n380.txt

Oh, but never mind the messenger. Let's look at the message:

When you start a diet program, it doesn't matter where you start from or what sociological factors prompted it. What matters is the gains or losses after you start. If the weight goes down you are on the right track.

Let's look a little closer.

We're talking rate of decline of gun-related crimes. The "argument" is that it's the rate wot matters. Let's apply that notion to the analogy that the author offers: weight loss. And let's not even bother considering the causes of the overweight in question; we'll stick to Litwin's formula, in which it matters not whether it's caused by diet or lifestyle or disease. This isn't the real world here, after all.

We have two overweight subjects -- just for poops and giggles, let's say a Canadian and a USAmerican, men of average height. The Canadian weighs 200 pounds, the USAmerican weighs 300 pounds.

In the first year, the Canadian's weight drops by 10%. The USAmerican's drops by 15%. They now weigh 180 and 255, respectively.

Same thing the next year: 10% and 15%, respectively, so they now weigh 162 and 217, respectively.

Look! After two years, the Canadian is at a healthy weight ... while the USAmerican still weighs more than the Canadian did at the outset.

The third year, they both lose weight at the same rate: 15%. At the end of the year, the Canadian weighs 138 -- yikes, that's heading for anorexia. The USAmerican weighs 184 -- still on the pudgy side.

So ... does the starting point not matter? You be the judge, eh?

No, no; allow me. The statement that the starting point is irrelevant, when measuring progress toward a goal, is a moronic nonsense.

If our 200-pound Canadian and 300-pound USAmerican had lost weight at the same rate, say 10% per year, the Canadian would be a 97-pound weakling in less than 7 years, while the USAmerican would still weigh about 144.

If both people have a "healthy weight" goal of 150, the USAmerican needs to lose 1/2 his body weight, while the Canadian needs to lose 1/4 his body weight. The USAmerican needs to lose 1/3 his body weight just to get to where the Canadian is starting.

And remember -- if we were using the real Cda:US firearms homicide ratio, the Canadian would weigh 200 pounds, and the USAmerican would weigh over 1600 pounds.

If the USAmerican ever wanted to catch up, he'd probably have to have his stomach stapled and his jaw wired shut, and get some serious liposuction, just to get started.

And I'd congratulate our USAmerican cousins on doing that when it comes to gun-related crime, if I thought that what they were doing was much worth noticing. I'll be needing to see something closer to half a ton of excess weight coming off before I do that.

Firearms homicides in Canada, 2002: 149
handgun homicides: 98
That's ninety-eight handgun homicides in a population of ~30,000,000.
That's 1 per 300,000.

If the US had 1 handgun homicide per 300,000 population, it would have 933 handgun homicides a year. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it more like 10,000 than 1,000 -- over 10 TIMES the Canadian rate??

If *I* were that overweight, I wouldn't be pointing fingers at someone else for losing weight at a lower rate than me.


Here are the starting points, folks (i.e. figures for years up to 95 or 96 that we might be calculating rates of decline from):

http://www.cfc-ccaf.gc.ca/en/research/other_docs/notes/canus/default.asp

Firearm homicide rates are 8.1 times higher in the United States than in Canada. For 1987-96, the average firearm homicide rate was 5.7 per 100,000 in the U.S., compared to 0.7 per 100,000 for Canada.

Handgun homicide rates are 15.3 times higher in the United States than in Canada. For 1989-95, the average handgun homicide rate was 4.8 per 100,000 in the U.S., compared to 0.3 per 100,000 for Canada. Handguns were involved in more than half (52%) of the homicides in the U.S., compared to 14% in Canada.

Rates for non-firearm homicides are nearly 2 times higher in the United States than in Canada. For 1989-95, the average non-firearm homicide rate was 3.1 per 100,000 people in the U.S., compared to 1.6 per 100,000 for Canada.

There's just no end to this nonsense in sight, is there? In wandering around the net a bit, I inadvertently crashed into yet another bit of the usual sewage, framed even more hysterically than usual:

http://www.dsgl.org/Articles/Ackermann.htm

For example, in London, England, following the Dunblane gun ban firearms murders have risen by 90%. In Australia following the confiscation and destruction of some 665,000 legally owned firearms the murder rate went up over the entire country, with the worst increase seen in Victoria - a rise of 300 percent!

You remember ...

http://www.breakthechain.org/exclusives/australiaguns.html

Victoria recorded 7 firearm-related homicides in 1996, and 19 firearm-related homicides in 1997. That number has now fallen.
1996 - 7
1997 - 19 (171.4% increase from 1996 to 1997)
1998 - 17 (10.5% decrease from 1997 to 1998).
1999 - 14 (17.6% decrease from 1998 to 1999).

Let's all laugh at the desperation of these disingenuous dimwits now. That's always my first and last response.

If Lara Flynn Boyle went on a diet and lost 3 pounds this year, would this be a "failure"?

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A fantastic read, really.

But I can’t help but think that if I were to start a diet, and dedicate 2 million dollars (or “£” or beaver skins or whatever it is those folks up in Canadia spend) of my families budget to buying SlimFast® - - - years later, after denying my family all of that money (and golly-gee-oops ACTUALLY SPENDING 1 BILLION DOLLARS ON FUCKING SLIMFAST®) I had better see at least a little decline in my fatitude – else wise I may have to come to the conclusion that my diet plan was “counter productive” and stop buying goddamned SlimFast® so as I don't look like a fool.

I had better see at least a little decline in my fatitude – else wise I may have to come to the conclusion that my diet plan was “counter productive” and stop buying goddamned SlimFast® so as I don't look like a fool.

I forgot to give you the link for those Cdn firearms homicide stats, which I'm sure you would have clicked on if I had.

http://www.statcan.ca:80/Daily/English/031001/d031001a.htm

2002
Canada's homicide rate increased in 2002 after two years of relative stability. At the same time, the proportion of homicides committed with firearms fell to an all-time low.

... Police services reported 582 homicides in 2002, 29 more than in 2001. As a result, the national homicide rate climbed 4% to 1.85 homicides for every 100,000 people, compared with 1.78 in 2001.

Just over one-quarter (26%) of homicides were committed with a firearm last year, the lowest proportion since statistics were first collected in 1961. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, firearms accounted for 40% to 50% of all homicides. This proportion has generally been decreasing since 1974.

A total of 149 homicides reported in 2002 were committed with firearms, 22 fewer than in 2001. This total represented a rate of 0.47 for every 100,000 people, the lowest since 1966.

(When one is considering recent homicide stats in Canada, a note is always needed, and StatCan provides this: "Last year's increase in homicides was driven by a large jump in British Columbia, where there were 126 homicides reported in 2002, up from 84 in 2001. Contributing to the increase in British Columbia were 15 homicides of missing women that occurred in previous years in Port Coquitlam and that were reported by police in 2002." The 50+ women who went missing from Vancouver's Downtown East Side over a period of years, all killed by one man, are appearing as homicide stats in later years, and skewing figures.)

That (the underlined bit above) would be a decline, would it not?

http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/030724/d030724a.htm

2002
Canada's police-reported crime rate remained virtually unchanged in 2002 (-0.6%). The national crime rate, which has been on a downward trend for more than a decade, is now 27% below its peak in 1991. While rates for most crimes remained unchanged or dropped in 2002, increases were seen in homicides, fraud/counterfeiting, drug offences and prostitution.

... Rates declined for violent crime and youth crime in 2002, while property crime was virtually unchanged.

... Nationally, the rate of violent crime dropped 2% in 2002, driven by a 3% decline in the rate of robberies and a 2% decline in assaults. The violent crime rate has generally been dropping since the early 1990s.

... Police reported 682 attempted murders in 2002, down from 725 in 2001, the second straight year of decline. The largest category of violent crime, common assault, dropped 2%. The rates for assault with a weapon and aggravated assault remained relatively stable in 2002.

... The robbery rate declined 3% in 2002, continuing a downward trend. About half of the almost 27,000 robberies were committed with a weapon. The rate of robberies involving a firearm has dropped by two-thirds since 1992. Robberies committed with a firearm now account for one in every eight robberies.

These would be declines, would they not?


And now any time you'd like to join me in calling for the defeat of the corrupt Liberal Party in the next election, and for all necessary information about the start-up costs of the firearms registry to be turned over to the Auditor General of Canada ... well, I guess it would be rather improper for a non-Canadian to do that, but you can rest assured that a lot of Canadians are.

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would be if she lost just 2% more weight, I will gleefully capitulate that yes indeed, one number next to another number of lesser value can fairly be described as having “declined” - no doubt about it - but I thought this post had something to do with the oh-so simple act of gun registration as a method of crime control?

Refresh my memory please, when did the teeth that is “The Firearms Act” really start taking its bite out of crime? 1974? (Edited to point out that my indication that it took effect in 1974 is pure sarcasm)



Now wasn’t it around 1966 when they started allowing the police to go around and start proactively confiscating people’s property (that is, personally owned firearms) based on the whim of whatever some local government council said?

Is that line streaking upward from the lower portion of the above chart around 1966 a decline?

Sure, the percentage of homicides where a firearm is used is less now than it was in the 60’s but the recent increase in the homicide rate amongst Canadians looks pretty bad – especially when you consider how close that rate increase is to The Firearms Act registry deadline date.

So next year when the price tag for the simple act of registering (almost) every single gun in Canada crests well over 1 Billion Canadian Dollars – and hopefully Her citizens will have had their fill of this shit – maybe, just maybe people will begin to see how utterly useless a tool gun registration is at controlling crime.

but I thought this post had something to do with the oh-so simple act of gun registration as a method of crime control?

Well ... "oh-so simple" surely does describe *something*.

I tell you what. You read the introductory post in the threat, and *you* tell us what it's about. I'd love to know.

I thought it was about how the fact that Canada's firearms crime rates are not declining as fast as the US's firearms crime rates is proof that Canada's various firearms control measures don't work.

Refresh my memory please, when did the teeth that is “The Firearms Act” really start taking its bite out of crime? 1974? (Edited to point out that my indication that it took effect in 1974 is pure sarcasm)

Y'know, I was going to say, in one of those posts, that I trusted that the audience would note that I was not making any claims. I guess I just thought it was obvious that I was not making any claims, given how I wasn't making any claims and all. I mean, apart from the "claims" about the FACTS that I cited.

Are you attributing some claim or other to me? Can you tell me what it might be?

Now wasn’t it around 1966 when they started allowing the police to go around and start proactively confiscating people’s property (that is, personally owned firearms) based on the whim of whatever some local government council said?

What on earth are you talking about? What might a "local government council" be?

Sir - sir? Wake up! Do you know where you are?

Sure, the percentage of homicides where a firearm is used is less now than it was in the 60’s but the recent increase in the homicide rate amongst Canadians looks pretty bad – especially when you consider how close that rate increase is to The Firearms Act registry deadline date.

I'll be happy to say it all again for you.

Police services reported 582 homicides in 2002, 29 more than in 2001. As a result, the national homicide rate climbed 4% to 1.85 homicides for every 100,000 people, compared with 1.78 in 2001.

A total of 149 homicides reported in 2002 were committed with firearms, 22 fewer than in 2001. This total represented a rate of 0.47 for every 100,000 people, the lowest since 1966.

Last year's increase in homicides was driven by a large jump in British Columbia, where there were 126 homicides reported in 2002, up from 84 in 2001. Contributing to the increase in British Columbia were 15 homicides of missing women that occurred in previous years in Port Coquitlam and that were reported by police in 2002.

The 15 women in question (I believe that number has since been revised upward) WERE NOT KILLED IN 2002. For the purposes for which you would like to use these figures, their deaths need to be *subtracted* from the 2002 figure AND *added* to the figures for the years in which they were actually killed.

Once you've done the math, maybe you could find a statistician who would pronounce the changes statistically significant. I doubt it.


Refresh my memory please, when did the teeth that is “The Firearms Act” really start taking its bite out of crime? 1974? (Edited to point out that my indication that it took effect in 1974 is pure sarcasm)

And what a sad and belly-flopped attempt at sarcasm it was.

http://www.cfc-ccaf.gc.ca/en/research/other_docs/other_depts/evaluation/default.asp

A Statistical Analysis Of The Impacts Of The 1977 Firearms Control Legislation
Programme Evaluation Section
July, 1996

This evaluation report focuses on the effectiveness of the 1977 changes to the Criminal Code specifically designed to address the problems of firearms deaths and injuries as well as crimes involving firearms.

... Initially, an exploratory analysis of the data showed a number of different patterns, some of which are inconsistent. With regard to homicides, the exploratory analysis suggested that the trends in both total and firearms homicides at the national level have been declining steadily since between 1975 and 1978 depending upon the specific region examined. However, in all regions of Canada, there has been a steady decline in fiream homicides since the 1977 legislation was implemented.

With regard to suicides, the time series steadily declines after 1978 both nationally and in Western Canada and Ontario. For firearm suicides, there is a distinct change from an increasing trend prior to 1978 to a decreasing trend since 1978.

Nationally, robberies have increased steadily during the period between 1974 and 1993. However, robberies with firearms have declined over the same period. In general, the use of firearms has continued to decrease, reaching an historic low of approximately 25 per cent of all robberies in recent years.

Is that line streaking upward from the lower portion of the above chart around 1966 a decline?

Nope, but the overall downward trend from 1975/78 sure is. As is the long-term trend in this other pretty one:

http://www.statcan.ca:80/Daily/English/031001/c031001b.gif

So did you have a point you wanted to make with this 1966/1974 stuff? Or were you just demonstrating more of your complete ignorance about Canadian firearms legislation?

Not only have you for some completely unknown reason identified 1966 as a significant date, you have completely failed to grasp the *actual* significant dates.

You apparently thought that the Canadian "diet" consisted of the firearms registry, which came into operation in 2003, and some chimerical phenomenon that occurred in 1966. Oh well, eh? Live and learn.

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- I have no idea what supposedly happened in Canada in 1966 (to "cause" homicide rates to "shoot up"). There are no "local government councils" in Canada, and municipalities have no jurisdiction whatsoever over criminal law matters such as firearms possession.

- Firearms legislation in Canada, the "controls" we're concerned with assessing the impact of, dates from 1977 -- long before the firearms registry that was brought on line in 2003. The firearms registry is simply an addition to existing measures.

- The trend in homicide rates, and especially firearms homicide rates, has been a decline since the mid-1970s. One possible conclusion is that the measures introduced in 1977 and 1991 have operated to reduce the number of firearms homicides, by either creating/accelerating a downward trend or preventing/braking any upward pressure.

The blip in 2002 is partly a result of a quirk in counting methodology that resulted in 15 homicides from several previous years being counted in 2002. (I expect that a similar blip will show up in 2003, as more bodies were found and identified as victims of that same murderer last year.) It also reflects a flare-up of gang-related violence in British Columbia, by the way -- 1 in 8 BC homicides is related to the marijuana trade; in 2001, BC's homicide rate was the lowest since 1964. And in a country where total homicides have never reached 600/year, an event such as the one in BC in 1996 when a man shot 9 members of his estranged wife's family (and then himself) dead will make analysis of numbers difficult -- note that little peak at 1996 on the chart I reproduced.

The previous year, 2001, spousal homicides in Canada rose to 86 from 68 in 2000. ("The number of men accused of killing their current wife or ex-wife rose from 52 in 2000 to 69 in 2001, with virtually all of this increase occurring in Ontario. The number of women accused of killing their husband (16) was unchanged from 2000. One homicide was committed by a same-sex spouse.") Again, the specificity of the components of any increase is something that needs to be taken into account in attempting to discern trends when the raw numbers are so small. There were only 8 more homicides in 2001 than in 2000, in total, even though there were 18 more spousal homicides.

I can't find a preliminary total for homicides in Canada in 2003 anywhere. Toronto seems to have had 65 homicides (31 involving firearms), and a very large proportion of these were gang-related. The number of homicides in Rochester, NY, rose from 41 in 2002 to 57 in 2003.

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What's this business about 1966 and local government councils? My curiosity is making me itch.

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Some people are sure quick to demand answers, and announce they hear crickets when they don't get an answer soonest....

The Gungeon's Gratuitous Misuse of Stat to Frame Your Argument Award


I feel slightly uncomfortable awarding this outside the Gungeon - Columbia, will you accept it in proxy?

Considering it is not my argument nor stats, I really shouldn't. However, it does look like a pretty neat sculpture so why not? :)

Didya click on that link of yours? The Star Phoenix one?

Didya go through the rigamarole of registering, waiting to get your password in the mail, and logging in?

Might I be correct in surmising that you found that article somewhere else, and know nothing whatsoever about the source or the author?

In that event, would you care to share with us what you were reading, and where this pointless editorial from an obscure hick newspaper in a city you couldn't find on a map with a map, in a foreign country, managed to enter your field of vision?

As always, just curious.


And I meant to add:

And finally a profound statement: The constitution was written to protect people from the government, not to protect the government from the people.

Now, I'm not at all sure what to think of someone who calls his own statements "profound" ... but apart from that, this particular statement isn't at all profound. The Canadian constitution was written for a number of purposes, and to state this as the reason it was written is quite simply beyond simplification and squarely in the realm of the false. Like I was saying; somebody's probably be happier in a different place; I'd say "in a different century", but as we all know, there is a place where the 18th century is alive and well at this very moment.

But then, I wouldn't have expected you to know that. Why would anybody bother to know enough about something to be able to assess the truth or accuracy of it??

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I didn't have to register at all to read the article. It just comes up for me. I probably wouldn't have done all that to read it being anti-registration and all. :)

As for getting to it, it's quite simple, just go to news.google.com and search guns and Canada and it comes right up.

It's where I found this one as well:

http://www.canada.com/montreal/montrealgazette/soundoff/story.html?id=49ac141b-6aec-4fb1-86e4-d4f6e872e760

"Time to dump the gun registry"

"The Martin government is letting slip tantalizing hints that it might do something about Canada's $1-billion gun registry. We are told that this has nothing to do with the election expected on June 28. Still, we can't help but note that if there were a political dimension to this, we would be seeing just what we are seeing now: acknowledgement of a problem but no specifics of a solution. Any precise step might cost votes.

Something certainly has to be done about the registry. The government's own estimates show that the cost of this thing, first estimated at $2 million, will reach $1 billion by next year and could climb past $2 billion within the next few years. To date, about 7 million firearms have been registered, leaving an estimated 1 million unaccounted for.

If there were some irrefutable proof that the registry had led to a decrease in the number of murders and suicides, Canadians might will support it, despite its astronomical cost. Unfortunately, proof of a cause-and-effect nature is hard to come by. It might be, as Calgary criminologist Mahfooz Kanwar said earlier this year, that any control on guns can help, and that eventually the registry will have an impact. But $1 or $2 billion is a lot to spend on a "might be."

The question then becomes whether there is a cheaper, more efficient, less invasive way to lower the incidence of gun crimes..."

Gun control not too popular in the great white North anymore is it?

Well ... if you were to rely on one editorial at one Hollinger (ex-Conrad Black, right-wing loony) newspaper, you might think so. Not to mention the predictable right-wing loony response to it in the newspaper's on-line opinion forum.

I liked this bit, that you didn't quote:

Keeping U.S.-made guns out of Canada would certainly help. As many as half the handguns recovered by Toronto police, and 75 per cent of the handguns associated with Toronto homicides, have been smuggled across the U.S. border. These are not weapons likely ever to be registered. More border guards and police officers, and better equipment at the borders, would help fight this plague.

(To be scrupulously candid, I think that those figures may be out of date, and are in fact a little lower. I think I managed to find the recent Toronto Police Service report a while back, and meant to spend some time reading it and forgot. I'll give it another shot on the weekend, maybe.)

Then there are these strange criticisms:

There are too many holes in the current legislation. The screening falls far short of protecting the public. The follow-up of known risks is also totally inadequate. These are areas where money should be spent.

Some blatant assertions there, not much ... any ... evidence. I'm not aware of any failures in the screening (for getting a firearms licence, I presume, or perhaps registering ownership; I dunno). As far as following up on known risks - is the writer suggesting that parole officers tail their clients to make sure they don't illegally acquire firearms?


Now, to answer your question:

http://www.guncontrol.ca/Content/Public_Support.html

Polls have consistently shown that the vast majority of Canadians support firearms regulation. According to the latest poll (Gallup, 2001), 76% of Canadians support the law -- its highest level since 1995. The poll indicates that 90% of Quebecers favour a national firearms registry, the highest level of support across the country, followed by Ontario where 80% support the registry. Elsewhere, 71% of British Columbians, 67% of Atlantic Canadians, and 53% of Prairie residents support a national firearms registry. The support for gun control is particularly high in the three largest urban centres: Toronto (88%), Montreal (97%) and Vancouver (80%). Click here for the poll* http://www.guncontrol.ca/Content/Temp/Gallup2001.PDF (in .pdf format). ...

A November 28, 2001 poll shows that more Canadians oppose gun ownership by general public, but majority still favours stricter gun laws. Click here for this poll by Gallup Canada Inc.* http://www.guncontrol.ca/Content/Temp/Gallup-2.2001.PDF released today
(in .pdf format).* ...

http://www.cric.ca/en_html/sondages/gallup.html
http://www.cric.ca/pdf/gallup/gallup_11.27.01_firearms.pdf

Seven out of ten Canadians support National Firearms Registry.
According to a Gallup Poll conducted this month, 76% of Canadians support a national firearms registry, up slightly from 70% last year.
Gallup (11.27.01)

http://www.cfc-ccaf.gc.ca/en/general_public/difference/default.asp

According to a spring, 2001 Environics poll, 77% of Canadians support a national firearms registry.

I'm not finding much more recent figures. Undoubtedly support for the firearms registry has slipped somewhat, as a result of news about cost overruns, and as spillover from generalized perception of the Liberal government as corrupt and fiscally irresponsible. I doubt that you'd find that the loony right-wing opinion expressed in the Montreal Gazette's forum represents more than a microscopic speck of public opinion in Montreal, and that even opposition to the registry among the less loony right-wing population rises above a single-digit segment of public opinion in that city.

http://www.cfc-ccaf.gc.ca/en/general_public/news_releases/auditor_general2002/default.asp?template=print
(December 2002 press release)

... there continues to be broad public support for the Firearms Program. There are now 1.9 million licensed firearms owners in Canada. That is a 90% participation rate. Seventy percent of licensed firearm owners have already registered their guns – that is 5.2 million guns registered and accounted for by December 3, 2002. Further, the policy objectives of the program continue to be supported by a vast majority of Canadians, with public support for firearms registration at 76%, according to an independent Gallup survey.

Again, I'm not finding figures on a quick search, but as I recall, a majority of firearms owners supports the registry as well.

I'm sure that some day the start-up costs of the registry will lose the fascination they have for some people. Those were start-up costs. They were in all likelihood unjustified to some extent, and very arguably arose out of either stupidity or cupidity on the part of someone. That money has been spent. It's over. We will now have annual program costs, and there is no indication that they will be unreasonable. The money that has already been spent on a program is simply not an argument for scrapping a program if it then runs efficiently and effectively.

From the press release cited above:
(a handy rule of thumb for USAmericans, for converting Cdn figures to what would be equivalent US figures, i.e. what the numbers would look like in a population the size of the US, to get a feeling for the situation: multiply by 9 or, for convenience, add a zero and think "a little lower than that".)

Police agencies are accessing the on-line firearms registry an average of 1500 times a day. Since the beginning of the program, more than 7,000 firearms licenses have been refused or revoked. That is 50 times more license revocations from potentially dangerous individuals than occurred during the last five years of the old program. The number of persons prohibited from firearms ownership has also continued to increase by almost 50% – from 15,750 in 1998 to 29,280 in 2001. The number of lost, missing or stolen firearms has declined significantly.

I wonder what your Gazette forum contributor would say about those facts if s/he bothered to acknowledge them instead of making unsubstantiated claims about "too many holes in the current legislation" and "screening <that> falls far short of protecting the public".

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I don't have the time I used to...

The statement contained in your question is false.

(If we were speaking rather formal French, I'd say "si", meaning "yes -- it *is* popular". We don't have a word in English for disagreeing with the statement made in a question like this. You'll see what I mean if you try to answer "You're not too happy with George W. Bush, are you?" "Yes" ... "Yes I'm happy" or "Yes I'm not happy"?)

No, you're wrong. Yes, gun control is extremely popular in the Great White North.

And unlike your right-wing columnist and his vague and unsubstantiated and non-credible assertions about the success/failure of gun control in Canada, I provided the facts to prove the truth of my assertion.

Feel free to learn them. Doing so might allow you to avoid asking silly questions like "Gun control not too popular in the great white North anymore is it?" in future.

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time isn't the real problem our friend has...

"gun control is extremely popular in the Great White North"
Down here too. It's a shame that because of the GOP and a scummy extremist lobby, we can't get what we need here.

My assertion was that gun control popularity is lessening and that is just from the anecdotal evidence looking at recent articles. I don't see too many supporting your registry experiment at all. As for empirical evidence, you said yourself that it was lacking so you really haven't backed up your counter-assertion either. Nice try though.

As for empirical evidence, you said yourself that it was lacking so you really haven't backed up your counter-assertion

I'm still trying to figure out what counter-assertion I am being alleged to have made. Any chance you'll identify it sometime?

My assertion was that gun control popularity is lessening and that is just from the anecdotal evidence looking at recent articles. I don't see too many supporting your registry experiment at all.

And there are none so visually impaired as those who cover their ears and go wah-wah.

If by "many" you mean "many members of the public", the polling (which is remarkably consistent, and which I offered you links to) proves you wrong. Over three-quarters of the population just isn't "<not> too many".

If by "many" you mean "many recent articles", well, if you'd like any more information about media ownership concentration in Canada, and the agendas of the owners of the major media outlets, let me know. I wouldn't dream of offering up a Fox News editorial commentary as proof of public attitudes in the US, so why you'd offer a Montreal Gazette editorial as proof of public attitudes in Montreal, let alone Canada, I just dunno.

(You might start by considering that the Gazette is an English-language publication in an overwhelmingly French-speaking market, and that it seldom reflects the opinions of the overwhelmingly French-speaking population of Quebec on anything at all. That population tends to be to the left of the country as a whole on just about everything. Consider the war on Iraq: in April 2003, "Quebecers are more opposed to an American-led intervention (76%) and possible Canadian participation (81%) than other Canadians (57% and 61%, respectively)": http://www.queensu.ca/cora/polls/2003/April9-War_in_Iraq.pdf)


My assertion was that gun control popularity is lessening and that is just from the anecdotal evidence looking at recent articles.

If your assertion had been that public support for the firearms registry has declined somewhat in the last 2 or 3 years, you might have been able to find actual statistically valid evidence for it. You might also have had to acknowledge that there is still majority support for it, and that a major reason for any decline is overall disenchantment with the Liberal government and its spending practices.

If your assertion is that editorial writers in right-wing periodicals, and right-wing loony elements of the population, don't support firearms control, well hey, you won't get any argument from me.


I'm still wondering about local government councils and 1966 and all that. (Haha; "1066 and All That" is a humorous book from the 1960s about British history.) Wouldn't it be wise just to come out and say that you don't know the difference, or care enough to remember the difference, between the UK and Canada, and really didn't have a clue about what "gun control" means in Canada? Or maybe you do, and were intentionally portraying the situation in Canada as something it isn't ...

You're more likely to have a faster decline in gun crime / body-weight if you've got MORE OF IT TO START WITH!

E.g., if you had 10 gun crimes a year in your country it would be far more difficult to reduce that figure by 10% than if you had 10,000 gun crimes. (assuming equal numbers of owners).

10 crimes a year would indicate good laws and appropriate enforcement etc. i.e. the country has done it's best to limit the risk of gun ownership but there are still a handful of crimes that cannot be eliminated due to human factors.

10,000 crimes a year indicates poor legislation and enforcement etc. Change that situation, and you'll be on the road to a far lower crime rate.

Why don't you compare the actual total amout of gun homocides and gun deaths? The weapons worshippers never mention the actual numbers, they always hide behind percentages and "cultural" diffeences. I also wish other regressive forces in the country worshipped Micheal Moore as much as they do.

Errr.....I'm saying that comparing "decline rates" in gun crimes doesn't realistically represent whether one country is addressing the problem better than other, especially when one country has more guns than another.

I.E. I'm backing Iverglas and saying that the article quoted is complete arse.

To be honest, I don't really understand what you're saying - care to clarify?

P.

"To remake Iverglas's point in fewer words...."

If Lara Flynn Boyle lost 3 pounds in a year, would her diet be a "failure"?

Remember to compare that (say, 3% of her body weight) to John Goodman losing 20 pounds in a year (what, 7% of his body weight?). His rate of decline is more than twice as fast as hers ... and he's still enormously, unhealthily bloated. Meanwhile, blow smoke rings at LFB and she's gone.

.

John Goodman could kick Lara Flynn Boyles ass!








Unless she had undertaken the requisite means to protect herself (and by that I mean arming herself with a whistle, cell phone, and a 4 hour seminar on self-defense down at the Y)