Firearms in Canada

[SkyDekker 1,465]

So, does this mean that our registry is working?

----------------------------------------------------------

OTTAWA (CP) - The latest figures available
indicate that the risk of death involving
firearms is declining in Canada
and was a fraction of the U.S. rate.
Statistics Canada says that in 2000, the rate
of homicide involving a gun in the United States
was 3.8 for every 100,000 population, nearly
eight times Canada’s rate of 0.5 for every
100,000 people.
In Canada, homicides accounted for 18 per
cent of deaths involving firearms in 2000, compared
with 38 per cent in the United States.
The report says that in Canada in 2002 there
were 767 males and 49 females who died from
injuries related to firearms.
And between 1979 and 2002 the rate of
death by firearms in Canada declined by more
than one-half.
During that period, about 80 per cent of
firearms-related deaths were suicides, while
homicides accounted for about 15 per cent of
such deaths, and about four per cent were unintentional.
Among males, that was a rate of 4.9 deaths
for every 100,000 population, down from 10.6
in 1979, and for females the rate fell to 0.3 deaths
for every 100,000 population from 1.2 during
the same period.
Statistics Canada also found that:
-In 1979, the rate of deaths related to firearms
was highest among young people aged 15
to 24. By 2002, the differences between age
groups had largely disappeared for people aged
15 or older.
-Police records indicate that handguns accounted
for two-thirds of homicides involving
firearms in 2002, up from about one-half during
the 1990s.
-In 2002, 31 people were unintentionally
killed by firearms, less than one-half of the total
of 71 in 1979.

[popsjumper 2]

Probably just means that Americans have better aim...

My reality and yours are quite different.
I think we're all Bozos on this bus.
Falcon5232, SCS8170, SCSA353, POPS9398, DS239

[kelpdiver 2]

Quote

So, does this mean that our registry is working?

Is compliance over 50% yet?

[Andrewwhyte 1]

The article I read mentioned that both death by firearm and homicide by firearm are also down in the US during the same period; so, no it doesn't mean the firearm registry is working. More likely it means the baby boomers are leaving their crime commiting years in great numbers.

[bodypilot90 0]

lol or slower at running away

[Nightingale 0]

I don't know much about gun history, so I was wondering...

Have there been advances in gun (weapon, gun lock, and safety, etc...) technology?
Have there been improvements to make bullets and powder (?) more reliable?
Have there been more gun safety classes taught? public education campaigns on firearm safety? other things to make the public more aware of proper gun handling?
Are more people using gun locks/safeties?

It seems like there could be a lot more factors involved than what was stated in the info above.

[jkm2500 0]

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So, does this mean that our registry is working?

To say yes, would concede to the same logic that the Brady bill had an effect on crime in the states. I think that it may have a small impact on the overall numbers, but that aint saying much. By looking at the stats on Canada it shows that there are only 30 something million people that live there. If you take a cross section of the US that falls into the same population density I would conjecture that the violent crime rate would be about the same.

There isnt any one reason why the crime rate is dropping. It could be said that due to weather patterns in the last 5 years crime is down. Don't claim that this one change is the cause of a trend. I think that there are too many causes to list.

Check out the table (it is for the US, but for a similar time frame to show the same correlation could be drawn). It shows that the crime rate is dropping while the number of crimes has actually just gotten back to the starting point. I guess, dont let the numbers fool you.

The primary purpose of the Armed Forces is to prepare for and to prevail in combat should the need arise.

[kallend 2,151]

Quote

There isnt any one reason why the crime rate is dropping. It could be said that due to weather patterns in the last 5 years crime is down. Don't claim that this one change is the cause of a trend. I think that there are too many causes to list

You almost got it right. The reason crime dropped in CCW states is simply on account of the CCW laws. The reason crime dropped elsewhere is complex and has no single explanation.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[jkm2500 0]

Quote

You almost got it right. The reason crime dropped in CCW states is simply on account of the CCW laws. The reason crime dropped elsewhere is complex and has no single explanation.
...

Hey Professor,
I am confused as to what this has to do with this thread. I am also confused, because you are inferring that I at some point in time I said this. Maybe you can straighten things out.

The primary purpose of the Armed Forces is to prepare for and to prevail in combat should the need arise.

[SkyDekker 1,465]

I knew you would get the point......

[JohnRich 4]

Quote

So, does this mean that our registry is working?

No. The whole comparison is bogus. You don't compare with America to determine if it is working. You have to compare the stats before and after within Canada. The murder rate in Canada was a fraction of the U.S.'s before the registry too - a fact that was omitted from your presentation. It seems to be implying that it wasn't, and now look at the difference! That's pure bullshit. Nothing in the posted stats indicated anything about any correlation between the gun registry and gun crime.

The gun registry is a useless boondoggle that has sucked up tons of money that could have been better spent elsewhere to fight crime.

Canada's gun registry:

The gun controls implemented by the federal Liberal government in 1995 appear to have had little if any effect on gun-related deaths, despite a $1.3-billion price tag and the government's extravagant claims that the measures would produce "a culture of safety" and dramatically reduce crime...
Full Story

Statistics Canada issued a “health report” this week that left the false impression that there was a link between the Liberals’ $2 billion firearms program and the decline in gun deaths. Statistics Canada should be embarrassed putting out a report that is so misleading in the way the data was presented. If bureaucrats were subject to peer-review, like academics, they would never get away with such a distortion.
Full Story

[Andrewwhyte 1]

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By looking at the stats on Canada it shows that there are only 30 something million people that live there. If you take a cross section of the US that falls into the same population density I would conjecture that the violent crime rate would be about the same.

You would conjecture wrong. Despite its enormous size and small population Canada is a more urbanized country than the US. Canada's six Metro areas containing >1 000 000 people hold more than 40% of the total population.

[rushmc 23]

Another view point...

http://www.canada.com/national/nationalpost/news/comment/story.html?id=459a5ae6-d6cb-48de-b47c-881d641e3bf3


NATIONAL POST
Latest News


Gun registry is no lifesaver


National Post


July 4, 2005




The gun controls implemented by the federal Liberal government in 1995 appear to have had little if any effect on gun-related deaths, despite a $1.3-billion price tag and the government's extravagant claims that the measures would produce "a culture of safety" and dramatically reduce crime.

Last fall, Statistics Canada declared that "the specific impact of the firearms program or the firearms registry" on Canada's declining homicide rate could not "be isolated from that of other factors." On Tuesday, following the release of her paper, Deaths Involving Firearms: 1979 to 2002, StatsCan researcher Kathryn Wilkins explained, "there have been gun-control laws for most of this last century, of one sort or another," so it is difficult to identify a single cause of Canada's shrinking rate of firearms deaths (a category that includes murders, suicides and accidents).

The decline in hunting as a recreational activity might explain some of the drop, as may urbanization, or the declining percentage of the population under 25 -- typically the most violent segment. The controls implemented by Brian Mulroney's government in 1991, following the Ecole Polytechnique massacre of 14 female engineering students -- involving better screening of potential owners and stronger safe-storage regulations -- seem also to have accelerated the decline in firearms deaths slightly beyond the decline seen in the 1980s.

What is remarkable, however, is that the Liberals' 1995 controls -- requiring all owners and guns to be licensed -- seem to have had no discernable impact. Following implementation of those regulations, firearms deaths simply continued at the rate of decline begun in 1991.

There are other indications of the most recent controls' uselessness. "In each year," Ms. Wilkins writes, "about four-fifths of all firearms-related deaths were suicides." And while in the past decade and a half firearms suicides have been cut in half, the overall rate of suicides has dropped just 15%, all of which is likely explicable by the ageing Canadian population. (Nearly every Western country has experienced a similar decline in suicides in cases where the average age of its citizens has risen.) While firearms suicides went from 4.5 per 100,000 population in 1979 to 2.0 in 2002, "suicide by suffocation/hanging ... rose from 3 to 5 deaths per 100,000." While gun controls may have helped reduce the number of firearms suicides, they did not lower the overall rate of suicides, meaning, at best, controls merely encouraged troubled Canadians to find other methods for taking their own lives.

Also, while "the rate of homicides involving a firearm fell from 0.8 deaths per 100,000 in the early 1980s to 0.4 in 2002 ... the share of homicides in which a firearm was used remained fairly stable." In other words, firearms murders may have gone down during the years in which Ottawa has sought to impose greater controls on guns, but they have declined by no more than murders with bats, knives, poisons and other uncontrolled weapons. And as Ms. Wilkins and others have pointed out, "handguns accounted for two-thirds of firearm homicides in 2002, up from about one-half during the 1990s," and handguns have been subject to mandatory registration since 1934.

We can understand Statistics Canada's reluctance to come right out and pronounce Ottawa's gun controls to be irrelevant: They're statisticians. But taxpayers and laymen are not similarly constrained.

© National Post 2005

"America will never be destroyed from the outside,
if we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

[SabreDave 0]

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So, does this mean that our registry is working?

No, I really don't think it means the registry is doing anything. It is a waste of money, resources and has done nothing but make criminals out of law-abiding citizens.

I doubt they have hit 50% compliance yet but I'm sure our government will say they have. Just like there was no ad scandal etc.

Total waste...........................

SabreDave

[sfzombie13 324]

Quote

You have to compare the stats before and after within Canada. The murder rate in Canada was a fraction of the U.S.'s before the registry too - a fact that was omitted from your presentation. It seems to be implying that it wasn't, and now look at the difference! That's pure bullshit.

that's not completely right either. i'll give an example:
i applied for a union job that involved our participating in a half hour safety review by osha. it had a graph that showed that since osha's inception in the 60's, construction deaths decreased steadily. cool, osha works, right? not so fast.....after that, a some other guy came in and gave his part, the graph had been extended to the late 1800's and the deaths were a lot higher, but had been steadily decreasing for almost 100 years without osha.
i learned how to do some crazy things with statistics in h.s. i also used to know how to quantify a place where 4+4=9. i forgot that though.

_________________________________________
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes

[SkyDekker 1,465]

John says:

Quote

No. The whole comparison is bogus. You don't compare with America to determine if it is working. You have to compare the stats before and after within Canada.

posted article reads:

Quote

And between 1979 and 2002 the rate of
death by firearms in Canada declined by more
than one-half.

uhmm, yeah...nice rant though....

Anyways, I agree this says nothing about the gun registry or any other one single item about gun control. Saying other wise is just as stupid as claiming that CCW is the single reason for reduction in crime in states that allow it.

[markd_nscr986 0]

John,

I knew your Bullshit Alarm would go off.......


As far as I'm concerned,anyone the feels the need to "register" a firearm can (and probably should)MOVE to Canada.........

Registration=Confiscation

Marc SCR 6046 SCS 3004

[IanHarrop 43]

Quote

John,

I knew your Bullshit Alarm would go off.......


As far as I'm concerned,anyone the feels the need to "register" a firearm can (and probably should)MOVE to Canada.........

Registration=Confiscation

Who says we want them? Keep your problems at home, don't export them to us!

"Where troubles melt like lemon drops, away above the chimney tops, that's where you'll find me" Dorothy

[JohnRich 4]

Quote

John says:

Quote

You have to compare the stats before and after within Canada.

posted article reads:

Quote

And between 1979 and 2002 the rate of death by firearms in Canada declined by more than one-half.

uhmm, yeah...nice rant though....

It wasn't a rant.

If you had read the references I provided, you would have seen things like this:

The report includes a graph depicting a decline in firearms deaths between 1979 and 2002 with vertical lines showing the years firearm laws were passed in 1991 and 1995. The graph itself isn’t even an honest representation of the facts. While “Bill C-68 (Compulsory gun registration)” was passed by Parliament in 1995, the Firearms Act didn’t come into force until December 1, 1998, and the deadline for law-abiding gun owners to register their firearms was extended by the government to July 2003 – a full year-and-a-half after the cut-off year covered by the Statistics Canada report.

The report failed to mention that the drop in suicides by firearm has been almost completely replaced by an increase in suicides by rope. So no lives were saved despite the waste of two billion dollars on regulating legal guns owned by law-abiding citizens since 1995. Why isn’t the government studying the causes of suicide instead of the methods people are using to kill themselves? Why aren’t they putting the money into suicide prevention instead of a useless gun registry?

Secondly, the report also states: “The rate of homicides involving firearms fell” but then added in the next paragraph, “…handguns accounted for two-thirds of firearm homicides in 2002, up from one-half in the 1990s.” BUT the report failed to mention that the mandatory registration of handguns has been required since 1934 in Canada. This is a clear demonstration of a firearms policy failure that Statistics Canada should be making obvious to the Canadian people instead of obscuring the truth in a report like this one.

Thirdly, the Statistics Canada report presents another misleading graph on the fifth page comparing firearms deaths in Canada and the United States. BUT as Professor Gary Mauser of Simon Fraser University points out, the report fails to mention that since 1991 the total homicide rate has declined by 36% in Canada, but fell by 42% in the U.S. Moreover, gun death rates fell by 30% in the U.S. between 1991 and 2002. This, despite the fact, that gun availability has been increasing in the U.S. and decreasing in Canada.

Finally, the report also failed to mention that in 2003, Statistics Canada’s own data show the homicide rate in the three Prairie Provinces was 1.1 times higher than the homicide rate in the four bordering states. So much for the effectiveness of Canada’s firearms regulations.

The decline in hunting as a recreational activity might explain some of the drop, as may urbanization, or the declining percentage of the population under 25 -- typically the most violent segment.

What is remarkable, however, is that the Liberals' 1995 controls -- requiring all owners and guns to be licensed -- seem to have had no discernable impact. Following implementation of those regulations, firearms deaths simply continued at the rate of decline begun in 1991.

Also, while "the rate of homicides involving a firearm fell from 0.8 deaths per 100,000 in the early 1980s to 0.4 in 2002 ... the share of homicides in which a firearm was used remained fairly stable." In other words, firearms murders may have gone down during the years in which Ottawa has sought to impose greater controls on guns, but they have declined by no more than murders with bats, knives, poisons and other uncontrolled weapons.

* * *

Facts are such cool things - they destroy all the anti-gun emotional arguments made by people like you. Have you borrowed a shovel from Kallend?

[SkyDekker 1,465]

John, I have agreed many times before that the gun registry is a sham here in Canada and an absolute failure. I don't need you or anybody else to convince me of that any more, I am already convinced and have said so many times before......hence it was a rant.

The point being made is that attributing a change in gun crime positively or negatively to one variable is stupid.

I think the red flag being waved with the word "gun" had you a little excited.......

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Facts are such cool things - they destroy all the anti-gun emotional arguments made by people like you

Uhmmm, if you read the first post, I asked a question and did not make an argument one way or the other. I think your emotions may have gotten the better of you and you may have missed that......

[JohnRich 4]

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John, I have agreed many times before that the gun registry is a sham here in Canada and an absolute failure. I don't need you or anybody else to convince me of that any more, I am already convinced and have said so many times before......hence it was a rant.

No, it was not a "rant". Just because you already agreed with me, doesn't mean that I was "ranting" in my response. We could both agree that 2+2=4, but that doesn't make this statement a rant.

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I think the red flag being waved with the word "gun" had you a little excited.

I wasn't excited. I was simply responding to a ridiculous assertion, and supported my response with two references containing facts and logic, to support my view. That's neither ranting, nor being excited. Rather, that's calm objective deliberation.

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Facts are such cool things - they destroy all the anti-gun emotional arguments made by people like you

Uhmmm, if you read the first post, I asked a question and did not make an argument one way or the other. I think your emotions may have gotten the better of you and you may have missed that......

When you accused me of "ranting", you made an emotional argument, devoid of any facts or logic. You don't defeat facts and logic by calling someone's statement a rant. With the use of that word in a derogatory manner, it was you who let your emotions get the better of you.

[kelpdiver 2]

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The point being made is that attributing a change in gun crime positively or negatively to one variable is stupid.

The two variables in question aren't on the same playing field.

Aside from the non compliance and the obvious fact that it doesn't work on criminals, the registry was implemented throughout all of Canada.

CCWs are much easier to track, and you can compare the change in metrics for US states that did implement it, and those that did not. They also were implemented over different years, so you can eliminate national trends from the analysis. The big risk in making a false conclusion is the element of self selection by the states to go CCW or not.