A rchive Date
[ 10-01-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/harris.html
Gun control's real crime
By MICHAEL HARRIS -- For The Ottawa Sun
January 10, 2003
On the face of it, you would think the federal government would be ready for some humility. For the second time in their mandate, the Liberals have lost a billion dollars of money that didn't belong to them.
The Justice Department deliberately kept its disgraceful cost overruns for the national gun registry from the public, prompting the auditor general to note the government's "inexcusable failure" to account to Parliament for its expenditures of public money.
The prime minister said publicly that bureaucrats have been fired for their part in the debacle. Yet again, Hans Christian Andersen is at the damage controls. Bureaucrats were promoted, not fired, and the PMO has been unable to provide the name of a single sacked employee to verify the Boss's public goofing around with the truth, something we know thanks to Greg Weston of this paper.
Eight of 10 provinces and the chief of police of Canada's largest municipal police force want to put the national gun registry in the deep freeze, or the dumpster, until someone up here figures out what they're doing.
All in all, grounds for at least a nibble of humble pie, yes?
So what does Martin Cauchon, Canada's justice minister, offer the public? An apology, an explanation, heck, even a get-out-of-jail-free card if you fail to register grandpa's blunderbuss?
None of the above.
He defends the national gun registry as if it were a great accomplishment and then tries to undo a billion-dollar boondoggle with a $92,000 consultant's review. Does anyone really believe that retired civil servant Ray Hession is going to put things right? A Grade 9 student would go red in the face trying to use the minister's logic.
Cauchon defends the national gun registry with an appeal to its intentions rather than its reality. He boasts that the government will not lose sight of its goals in a controversy over costs, which in itself is an odd way of putting it. When $2 million becomes $1 billion, (enough money to overhaul Ontario's entire school system) where is the controversy? It is not a controversy, it is a national scandal.
Missing in the minister's impudent defence of the indefensible is the real problem with our national gun registry. No one in the federal government has ever questioned the basic premise spouted again this week by the justice minister that the gun registry "helps make our country a safer place to live." Even if that were true, it would not excuse or explain the train wreck of gun control in Canada. But according to the only empirical study of the relationship between gun control and crime, Mr. Cauchon and his Liberal colleagues simply don't know what they're talking about.
In 1998, John Lott, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, published the first book that investigated the relationship between gun control and crime from an empirical rather than agenda-driven approach. He examined statistical data from all 3,014 counties in the United States and measured the impact of non-discretionary concealed handgun laws in several major states.
Lott's conclusions would have those who support gun control unconditionally running for the garlic, wooden crosses, and holy water: More guns, less crime. The book by the same name was praised for its ground-breaking scholarship by a bevy of academics, including two top professors at Harvard Law School. As one of them, Steve Shavell, observed, "This book will -- or should -- cause those who almost reflexively support the limitation of guns in the name of reducing crime to rethink their positions."
Without resorting to artfully selected data devoid of statistical controls (the normal approach of the more than 200 studies on gun control), Lott tests myth after myth about guns and crime in the United States against a huge body of evidence with meaningful statistical controls. For example, it is often stated by those opposed to concealed handguns that armed citizens would shoot each other in the wake of traffic accidents or accidentally shoot police. True or false?
False. Drawing on data from the 31 states that allow their citizens to carry concealed weapons, there has only been one recorded incident of a permitted concealed handgun being used in a shooting after a car accident. "No permit holder has ever shot a police officer and there have been cases where holders used their guns to save officers' lives," Lott writes.
Does the defensive use of handguns by permit-holding citizens increase their chances of injury or death in confrontations with criminals? No. According to statistics from the U.S. Justice Department's National Crime Victimization Survey between 1979 and 1987, the probability of serious injury for women from an attack is 2.5 times higher for the woman who offers no resistance than the woman who resists with a gun. Behaving passively for men is 1.4 times more likely to result in serious injury from an attack than resisting with a gun.
Lott points out that while violent crime that ends in death is widely reported in the media, the defensive and deterring use of handguns that save lives during assaults, robberies and burglaries is rarely even mentioned -- an astonishing 82,000 per year.
REAL DETERRENT
Lott makes the case that handguns are a real deterrent to criminals. In Canada and Britain, which have comparatively tougher gun control legislation, almost half of all burglaries are "hot," meaning the residents are on the premises at the time of the invasion. In the U.S., with less restrictive legislation, the "hot" burglary rate is only 13%. Why the difference? Quoting from surveys of convicted American felons, Lott reports that the criminals are much more worried about running into an armed victim than the police.
Gun-control advocates frequently argue than more guns will greatly increase the number of children who die in gun accidents. What are the statistics for the world's largest gun culture? In a word, surprising.
Lott cites the evidence from 1995, when there were a total of 1,400 accidental deaths involving guns in the United States. Thirty of those deaths involved children up to four years of age, and 170 more involved those aged 5 to 14.
A tragic record to be sure, but relatively modest numbers compared to the 2,900 children who died in traffic accidents, the 950 who drowned, and the 1,000 who lost their lives in fires. "More children die in bicycle accidents each year than die from all types of firearm accidents," Lott writes. His point is not that these deaths are any less tragic, but that they are a lot less frequent than the popular press would have us believe.
Lott's conclusion could not be more unpalatable to our federal government, which has produced absolutely no evidence that gun control makes the public or police any safer. He writes, "Preventing law-abiding citizens from carrying handguns does not end violence: It merely makes victims more vulnerable to attack."
Martin Cauchon wants us to believe a very different proposition, namely that universal gun registration will reduce violent crime and be worth it at any cost. So far we haven't seen the proof, just the platitudes, and I think I know why.
Author, broadcaster and investigative journalist Michael Harris can be heard Monday to Thursday, 1-3 p.m. on 580 CFRA.
Letters to the editor should be sent to oped@sunpub.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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