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

Gun-death decline not linked to registry: Drop in deaths also occurring in U.S., with loosened gun control

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

A recent report from Statistics Canada suggesting a falling death rate attributable to firearms carries an important caveat: "It is difficult to measure the contribution that gun control regulations may have made to this decrease."

Indeed, it is exceedingly difficult.

For one thing, when 80 per cent of gun deaths are suicide, the matter of registration is irrelevant. The 636 Canadians who shot themselves in 2002 were driven by a state of mind for which firearms legislation is no cure. (Of the remaining firearms deaths, 31 were by accident and 149 were homicide.)

Worse for those who might try to claim a small propaganda victory for the much-maligned registry, countries that have no comparable regulations also show markedly reduced death rates. Meanwhile, counterintuitive though it seems, others having more stringent gun-control than Canada report increased gun-related homicides.

Unfortunately, despite being otherwise a reliable description of a welcome social development, the report by StatsCan researcher Kathryn Wilkins still contains some disingenuous hints that the registry actually may have helped, thus belying her caution.

For instance, among Wilkins's hints is a graph showing a general downward trend in Canadian gun-related deaths from 10.6 per 100,000 in 1979, to 4.9 per 100,000 in 2002. However, its sole annotations indicate the passage of safe-storage legislation in 1991, and the establishment of the registry itself in 1995.

But, in neither case does the graph show a sharp interruption to the steady downward trend. For all the acceleration either law seems to have prompted, she might equally well have noted the first Gulf war or the second Quebec referendum.

Similarly, Wilkins writes that the "risk of death from a firearms-related injury in Canada is a fraction of that in the United States. In 2000, American males had more than three times the risk of dying from injuries related to firearms when compared with their Canadian counterparts. The excess was even greater for U.S. females -- seven times as high."

All true, but if it is worth mentioning Canadian legislation at all in a consideration of Canadian statistics, then the U.S. legislative environment must also be referenced when looking at U.S. statistics.

Interestingly, the U.S. also shows declining gun-related deaths over the last 25 years, from 14.84 per 100,000 in 1980, to 10.50 per 100,000 in 2002 -- but against a background of loosened firearms laws, rather than tightened. For instance, the right to carry concealed weapons has been expanded in that time by half, to 37 states of the union.

Perhaps demographics lie behind the decline in the rate of gun-related fatalities in the U.S., or maybe emergency-room techniques have sufficiently improved in that time to save lives in large numbers that once were lost. The only certainty is that it wasn't a federal gun-registry.

Nor did it help Great Britain to skip right past registration, into a virtual ban on legal ownership of firearms. There, handgun homicides rose five-fold between 1980 (eight) and 1999 (42.)

Naturally, a reduction in firearms deaths is an encouraging trend. However, any effort to correlate that with restrictive legislation simply doesn't accord with the facts. StatsCan concedes this on the one hand, yet subtly offers the reverse message by pointing us to comparative international averages, not to the equally important trends. It was an important, and perhaps telling, omission.